Why doctrine matters

Posted at 5:30 PM

In a quote somewhat related to a few recent thoughts, we have John Piper on Athanasius:

What was clear to Athanasius was that propositions about Christ carried convictions that could send you to heaven or to hell. There were propositions like: “There was a time when the Son of God was not”; “He was not before he was made”; and “the Son of God is created”. These propositions were strictly damnable. If they were spread and believed they would damn the souls which embraced them. And therefore Athanasius labored with all his might to formulate propositions that would conform to reality and lead the soul to faith and worship and heaven. I believe Athanasius would have abominated, with tears, the contemporary call for “depropositionalizing” that you hear among many of the so-called “reformists” and “the emerging church”, younger evangelicals, “postfundamentalists”, “postfoundationalists”, “postpropositionalists”, and “postevangelicals”. I think he would have said, “Our young people in Alexandria die for the truth of propositions about Christ. What do your young people die for?” And if the answer came back, “We die for Christ, not propositions about Christ,” I think he would have said, “That’s what Arius says. So which Christ will you die for?”

“Which Christ will you die for?” is one very good reason why doctrine matters, and why words matter. The above John Piper quote appears on Dave Bish’s blog along with a fantastic quote from a Christian songwriter:

It’s no light thing singing doctrinally accurate & ‘sharp-edged’ songs. I am singing & writing the very truths that got my brothers like Athanasius exiled or killed. I must not cheapen their memory & the freedom they won by putting trivia in the mouths of God’s people. Nobody was ever burnt at the stake for saying “God is nice & He likes you”. (Matt Blick, A songwriter’s motivation)

Bish comments that preachers therefore have to think carefully about the words they use. We’ve both written about this before, though with a different emphasis. Here, what happens when we get this wrong is not just boring or confusing our listeners, but failing to point them to the true Christ. Which Christ are we worshipping, serving, proclaiming – a false Christ or the true Christ? Doctrine matters.

Assumptions and worldviews

Posted at 6:17 PM

It’s always interesting watching stuff by Russell T Davies (most recently known for Doctor Who and Torchwood) because quite often his worldview seems to rise to the surface of the script. Take this example from the current Torchwood miniseries:

Rupesh: My first case – my first death – was a suicide. D’you know why she did it? ‘Cause—she’d written all these letters; she’d been a Christian all her life – and then, alien life appears. She wrote this bit: she said “It’s like science has won.”

Gwen: Lost her faith?

Rupesh: More than that. She said she saw her place in the universe – and it was tiny. She died because she thought she was nothing.

Gwen: I went through that. Even now I get terrified. But at the same time, it is brilliant, and beautiful, and … magic. It’s bigger you know. It’s like the whole wide world is bigger. My life is bigger.
(From Children of Earth – iPlayer link will no doubt expire soon.)

Ignore the fictional aliens for a moment. The underlying assumption is that science and Christianity are in conflict – the case for this isn’t argued, it’s merely assumed. Often Christian truth isn’t argued against; our society’s base assumptions are such that there is no longer an argument.

Without God, our significance is lost – and that leads, in this story, to an increase of suicides. Davies goes further, though, by trying to put something on top of this nihilistic view. The world is nonetheless brilliant, beautiful and magical – which makes the pointlessness, the smallness of it all irrelevant. Perhaps we can make our own significance.

Maybe I was the only one who was struck this way, but it seems that this is Davies making any need for God seem both unnecessary and incomprehensible. God doesn’t fit the worldview of the Torchwood universe. This recurring theme comes up in so much of both Doctor Who and Torchwood: the universe is huge and beyond our understanding, but isn’t it just marvellous anyway? Scientific advances, new planets – these are the things we wonder at and take delight in. Doctor Who is like a small child making discoveries. In this Torchwood scene, Gwen is similar – but also, her final sentences read like a convert speaking of new spiritual life to an unbeliever, but with this new big universe in the place of God.

The worldview of Torchwood and Doctor Who strikes me to be making an idol out of science – and as such, is very in keeping with the zeitgeist. How many people hold these sorts of assumptions? I don’t know, but we absorb them from the things we see, hear and read. It’s in scenes like this one I feel that Davies is pushing something onto us. (Let’s pray for more Christian writers for TV!)

I’ll try and close this rambling entry. There are certain ideas that are almost in the air we breathe; even Christians can be influenced by the worldviews and values portrayed in entertainment, news and comment. We need the revolution of theology. Mike Reeves (quoted in the entry just linked to) is excellent on this:

Theology is the “true research: as we re-search reality afresh in the light of how God has revealed it to be. It’s walking through life with a torch on. It’s refusing to drift with the zeitgeist”. We Christians need to “wash our brains with the Mediator, rather than being brainwashed by the media”.

Another way of putting this is: we need to critically engage with what we’re watching, hearing or reading, and not be mindless consumers.

With regards to the worldview portrayed above – well, I love science and scientific discovery, but science is too small. I can say about life with God: “it’s like the whole wide world is bigger. My life is bigger.” We were made for something bigger.

True Belief

Posted at 5:19 PM

I’ve written before on why theology is not dull and irrelevant. In Theology is the Revolution I talked a little about how we do theology – by trying to think Christianly about everything, getting rid of the idols in our hearts and minds, and above all getting to know God better.

There’s a potential pitfall here, and that’s an intellectual-only understanding of truths about God. For example, it’s perfectly possible to have a fully fleshed out view of the atonement, that encompasses propitiation, justification, redemption and reconciliation, without that moving you to love God more and give him the praise he is due for sending Christ to die in our place. James writes:

You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that – and shudder. (James 2:19)

Even the demons have an intellectual belief in God, but we know Christian belief is different because it results in a changed life. A sign of whether I truly believe something is whether it affects my actions. To take the common and silly example of a chair: if I claim to believe a chair will take my weight, but refuse to sit down on it, then my actions show my lack of belief. James writes later:

Who is wise and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom. (James 3:13)

There’s another aspect to true belief too. If our emotions are not engaged, then how can we say we truly believe? If I don’t love Jesus more because of the cross then I’ve not fully grasped the cross, however great my intellectual understanding. If I say I know that God is glorious but that doesn’t delight me, I either don’t truly believe he is glorious, or worse, I’ve no delight in his glory because of my unredeemed nature. Jonathan Edwards said:

He that is spiritually enlightened… does not merely rationally believe that God is glorious, but he has a sense of the gloriousness of God in his heart. There is not only a rational belief that God is holy, and that holiness is a good thing, but there is a sense of the loveliness of God’s holiness. (Jonathan Edwards, A Divine and Supernatural Light)

Jesus says to the Pharisees:

Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: “‘These people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.’” (Mark 7:6)

It’s possible to say the right things – maybe even do the right things – but still have our hearts far from God. We often say that love is a choice, not a feeling – but that’s not the whole story. John writes: “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us” (1 John 3:16) – Christ showed his love for us by dying in our place. The writer to the Hebrews says: “[Jesus,] for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2) – Christ died for us because of the greatness of his resulting joy, having saved a people for himself. John Piper’s famous thesis is that obedience and joy go together; our hearts are warmed when we show our love for God through following him, because that is how we are made. True love is never mere decision; it stems from and flows into our hearts.

So here we have three aspects of true belief: the intellectual side, the emotional side, and the behavioural side. You could call them Doctrine, Behaviour and the Heart. They affect our thinking, our feeling and our doing. True belief must affect all three. They’re like three sides of a triangle, which must go together, otherwise the triangle is distorted.

We might naturally have a tendency towards one or another. For example, the rationalist philosopher might tend towards thinking as ultimate, ruling out emotions and objective tests. The existentialist might concern themselves much more with feelings. Or, perhaps closer to home, the conservative evangelical might expend much effort getting their thinking straight, but not letting what they “know” affect their hearts or change their lives; parts of the church might play down the importance of doctrine as long as we’re doing something (about the environment, the poor, the marginalised); other parts might be tempted to base truth around experience and not Scripture. All have distorted the triangle in some way; all need correction.

When we read the Bible, or a Christian book, it should never remain intellectual only. If what we’re “learning” isn’t changing our lives, we’ve not really learnt it. If it’s not warming our hearts, we don’t truly understand it. God’s truth should change us from the inside out, and not just inform our minds: it must warm our hearts and change our wills, too.

When I open up the Bible, I might read a passage for the umpteenth time and say that I know it – but most of the time my life won’t look like I believe it, and my heart is still cold to its truths. I need to take the chance to refresh my understanding so as to affect more than just my mind.

When I come to theology, it should turn my world upside-down, affecting the way I think, the way I feel, the way I act. It can’t just be limited to one area – it’s got to affect them all. It’s only then that theology will be truly revolutionary.

The importance of terminology

Posted at 1:18 AM

Words matter. Despite what literary deconstructionists say, we can communicate meaning with them. The words we use have an effect on what we think, and vice-versa. Using a word that isn’t quite right, or that someone else has a different understanding of, can lead to miscommunication, and sometimes to wrong thinking and practice.

We have to be careful that we have the right definition of words we use as Christians, because we can misunderstand what God is saying if we don’t. For example, if your understanding of the word “evangelism” includes living a distinctive life, not just telling people the gospel, you won’t feel the same urgency when being encouraged to evangelise. If your understanding of the word “doctrine” is that it is by definition dry and irrelevant, you’re going to think Paul was being boring when encouraging Titus to teach what is in accord with sound doctrine (Titus 2:1). If you think “faith” is by necessity “blind”, then half the New Testament is going to sound anti-intellectual. Words matter.

They matter in how we use them, too. If we always refer to where we meet as a church as “the church”, we’ll gradually – even if we wouldn’t say this! – begin to think of the church as something we attend, not something we’re part of. If we refer to the pastor as the minister, we may start thinking that ministry is something other people do. If we refer to the pastor as a priest, we slide into thinking he intercedes for us before God.

Now, referring to the pastor as a priest is actually a true statement! It’s just that we’re also priests, and the most perfect priest is Jesus. Using a correct statement nonetheless gives rise to a dangerous idea – that of someone other than Jesus as an intermediary between us and God.

During the course of New Word Alive, I came across a couple of words in very common use that I felt could be (or were already) prone to these kind of dangers. The first was “mission”, and the second was “worship”.

The word “mission”

I attended Krish Kandiah’s seminars on “Kinetic Christianity”. In the first session, his use of the word “mission” was different to how I use it. My use of mission is almost synonymous with evangelism – he was using it in a much broader sense, specifically “that which God sends the church into the world to do” (my paraphrase of Krish quoting John Stott). Mission, then, includes evangelism and social action. This was the first time I’d heard this formulated; I’ve been struggling to see how exactly to relate the two for a while.

As a result, we got talking about how using words in a way the Bible doesn’t can lead to wrong emphases in our practice. Redefining mission (from Latin “missio”, to send; “as the Father has sent me, so I am sending you” – John 20:21) as solely evangelism is to miss the message of parables like the good Samaritan (which Krish spoke on in a main meeting later in the week) and others like it. If we use mission to mean evangelism, then we’re never going to feel the real force of such passages, and we’re going to have a skewed practice that rejects the need for social action, all for the sake of being “faithful to the Bible”. We’re going to feel guilty about doing anything other than evangelism, and, at the extreme, we’re going to become uncaring! Using the wrong word (mission, not evangelism) distorts the biblical picture.

In passing, Krish mentioned the misuse of the word worship, and how equating it to just what we do when we meet together has led to a lessened view of worshipping God with our whole life. I agreed wholeheartedly, and (co-incidentally enough) happened to be going to a seminar on worship after his.

The word “worship”

Having just written about Marcus’ and Anna’s seminar, you can see that it challenged me deeply. There was only one thing that concerned me, and in some ways it was quite a minor thing. After all, the message of the seminar was something that I and others like me desperately needed to hear. As you might expect given the entry I’m currently writing, the issue was one of terminology: I felt that Marcus’ use of the word “worship” to describe what he was advocating didn’t follow the New Testament pattern, and I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with that. (The following section assumes you were at the seminar, have read my previous entry, or have at least glanced over the article much of his material came from.)

We talked about this after the seminar, and I expressed my concern as follows: given that much of the understanding of worship in the seminar seemed to come from the Old Testament, and the New Testament passages (Philippians 3:1, 4:4) didn’t use worship language, what evidence is there that what he’d described should be called worship? I said I wanted to make sure I was using biblical words in biblical ways, and wasn’t convinced this understanding of worship in the New Testament era was how the Bible used the word.

His response was taken from Revelation 4, where the word worship is used. Here we see the kind of worship which is specifically adoration in words or song – the Greek word itself meaning “to come towards to kiss”.

After a brief conversation, I left him to talk to another person with questions probably far more important than mine! Nevertheless, I remained unconvinced – my understanding of the Revelation passage is that we cannot extrapolate a whole definition of worship in the New Testament from it, as it’s in heaven, not on earth, and our worship in heaven will look different (though not completely) to our worship on earth. Romans 12:1 seems a more comprehensive definition of worship: “in view of God’s mercy” (it’s an emotional as well as rational response) “offer your bodies” (not just our minds and emotions) “as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God”. This will include what Marcus advocates in the above article and in his seminar – in fact, depending on how you interpret his definition, it might include it all to the exclusion of all else! (More on that later.) But just like referring to a pastor as a priest is technically accurate, it might not be the most helpful thing to define it as worship.

You may be saying “but it’s just words!” I hope that I’ve shown on the previous pages that it can never be “just words” – but I will try to engage specifically with why this particular area concerns me, and look at some other misuses of the word.

Pastoral implications

What might a misuse of the word worship lead to? The extreme is when “worship = singing”. Here we have a super-spiritual view of worship, that might lead to a divide between the Christian part of our lives and the secular stuff. Singing to God is worship, but what I do with myself on a Monday morning isn’t. We lose a whole-life view of Christian discipleship. That’s not how we’d say we think, but it’s what we end up doing, because of the power of the terms we use. I’ve seen this happen to people.

Less extreme but still worrying is when “worship = when we meet together”. There we have the same tendency to think of Monday morning as our time, not God’s time – but there’s also the temptation to see “attending church” as something we do for God. If going to church is how we worship God, then we’ll lose the biblical emphasis on us meeting together for our encouragement. We’ll become more individualistic, making church about “me and God”, not “me, my church family and God”.

If “worship = private devotional time, adoring and praising God” then there’s a temptation to distinguish too much between this time of devotions, and the rest of the Christian life. We need to be delighting to serve God in every area of life, praising him with all that we do, or we’ll still be limiting the breadth of worship. We might end up with a lesser view of how our lives lived for God are worship, and see the personal, individual time with God as “better”, or “more worshipful”. I think this is super-spiritual, and think our spirituality needs to affect our bodies and actions just as much as our heart, feelings and words.

Finally, Marcus’ definition:

Worship is delighting in, extolling, enjoying and making much of the object of your love

Looking at this in a more limited way, I think I’d say that that’s what rejoicing in God is, and argue that it’s an essential part of worship. Worship certainly isn’t emotionless duty! I think that this is crucial to worshipping God with the whole of life, but while it is worship, it isn’t worship to the exclusion of everything else. And referring to it as worship implies that.

However, if we take “delighting in” and “enjoying” in a fuller sense, that might result out of a Christian Hedonist understanding of Christian living, then maybe this does define worship after all. We’re to delight in God, the object of our love, in everything that we do. If delighting in God includes or implies a pursuit of God (see my previous entry, and Marcus’ article), then it’s going to include our whole lives. John Piper’s thesis in Desiring God is that our desire for God drives every area of our Christian life. If this is part of the definition, then perhaps it’s closer to Romans 12:1 than I thought initially. I’m still not certain I’m happy with the weighting of concepts, though, and would prefer to round out Romans 12:1 (“offer your bodies as living sacrifices”) with the joy apparent in Philippians and elsewhere, rather than the other way round.

The impression I got from Marcus, however – and bear in mind we only had a short conversation – was that he emphasised specific times of delighting and pursuing God. All well and good – as I’ve said, I need far more of these! – but I think here the issue with vocabulary is more apparent. If we’re referring to these specific times as worship, my instinct is that we lose the bigger picture of worship as a result. This might not be something that affects those who have a deeper or more rounded understanding of worship – but for those who don’t, it might subconsciously create the kind of views I mention next to “worship = private devotional time”. Yes, these times are worship – but so are our Christian meetings, or times of singing, and I hope I’ve shown the problems using worship terminology there can cause. This is why I think the words we use are important: we can all subconsciously take on slightly distorted attitudes about the Christian life. It might only affect things subtly, but the effect is still there, and will be more noticeable in younger Christians without a more rounded theological understanding.

I hope I’ve been fair to Marcus’ teaching on this, and if you feel I haven’t then please let me know (particularly if your name is Marcus Honeysett!). Marcus is far wiser than I am and I’ve learnt much from him, and so I hope that where I’ve disagreed with him, I’ve done it with an attitude of humility. However I do want to be concerned about using biblical words the way the Bible uses them, because I think the words we use can affect the way we live and view things. I’m trying not to be someone who merely “argues about words” (2 Timothy 2:14), by being someone who strives to “correctly handle the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15).

I should also add that I think the lack of these times of delighting in God in conservative evangelical circles is a far greater problem than referring to them as worship! That’s not to say I don’t think there is an issue – just that there’s a more important one. Marcus mentioned during our conversation that he was emphasising certain things because our conservative evangelical culture urgently needs to rediscover these whole-hearted gospel affections – and to that I say amen!

So in summary, just as conservative evangelicals need to recapture the fullness of the word “mission”, I think we need to do the same with the word “worship”. Let’s get the fullness of the biblical picture, living the whole of our lives for Jesus as we delight in him and pursue him more. It shouldn’t surprise us that that’s where true joy, and true worship, can be found.

Theology is the revolution

Posted at 1:23 PM

Mike Reeves helps explain what theology is, in the context of Judges 6:25-28 (quote taken from 9 minutes into DIY Theology):

Theology is smashing up idols – smashing up the idols in our mind and in our world. And not just smashing them up but replacing them with (v26) proper kinds of altars to the Lord our God: replacing them all with Jesus Christ. So the story here is: Gideon is surrounded by the idolatry of the Mideonite regime. and he begins the revolution against it by bulldozing Baal. And that is theology! It’s not just reading books, studying languages, whatever: it is about rebelling against the world order, not just the Mideonites little regime, rebelling against the whole world order as it rebels against God. Rebelling against it, bringing down the system, utterly replacing it: that is theology. Theology is the revolution.

Ranald Macaulay writes of Francis Schaeffer:

From the very beginning, then, Schaeffer had a mind for what he called “True Truth.” He loved the Bible and its message of salvation first and foremost because it is “true.” It accurately reflects the reality within which all human beings find themselves and against which, ultimately, they cannot revolt – try as they may.

The corollary of this was a sense of inescapable responsibility to unmask and challenge falsehood. Other religious and philosophical worldviews, he realized, are basically “lies” and/or distortions of the truth, as much in relation to the created order as in relation to God’s acts of salvation through history. So Schaeffer’s approach to “apologetics” was already “presuppositional” from the start. Begin with the Christian worldview and everything makes sense: Start elsewhere and nothing does.

Sometimes I’ll say “the Bible is true” with my mouth, but be relativistic in my thoughts, thinking that it’s not true for others. That makes no sense, though. “True Truth” is true for everyone.

Blaise Pascal wrote:

Men despise religion; they hate it and fear it is true. To remedy this, we must begin by showing that religion is not contrary to reason; that it is venerable, to inspire respect for it; then we must make it lovable, to make good men hope it is true; finally, we must prove it is true.

So often I don’t have confidence in any of these points. Our culture defines faith (a better term than religion for Christianity) as being irrational, only worthy of ridicule, something to be hated, to be got rid of so we can stop worrying and enjoy our lives, but above all, as dangerous, nonsensical falsehood.

But why do I listen to our culture, the “world order [that] rebels against God”? Later on in his talk (twelve minutes twenty seconds in), Mike Reeves says:

Christian theology is about clearing out all the junk in our minds that we’ve accumulated through years of just listening to the world, and replacing it with truth. It’s putting on the mind of Christ and so sifting out the lies in our culture. It’s washing our brains with the Mediator, rather than being brainwashed by the media.

God is a God who speaks. Ultimately, he has spoken to us “by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he also made the universe” (Hebrews 1:1-2). Without God’s revelation of himself, we can’t know True Truth. But God has revealed himself through Jesus, through the words of the Bible, through history, through creation – “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1). The Teacher’s cry of “Meaningless!” in Ecclesiastes can be answered. We can have confidence in God’s truth, because it is True Truth.

Theology is the “true research: as we re-search reality afresh in the light of how God has revealed it to be” (Reeves again, twelve minutes in); “It’s walking through life with a torch on. It’s refusing to drift with the zeitgeist” (thirteen minutes). The world is constantly bombarding us with its own truth, but it doesn’t describe reality. The Bible makes sense of how things are. It’s true for everyone, and not just me. Christian faith is rational, and there are many ways I can show this to others; it will be ridiculed, because the message of the cross is foolishness, but I know that God’s folly is greater than man’s wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:18-25); it is something to be loved, because it shows how things really are, gives a wonderful solution to our greatest need, and shows us Christ, who is infinitely desirable; and it is true.

We Christians need to “wash our brains with the Mediator, rather than being brainwashed by the media” (cf. Romans 12:2). We need to think Christianly about our lives, our careers, our relationships; about politics, poverty and public morality. We need to “rebel against the whole world order as it rebels against God”. Theology should turn our lives upside-down, because it’s through theology that we see the world as is really is; we see ourselves as we really are; and above all, we see who the God of the universe really is.

It turns out that not only is theology incredibly practical, it’s incredibly exciting too.

(Read more by Mike Reeves: Fear and Loathing in Las Vagueness.)

Learning from the charismatic movement

Posted at 10:10 AM

Here is Dave Bish’s summary of Dan Edelen’s analysis of the needs of the charismatic movement. I’ve seen charismatic theology accompanied by Scripture being ignored or misused, a selfishness shown in seeking emotional experiences with little internal change, a very Old Testament view of Christian worship and Christian meetings (namely, the two are far more connected than Romans 12 and Hebrews 10 would have us believe) and a lack of discernment (shown most clearly in ignoring or expressing irritation at the testing and weighing of teaching by others). Two things to say, then.

Firstly, praise God that these problems are by no means universal! It’s years since my first encounters with the charismatic movement, and since then I’ve read and listened to many, many charismatic speakers who have all helped instil in me a deeper love and a better understanding of God, a greater day-to-day experience of God, and a greater love of the Bible, but more importantly, Christ. It’s brilliant to hear that those in the movement are as concerned about parts of it as I am, as there’s no way I’m ever going to be listened to! It’s also brilliant that those in the charismatic movement are effectively shaking up many conservative Christians and getting them excited once more about God’s sovereign plan for the world. Conservative authors and speakers like Jim Packer have been calling for deep relationships with God for years; in my case, at least, it took the charismatics I know to get through to me! Recently, it’s mostly through charismatic writers and bloggers that I’ve grown to love God more and love Scripture more, and learnt to be more discerning, more loving and more accepting of those different from me.

Secondly, the striking thing is that each of Dan’s points has to do with a loss of focus on Jesus and his importance. This particularly hit home because I recognise that I can do exactly the same things. Very easily can I slip into a pattern of life that sidelines Jesus, or make the things I read all about abstract issues and not about Jesus. Rather than over-emphasise the Spirit, I can over-emphasise the Bible as an end in itself, and theology as a pursuit for its own sake, rather than both as a way to know and love Jesus better. I may not make the mistakes as publicly as some in the charismatic movement, but I make them all the same, in my own, quiet, conservative evangelical way.

In summary, these problems are by no means universal in the charismatic movement, and they’re not specific to it either. So let’s all throw out dry and boring theology and teaching; let’s recover passionate preaching about Christ from his Word, and let’s live whole lives for God’s glory, enjoying his presence with us, through good times and bad. Let’s not expect things to be easy; let’s not forget our flesh is sinful; but let’s remember that God has given us new hearts, and he gives us the grace we need for each day. Let’s keep our eyes on Jesus, and remember that both the Spirit and the Bible point to him and help us to know him and love him more.

Let us know; let us press on to know the LORD;
his going out is sure as the dawn;
he will come to us as the showers,
as the spring rains that water the earth. (Hosea 6:3, ESV)

Music and emotions

Posted at 10:18 PM

…singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God (Colossians 3:16).

The duty of singing praises to God seems to be appointed wholly to excite and express religious affections. No other reason can be assigned why we should express ourselves to God in verse, rather than in prose, and do it with music but only, that such is our nature and frame, that these things have a tendency to move our affections. (Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections.)

In some parts of the church, people can give the impression that emotions while singing are bad. Given the hyper-emotionalism of some sections of the church, where music takes over completely from the words and gives a buzz completely separate from any spiritual convictions, one can perhaps sympathise with putting forward this view. To do so, however, is to go too far to the other extreme and to become unbiblical in another way. The Bible says we should emotionally respond to singing. Singing should be an emotional experience.

Think about it this way. When something good happens to us, we respond emotionally. When I got my A level results, I thought that meant I hadn’t got into Bristol, so when I checked online and they’d let me in anyway, I was ecstatic! If I’d just shrugged my shoulders and said “nyeh”, that would have been slightly strange. You would have to conclude that either I didn’t care about the outcome, or perhaps that I didn’t understand what had just happened.

The gospel is such good news that an uninterested response is evidence that we don’t understand it, don’t believe it, or aren’t listening. When we sing about God and his gospel as believers, an uninterested response is going to mean we’re not listening, or we’re not wanting to engage with it. If we’re listening, understanding and engaging with the words we’re singing, we should be responding emotionally to the truth we’re singing. The job of music is to help us do this. When we need reminding of the joy of the gospel, the music helps us respond to the words we’re singing so that we can respond rightly.

Music helps us to grasp the truths of the gospel better, but music also helps us express our emotions – we sing with “thankfulness in our hearts to God”. God’s gospel is a good gospel, and it’s worth singing about – not with dry formalism, but with joy and thankfulness!

And they sang a new song, saying,
“Worthy are you to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation,
and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God,
and they shall reign on the earth.” (Revelation 5:9-10)

How is it possible to sing words like that and not experience emotion?

So where’s the issue? The issue is what is exciting our emotions primarily. We have to find the line between music helping the words, and music eclipsing the words. Is it primarily the truth of the gospel that we’re responding to, or have we missed the truths we’re singing about and are reacting to the music more? Dave Bish writes: “Experience is essential but like faith the issue is what’s the object of it.” I’ll try and flesh out a little what the wrong focus might look like with the following questions.

Firstly, when are we most emotionally moved? Is it when we see the implications the gospel has for our lives? Is it when we sing “of the blood that never fails, of sins forgiven, of conscience cleansed, of death defeated and life without end”? Is it, perhaps, when we sing of an unspecific love (“your arms are the arms that surround me in a warm embrace”), speculation (“surrounded by your glory, what will my heart feel?”), or in vague truth with no depth (“it’s all about you, Jesus”). Is it in between songs when the guitar strums on, and we’re not thinking about anything much but it feels good?

I don’t mean to criticise individual songs here, but where the focus is not on gospel truth in all its fullness, and simply focused on subjective issues or vague niceties, it becomes very easy to become emotionally moved by the music not the words. I can sing “Awesome God” and respond to the truths of the gospel, but the words don’t remind me of specifics and my mind’s like a sieve – I forget stuff easily, so I can slip into focusing on the music more. That’s more of a tangent into song selection though – the issue here is whether we’re being more emotionally moved by the music or by the truth, and sometimes being aware of when we’re most emotionally engaged helps us to see this.

Secondly, is the music more important to us than the talk? When we sing, we’re singing truth to each other, but when we hear God’s word taught, it should be deeper, richer, more satisfying and more applied than our songs. You can’t encapsulate the wonder of the glory of the Father, or Christ’s substitutionary death, or the indwelling of the Spirit, in a few lines of song – though of course songwriters do their best! The songs should reinforce the detailed truth of the talk. Talks should also challenge us to live lives more like Christ. If we think the songs are more important, it seems to me we could be saying we want “lighter” truth and fewer challenges.

If there’s a series of songs just before the talk, and they finish, and we’re disappointed and want to carry on singing, we might be saying that the emotions from the music are more important to us than the emotions from the words. We’re moving on to look at God’s word! We should be as excited to hear God speak through the preacher as to hear our friends (and God) speak to us through the singing!

Thirdly, how long do the emotions last? Are we fired up emotionally on a Sunday night only to forget entirely about God Monday morning? Bish continues:

They don’t last any longer than the breath coming out of your mouth on a cold winter’s day. And affections that don’t last don’t change lives. The more conferences I’ve been too the more suspicious I’ve become of radical claims to change, by myself or others. It’s easy in the buzz of a conference, festival or meeting to feel deeply moved. Even with the very best of intentions. But, it’s only if this desire if rooted in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and consequently the transforming one-degree at a time work of the Holy Spirit that the change is going to last.

Is our emotional response to the singing a gospel-rooted, life-changing response, or is it a temporary buzz? Does the joy carry on beyond the meeting, or is it only there when we’re singing?

Fourthly, what happens if the music is bad? Maybe there’s only four people singing. Maybe you’re used to longer times of singing and there’s only one song. Maybe you’re used to traditional hymns and the songs are more contemporary in style – or vice versa. Maybe the singer can’t sing! What happens then? Do we give up all hope of engaging with God?

It’s possible that the music is now distracting us from the words in another way. If the singer is out of tune, it’s understandable for a sensitive ear to be distracted. If it’s just a style issue, though, are we letting that distract us from the things we’re singing? Are we making style the essential issue rather than the words?

Bad music isn’t good, but it’s not an insurmountable obstacle.

In all of this I don’t want to be misheard. The questions above are just things to get us thinking. There might be a perfectly good reason why the talk isn’t something you look forward to – the speaker might be rubbish, for example. I’m also not saying that there isn’t a place for the less specific truth of songs such as “Awesome God”, just that it’s easier to fall into the traps I’ve mentioned with them. Hopefully this will help us all get a right perspective on the place of emotion in our songs. (Please feel free to come back at me if you think I’ve got the balance wrong! I’m trying to work these things out myself, and input and correction is always welcomed.)

This is an area that I’ve got a bit of experience in, from both sides of the equation. In my church youth group, I was involved in leading music, and without thinking could end up doing it in an emotionally manipulative way, separate from the words we were singing. When I was being led in song, I would often work up an emotional high separate from the truths we were singing. Towards the end of my time in the youth group I saw the problems with what I was doing, and swung to the other extreme. Words were all that mattered; let’s cut back all the extra instruments and arrangements and just have piano, in case the music has an effect on anyone. I’m still naturally suspicious of people showing too much emotion when singing, particularly at musical high points where the words don’t suggest anything. But I’ve realised that both extremes are wrong. As Bish puts it:

I’m not sure whether cold-intellectualism or fluffy-emotionalism is the big issue of our day. Probably depends where you’re sitting and who you’re mixing with. Genuine deep-rooted gospel-driven affections would seem to be a way to avoid either extreme. The New Testament seems to talk a lot about the gospel and a lot about us having joy. Perhaps those things are connected…

Perhaps they are.

Music in the CU

Posted at 12:53 PM

Last weekend I was away with UCCF on a new leaders’ training conference, looking at the distinctives of Christian Unions (CUs), with wonderful teaching on leadership, Christian growth, joy, and more practical issues alongside. Our main sessions were looking at Philippians, and at the start of his talk on chapter 2 (which includes what is probably an early hymn), John Risbridger addressed the musicians in the group, as an experienced musician himself.

In reality, you guys will probably shape the theology – that is, the sort of understanding, the ethos, the spirituality – of your CU more than any individual speaker who comes to speak to you over the course of the year. The reason for this is that on the whole, people forget the words that they hear, but they remember the words that they sing. And those words that they sing sink down deep into their hearts and lives and minds, and actually form the whole way that they think about God, and about what being a Christian means. It’s a really huge responsibility … that you need to exercise with great care and humility and dependence on God. I’ve come to the conclusion that stringing together a few of my favourite songs that I just happened to listen to while getting dressed in the morning isn’t good enough. I want to do what Kenny was doing this morning – I want to harness the power of music, which is a God-given power, to help people grasp life-changing truth, and then to respond to it with love and adoration and praise. Don’t be ashamed of the power of music. Music is God’s gift to us; it has power because he gave it power – but we can use that power for good, or for ill, and I want to use that power well, to engage people with truth, and to give them the vocabulary to respond to God with love and worship. And you thought all you had to do was play the guitar. (Condensed from recording, available at Dave Bish’s blog)

Glad it’s not just me who thinks these things then.

The weekend was challenging on many fronts, but thinking more about music in the CU was a big one. I’m from a more conservative (as opposed to lively) background, so my natural inclination is towards shorter times of singing. Sometimes it feels to me like too many songs in a row can detract from the words of individual songs. The example I used to explain this to some people on the weekend was talks. Talks from the Bible are great, but in our meetings we only have one, because having two would be too much to take in. Similarly with songs, it can be hard to take in all the words (letting the words “dwell in (us) richly”) if we sing too many. So my initial feelings were fewer, better songs, like Braddon Upex calls for:

There is a mighty power in a song
And they can wreak great havoc when they’re wrong.
This is the reason why I join with him
Who called for fewer, better, shorter hymns:
For fewer, for we sing too many songs,
Reducing services to sing-a-longs;
For shorter, though for mine it would suffice
Were we to sing each once instead of thrice;
For better, for so much of what we sing
Is far from fit to set before our King.

However, while my initial inclination was therefore to limit the number of songs we sing in our CU team meetings, I came to the conclusion that this was over-reacting. We can sing lots of songs on a similar topic to help a particular truth sink in, and that can be helpful. Alternatively, we can sing just a few select songs, perhaps with more verses, to accomplish a different purpose. The example of only having one talk doesn’t quite hold, as in one talk a speaker can hammer home one point throughout, or make various points as he goes along. Similarly with songs, we can hammer home one point through multiple songs, or have a few select songs on (sometimes, but not always) distinct topics. What it comes down to is discernment as to what will best help the words sink in – and that will sometimes mean fewer songs, and sometimes more.

How many songs is too many? Well, it depends how long your meeting is! At Bristol our meeting is an hour and a half long, with just under half an hour for the talk. My feeling is that anything from three to six songs is good, depending on what else is to be included. At this point, it comes down to what best serves the words (as above), and how much else there is to fit in. Whereas singing is important, I don’t want to it to crowd out prayer, or testimonies, or practical training, or other important things.

Different people expect different things from the music. Some want an extended time of singing, allowing them to “get into it” so that they can focus more and more as more songs are sung. (I spoke to someone who equated this with a speaker starting with a joke or an anecdote to allow people time to concentrate.) Some prefer shorter times, as too many songs makes it hard for any particular words to sink in. Hopefully discernment on my part will enable people on both sides to benefit from the music. However, I have a slight issue with allowing time to “get into it”, because it seems to me that if we’re merely “getting into it” during the first song or two, we’re not letting the words “dwell in us richly”. (I’m not saying more extended times are therefore bad – note what I’ve already said about both long and short times of singing being appropriate.)

Here we’re touching on a much larger issue to do with emotions and what happens when we sing, which I’ll come onto another time. This is perhaps where I’m going to most strongly disagree with people on music, and is one of the areas of conflict I mentioned last time. Here there is a difference in theology to be explored, not just a difference in style (and just so people are clear, I think emotion when singing isn’t just good, but essential!).

Musical association

Posted at 11:53 PM

Music has this way of reminding us of things – ideas, places, people. On right now is the song “Trains”, by Porcupine Tree, and for a moment I was back in a hut near the Sipi Falls in Uganda. There was no electricity, no mosquito nets, and we did everything by torchlight. I would lie back in the dark, staring at the thatched ceiling, and listen to Porcupine Tree on repeat. We were only there for two days, but that one song particularly brings back memories.

It’s six years since I first heard the song and read the book, but Melt by Leftfield still reminds me of an occasion in my grandparents’ house, reading Heart of Stone by my uncle for the first time. I have an image of the limestone pinnacles of Madagascar, as if seen from a helicopter fly-by, with Melt playing in the background – and whenever I hear the song, I imagine the pinnacles as he described them.

Music can evoke emotion, create tension, and stick in your head longer than many visual images. It can create or heighten euphoria and drive people to despair. Music is a powerful medium for conveying a message.

Collosians tells us that as we sing as Christians, we should let the word of Christ live in us. We should be singing about Christ. We should be singing truth, because his word is truth. So music is a very powerful part of a church meeting! We need to get the words of our songs right, because we’re going to remember the lyrics far more easily than a Bible passage or clever talk illustration.

‘Tis hard to say if greater harm is done
When heresy is preached or when it’s sung,
But I will argue that the latter’s worse—
More virulent is heresy in verse.

…and sermons stay not long between the ears
But song words linger in our heads for years
The music and the metre make them stick.
You disagree? Go ask a heretic—
—Ask Arius who spread his lies through song
And like the piper led astray the throng,
Or ask the merchants, those who bait their snares
With music, and with jingles flog their wares.

(Braddon Upex, An Essay on Hymnody)

Writing, or selecting music for Christians to sing is a weighty task, and yet so often we let musical talent be the only factor in choosing someone to lead the singing and choose the songs. Music leading in church can be a form of pastoring or teaching. So let’s think as carefully about finding these guys as we would for a youth leader, or pastor! It’s a responsibility for me as a musician to think carefully not just about the music, but the words of the songs I’m choosing. The songs people sing are going to influence their thinking, their praying, their speaking. Choosing biblical songs means God’s word influences them, as they’re humming the tune on the way to work, or singing it while in the shower. Isn’t that a big part of pastoring – explaining God’s word to people so that they become more Christ-like? Isn’t that part of what we’re trying to do through songs?

(More to follow, perhaps. We’ll see where my thinking takes me.)