Worship and music are like Siamese twins—separated only with difficulty.
Whenever hearts leap in response to the mercies of God, hands reach for musical instruments. Heirs of Jubal[1] have played music in every generation. Miriam played her tambourine to celebrate God’s rout of the Egyptians in the Red Sea.[2] David the shepherd boy took up his harp to sing to the Lord who shepherded him[3] and later, as King David, organised a levitical choir and band.[4]
In Christian worship, music has been in and out of fashion. For centuries the unaccompanied human voice was preferred because instrumental music had unhelpful associations—either Jewish or pagan. Augustine, describing the singing at Alexandria under Athanasius, observed that ‘the pipe, tabret and harp are here associated so intimately with the sensual heathen cults, as well as with the wild revelries and shameless performances of the degenerate theatre and circus, that it is easy to understand the prejudices against their use in the worship.'[5]
In similar vein, Clement went to extraordinary lengths to dodge the instrumental implications of Psalm 150. To him, trumpet, lyre, tambourine, strings, flute and cymbals represented parts of the human body. So the ‘strings’ were the body’s sinews and ‘the mouth is a lute, moved by the Spirit as the lute is by the plectrum.'[6]
A new phase began in early medieval times when Pope Gregory I introduced the Gregorian chant, or plainsong. It was a fashion that would last for a thousand years. Without harmony or polyphony, it took a simple melodic line, without accompaniment, and was sung by priests and choir only, not by the congregation.
Then, sometime between the seventh and ninth centuries, the organ appeared in Christian worship, introduced, it would seem, from the courts of the princes of Europe—but only in the West. The Eastern church preferred to stick with the human voice. And even in the West the introduction of the organ was long delayed by stiff opposition from the monks.
The sixteenth-century Reformation saw a massive reaction against the traditional practices of the Roman Catholic Church, including its music. Scouring the New Testament for guidance, the Reformers observed that it contained not a single reference to any musical instrument. Accordingly, John Knox wrote off the organ as ‘a kist (chest) of whistles’ while Martin Luther, with characteristic bluntness, declared that ‘the organ in the worship is the insignia of Baal’.[7]
It was not until the eighteenth century that organ music to accompany singing became general in Protestant churches. Even then, many frowned upon it, believing that the unaccompanied voices of the congregation were the only fit expression of Christian praise and worship. John Wesley was one of them. He stated, ‘I have no objection to instruments of music in our worship, provided they are neither seen nor heard.’ It surprises many today to learn that the wonderful hymns composed by his brother Charles were intended to be sung unaccompanied.
Things remained much the same in the nineteenth-century. The Church of England had embraced organ music, but most Nonconformist groups gave it little or no room. The ‘prince of preachers’, C.H. Spurgeon, who every week preached to thousands in his London Metropolitan Tabernacle, would allow no instruments. ‘What a degradation,’ he proclaimed, ‘to supplant the intelligent song of the whole congregation by the theatrical prettiness of a quartet, bellows and pipes. We might as well pray by machinery as praise by it!’
But William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, took a different view with his famous rhetorical question, ‘Why should the devil have all the best tunes?’ His military-style brass bands playing catchy tunes to Christian words introduced a new, popular dimension to church music, though the bands tended to remain a speciality of that denomination only. Elsewhere, instrumental accompaniment tended to be fairly low-key, often in the form of a pedal-organ, a piano or a simple electric organ.
In my youth I was in the Brethren. We sang unaccompanied at the Sunday morning communion service—the ‘Breaking of Bread’—but used the harmonium (pedal organ) for the evening ‘Gospel Meeting’. I once asked a respected elderly sister why we didn’t use the organ at the Breaking of Bread. Her reply baffled me then and baffles me still: ‘It’s because the organ is the wooden brother who hasn’t been baptised’! Later, a more rational member explained the real reason. At the Lord’s Table no-one should be distracted from entering fully into worship by having to play an instrument, whereas the use of the organ at the Gospel Meeting was a justifiable concession to unsaved people who, coming into the meeting, would probably be more comfortable with an accompaniment.
Whatever you think of that reasoning, there’s no denying that praise a cappella has a long and worthy pedigree in Christ’s church. I certainly have warm memories of our Sunday morning worship, where several people with the natural ability to harmonise gave the unaccompanied singing a special richness.
I first got a guitar in the early 1950s, when I was twelve. A few years later I was using it in the church youth group. Then we introduced the use of a small electronic organ into the Breaking of Bread. Soon, we began using both organ and piano together in the evening meeting, followed in due course by other instruments: tambourine, guitar and flute. And the changes did us no harm.
In more recent years, at least outside of the more formal denominations, it has become the norm to have a ‘worship band’. With sensitive musicians a band can be a huge asset to the praise and worship. The key word, however, is ‘sensitive’. Too often, church bands take their style from pop groups and hike up the volume on their amps to match the decibels that vibrate the walls in night clubs. They end up driving the singing, not accompanying it, and too much input from guitars and drums forces every song into a heavy rhythmic mode which isn’t always appropriate.
There must be room for some balance here. Henry Baker’s hymn, Oh praise ye the Lord, dating from the nineteenth century, seems to get it right. He first calls upon the people of God to raise their voices in praise to him:
Oh praise ye the Lord!
Praise him upon earth,
In tuneful accord,
Ye sons of new birth.
Praise him who hath brought you
His grace from above,
Praise him who hath taught you
To sing of his love.
Then he acknowledges that instruments of many kinds can supplement the human voices:
Oh praise ye the Lord,
All things that give sound;
Each jubilant chord
Re-echo around.
Loud organs, his glory
Forth tell in deep tone,
And sweet harp, the story
Of what he hath done.
Organs and harps. You couldn’t find two more contrasting instruments, yet each can enhance the worship of God’s people. Let the organist have his head from time to time till the whole building rumbles with thunderous praise. At other times the delicate sound of the harp is more apt. By all means bring in the brass band now and again, or the glockenspiel, the cello or the oboe. But let there also be times when no instrument is heard at all.
Not many Christians today would want to revert to unaccompanied singing as the norm. But surely there is room for it to happen from time to time. And what instruments we permit must serve the singing, not dominate it. That means a commitment to sensitivity on the part of musicians and strict restraints on the use of the volume knob. The human voice is still the best ‘instrument’ and deserves pride of place in the worship of God.
Footnotes
- Genesis 4:21
- Exodus 15:20-21
- 1 Samuel 16:18
- 1 Chronicles 15:16-24
- Augustine of Hippo, 354 AD
- Clement of Alexandria, 190 AD
- But, organ aside, he evidently had broader views on music in general:
‘Music is a fair and lovely gift of God which has often wakened and moved me to the joy of preaching. St Augustine was troubled in conscience whenever he caught himself delighting in music, which he took to be sinful. He was a choice spirit, and were he living today would agree with us. I have no use for cranks who despise music, because it is a gift of God. Music drives away the Devil and makes people gay; they forget thereby all wrath, unchastity, arrogance and the like. Next after theology I give to music the highest place and the greatest honour. I would not exchange what little I know of music for something great. Experience proves that next to the Word of God only music deserves to be extolled as the mistress and governess of the feelings of the human heart. We know that to the devils music is distasteful and insufferable. My heart bubbles up and overflows in response to music, which has so often refreshed me and delivered me from dire plagues.’
Quoted in Here I Stand: Martin Luther, by R. Bainton, Lion, 1978, p341.
Bungalow Living: Rejecting dualism
24 January 2018I’ve come across a disturbing trend: Christians who can’t cope—not with their own circumstances but with other people’s. For instance, someone today said about a chronically sick friend, ‘No, I never go to visit her. I just can’t cope with her condition.’
Here’s another case. A retired couple decided to move house to be nearer their children. But a dead housing market meant that after several years they still hadn’t found a buyer, and they didn’t have the means to move without selling first. A well-meaning Christian brother wrote and advised, ‘You need to do what Jesus said: command the house to sell. That will clear the log-jam right away. You can start packing!’[1] When the couple informed their well-meaning friend that they had been doing this very thing for a long time, with no apparent change, the communication dried up. The friend couldn’t cope with it not working.[2]
And here’s another. When a young couple known to me had their first child, a son, it wasn’t long before routine tests discovered that the little boy had a birth defect: he was profoundly deaf. They prayed about it. They got the whole church praying about it, long and hard, but with no evident change.
Then the medical authorities informed them that a new technique had become available. A small device could be implanted into the child’s head. While it would not enable him to hear in the normal sense, it would move him a tiny step closer to being able to detect certain sounds and so provide a better chance of at least some aural communication. Most of the family’s friends rejoiced at the opportunity. But a few Christians said it would be a mistake to agree to the implant, because that would show a lack of faith in God’s power to heal. So when the implant went ahead, they cut the family off—they couldn’t cope with the situation. One such lady, who had been close to the family, now crossed the street rather than meet the mother and have to face up to the fact that God hadn’t healed the boy.
This is a shameful response, brought about by what I call two-storey living. These people have two distinct living-areas in their lives. There’s the ‘downstairs’ level, where everyday life takes place: going to work, painting the hallway, buying groceries, paying the mortgage, eating dinner. Then there’s the ‘upstairs’, which is ‘spiritual’. Here, you just quote the right healing scripture and healing takes place instantly. If you have a problem, you just ‘take it to the Lord in prayer’ and he solves it for you right away. If you are short of money, you mention it to Jehovah Jireh[3] and, that same night, under cover of darkness, an anonymous person slips an envelope containing £500 through your letterbox. It always works. God says it will, so it must. It can’t not work. So when the going gets a bit rough downstairs, these folk take refuge upstairs where ‘rough’ doesn’t exist. Some in fact stay up there most of the time, reluctantly venturing down only when they need a sandwich from the fridge, or a couple of paracetamol.
This approach is a form of what theologians call dualism: two separate areas of experience, one in the physical world, the other in the metaphysical. Authentic Christianity has no place for it and has traditionally labelled it heresy. True Christian living calls us to abandon such two-storey living and move into a bungalow where there is no spiritual/secular divide, where everyday life and true spirituality co-exist in harmony, where the devil is God’s devil,[4] and where faith is robust enough to cope with anything—even God’s apparent failure to live up to his promises.
How does this apply to the lady who ‘couldn’t cope’ with visiting her one-time friend with the artificial voice-box?
For a start, she should be thoroughly ashamed of herself for her abysmal failure to show the Christian grace of caring. Then she should sort out her confused thinking that says, ‘Hmm. Betty is a good Christian woman. She forsook a lucrative career in the secular world in order to serve the Lord. She even suffered for the gospel while serving in a Muslim country. God must love her very much—certainly enough to reward her by preserving her health. But, oh dear, God hasn’t done it! I can’t square that with God’s love, so I’ll just stick my head in the sand and pretend the problem isn’t there. Unfortunately I won’t be able to visit the poor old girl, because that would be to yank my head out of the sand and see the grotesque problem yet again—and I can’t cope with that!’
You can apply the same approach to the person who can’t cope with the house-sale mountain not jumping into the sea as commanded, and to the pathetic woman who crossed the street rather than face the reality that the child of a Christian couple was profoundly deaf.
Fundamentally, these people all have a problem with God. They have him all neatly sewn up into a system whereby, provided they press the right faith-buttons and quote the Bible’s allegedly absolute promises with enough vigour and volume, God is somehow obliged to spring into action without delay and address the issue. Upstairs, he always does. But they can’t face the fact that in the real world of downstairs living sometimes—if we’re honest, often—God doesn’t do it. Of course, they have an escape clause to cover such eventualities: lack of faith on the part of the person who needs his help. It can’t possibly be God’s problem, so it must be a human one.
Now you shouldn’t kick a person when he’s down, yet that’s exactly what these mixed-up Christians do. Not only do they desert the poor woman with the voice-box when she needs Christian company most, they also tell her it’s her own fault entirely that she’s in that condition: ‘If you’d had faith, sister, you wouldn’t have got into this state in the first place.’ That’s going to make her depressed as well as sick. It is seriously unchristian.
Bungalow living means saying goodbye to all that unsanctified behaviour. It means admitting that we still live in an imperfect world, that there’s a ‘not yet’ aspect of the kingdom as well as an ‘already’, and that it can get messy downstairs.
Bungalow living means adjusting our view of God instead of turning our back on sufferers. Is God loving, good and kind? Most certainly; he has revealed himself plainly as such. Does that mean he is obliged to make our life a bed of roses? Absolutely not. He is working to a higher agenda than our personal comfort. Indeed, in the present age he often chooses to use suffering as a tool for maturing us and shaping us into a closer likeness to our Elder Brother. Facing up to these things is what real faith is about.[5]
At the great Messianic Banquet in the age to come we shall be able to feast to our hearts’ content on the goodness of God. There will be no delayed house-moves, no aural implants, no artificial voice-boxes there. There will be fulfilment, food and shalom for us all. But what about here and now? Happily, not everything is reserved for the future. From time to time the Lord, in his goodness, may grant us—as a privilege, not a right—a sample from his banquet-table, a tiny taste of the powers of the coming age—and no more.[6] Savour it when it comes, and stay real when it doesn’t.
And, oh yes—the dining room is downstairs.
Footnotes
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