Monday 10 September 2012

It's A Small Matter--Or So We Are Told

Music And Worship

Music is a contentious issue in the Church.  This is not surprising.  It has been contentious for a long, long time.  One of the issues abroad today is whether church music and song should reflect the currently prevailing musical idioms of our culture. 

On any given Sunday, up and down the country churches listen to (and sing) songs which imitate trite "love songs" playing on just about every radio station, 24/7.  With one difference: the love songs are sung about Jesus.  It is banal and disrespectful.  It breaches the third commandment--being nothing more than the using of God's holy Name in a vain and empty manner.

T. David Gordon, in his Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns puts the matter in a wider perspective. 

Biblically, then, neither music nor song is merely a matter of entertainment or amusement.  Both are very serious business, both culturally and religiously.  Song is the divinely instituted, divinely commanded, and divinely regulated means of responding to God's great works of creation, preservation, and deliverance. 

Worship song is both the remarkable privilege and the solemn duty of the redeemed.  Therefore, to suggest that worship song is "merely" or "just" anything, whatever that "anything" is, is to deny the very teaching of Scripture about the importance of worship song in God's economy--an importance so great that it characterizes the life of the redeemed in the world to come.  Thus, the unfortunately common statements, by both proponents and opponents of contemporary worship music, that this is "merely" a matter of taste or preference are erroneous and must be regarded as unbiblical. 

This . . . posture that worship song is merely a matter of amusement or entertainment . . . . arises from a culture that has come to be characterized, as Neil Postman argued, by amusement.  In such a culture . . . it is not surprising that even Bible-believing people have unwittingly adopted such an anti-biblical stance.  They simply aren't aware of the conflict between the teaching of the Bible and the values of our culture on this point.  [T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns (Phillipsburg: P& R Publishing, 2010), p.31f.]

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