Re-learning to Speak Biblically: Another Riddle

18 January 2009

I posed a riddle from Psalm 99 a while back.  In the course of my Greek class last fall, I came upon another one in 1 John 2:3-4:

Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments.  He who says, “I know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in Him.

The thing Free Grace folk usually talk about here is the definition of knowing God — what does that mean?  Is he talking about eternal destiny, or is he talking about something else?

Let’s skip that very important question and talk about something even more basic, that often gets missed.  Whatever knowing God might be, is it achievable?  Knowing what the commandments are — and John is at some pains to make sure the more demanding aspects of the commandments remain uppermost in our minds — how could anyone ever claim that they know God?  And if they can’t claim it for themselves, how could they claim it for anyone else?  We all violate the commandments every day.

So then here’s the riddle: How can John say, just a few verses later in 2:12-14:

I write to you, little children,
Because your sins are forgiven you for His name’s sake.
I write to you, fathers,
Because you have known Him who is from the beginning.
I write to you, young men,
Because you have overcome the wicked one.
I write to you, little children,
Because you have known the Father.
I have written to you, fathers,
Because you have known Him who is from the beginning.
I have written to you, young men,
Because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you,
And you have overcome the wicked one.

He says to those he addresses, three times, that they have known (already!) God.  He says it twice to “fathers” and once to “little children.”  This is significant because he addresses his whole audience as little children in a number of other places in the epistle (see, for example, 2:18, and also the synonymous uses in 2:1, 28, 3:7, 18, 4:4, 5:21).

How can he say to his audience “If you keep God’s commandments, then you can say you know God” and then say to them, only a few sentences later “You have known God”?  Given human sinfulness, how can he do that?

We would not dare, most of us, to speak this way to one another.  And because we would not dare to speak biblically to one another, we will find ourselves compelled to speak in truncated ways that do not match the Scriptures.  The solution is to come to terms with speaking biblically.  And to do that, we must solve this riddle.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Competent to Counsel?

11 January 2009

Within the evangelical, Bible-believing, American church in the last four decades, an awful lot of things have happened which I fervently hope my grandchildren will have a hard time believing.  But among a truly embarrassing heap of incongruous strangenesses, there are a few that really stand out, and I’d like to talk about one of those.

Starting in the late sixties, our counselors — those specialists in explaining to us how people in disagreement can sit down and have a peaceable discussion like grown-ups — divided into two camps that were, for the most part, utterly incapable of peaceable dialogue.

Let me say that again: Our conflict resolution specialists could barely speak to one another, let alone resolve their intramural conflicts.

And these are the people who are supposed to help us get along with our in-laws.  “Tell it not in Gath…”

David Powlison unfolds half of the sad tale in Competent to Counsel? The History of a Conservative Protestant Biblical Counseling Movement.  As the title indicates, Powlison is writing a history of the biblical counseling movement, not a history of the debate between it and the evangelical psychotherapists. As far as the debate goes, this is hardly the whole story.  But thus far, it is the only serious, scholarly attempt to chronicle the biblical counseling movement — which is valuable in itself, and addresses the conflict from one side in any case.

Why does it matter?

Because if we want to avoid similar decades-long battles in other areas — like, say, over the exact content that one must believe to be saved — then it is helpful to see what our brothers have done wrong (and what they have done right) in past conflicts.

Just one example:  When Jay Adams began writing and speaking about counseling, he almost completely bypassed the evangelical psychotherapists and went straight for their constituents.  His message was “The Bible has the answers for problems in living; seek the answers there.  Don’t listen to these guys; they’re not basing their responses on the Bible, and in any case they are an illegitimate secular pastorate and their function needs to be returned to the church.”  (My paraphrase, but he was at least that blunt.)

Now, the response was predictable as sunrise: the psychotherapists fought back tooth and nail, or ignored him.

Adams had to know that was going to happen.  He seems to have made a decision that he was unlikely to win them over in any case, so he would take his argument to the broader church as fast as possible, using deliberately inflammatory rhetoric to make friends quickly where people agreed with him — at the cost of making enemies quickly among the psychotherapists.

Now, I think Adams had an important message, and the wider church needed to be brought into the discussion.  But the biblical standard for engaging fellow believers is “Consider one another in order to stir up love and good deeds….”  Instead, Adams chose a course of action practically guaranteed to maximize animosity and bad deeds among the evangelical psychotherapists, with predictable results that largely persist today.  While there are pockets of biblical counseling here and there, the evangelical world as a whole has weighed it and found it wanting.  The reasons for that state of affairs would fill a book, but it surely hasn’t helped that while bringing much biblical content to bear on problems in living, the movement simultaneously behaved unbiblically toward one group of fellow believers.

For those of you conversant with the present gospel spat, this ought to sound familiar.  Think we can learn anything from history?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Novel is a Christian Art Form

28 December 2008

I came across the following in an interview titled “Faith Fired by Literature” hosted by speakingoffaith.org.

Krista Tippett (interviewer): What did he [Walker Percy] mean when he wrote, “There is a special kinship between the novel as an art form and Christianity as an ethos, Catholicism in particular?”

Paul Elie:  What he meant is that the novel as a form is distinguished from other forms in the broad sense,– like a play or an epic poem– in that it deals with narrative events in the lives of ordinary people.  There are exceptions to this, but in the main, if you looked at the history of the novel over two hundred fifty years, that would be true.  With the novel, the ordinary person comes on stage.

Well, theologically, the coming of Christ is the entry of God into the life of an ordinary person.  Jesus was just an ordinary man in first-century Palestine, walking the earth like the rest of us, having problems, encountering opposition, dying a violent death.  So in this sense, Christianity is seen as sanctifying and directing us to ordinary lives as the place where the divine is to be found , and so you can see the parallel between that and the novel, which looks for meaning in precisely the same place.

Amen.  I would, of course, take issue with the notion that this understanding is the property of Roman Catholicism in particular, and on two grounds.

First, if you’re any kind of Christian at all, you believe that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  This belief, affirmed from the earliest days of the ancient church and expressed one way or another in the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Definition of Chalcedon, is the common property of small-c-catholic Christianity — the whole of the Christian church.  It is one of our great grounds of unity, and far too little is made of it.

Second, recovering the doctrine of vocation — the belief that God calls the farmer to his field as surely as He calls the missionary to his — was one of the great victories of the Protestant Reformation.  In the west, the medieval church had largely lost this truth, and its recovery was one of the centerpieces of the Reformation, now sadly neglected in much of the church.  But it is our property nonetheless, and this dignifies all the “mundane” details of imaging God through dominion over the earth.  Our fulfillment as human beings is found there, being human as God called us to be, or it is not to be found at all.

So in the one case, the truth which makes the novel a peculiarly Christian form is common to all Christianity, and in the other the truth is represented most strongly not in the Roman, but in the old Protestant, tradition.

I say “old Protestant” tradition because the modern Protestant has lost it again.  We talk blithely of “full-time Christian work” as if that phrase meant something more than “sanctified living” — because to us it does.  We regularly follow this up with a pro forma qualification — “of course we’re all supposed to be ‘full-time Christians,'” we’ll say, “but you know what I mean.”

And we all do.  What an indictment!

“Full-time Christian work” means you leave off directly taking part in the dominion of the earth for talking to people about God.  It means imaging God with your mouth rather than your hands.  It means you’ve entered the Christian ‘chattering class.’

In its common usage then, the phrase “full-time Christian work” is the wheezing gasp of an ecclesiology that desperately needs to be put out of our misery.  In biblical ecclesiology, the Church is not just a club or a religious group among other religious groups.  It is nothing less than the new humanity — man-in-risen-Christ rather than man-in-fallen-Adam.  And everything that man-in-risen-Christ lawfully does is charged with meaning: it is the image of God in the world.

Hence the modern novel, the tale of ordinary people doing ordinary things — meaningfully.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

If You Can’t Base Doctrine On Experience…

20 December 2008

It is a truism universally acknowledged — at least in my incestuously small circles — that you can’t make doctrine from experience.  We often say it exactly like that: “You can’t make doctrine from experience.”  Or in the disclaimer form: “I realize you can’t make doctrine from experience, but I’ll tell you, I’ve found that…”

Of course this position is perfectly understandable.

I think of a man and a woman, both married to other people, who were committing adultery together.  (By the way, this is a true story.)  They justified their adultery on the grounds that they always knelt by the bed first and prayed together that if them coming together was not God’s will, He would step in and prevent it.  He never did.  On the strength of God’s non-intervention, they concluded He must approve, that their ‘love’ for each other must have somehow sanctified their illicit relationship.

See?  You can’t make doctrine from experience.

Countless abuses, errors and rank sillinesses are being avoided, at this very moment, by people who are having strange experiences, but who, on the strength of this dictum, will not try to make doctrine out of it.  This is a Good Thing.

But…

…is it true?  Is it really as simple as “You can’t make doctrine out of experience”?

I submit the following example for consideration:

Does this blessedness then come upon the circumcised only, or upon the uncircumcised also? For we say that faith was accounted to Abraham for righteousness.  How then was it accounted? While he was circumcised, or uncircumcised? Not while circumcised, but while uncircumcised. And he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had while still uncircumcised, that he might be the father of all those who believe, though they are uncircumcised, that righteousness might be imputed to them also, and the father of circumcision to those who not only are of the circumcision, but who also walk in the steps of the faith which our father Abraham had while still uncircumcised.

For the promise that he would be the heir of the world was not to Abraham or to his seed through the law, but through the righteousness of faith….

For those of you who haven’t recognized it, that’s Romans 4:9-13.  Paul is arguing that an uncircumcised person — i.e., a Gentile — can be found righteous on the basis of his faith.  How does he prove his point?  Note the portion in bold. Paul argues on the basis of Abraham’s experience.  We use the word “history” instead, but that just means it’s really old experience.

The comeback, of course, is that Paul was inspired by the Holy Spirit to write Romans as Scripture; not being similarly inspired, we can’t interpret experience in the same way that he could — and anyway, he’s interpreting Old Testament Scripture, not his own personal experience.  I think there are good responses to both objections, but let’s bypass them for the moment and look at another example:

If I do not do the works of My Father, do not believe Me; but if I do, though you do not believe Me, believe the works, that you may know and believe that the Father is in Me, and I in Him.

That’s Jesus speaking in John 10:37-38.  He challenges his hearers that if they don’t find His words convincing, then they ought to believe His works — i.e., His miracles.  But these are events which they have seen and heard themselves, that is, personal experiences.  From these personal experiences, Jesus’ readers should derive a christological conclusion.  That is once again getting doctrine from experience.

But perhaps someone will say, “That’s all well and good for the people who see supernatural events like the miracles Jesus is talking about there, but you can’t make doctrine out of the events of ordinary life.”  Really?  Let’s look at a third example:

You shall truly tithe all the increase of your grain that the field produces year by year. And you shall eat before the LORD your God, in the place where He chooses to make His name abide, the tithe of your grain and your new wine and your oil, of the firstborn of your herds and your flocks, that you may learn to fear the LORD your God always. But if the journey is too long for you, so that you are not able to carry the tithe, or if the place where the LORD your God chooses to put His name is too far from you, when the LORD your God has blessed you, then you shall exchange it for money, take the money in your hand, and go to the place which the LORD your God chooses.  And you shall spend that money for whatever your heart desires: for oxen or sheep, for wine or similar drink, for whatever your heart desires; you shall eat there before the LORD your God, and you shall rejoice, you and your household.

This is from Deuteronomy 14:22-26, but particularly note the clause in bold.  It’s an instruction on the conduct of the festival year, and the disposition of the ‘party tithe.’  At the appointed time, they are to gather up 10% of the previous year’s income, go up to the place God designates, and throw a party.  They are to do this every year.  No miracles, no supernatural events — just the ordinary rhythms of life, like a Thanksgiving dinner, the Super Bowl, and watching the ball drop on New Year’s Eve.

They are to throw this party, Moses tells them, so that they will learn to fear God always.

This rings strangely to our ears for a number of reasons that I’ll pass over here.  We should notice, however, that the theological conclusion comes in the doing of it, that is, in experience.  Again, it is precisely in experience that they are to learn their doctrine.

Does this mean that we can have a strange experience and use it to justify any theological nonsense we want?  Of course not.  There are controls — interpreting experience by what God has said — but that’s a discussion for another post.  For the time being, note: our modern dictum that “you can’t get doctrine from experience” would ring very strangely in the ears of the men who wrote the Bible.  They plainly did not believe any such thing.

Neither should we.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

News: Winning NanoWriMo

15 December 2008

nanonovember120x238Ten years ago, a merry maniac by the name of Chris Baty decided it would be a good idea to try to write a novel in a month.

This is obviously ridiculous.

But he did it, and got people to join him.  The event is called National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo), and it takes place every November.

To clarify, the challenge is to write a 50,000-word first draft of a novel entirely in the month of November.  It doesn’t have to be perfect.  It doesn’t have to be edited.  It doesn’t even have to be finished.   It does have to be nonexistent until midnight on November 1 — no starting early — and at least 50,000 words long no later than midnight, November 30.

Last year, my darling wife did it — starting late and finishing early, even — and I made taquitos and encouraged her when she thought she wasn’t going to make it.  It looked like so much fun I decided that I’d join her this year, circumstances permitting.  Well, circumstances didn’t really permit, but I decided to join her anyway.  I could always quit if I was failing horribly.  And besides, 50,000 words sounds like a lot, but spread over 30 days it’s only 1,667 words a day, which is not all that bad.  After all, I’ve banged out 10,000-word position papers in an afternoon; 1,667 words a day should be easy.

I was behind from the very first day.

1,262 words behind, in fact.  The next two days were so busy I didn’t even try to write — which put me even further behind.  By the morning of November 4, I needed to write 6,263 words by midnight just to get caught up.

I didn’t.

Don’t get me wrong; I wrote a very respectable 2,007 words that day.  But it wasn’t close to enough.

It got worse from there.  When I went to bed on November 21, I  still needed almost 28,000 words — more than half the total — and I had only 9 days to go.  Meanwhile, I had no idea where my plot was going, and my wife was in worse trouble than I was.  Her writing process is to talk about what she’s writing.  A lot.  As she talks, and people comment and ask questions, ideas come to her, and then she goes and writes them down.  Last year, that worked wonderfully, because I was supporting her.  This year, though, I was writing.  My writing process is to say nothing, and write in utter solitude and silence.

Cracks were beginning to appear in the domestic bliss.

The spectre of failure loomed.  We began to discuss whether we’d have to alternate, with one of us writing at a time, and the other in a support role, and then switching places next year.  We decided, though, that we were going over the cliff with all our flags flying — either win together, or not at all.  We needed a way to work together.

We didn’t have one.  We talked about both our projects, which helped Kimberly immensely and — to my delight — helped me some, too.  But it was costing me valuable writing time.   Thinking that we were going to succeed became a conscious discipline rather than a belief.

That lasted for days.  Just before bedtime on the 25th, with just 5 days to go, I was struggling along at 31,000 words, and Kimberly was just behind me.

Then a friend introduced us to Write or Die.  It’s a web-based app with a simple text editor.  If you stop writing, it turns your screen angry colors and plays nasty sound effects — crying babies, Hansen, and worse — on the theory that an immediate, negative consequence motivates better than a distant, positive one.

If it sounds like this doesn’t allow for sober reflection and careful attention to what one is writing, then you’re getting the idea.  The goal is to WRITE — editing can come later.  Bad writing can be edited, but blank pages can’t.  It works better than you’d think, and both of us found surprising twists of plot and characterization arising from “mistakes” we made under pressure.

It was the tool we’d been waiting for.  We instantly went from 1,000-word days to 3,000-word evenings, and better.  We would write for 10 minutes at breakneck speed, churning out 300-600 words, then compare word counts so the winner could celebrate.  A quick break to shake out the hands, get a bite to eat, talk character and plot on our respective projects, then back to it for another ten or twenty minutes.

All of a sudden I could spare the time to talk as much as Kimberly needed so she could write, and still get my own writing done.

nano_08_winner_largeWe made it.  Together.  Rather handily, actually — we both hit 50,000 words with time to spare.

Needless to say, we’re pretty happy with that.  Kimberly’s book is nearly done.  Mine still needs some serious surgery, and probably another 20,000 words or so.  I’ll have something to do over the Christmas holidays.

But for us, the most important thing to arise from NaNo 2008 was gaining the ability to write together.  Still on separate projects, but in the same house, at the same time, with two very different writing processes.

The domestic bliss is back.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

News: We Got Sound!

11 December 2008

I’ve upgraded! For the paltry sum of $20 annually, I can have sound files, and 5Gb of extra storage. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it all — that’s a lot of space — but for the moment, I’ve put up the Living the Living Word lectures. In a nutshell, it’s a 10-week exploration of the idea that the Bible teaches us how to study the Bible, complete with enough suggestions for further study to get you at least to a Bible college-level workload, if you want to do that much. The extra work is not required, however, and the lectures are designed to be beneficial for people who just want to listen.

I’ve also posted my personal recordings of last year’s FGA panels on assurance and the cross, for those who’ve perhaps read about the discussions but haven’t had the chance to hear and judge for themselves. Links to both are also now posted on the Gospel Discussion page.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

If You Confess Your Sins, You Should Pick Up Litter, Too

7 December 2008

One of the enjoyable sidelines I’ve tried to develop here at Full Contact Christianity is a ferocious intolerance for theological inconsistencies.  It’s one thing to just be wrong; it’s quite another, much more irresponsible thing to believe (1) A, and (2) Not-A — and loudly declaim on both topics.  Granted, the two proclamations don’t usually take place at the same time.

I’d like to address a doozy this week — the idea that one can be so taken with “spiritual” matters like relationship with God or sharing the gospel with the lost that one simply has no time for “peripheral” concerns like caring for the world we live in.  After all, it’s all going up in flames anyhow, and then God recreates it, so why worry about it?  Where’s the contradiction, you ask?  Just watch.  Much as I would enjoy an opportunity to do some first-hand mocking,  N. T. Wright said it better than ever I could, so with no further ado, here he is:

I’ve spoken about God’s ultimate intention, that through the renewed human beings in Christ, the cosmos itself would be renewed.  This strikes very hard at those of us who grew up within some kind or other of a pietistic tradition which actually had a low social concern because it said that was just oiling the wheels of a machine which was going to go over the cliff:  What’s the point in tinkering with the structures of society?  What’s the point in worrying about global warming, or whatever it is, because we know that the world is going to be jettisoned, and that we the saved will go off to be with God elsewhere.

Romans 8 ought long ago to have given the lie to any such idea.  God loves the world that He’s made and wants to renew it.  He sees it groaning in travail, and the answer to something groaning in travail is that the new is going to be born out of the womb of the old, not that the groaning person or world is going to be left to groan forever until it dies — No!

Where does that then leave us at the moment?  There are many people who will see this picture and then will say “That’s great; we’re going to get that renewal one day when the Messiah comes back.  When God renews everything then it’ll happen, but there’s nothing we can do about it at the moment.”

Now listen, many of you are pastors – probably the majority of you are pastors, that’s why you’re here.  [Suppose] somebody came to you and said, “I’m having a real trouble with holiness, with this sin problem.  I just find I sin all the time, and I see well there is this thing called holiness, but there’s really no point in me trying very hard after it, because after all, one day, God will raise me from the dead and give me a beautiful new life in which I will never sin again.  That’s going to happen, so why should I worry about it now?”

I hope that if somebody came to you like that, you would hit them with a fairly heavy dose of inaugurated eschatology.  You mightn’t express it quite like that, but what you would say is, “God wants you right now in the present, to live as nearly as you can in the power of the spirit to that lovely fully human creature that you’re going to be one day.  Of course you will constantly be saying ‘God have mercy on me, a sinner.’  But He has given you His Spirit so that you can anticipate in the present what you should be in the future.  “

Now, should we not say the same about our responsibility for creation, for the world which God made and which He loves so much?  Of course we should.  And if we get our soteriology right, we can go to that task without any of those snide remarks that this is a derogation from our gospel duty.  It is part of our gospel duty.”

(This is from Session 6 of the 2005 Auburn Avenue Pastors’ Conference, available for $1.99 here, at about the 57:30 mark.)

An additional note for those of you who are interested in (or furious about) Wright’s position vis-a-vis the New Perspective on Paul.  In this particular conference, Wright is addressing an audience entirely conservative, and mainly composed, from what I gather, of Presbyterian pastors.  If you’ve read some of the caterwauling about how Wright is striking at the vitals of the Christian religion, this is a good place to see what he has to say for himself to a group of people who will share your concerns.  He delivers five lectures (Richard Gaffin does the other five) and participates in three Q&A/discussion sessions, so there’s quite a bit of material, and some good interaction as well.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Psalm 99: A Riddle

30 November 2008

Psalm 99 poses a very difficult problem for modern readers.  See if you can spot it:

The LORD reigns;
Let the peoples tremble!
He dwells between the cherubim;
Let the earth be moved!
The LORD is great in Zion,
And He is high above all the peoples.
Let them praise Your great and awesome name
He is holy.

The King’s strength also loves justice;
You have established equity;
You have executed justice and righteousness in Jacob.
Exalt the LORD our God,
And worship at His footstool
He is holy.

Moses and Aaron were among His priests,
And Samuel was among those who called upon His name;
They called upon the LORD, and He answered them.
He spoke to them in the cloudy pillar;
They kept His testimonies and the ordinance He gave them.
You answered them, O LORD our God;
You were to them God-Who-Forgives,
Though You took vengeance on their deeds.
Exalt the LORD our God,
And worship at His holy hill;
For the LORD our God is holy.

The problem for us comes in the portion in green.  If we know our history, we’re on the alert immediately.  We want to say, “Wait a minute, God!  Moses did not keep Your testimonies and ordinance; he struck the rock.  Aaron didn’t either; he made the golden calf.  Samuel raised evil sons.  How can You say such a thing about them?”

If we’re not familiar with the history, we still have trouble with the passage, because in the same breath, the Psalmist says that God forgave them, although He took vengeance on their evil deeds.  So if there were offenses to forgive, if they were in fact guilty of evil deeds, then they clearly did not keep God’s testimonies and ordinance — right?

Wrong.  Obviously wrong, because the Psalmist and the Holy Spirit say otherwise.  But we cannot find it in our hearts to speak of Moses, Aaron, and Samuel in the way that the psalm speaks of them.  We believe, right down to our bones, that it is an inaccurate, self-contradictory description.

In other words, we do not have the mind of Christ on this subject; we don’t see it as God does, and can’t speak of it as He does.

And yet, this is a psalm.  We are supposed to sing it, just like the other psalms.  Here, then, is the riddle: How can we sing it in good conscience, with understanding? How can the Psalmist and the Holy Spirit say, in the same breath, that Moses, Aaron, and Samuel kept God’s testimonies and His ordinance, and that He forgave them and avenged their evil deeds?  How is that possible?

When we can answer that, we will know a little more about God’s forgiveness than we presently do.

And maybe we’ll become better at forgiving each other, too.

1 Comment | Meditations, Speaking as God Speaks, Worship | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Hymns or Contemporary Music? An Exercise in Missing the Point

23 November 2008

A lot of ink, and no small amount of (metaphorical) blood, has been spilt over whether worshippers today should sing hymns or contemporary music.  I don’t intend to rehash the debate here, because I think it’s a stupid argument.  The people on both sides have so thoroughly overlooked the central questions on worship music that it’s a bit like arguing about whether to allocate federal funds for free condoms in public-school sex education classes.  (Sex education that leaves parents out? Federal funding?  Public schools?)  If you’re already that far gone, fighting about condoms is pretty much beside the point; the whole premise of the debate is deeply wrong several times over.

So it is with worship music.  First of all, the entire debate is largely conducted in terms of musical taste, which is already wrong.  Worship is offered to God; the question is not what makes us feel good, but what He wants to hear.  Blithely offering what we want to give is the mistake Cain made, and we’ll fare no better than he did.  Realizing this leads us to a second temptation.  I think it was Anne Lamott who said that you can be pretty sure you’ve made God in your image when it turns out He hates all the same people you do.  As of people, so of music: if you think God’s tastes entirely match your own, chances are pretty good that you’ve confused God with the person in the mirror.

Second, the question of whether it’s better to sing hymns or praise choruses is pointless, because the first priority is to sing psalms.  Try on these passages for size:

How is it then, brethren?  Whenever, you come together, each of you has a psalm, has a teaching, has a tongue, has a revelation, has an interpretation.  Let all things be done for edification.  (1 Corinthians 14:26)

And do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation, but be filled by the Holy Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and playing heartily to the Lord….  (Ephesians 5:18-19)

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing to the Lord with grace in your hearts.  (Colossians 3:16)

Is anyone among you suffering?  Let him pray.  Is anyone cheerful?  Let him sing psalms.  (James 5:13)

Might it be that there could be extrabiblical psalms, songs we write today to sing to the Lord?  Of course.  Paul’s use in his letters of early Christian hymn fragments seems to make this point pretty clearly.  But — as Doug Wilson so pointedly puts it — while the commands may potentially encompass more than the Book of Psalms, they surely do not encompass any less.  Leaving aside the question of what songs we might write, we have 150 that we know we’re supposed to sing.  Most of us could count on one hand the ones we could sing all the way through, and have a finger left to scratch our heads wondering how we ever missed these clear commands in Scripture.  Best we get started; we’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

Of course, we have the lyrics, but not the music.  We have to supply the music, and this has the potential to renew the debate: contemporary music, or something older? The first answer is “something older.”  Not because it’s better — although it might be — but because we already have it. The sooner we get started, the better, and it turns out we’re not the only ones who have ever thought about this.  There’s a rich Western heritage of music for the Psalms: we have medieval chant, the Scottish Psalter, the Genevan Psalter, the Irish Psalter, and various others.  The music in these psalters is older, and we’re going to have to live with it, at least until we can replace it.  But such is the price of several centuries of disobedience; if you don’t like Renaissance and medieval music, consider it motivation to get cracking.  It makes no sense to tell God “We’ll be happy to obey You in this matter just as soon as we’ve come up with some music that suits our tastes.”  Pfui.  We’ve got music; let’s use it.  Who knows, we might even decide we like it (I have).

Of course, there’s no reason for our composers today to rest on the laurels of the medieval church and the Protestant Reformation.  We should be writing music for the psalms, making our own contributions to the worship of the Lord, and this, again, threatens to renew the debate: contemporary music, or something in an older style?  But to argue the point in terms of temporal categories is, once again, already wrong.

The question should be, what sort of music best fits the psalm we’re working with?  Since God has given us the lyrics, we have to honor them; therefore, the music should augment the lyrics, not blunt them.  Repetitive variations on a theme in the lyrics should lead to repeated variations on a theme in music.  Happy lyrics that call for cymbals and shouts should lead to loud music with cymbals and shouts.  Mournful confession in the psalm should lead to mournful music.  Angry and discordant lyrics should lead to the same sort of music.  And so on.

Once we begin to consider these issues, then the debate over contemporary or traditional music might actually be worth taking up again.  But personally, I suspect that when we begin to consider these issues, most of the present debate will wither away, revealed for the silly distraction it always was.

2 Comments | liturgy, Meditations, music, Worship | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Sociology of Vigorous Music

16 November 2008

The Western church has tried, and failed, to reform its worship before, or at least failed to make the reforms stick.  The reforms lasted long enough to give us some wonderful music, but we are now trying to recover it, because in the intervening centuries, we lost it.  The historical trend is from the rich and complex to the simplistic and predictable, from vigorous, robust singing to plaintive, introspective howling.

Why?

One answer is that we are sinners, and we always resist God.  He requires music to match the songbook He gave us, and we simply don’t deliver.  His songs are profitable for teaching, rebuke, correction and instruction in righteousness, which is to say, they are often comforting, but always uncomfortable.  We prefer to be comfortable, so we don’t sing God’s songs.  Not singing His Word, we are free to write our own, comfortable words, and compose for our comfortable words a lazy musical score that does not challenge us.

That’s one answer, and I think it’s a good one.  I’d like to add to it, though, because I think it’s missed something important.  I do this provisionally, in the spirit of a trial balloon, and if this intrigues or outrages you, I would love to hear from you.

When we backslide, there are always two reasons why: first, because we wanted to go backward, and second, because we didn’t move forward.  The answer above addresses only why we wanted to go backward.  I’d like to address the second reason, and begin to discuss how to move forward.

Many of these older, more complex, vigorous tunes are dances.  In fact, this is precisely the reason Queen Elizabeth dismissed the Genevan Psalter as “Genevan jigs.”

So where are the dancers?

If everyone sits in pews, or even stands in place, and sings the original ‘Genevan jigs,’ the incongruence between their music and their actions will get to them sooner or later.  Eventually, they will slow down the music to match what they’re doing with their bodies.  If even a few people are dancing, though, the sight and tempo of the movement will reinforce the vigor of the music.  We’re going to have to recover worship dance along with worship music, if we’re going to succeed in reviving vigorous psalm-singing.   It’s a package deal — the physical movement demands a certain sort of music, and the kind of music many of the Psalms require naturally demands that the body get up and move.   It’s unnatural to sing a jig without somebody dancing a jig.

I don’t know that there’s biblical precedent for making dance a part of the ordinary liturgy, but there is definitely precedent for worship dance on an ad hoc basis — Miriam (Exodus 15) and David (2 Samuel 6) come immediately to mind.  In order for that to be an option, a vigorous tradition of folk dance has to be part of the ongoing culture of the church, otherwise we won’t have the skills when we need them.

Music and dance go together.  There’s one other ingredient, though.  Vigorous dance has a strong, even martial quality to it.   This is no accident: in premodern cultures, there’s no separation between dance and martial preparation.  The martial arts of premodern cultures are all related to the cultures’ dances, and although not all dance is martial preparation in these cultures, martial preparation almost invariably involves dance.

Why?  I’m not sure of all the reasons, but I can speak to at least one of them from my own experience.  Dance is sustainable (physically, but more important, psychologically) in a way that harsh preparation for combat is not.  Dancing with a partner or a group reinforces general athleticism, distancing, timing, coordination, and so on, but it does these things in a relaxed and joyful way.

Contrast the dance to, say, hard sparring.  Sparring — even friendly sparring — takes a certain amount of focused bad intentions, it hurts, and it’s really rough on the body if you’re older than 25 or so.  You can only do so much of it.  Dance doesn’t have those problems, and so one of its functions is to involve the whole community in sustainable martial preparation.

It works the other way too.  As long as there’s no artificial barrier between martial preparation and dance, the culture’s dance tradition never fully loses contact with its martial traditions, and is in no danger of becoming decadent and effete.

So here’s the problem as I see it: cultures the world over demonstrate that a martial backdrop, vigorous dance, and vigorous music all go together.  Lose part of the package, and it seems that you’re in some danger of losing the whole thing.  If we’re going to have vigorous music — and keep it this time, instead of losing it after a century or so — I suspect we’ve got to figure out a way to have the whole package.

All of that said, the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, and the church is unique among the cultures of the world in that regard.  So how does this work itself out for us?

13 Comments | liturgy, Meditations, music | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

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