Every American evangelical and fundamentalist ought to be forced to recite this paragraph by John Calvin every morning:
“We know from experience that song has great force and vigor to arouse and inflame the hearts of men to invoke and praise God with a more vehement and ardent zeal. . . . Wherefore that much more ought we to take care not to abuse it, for fear of fouling and contaminating it, coverting it to our condemnation, when it was dedicated to our profit and welfare. If there were no other consideration than this alone, it ought indeed to move us to moderate the use of music, to make it serve everything virtuous, and that it ought not to give occasion for our giving free reign to licentiousness, or for our making ourselves effeminate in disorderly delights, and that it ought not to become an instrument of dissipation or of any obscenity.”*
Sigh. It probably wouldn’t do much. After all, John Calvin isn’t Scripture, is he?
*John Calvin, Epistle to the Reader (quoted in: Charles Garside, Jr. The Origin of Calvin’s Theology of Music, 1536-1543. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1979, p. 33; quoted in D. G. Hart and John R. Muether, With Reverence and Awe (Phillipsburg, PA: P&R, 2002), 161-162.
Immoderate 
If you want to quote people on church music, you should read what Zwingley thought. Probably your church music fails his requirments. Does that mean you are not worshipping properly?
It may. I pray not, but is a terribly serious question, and we should ask it with sobriety and fear.
I’m so sorry that my Calvin remark does not please you, Billy Bob. I cannot say that I am terribly surprised.
This whole area is one of great personal frustration. I agree with a vengeance that the issue is a critical one — the value, meaning, use and misuse of music in worship, that is. I have considerable sympathy for the notion many fundies prosecute, viz. that some music in worship is positively toxic to the entire enterprise of worship. The corollary would also seem reasonable — that for the enterprise of worship, some music would not only be immenently suitable, but perhaps it would be so well conformed to that purpose that it would be vain (or sacriligeous) to deploy it in any other venue or for any othe purpose.
But, here’s the rub — I’ve never heard anyone come out with some sort of framework for understanding music, and singing (the union of words and music), along with a credible vocabulary for talking about these things, much less criteria which can be shown to have Biblical support, or endorsement, or validation. It seems always to boil down to “what I think, feel, or suppose.”
Until and unless someone can mount a credible theory for analyzing, categorizing, and criticizing the “stuff” of which we are speaking, discussions will simply generate additional clouds of acrid smoke.
You seem to not really know Zwingli’s position on church music.
You mean no singing at all? I believe that this contradicts Scripture, but I would rather approach the subject with the sobriety of Zwingli than the flippancy of many today. We are considering how we worship the one true and living God.
BQ, pardon me for musing about this, but I imagine that the issue will indeed boil down, in a certain sense, to ‘what I think, feel, or suppose.’
Now, don’t get me wrong, I believe in Ultimate Reality and, moreover, that we can get a sense of what reverence looks like from the Scriptures. We see it in, for example, the response of Jacob at Bethel (the verses I highlighted today). But that does not prescribe for us a list of reverent and irreverent songs (and everyone, I might add, is compiling that list in one way or another). I guess this is why we must become humanists, in a certain sense, seeking to understand music (and not in a scientific way, I want to stress here) and ourselves and how we respond to music and what it does to us. This is why the remark by Calvin is so appropriate. It marks the measured modesty and suspicion towards music so lacking in today’s debate. But back to my point.
In a certain sense, I think, (and I am willing to accept correction on this) it does come down to ‘what I think, feel, or suppose,’ in the sense that this is subjective. But is not your knowledge of the existence of God, to a certain extent, subjective? Has anyone ever proven it to you with hard scientific data? What makes you love God? Why do you know the Scriptures are true? What kind of objective evidence would it take? Is there any way of proving objectively the validity of an historical event? And, even if there were, what good would it be? The event needs the tendency of an interpreter. For me, this all boils down to love for God. I love him, and know him, and thereby, I trust (and earnestly pray), that I know what is reverent.
These remarks are certain to make my opponents very upset, I realize. But as I look upon God and see him in all his holiness and majesty and am struck with response of reverence and awe, I know that the other responses are completely out of the picture. Let the turks have their ‘trendy’ and ‘hip’ and immodest diety. I cannot worship any but the God I love which has been revealed to me in Jesus Christ. If I may be so bold to say this modestly, I only know Ultimate Reality through Him.
Ryan,
I may surprise you by agreeing that at some point one’s values regarding music and worship will involve “what I think, feel, or suppose.” Where we might disagree (and, we might not, too) is how we come to think, feel, or suppose whatever those values turn out to be. If, after all is said and done, there is nothing that informs, shapes, or otherwise impinges on our thoughts, feelings, and suppositions, then not only our values regarding music, but our values everywhere else — including doctrinal or spiritual or moral values — are nothing more than personal tastes. I do not think you mean to say this, else you will have enemies aplenty, and rightly so!
I indicated in an offline message that I wished to extend this discussion beyond music before returning to it. Various things have kept me from getting any further than rereading something that I knew had the germ of the idea I wished to develop. So, for now, I will refer you to the paper which contains the kernel, by providing a link to it:
http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=16-06-085-f
It would be unfair to the author to seize on the kernel I’m thinking of without providing his entire discourse. So, I’d ask you as you have time to give it a read. It shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes, maybe twice that long if you stop to reread and ponder along the way.
The kernel I’m thinking about is contained in this paragraph from the paper. Later this week, I’ll give a go at relating it to your previous comments, for I think they do, indeed, relate to one another in interesting ways. Enough for now. In the kernel which follows, the italics are original, but the bold-face is supplied by me, to point to what I wish to elaborate on later this week:
From “Communion & Division: The Structure of Knowledge” by Patrick Henry Reardon
To know the truth, then, is really to know the truth, not simply to hold to certain ideas that “correspond to” the truth. To know the truth is an act formally different from holding opinions and beliefs that happen to be correct. To know the truth is to have one’s mind shaped by real form, rei forma; it is something quite other than venturing an accurate and well-informed guess about reality. Real knowledge, therefore, is not some kind of inwardly symmetric and coherent web of basic beliefs that “correspond” to reality in varying degrees of probability. To know the truth is to have one’s mind contoured by the shape of being. That which makes a res to be a res is its forma, its morphe, and to know that res is to have one’s mind shaped by that same form. Thus, real knowledge, the knowledge of reality, is not correspondence but communion. To know is to become one with the truth, co-gnosco.
Thank you for the article, BQ! What you suppose me not to say I indeed do not intend to say–far from it. Truth is subjective only in the sense that is not objective or outside of me, but as I know God I know the Truth. Not everyone knows God, so they cannot know truth (this is not to say that they cannot know by common grace apprehend some elements which correspond to Reality). I should, at this point, stop speaking, and continue my journey which includes reading such articles like the one you have provided here. May we all come to know the True Beauty of Holiness.
Knowledge is communion. Amen. Mystical. Reardon bashes nominalism. Amen. Real. Reardon insists we must know who we are before we can ask what we can know. Amen. Excellent.
Ryan, and any others following this …
You ask, “But is not your knowledge of the existence of God, to a certain extent, subjective? Has anyone ever proven it to you with hard scientific data? … Is there any way of proving objectively the validity of an historical event? And, even if there were, what good would it be?”
It is this passage that reminded me of Reardon’s essay, and that particular part of it that I quoted. It’s not so much that either he or you were echoing the other – it’s that there is a kind of intersection between his thought and yours at this point.
If we are honest with ourselves, I would guess that about 90 percent of what we would ordinarily claim to know, we know via authority operating in this way: we are told by someone whom we trust that such and such is so, and we simply “take” that as bona fide, credible, and accurate information and go on about our business.
Now, amidst this vast fund of things we know by someone else’s testimony there is, without a doubt, a parallel fund of facts (much smaller in size) which we know directly, by our own immediate apprehension (“I saw the lightening strike the fencepost!”). Within the overall fund is a pool of things which we know but which are inaccurate to varying degrees. Nevertheless, on balance, the knowledge we actually put to some use is mostly congruent to the world , else we would soon die from error, ignorance, folly, and the like. Yes, it’s all a huge hodge-podge of probabilities, fuzzy likelihoods, and similar things, but we muddle through, better as our fund of knowledge is greater and more accurate, not so good if its small and shot through with errors.
An idea that has come to the fore in the past generation is the social dimension of knowledge – that much of what we know by authority comes not through the collective testimony of individual witnesses for each and ever datum in our fund of knowledge, but more like a web, or a framework of notions and ideas and concepts, which having been honed, refined, and validated by generations of people before us, come down to us through the normal socialization dynamics of ordinary human life – being reared in a family, educated by extended family, teachers, and the community.
It seems the post-modernists are insisting that knowledge is comprehensively, utterly, and merely social; so that knowledge of “reality” is a mirage, a communal solipsism, as it were. I believe they are wrong (that’s another discussion), but to say they’re wrong does not require we relinquish this social dimension of knowledge. In its purest form, the Scripture calls this wisdom, and it is preserved for us in specific portions of the canon of Scripture.
It is at this point that there may be an intersection with what Reardon is talking about when he speaks of knowing as communion, knowing that happens as our minds are shaped what we know, a communion (and, therefore, a degree of union) between those whose minds are shaped by the same thing(s) and whose knowledge is shared and shaped by what is known. Moving from Reardon’s theoretical formulation to the practical matters of how such knowledge ever arises in the first place, it’s easy to see how this proceeds from infancy, to early childhood, to youth, adulthood, and through old age. All along the way, our minds are being shaped by what we are taught, and a great many of the things that shape our minds are – in principle – very ancient, ancient to the degree that they come down to us from the impossibly distant past.
You said that our observations of others who are dumb-struck by the Holy does not generate for us a list of acceptable songs. However, the Scripture has a reservoir of songs (the Psalms) which our broader Biblical education tells us are in some sense the immediate result of God’s own creative Word. Can we learn nothing by pondering them? Can we not “catch” something true about worship and music from this source?
I agree, the Bible does not give us a list – of songs, or tunes. It has provided Christians with a fund of lyrics. I sent you some last week, pointed for chanting. (By the way, how’s that experiment going? ) And, it shows us a wide range of what God finds acceptable in a people’s hymnody (when’s the last time you heard a hymn in church that was within light-years of Psalm 137?). What I do not find anywhere in the Bible is the trite, the insipid, the happy-clappy. And, yes, those concepts are also informed by the Bible.
You quoted Calvin: “We know from experience that song has great force and vigor to arouse and inflame the hearts of men to invoke and praise God with a more vehement and ardent zeal.” Some of that experience is inscripturated. We can behold what God has produced, what His servants have offered and He has accepted, and we can think His thoughts after him. And, if we do this, we are moving in the realms that Fr. Reardon was speaking about. But those realms also include the wisdom of the people guided by God’s Spirit. And, that too was a theme in Reardon’s essay. For the most part, that wisdom is not inscripturated, though the Scripture tells us God’s Spirit works through it and in it.
BQ
Well said, BQ. I am working up the courage (with anticipation) to go through the instruction you sent me. They sit on my desktop and I will be going through them soon.
Thank you for your words. I think you are right that the Psalms do, in fact, inform our knowledge and understanding of what is reverent and holy. I actually have a post coming up that touches on this.
Thank you for your observations.
You need to teach me that Psalm chanting Ryan.
Ryan, you’ll likely feel a little silly when you do undertake the exercise I sent you. When I teach others — including children capable of reading the Psalms — to sing pointed psalm texts, they pick it up in about five minutes.
This exerercise, moreoever, will over time provide a tangible demonstration of Reardon’s notion of knowledge as communion, or better, the experience of having one’s mind shaped by what it knows. I got pushed toward this practice (singing Psalms to Anglican chants) by the fifteenth chapter of William Law’s Call to a Devout and Holy Life, which is simply the best apology for the practice one can find. He points out that the Psalms were written to be sung, and that to merely read them, even out loud, is to miss an indispensable feature of their message, perhaps even to misunderstand it.
But, someone will object that King David did not have Anglican chants in mind when he composed a psalm. This is true, but the objection has force only insofar as it assumes that a particular melody is required. Even granting that doubtful premise, to sing a Psalm text is surely closer to its original, intended sense than to merely read it.
Chant reverses the relationship we are accostomed to between melody and text. In chant, which is what the Psalms were composed for in the first place, it is the text which controls the deployment of the melody. This burnishes the text’s meaning in ways that mere “reading” of the text cannot do, but which singing effects with great intensity. It’s the difference between drinking a cup of lukewarm water and a cup of piping hot cocoa. Both are liquids, but that’s about the end of the similarities.
I picked up the practice about five years ago. Our parish has chanted the Psalms and Prayer Book canticles from its founding two years ago. I’m confident that all of us will enthusiastically testify that learning this has changed us in myriad ways — in how we think about worship, how we think about prayer, praise, lament, confession, proclamation, in how we related to the lyrical portions of the Bible. One man with small boys aged 2 and 4 sings the Venite to them before bedtime, and the older one joins in with a lusty boyish soprano, the words already committed to memory. “I realized that my sons could grow up so that singing the Psalms is, for them, something they have never been without.” What this father is doing is engraving deeply into his sons’ psyches a host of values which will ever afterwards judge the hymnody of any assembly they enter, a judgment made possible by singing God’s thoughts after Him.
bq