Worship
Music: Theocentric or Anthropocentric?
Today there is a battleground over music and there are those who
claim that you can use any kind of music, any form of worship, in order to
worship God as long as you add words to it, and that there is no such thing as
a universal overriding principle to govern and control the music that is used.
Francis Schaeffer, who is now with the Lord, stated in an address at the
University of Notre Dame in April, 1981: “Christianity is not a series of
truths in the plural, but rather is truth spelled with a capital T; truth about
total reality, not just about religious things. Biblical Christianity is truth
concerning total reality and the intellectual holding of that total truth, and
then living in the light of that truth.” Truth is at the very heart of biblical
worship. John
In the Scripture music is an integral part of worship, it is a very
important. We’ll se in Ephesians 5:19 it is related to the filling of the Holy
Spirit. We saw in John 4:25 that if we are going to worship God—and in this
passage the Lord is talking about a future time, specifically the church age—we
must be worshipping in Spirit and in truth. What we have in this verse is the
use of the word PNEUMA [PNEUMA] for “Spirit.” It is also translated “wind” in John 3, it is already
used some 10 times out of the 24 times it is used in the Gospel of John. In
this Gospel PNEUMA primarily refers to the Holy Spirit. In the ten uses so far it refers
to the Holy Spirit seven times, it describes the wind one time, and two times
is refers to the new regenerate nature inside a believer. But what we have here
in this verse is more than just the use of the word PNEUMA, we have the phrase EN PNEUMATI [e)n
pneumati],
and that phrase is used only one other time in the Gospel of John in 1:33 where
it refers to the baptism of the Holy Spirit, or by means of the Spirit. It is
used seven other times in the other Gospels where there is an instrumental use
meaning by means of the Spirit. In all but one case in Paul’s writing it refers
to an instrumental use. Why is that important? Because when we look at this
phrase EN
PNEUMA
we don’t have capitals in Greek, and upper case to tell us when the author is
using it to refer to the wind or to the Holy Spirit, the human spirit, or to
the attitude of thought, or any of the other eight or nine nuances to this
word. So we look at usage and when we look at how this phrase is used in the
Scripture it has this idea of instrumentality or means, that we are to worship
God by means of the Spirit. And that certainly fits with Ephesians 5:18, and
The reason for emphasizing this is because people want to say that
worship today is what you want it to be. It is defined by the heart of the
worshipper how he thinks and defines his own worship of God. After all, if you
bring to God what you want and what you believe is honourable to Him, God
should honor that, shouldn’t he? That is what Cain thought. He brought what he
thought would honor God and God rejected it. He accepted the worship that was
brought by Abel in line with what he had revealed to them already. So we see
that worship must be done in fellowship, by means of the Holy Spirit, and by
means of truth. This implies that every aspect of worship—giving, the music,
the words—comes under an umbrella criterion of absolute truth; it is not
autonomous.
The basic assumption in contemporary music is that it is completely use
it and we can use it any way we want to. According to their literature and what
they have written contemporary Christian music advocates say that you can talk
about good music and bad music within styles or within categories but you can’t
talk about good music versus bad music. So what they have done is to segregate
an aspect of God’s creation from His role as creator and made it independent
and autonomous, which is the foundation for any kind of idolatry. When you take
any aspect of the creation and separate it out from under the revelation of God
and the authority of God it is the first step in establishing idolatry. So we
see that the fact that Jesus says that worship must fit an absolute standard of
universal truth this would apply at the very least to the musical aspect of
worship, and that runs contrary to the basic assumption in the philosophy of
contemporary Christian music.
We also find this same verbiage of EN PNEUMATI in Ephesians 5:18:
“And do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with
[by means of] the Spirit,
So what do we conclude from these passages?
1) First of all we
conclude that music is part of God’s creation from the very inception. We
understand that as the creator from eternity past music is in the mind of God.
We have looked at passage like Job 38 that speak of the angels singing together
for joy when God laid the foundation of the earth.
2)
We understand that music is a central part of worship
and is a result of the filling of the Holy Spirit.
3)
We recognize that music therefore must be in
conformity with absolute truth, which means that as part of God’s creation it
is not neutral, it is not independent from God’s authority or His revealed
Word.
God is totally distinct from creation and he speaks across that barrier
which distinguishes the creator from the creature to His creation. He created
everything. So that means that He is the one who defines matter and energy. He
defines who mankind is as image-bearers of God. God is the one who defines
mankind’s purpose. He is the one who establishes social laws, marriage, family,
politics, government, law. All of these things related to human social activity
is defined by God. That is a profound statement and it means that if you are
going to think anything about politics you had better start with what is going
on in Genesis 1-3 and society, and then deal with the Noahic covenant and the
tower of Babel. You can’t truly think biblically about politics or law if you
don’t start there. You are just starting with some aspect of the creation and
then you expand that out autonomously from God. That is idolatry. We have to
think about these things biblically. It doesn’t means that we run away from
these things and we don’t have anything to do with them, but we have to
understand what is going on in the world. Ethics are grounded in the
righteousness, veracity and integrity of God. Aesthetics: God is the original
workman and creator, He created a universe of beauty. The study of art, music,
literature, all of these things, come under the category of aesthetics and we
need to go to the Scripture and we can extrapolate principles related to beauty
and actually build a theology of beauty. What we are saying here simply is that
you can’t come along and say we are going to take animals, everything about
zoology and biology and take that out from under God’s authority, He doesn’t
speak to that element of creation. After all, that is what the Darwinists will
say and the theistic evolutionists: the Bible doesn’t address biology. We
understand principles of the animal creation because God is the creator and it
originated with Him. The same thing is true when it comes to music. We have to
extrapolate those principles from what we have in the Word of God.
What we have studied so far in terms of worship and music and worship is
that we have defined worship basically as an act whereby the individual
subordinates and submits every thought, every aspect of his being in life to
the authority of God and God’s revelation of Himself. It starts with God and
has to do with our individual attitude of submission to divine authority. As we
submit to His divine authority and God speaks to us through His Word then in
the process of Romans 12:2 we are getting rid of that human viewpoint, worldly
cultural frame of reference, and replacing it with divine viewpoint. So thus we
recognize that worship begins with the individual in terms of being in
fellowship, and second, it extends to humility and orientation to God. The second
thing we have pointed out is that worship includes the styles and forms of
worship, including the music, and that this isn’t a matter of personal taste.
And third, music originated in the mind of God.
It originated in the mind of God; God created everything. But after the
fall of Adam in Genesis 3 everything in the creation is subject to the
corruption of the fall. That means that everything in creation can be abused
and misused and distorted, and can itself become worship, and that is the
source of idolatry. So music has to be redeemed through Christians who are
willing to think consistently and profoundly about the nature of music. Through
different talents and abilities then develops excellent music that is used in
worship. There is such a thing as good music and bad music and we have to go to
the Word of God in order to understand this. But before we get there we have to
understand some cultural aspects about music and how we got here, because music
has become a Trojan horse of pagan worldview. One of the reasons that so many
Christians are ineffective in their spiritual life is not because they hold bad
doctrine, although some of them do, but they have allowed their cultural
viewpoint to envelop biblical truth and reinterpret it within their cultural or
worldly framework. As Charlie Clough has pointed out several times in his
Framework series, the problem is that in human viewpoint we are so committed to
autonomy and independence from God that when we hear divine truth we often
envelop it within our human viewpoint opinions and preferences and we have
selective hearing. We want to absorb that which is comfortable and, “Well, I’m
not so sure about that which makes me uncomfortable.” That is the basic
assumption of a lot of worshippers today because this contemporary worship is
connected with the whole church growth movement and the mega-churches. They
build on this assumption that we have to have music in the church that is going
to make the unbeliever feel comfortable. When we come into the presence of divine
truth it is going to challenge our basic opinions about life down to the very
core of our being.
This brings up a very important point, that ideas have consequences,
that the issue in music is related to worldview. It is not simply that some
music is evil in itself or holy in itself, but it reflects a certain view of
the universe. What do we mean by worldview? We must understand that everybody
has a worldview. Worldview isn’t the same as a philosophy. A worldview is
basically a set of ideas or beliefs about the nature an operation of reality.
Everybody has some sort of grid to which they organize the data of life—what is
a good decision, what is a bad decision, what is right and what is wrong, how
do I explain who I am? Am I perfect? My destiny and why I am here, etc. Most
people have inconsistent worldviews because they have never thought about it
very much. But a worldview simply answers these basic questions related to
life, and thus it provides a mental map or guidebook or grid for looking at the
world around us. And the way we look at the world around us is going to leak
out in our opinions and views on life—on law politics, ethics, education,
psychology, money, economics, right and wrong, music, art, social institutions;
these all come out of our worldview. Worldview explains the origin, purpose and
meaning of life.
When worldview changes, culture changes. Worldview is at the very core
of what we call culture, that set of ideas that we have as a group of people
that collectively helps us all to figure out why we are here and what we are
doing. Down through history there have been three or four key points of ideas
where there are major shifts that have taken place, and every time we get to
one of these major shifts it affects how the church worships. Each time there
is a major cultural shift art changes, music changes, the church changes.
Unfortunately, as we look at the history of Christianity, the church sadly
imitates the world rather than influences the world, with only a couple of
exceptions and a couple of time periods. What we see as we study this is that
when the culture changes the music changes. Then the music reinforces and
promotes those changes and becomes a purveyor of the new ideals in the new
worldview. So there is this cyclical effect.
A significant event occurred at the beginning of the 19th
century. There was a philosopher in
All of this is to help us understand how we can redeem music in terms of
a biblical worldview. Next time we will talk about the fact that music isn’t
neutral, that there are criteria, there are absolutes that we use to judge and
evaluate the kind of music that we use to worship God.