Using a portion of Calvin R. Stapert's book, A New Song for an Old World, in my last post, I discussed how our worship, and especially the music we use in worship, has become characterised by a singular expression of something approximating joy. It raised the question of why we have become unable to express many of the feelings and emotions that are part of the worship of Scripture.

From Stapert's perspective, the problem is that we have become confused about the purpose of music in worship. He writes,

While suppressing the 'doleful' countermelody leads to a trivialization of the joy theme, a tendency toward a pagan kind of epiclesis¹ leads to a perversion of it. Those misled by this kind of epiclesis think – or at least act as though – 'we convene ourselves [for worship] and then wait for God to show up because we have said the magic words or cranked up enough volume in our praise.' They also inevitably blame the music when they feel worship to be joyless and spiritless. They see music as a stimulus to rather than a vehicle for the expression of joy, an enticement for the Spirit's presence rather than a grateful response for it, as though the Spirit were at the beck and call of our music. Granted, the border between a response and a stimulant is obscure. In addition, as Augustine and other church fathers attest, music can be a legitimate stimulant for 'inflaming' our piety and devotion. Nevertheless, it is as important for us as it was for the church fathers to keep the distinction clear, and to remember (1) that response, not stimulation, is the fundamental role of worship music; (2) that 'inflaming' can easily degenerate into manipulation; and (3) that not all that is called 'spiritual' is of the Spirit, or, as Plantinga and Rozeboom put it, 'not all that moves us is of God.' I am convinced that there would be a marked and salutary difference in the church's music and worship if we would maintain the central focus of our 'new song' to be a joyful response, offered in humble gratitude, not a stimulant 'to excite every nerve...and to create as many...synthetic passions as possible' (to quote Thomas Merton) [202].

If you have a conversation with evangelicals about worship, most of the time the debate centres around which style of music they like best. Besides the problem of such a narrow definition of worship, which sees it as nothing more than the music, it also proves Stapert's incisive observation – we want worship to be a stimulant, to make us feel something. If the music doesn't satisfy our own subjective tastes, we believe that somehow the Spirit won't be present in our corporate worship; indeed, we believe we haven't worshiped.

So how do we get the congregation to understand that worship is fundamentally an act of response?

In the first place, we need to make our worship gospel-centred. I know that this is one of evangelicalism's many buzzwords, but it is true. A proper, holistic understanding of the gospel must be at the centre of our worship. Too often the gospel is stripped down to mean nothing more than the fact that Jesus has saved us. Well, yes, of course. But saved us from what? We need to understand the counterpart, the state we were in before Jesus saved us. Praising God for our new life in Christ means very little if we don't understand our old life.

The most obvious way to do this is to saturate worship with Scripture. Don't just have Scripture read before the sermon, but take your call to worship from Scripture. Have call and response readings and prayers based on Scripture. Very important here as well is to ensure that the lyrics of the songs you sing in worship are Scriptural. In his latest book, Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns, T. David Gordon writes about his efforts as a pastor to keep the songs used in his church theologically accurate. To that end, he went through the church's hymnal, which contained more than 700 hymns, and found over 500 of them to be lacking. Needless to say, it is remarkably easy to pen careless or even unorthodox lyrics when your primary concerns are things like rhyming, or evoking warm feelings in those singing your songs.

This is, I think, one of the biggest problems with contemporary music as well. Too many songs give the pretense of being Scriptural, using phrases here and there from the Bible, but often they are carelessly constructed. I could give a number of examples, but there is a twofold point to be made here. First, the church confesses what it sings, so biblical and theological accuracy are vitally important to the music of worship. Second, and related to this, is the fact that one of the easiest ways to memorise something is when it is set to music. At the end of the day, the congregation will be walking away from the worship service singing the music. Every effort must be made to ensure what they are singing is true to Scripture.

In addition to making worship gospel-centred, we need to have a structured liturgy if we are to teach people that worship is an act of response. For this, we need to ensure that a number of elements are present in our worship. A call to worship reminds the congregation that we don't come to worship to feel good, but because God calls us into his presence, to assemble before his throne. In response, we should sing songs of praise to him, recognising that he is the almighty God. Coming before his throne also requires that we lay our sins before him and seek his forgiveness and assurance of pardon, corporately and individually. In response, we should sing songs of lament for our sin, that seek his forgiveness, and that remind us of his grace and mercy. After hearing God speak through his written Word and the preached Word, a song of response should follow that fits with the theme of the message. In the Eucharist, the gospel is made visible and grace is imparted to us, and our song should be a song of praise to the Lord for his salvation and his faithfulness to us. When we hear the benediction, we are hearing God himself bless us, and so our song can be nothing more than a resounding 'Amen!'

David Watson, in his book, I Believe in the Church, writes, 'It is...God himself who initiates worship. It is simply our response to all that God has shown us of himself and done for us in our lives' (181).

God initiates, we respond. It is a pattern that cannot be reversed, for when it does, it ceases to be worship. Our concern that worship be joyful, then, is wholly contingent on our recognition of who God is and what he has done for us. But when we begin to grasp on to that, to truly start to understand the reality that the Lord of heaven and earth has called us to be his own, our worship will take on dimensions that we never expected, and we will say with the Psalmist, 'Come let us sing for joy to the Lord; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation!' (Psalm 95:1).

Music certainly plays a very important role in our worship. In fact, it is one of the unique aspects of Christianity that our faith evokes from us a response of song. But we need to do a better job of thinking carefully about the music of our worship. The so-called 'worship wars' have missed the point, to a degree; the issue is not so much the style of music used in worship, but the role that music plays in worship. Using Stapert's terminology, is it a stimulant or a response?

Incoherent as these ramblings are, I thought it fitting to conclude by citing R.B. Kuiper, who in his book, The Glorious Body of Christ, had this to say about worship:

When God's people assemble for worship they enter into the place where God dwells. God meets them, and they meet God. They find themselves face to face with none other than God himself. Their worship is an intimate transaction between them and their God.

If the church were fully conscious of that truth, what dignity and reverence would characterize its worship! (347)

May that indeed be true of all our worship.

¹Epiclesis is the Greek word for 'invocation'. In worship, it refers to the invocation of the Holy Spirit.

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Robert E. Webber, in the first chapter of his book, Who Gets to Narrate the World?, discusses how the North American Church has lost its grip on the fullness of the biblical story and instead has only concentrated on various small pieces. It cannot see the whole picture, the all-encompassing narrative. He points out the following:

God's story suffers from reductionism and privatism. The failure to put the whole biblical picture together is a result of the [Church's] cultural accomodationism. Specifically, it is the problem of reductionism. The Christian faith has been reduced to a few doctrines of self-interest. In my own background, my dad and his pastor friends concentrated almost exclusively on five doctrines: sin, sacrificial atonement, conversion, sanctification and premillennialism. What was missing was a thoroughgoing connection between creation, incarnation and the re-creative acts of God (such as the resurrection and restoration of creation). My dad, though a devoted Christian and a passionate preacher, lost the fullness of the Christian story because he created a story around five pieces of the puzzle instead of the whole picture. The Christian faith was reduced to the problem of my sin, the work of Christ for me, the necessity of my conversion and the expectation of my faithfulness to live like a Christian. I was made the center of the story. I needed to invite Jesus into my life and my journey so he would walk with me and bless my life and my ministry.

God calls us to His story. By contrast, the original story, the one delivered by the apostles to their successors in the early Church, was not nearly so much my narrative as it was God's. And God speaks His narrative through the Bible. God's story is about the whole world from its very beginning to the very end. It includes all the nations and governments of the world; it includes the earth, sun and sky; it includes the entire universe. This story even includes you. God, the divine narrator, is saying: I have a purpose for humanity and a purpose for creation and history. I am not asking for permission to join your narrative (although I do); I am asking you to join My narrative of the world, of human existence, and of all history (25).

Webber then proceeds to sketch the story of redemptive history using the categories of creation, fall, incarnation (or redemption), and re-creation (or consummation). He makes the point that recovering this narrative is the most significant and crucial challenge for the Church in our time, and successfully carrying out the mission of God we are entrusted with depends on it.

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There are echoes of such thinkers as Van Til and Dooyeweerd in this:

The implicit narrative of covenant always presupposed that something had gone drastically wrong within creation. But it isn't just that if God is proposing a solution there must have been something wrong. The particular solution God proposes—that of beginning a family and promising them a land—shows that what is wrong concerns, in a central way, the fracturing of human relationships and the fracturing of the relationship between humans and the non-human creation. And the particular faith for which God calls indicates, as Romans 4 draws out, that at the core of the problem is the failure of humans to trust God, to give him praise and honour as the all-powerful creator. All of this is strikingly reemphasised in the gift of Torah, which holds out an extraordinary blueprint of what a genuinely human life is like, a blueprint which called forth the delighted acclaim we noted in Psalm 19, and of course plenty of other places.

The failure of human beings to be the truly image-bearing creatures God intended results, therefore, in corruption and death. When we begin with creation, and with God as creator, we can see clearly that the frequently repeated warnings about sin and death, referred to as axiomatic by Paul, are not arbitrary, as though God were simply a tyrant inventing odd laws and losing his temper with those who flouted them, but structural: humans were made to function in particular ways, with worship of the creator as the central feature, and those who turn away from that worship—that is, the whole human race, with a single exception—are thereby opting to seek life where it is not to be found, which is another way of saying that they are courting their own decay and death. This is to say, with the entire Jewish tradition, that the basic sin is idolatry, the worship of that which is not in fact the living creator God.
— N. T. Wright, Paul: In Fresh Perspective, 34-35.

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The Dutch philosopher, Herman Dooyeweerd, makes the observation in his Roots of Western Culture, that the underlying foundation of all of life is religious. Christianity, he notes, establishes an antithesis that "pertains to the relation between the creature and his creator, and thus touches the religious root of all temporal life." His subsequent thoughts on this bring to light the profound tension that exists between our faith and this world, between belief and unbelief. Dooyeweerd says,

The religious antithesis does not allow a higher synthesis. It does not, for example, permit Christian and non-Christian starting points to be theoretically synthesized. Where can one find in theory a higher point that might embrace two religious, antithetically opposed stances, when precisely because these stances are religious they rise above the sphere of the relative? Can one find such a point in philosophy? Philosophy is theoretical, and in its constitution it remains bound to the relativity of all human thought. As such, philosophy itself needs an absolute point of departure. It derives this exclusively from religion. Religion grants stability and anchorage even to theoretical thought. Those who think they find an absolute starting point in theoretical thought itself come to this belief through an essentially religious drive, but because of a lack of true self-knowledge they remain oblivious to their own religious motivation.

The absolute has a right to exist in religion only. Accordingly, a truly religious starting point either claims absoluteness of abolishes itself. It is never merely theoretical, for theory is always relative. The religious starting point penetrates behind theory to the sure, absolute ground of all temporal, and therefore relative, existence. Likewise, the antithesis it poses is absolute.

Therefore, says Dooyeweerd,

to arrive at the true and decisive meaning of this antithesis and, at the same time, to penetrate to the real source of the differences of opinion concerning its significance, it is necessary to take into account the religious ground motives (religieuze grondmotieven) of Western civilization. They have been the deepest driving forces behind the entire cultural and spiritual development of the West.

One can point to such a ground motive in every religion. It is a spiritual force that acts as the absolutely central mainspring of human society. It governs all of life's temporal expressions from the religious centre of life, directing them to the true or supposed origin of existence. It thus not only places an indelible stamp on the culture, science, and social structure of a given period but determines profoundly one's whole world view. If one cannot point to this kind of leading cultural power in society, a power that lends a clear direction to historical development, then a real crisis looms at the foundations of culture. Such a crisis is always accompanied by spiritual uprootedness.

A spirit is directly operative in the religious ground motive. It is either the spirit of God or that of an idol. Man looks to it for the origin and unshakable ground of his existence, and he places himself in its service. He does not control the spirit, but the spirit controls him. Therefore specifically religion reveals to us our complete dependence upon a higher power. We confront this power as servants, not as rulers.

I have long disliked the way in which the word religion is thrown around and trampled on. What is worse, I think, is the way evangelicals have grabbed onto this culture's use of the word and adopted for itself the false distinction between Christianity and religion. Dooyeweerd here begins to offer a helpful corrective to the lines of demarcation we have unwittingly drawn.

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Marcion, one of the infamous heretics of the ancient Church, saw the God of the Old Testament as one of strict justice, both ruthless and legalistic. To him, this God stood antithetical to the God of the New Testament who was a figure of grace and redeeming love. For this reason, when forming his Scriptural canon, Marcion rejected the Old Testament altogether and cut out large portions of the New Testament, those that reflected the Judaic God in any way.

Last night I was reading from the book of Exodus and was struck by how off the mark Marcion was. I read from Exodus 15:1-16:36. Chapter 15 records what we often call the Song of Moses, his song of praise following Israel's release from Egypt and their deliverance from the hands of Pharaoh and his armies. One of the things that stood out to me this time was that Exodus 15:1 says that it is not just Moses singing this song, but the Israelites altogether. That made Exodus 15:24 stand out even more because after they sing this great song of praise—which is further recalled in such passages as in Psalm 78:52-53 and Psalm 105:37-45—here in verse 24 they are already grumbling and complaining only three days later. God provides sweet water for them to drink in 15:25, and then after more grumbling and complaining from Israel, he provides manna and quail in 16:13-16. Moses makes an important remark in 16:8: "Your grumbling is not against us but against the Lord."

Contrary to Marcion's perception, this is a picture of God's covenant faithfulness, and the more you read of Israel's story the more you see that faithfulness. Here in Exodus 15-16, just two chapters and the span of probably a couple months, Israel complains to God twice and disobeys his instructions twice, yet He remains faithful and is merciful and patient with them.

The story of Israel is often a disheartening one, especially when you realize how clearly it reflects us. But the story of God's faithfulness is extraordinary. Marcion was wrong. The God of the Old Testament is exactly the same as the God of the New Testament, one of grace, mercy, and love. All of history is the story of God gathering His people to Himself, establishing them under His rule, and showering them with His blessing. His covenant promises to His people remain forever.

Israel was unfaithful. We are unfaithful. But God is eternally faithful.

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