Feminization of Church Worship

From Doug Wilson, in Future Men, p 98:

Music has been one of the chief culprits in the feminization of the church. Many of the “traditional” hymns of the nineteenth century are romantic, flowery, and feminine. (I come, after all, to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses.) But the recent rejection of such hymns in favour of contemporary worship music has been a step further away from a biblical masculinity. The current emphasis on ‘feeling worshipful’ is frankly masturbatory, which in men produces a cowardly and effeminate result.

The fact that the church has largely abandoned the singing of psalms means that the church has abandoned a songbook that is thoroughly masculine in its lyrics. The writer of most of the psalms was a warrior, and he knew how to fight the Lord’s enemies in song. With regard to the music of our psalms and hymns, we must return to a world of vigorous singing, vibrant anthems, more songs where the tenor carries the melody, open fifths, and glory. Our problem is not that such songs do not exist; our problem is that we have forgotten them. And in forgetting them, we are forgetting our boys. Men need to model such singing for their sons.

Tozer on Hymnody

Compare the Christian reading matter [with previous Christian centuries]and you’ll know that we’re in pretty much the same situation. The Germans, the Scots, the Irish, the Welsh, the English, the Americans and the Canadians all have a common Protestant heritage. And what did they read, these Protestant forebears of yours and mine? Well, they read Doddridge’s The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul. They read Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying. They read Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Holy War. They read Milton’s Paradise Lost. They read the sermons of John Flavel.

And I blush today to think about the religious fodder that is now being handed out to children. There was a day when they sat around as the fire crackled in the hearth and listened to a serious but kindly old grandfather read Pilgrim’s Progress, and the young Canadian and the young American grew up knowing all about Mr. Facing-Both-Ways and all the rest of that gang. And now we read cheap junk that ought to be shoveled out and gotten rid of.

Then I think about the songs that are sung now in so many places. Ah, the roster of the sweet singers! There’s Watts, who wrote “Oh, God, Our Help in Ages Past,” and Zinzendorf, who wrote so many great hymns. And then there was Wesley, who’s written so many. There was Newton and there was Cooper, who wrote “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” and Montgomery and the two Bernards—Bernard of Cluny and Bernard of Clairvaux. There was Paul Gerhardt and Tersteegen, there was Luther and Kelly, Addison and Toplady, Senic and Doddridge, Tate and Brady and the Scottish Psalter. And there was a company of others that weren’t as big as these great stars, but taken together they made a Milky Way that circled the Protestant sky.

I have an old Methodist hymnal that rolled off the press 111 years ago and I found forty-nine hymns on the attributes of God in it. I have heard it said that we shouldn’t sing hymns with so much theology because peoples minds are different now. We think differently now. Did you know that those Methodist hymns were sung mostly by uneducated people? They were farmers and sheep herders and cattle ranchers, coal miners and blacksmiths, carpenters and cotton pickers—plain people all over this continent. They sang those songs. There are over 1,100 hymns in that hymnbook of mine and there isn’t a cheap one in the whole bunch.

And nowadays, I won’t even talk about some of the terrible junk that we sing. They have a little one that is sung to the tune of “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” which goes like this:

One, two, three, the devil’s after me,

Four, five, six, he’s always throwing bricks,

Seven, eight, nine, he misses me every time,

Hallelujah, Amen.

And the dear saints of God sing that now! Our fathers sang “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” and we sing junk.

This tragic and frightening decline in the spiritual state of the churches has come about as a result of our forgetting what kind of God God is.

- A.W. Tozer, The Attributes of God, Vol. 2

Two Views on Christ’s Invitation

Here are two works of Christian imagination, depicting what it means for Christ to invite sinners to Himself. However, they are nearly opposite in meaning. Read both and then ask yourself the following questions: What view of Christ does each author possess? What affections do the  writers wish to evoke with their respective pieces? Which of the two has captured the biblical Christ, and which has given us a substitute?

Have You Any Room for Jesus? (Anonymous, Adapted by Daniel Whittle, 1878)

Have you any room for Jesus,
He who bore your load of sin?
As He knocks and asks admission,
Sinners, will you let Him in?

Refrain

Room for Jesus, King of Glory!
Hasten now His Word obey;
Swing the heart’s door widely open,
Bid Him enter while you may.

***

The Silver Chair (C.S. Lewis)

(Jill Pole, rasping with thirst, wants to drink from a stream, but Aslan the Lion sits on the opposite bank, watching her.)

“If you are thirsty, you may drink.”…

For a second she stared here and there, wondering who had spoken.

Then the voice said again, “If you are thirsty, come and drink,”…

She realised that it was the lion speaking. The voice was not like a man’s. It was deeper, wilder, and stronger; a sort of heavy, golden voice. It did not make her any less frightened than she had been before, but it made her frightened in rather a different way.
 
“Are you not thirsty?” said the Lion.

“I’m dying of thirst”, said Jill.

“May I – could I – would you mind going away while I do?”, said Jill.

The Lion answered this only by a look and a very low growl. And as Jill gazed at its motionless bulk, she realized that she might as well have asked the whole mountain to move aside for her convenience.

The delicious rippling noise of the stream was driving her nearly frantic.

“Will you promise not to – do anything to me, if I do come?”, said Jill.

“I make no promise”, said the Lion.

Jill was so thirsty now that, without noticing it, she had come a step nearer.

“Do you eat girls?”, she said.

“I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms”, said the Lion. It didn’t say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it.

“I daren’t come and drink”, said Jill.

“Then you will die of thirst”, said the Lion.

“Oh dear!”, said Jill, coming another step nearer. “I suppose I must go and look for another stream then.”

“There is no other stream”, said the Lion.

The Beautiful

On one particular evening, the man invited some of his friends, who were still worshippers of Lord Smiley-Face, to hear an orchestra. His friends chatted happily before the performance began, and it seemed as if their accents had been affected by something, for they suddenly sounded slightly polished and nasal. Thankfully, they returned to normal after the concert.

The concert was masterfully executed by the musicians. The piece of music told its story, weaving through twists and turns, adding variation upon variation on the central theme. The composer never surrendered to the desire to create effects for their own sake, nor to be bombastic, obnoxious or sentimental. He did not tickle those who wanted their emotions tugged, nor did he reward lazy ears. He did not manipulate the hearer, but artfully drew him into the story, unfolding it layer by layer, building it layer by layer.

When it was over, the man invited his friends over to his home. He was desirous to hear their impressions.

They were smiling, as holy worshippers of Smiley-Face did.

“It was very impressive,” said one, sipping his coffee.

“I especially loved the part when the trumpets went pum-pa-pum-pum-pum,” said another, poorly mimicking the part in question.

“There really is depth to this music,” said a third, looking self-consciously serious, munching on a ginger cookie.

The others nodded, with solemn hums.

The man masked his disappointment with these responses and ventured what was on his heart.

“Did you think it was beautiful?”

“Of course, beautiful, beautiful,” they clucked, as if they had been asked if the sky were up or if the earth were round.

The man swallowed, and pushed on, half-sensing that the pleasantries of the evening were about to end.

“What do you mean when you say it was beautiful?”

They looked genuinely startled by the question, and shuffled uncomfortably. They glanced at each other. One let out a nervous laugh. “Well…what does anyone mean by that, eh? I mean, the eye of the beholder, and all that sort of thing, right?”

“Do you simply mean that the music was enjoyable to you?”

“Yes, exactly – enjoyable!” said one of the friends, his face displaying visible relief.

The man paused.

“Do you think some people would not enjoy it?”

“Well… sure.” They began to look suspiciously at the man, wondering where this was going. “This kind of music isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, you know!” said the loudest one of the group.

The man waited a moment and pressed on.

“If some did not enjoy it, and you say that enjoyment is the essence of beauty, then perhaps the performance was not beautiful.”

“Not beautiful for them, you mean,” said one friend, happy to know he had spotted the error in the man’s thinking. “Beauty is a matter of personal taste,” he said, looking momentarily philosophic.

“In that case, the music and its performance are not beautiful in any real way. Beauty is simply the feeling of pleasure that some people have when they hear it.”

The momentary silence betrayed the fact that his friends were in uncharted intellectual territory.

And then they broke into a simultaneous chorus of “I wouldn’t put it that way” and “not exactly” and “that’s not what we’re saying”.

Finally one spoke for them all. “The music is beautiful. But not everyone appreciates this kind of thing. We’re all different.” He didn’t seem to realise that he hadn’t answered the man, or said anything different.

The man knew his friends were running out of patience, but he hoped for a breakthrough. He prayed inwardly, and began speaking quietly, and directly.

“The way I see it, there are only two options to choose from. The first is that the music is not beautiful in reality. When it is heard, different minds react to its otherwise meaningless form to produce pleasure or disdain. When those who like it call it ‘beautiful’, they are actually referencing their own psychological event of pleasure.”

His friends seemed to be listening, their eyes occasionally darting to each other and back to the man.

“The other is that the music is beautiful in itself. It approximates the Beautiful, that is, what is beautiful in God’s mind. Since man has been created to love beauty, when some people love what is beautiful, and others dislike it, it is a reflection on their own ordered or warped souls. The different reactions are not random reactions, but good hearts loving what is good, and bad hearts hating it because it is good.”

The last statement set the cat amongst the pigeons. Violent head-shaking and verbal negations followed. They seemed to be climbing over each other’s sentences to respond. One emerged on top of the others. “Are you trying to say that the people who didn’t like tonight’s performance are evil?” he demanded, his voice rising to a near-shriek on the last word.

The man waited to answer, and deliberately lowered his voice.

“There could be good reasons for not liking the music tonight. You could find fault with the musicians’ execution of the piece. You could hypothetically fault the composer for music that was unsymmetrical, disorderly, unimaginative, juvenile, or even lawless. But that would be another way of saying it was not beautiful. Which would be saying that it did not honour God and the reality which art is supposed to portray. If the music was false in its portrayal of reality, then those who love truth should dislike it. If the music was not beautiful in its use of musical symbols, then those who love beauty should dislike it. But if it was beautiful, then it truly would be wrong to dislike it.”

“So, you’re saying it would be a sin to dislike the music we heard tonight?” asked one, sounding like a journalist.

“I’m saying it is a sin to hate what God loves, and it is holy to love what He loves.”

“And how do you know if God loved the music tonight?”, asked one in a tone that suggested she wanted to poke a bony finger into his chest.

The man scanned the faces of his friends, and then dropped his gaze, looking at his shoes with sadness.

“I’d hoped that a group of God-lovers would agree on that very point.”

Some Thoughts on Two Sincere Christian Rappers

9Marks has the audio of an interview with two Christian rappers, Shai Linne and Voice (Curtis Allen, also a pastor), which can be heard here.

This post is simply an attempt to respond to and evaluate some of the statements made in the interview.

By way of prefacing my remarks, let me state two things.

First, let me say all the obligatory things without which you are considered mean-spirited, narrow and not worth hearing. So here goes: I greatly respect Mark Dever, and consider much of his work a huge blessing to the church. I am thankful for 9Marks ministries. Shai Linne sounds like a dedicated, sincere believer who has an intelligent understanding of preaching, the authority of Scripture and a better-than-average theological understanding. Curtis Allen sounds likewise like a dedicated pastor, with a powerful story of conversion, and someone who is, in principle, committed to the Scriptures, and not to a rabidly pragmatic form of ministry. He is gracious in his approach to the subject.  Both seem to be dedicated to serving the body of Christ, which makes us at least brothers, if not full-blown allies.

Second, let me alert you to the kinds of intellectual moods which prejudice our judgement in this kind of thing.

* We seem to be less able to critically judge an argument than our forbearers were. They were able to separate the argument from the person, and rationally analyse the merits of an argument. We are prone to play the man and not the ball. That means, if we think the person is sincere and loves God, we decide generally in favour of his argument, regardless of its details. Alternatively, if we think the person is disobedient and worldly, we decide against his argument, regardless of the details.

* We are living in a time of aesthetic relativism within Western Christianity, where generally conservative people feel that the last remaining and defensible absolute is propositional truth, while the medium in which it is delivered is culturally flexible wrapping paper, forever lost to the modernists (thought they don’t often realise as much). With that attitude, any argument about contextualisation, contemporising the message or reaching a particular culture seems to bowl everyone over into acquiescing silence.

* We are also in a time of impatience with detailed and extended argument. Dever caricatured a fundamentalist’s approach to music as “believing that the rhythm is inherently sensual.”  The argument against rap as appropriate music for worship or the development of Christian affections does not necessarily (or merely) hold that a rhythm is inherently sensual, but that music can communicate meaning intrinsically, associatively, conventionally or ascriptively. Certainly things that are dissonant with Christianity at best, and sinful at worst, can be communicated. Who would disagree that communication can be sinful or harmful? However, it takes some time to articulate that argument, and not everyone wants to give the argument the time it needs to be heard.

* We are living in a time of pragmatism, where results or even intended results always trump means and methods. If results are seen in the form of conversions, or if there is any sign that God has used something to draw people to Himself, all opposing arguments are thrown to the wind, forgetting that God has used many, many things which He disapproves of (think: Balaam).

With that said, let me focus on a few remarks during the interview. At one point, Dever asks both men to respond to critics of Christian rap, who say that the music is ‘inherently sensual’ (an unclear question at best). If I construe their response correctly, they believe Christian rap is defensible for the following reasons:

No musical form is inherently sinful. There is no objective standard to judge musical form. Musical forms are cultural preferences, which ought not to be spiritualised, but accepted as part of the diversity of the body of Christ. Relativism is bad, but when it comes to the arts, our preferences are culturally formed, meaning (as I take it) that they are morally neutral. While rap has a negative association, all things in the world have such baggage, and God ultimately redeems things for His use, meaning He does the same with rap. The final standard to which all arguments must submit is the glory of God.

Some short responses:

1. There is no objective standard to judge music by, if what you mean by objective standard is some kind of Ten Commandments of melody, harmony and rhythm. But then, there is no ‘objective standard’ for judging what God means by ‘Be angry and sin not’ or ‘let us worship Him acceptably with reverence and awe’ or ‘rejoice in the Lord always’. Where do I go to find out what kind of anger is pleasing to God? Where do I go to find out what constitutes ‘reverence and awe’? In other words, we have confused categories. We want propositional definitions for affective truth. Later on in the interview it is suggested that artistic forms don’t submit to the same kind of absolute judgements as other things do. And this is partially true, but the truth it omits turns the flavour of the argument towards something less than true. Affective, and therefore artistic truth, is not explained in the black-and-white forms of propositional truth. To expect it to be so would be to expect it to be something other than art. However, does that mean it has no standard in God’s universe to be judged by? Is there no such thing as the true, the good and the beautiful? Is it impossible to approve the things that are excellent (Phil 1:10)? Aesthetic judgement is not to be separated from moral judgement. God expects us to subsume them all in our thinking and judging (Phil 4:8, Heb 5:14).

2. It is of course true that our preferences are shaped by culture. We ‘don’t come out of the womb liking Handel’. But all that says is that our loves are shaped by our culture. What it fails to deal with is whether those loves are pleasing to God, or whether the culture in which they were shaped was pleasing to God. Some cultures have made a virtue of shrewd betrayal. If you grow up in this culture, you will know doubt love such a thing. This does not make such a preference morally acceptable.  What is being attempted here is to suggest that preferences do not have moral dimensions, and that if the preference is shaped by a culture, then only cultural imperialism or elitism would suggest that such a preference is morally dubious. Once again, we need an understanding of culture that goes beyond superficial notions of ethnicity and food preferences, and reckons with the moral imagination and religious worldview of a group of people.

3. I was a little disappointed with the response to the question about the negative associations of rap music. The answer seemed to suggest that everything is worldly, and therefore everything is redeemable. That seems to be a confusion between the world of John 3:16 and the world of I John 2:15. Not everything in the world is worldly – I Timothy 4:4. It is fairly clear that while God can redeem many things, in some cases such redemption can only be accomplished when the thing itself has been utterly transformed. God can redeem pornographers, but we all understand the contradiction of Christian pornography. God could redeem a nudist colony, but not by turning it into a Christian nudist colony. Sometimes the depravity of something requires either its complete transformation or even its destruction to be made pleasing to God.

4. Finally, I resonate with the idea that all things must be submitted to the glory of God. However, the danger is that we can use this as a ‘Get Out of Jail Free Card” for all our actions. If I’m doing this for the glory of God, then it trumps all other objections. This seems to me to be a  form of pragmatism. The end – the glory of God – always justifies the means.

There is more that can be said, and I don’t want to over-analyse remarks that were made in an interview, and not in a formal debate. There is much to commend in these men. But worship is not a trifle, and it is worth disagreeing over.

As one who grew up and spent many years in an inner-city ghetto, and lived on rap and hip-hop, I can tell you that what people need is not more of the same, but a transcendant alternative.

Translating vs. Transforming

Millard Erickson, in his Christian Theology, speaks of two different approaches to contemporising the message of Christianity. One is to translate the message, and the other is to transform it.

Translators try to keep the integrity of the Christian message intact, but seek to translate it as far as possible to the culture, separated from the Bible not only by distance and language, but also by centuries of cultural change.

Transformers, on the other hand, believe that the message itself must be changed to be applicable to the culture at hand. They believe that the message was so attached to the ancient culture in which it was given, that to merely translate it is to distort it. They believe the message must be ‘re-imagined’, re-invented and essentially re-written.

Of course, conservatives are translators. To be a conservative is to believe in timeless, transcendant, permanent things that exist in spite of any particular culture’s understanding of them. Conservatives believe that some cultures have had a better grasp of the permanent things than others. Therefore, conservatives believe that the very things we want to conserve are permanent things: the gospel, Christian doctrine, New Testament worship, appropriate affections for God and helpful expressions of these permanent things in the Christian tradition.

We do not believe we have the right to transform these things, because we believe that is an arrogant position to take. To completely re-write the Christian message, worship or tradition is to set ourselves up as authorities, and to demote to uselessness the things handed to us.

However, the more distant a culture is from the permanent things of biblical Christianity, the greater the work of translation. As our culture descends deeper into relativism, pragmatism, nihilism, hedonism, intellectual apathy and aesthetic decay, the very things people need are the things becoming more and more incomprehensible to them.

The response of many Christians is to resort to transformation. Since the gap between Christian affections and modern sensibilities seems like an unbridgeable chasm, they transform Christian worship into entertainment, use kitsch instead of beauty, turn Christian fellowship into yuppie-gatherings, replace slowly-learned Christian affections with immediate sentimental ones and end up with something resembling modern pagan culture with a lot of Jesus-talk.

But the conservative’s approach has its own problems. The problem is especially acute in Western countries, where a transformed Christianity competes alongside with conservative Christianity. In the effort to conserve biblical worship, Christian affections, and Christian doctrine, we find we are often speaking a different language to the average Christian who walks through the church doors.  For many of us, the temptation is to just sing solid hymns, tout examples of the best music, art, literature, poetry and preach our meatiest sermons, ignoring the puzzled expressions of our hearers.

What we soon find, is that there are many who are trying to get on the conservative horse, but it is simply too high. The ambient culture has made us all midgets next to the stallion of the permanent things.

What is needed is translation, and a lot more of it. Before people are shaped to love what God loves, they have to understand it. The answer is not to dumb down the message, warp the affections or find short-cuts to popular comprehension. The answer is to slowly, steadily, patiently explain the meaning of the hymns we sing, the meaning of music, the meaning of culture, the meaning of biblical doctrine, the meaning of the affections, the meaning of helpful Christian poetry, theology, music, art or works of devotion. The answer is to take a very long view. Not months, but years. Not even the years of one pastor, but perhaps two or three generations. 

If we do not translate true Christianity, we may as well be singing in Latin to peasants in 13th century England. The beauty might be faintly recognised, but it will not be appropriated and reproduced.

I think we are only beginning to understand the scope of the translation project. We may need to sing less and explain more. We may need to do a lot of pointing, a lot more explaining, mixed in with a lot of patience.

Transforming is quick and brings immediate results, but what you have may not be Christianity anymore. Translating is time-consuming, pain-staking work. However, for the conservative Christian - the steward of the faith once delivered to the saints -  there really isn’t a choice between the two.

Cry “Elitism!,” And Let Slip the Dogs of War

T.S. Eliot wrote a book called Notes Toward the Definition of Culture. He wrote this book because he believed (correctly, I think) that the meaning of the word culture was being lost through careless use. Eliot’s primary thesis was that culture is the incarnation of a religion.

“We may go further and ask whether what we call the culture, and what we call the religion, of a people are not essentially aspects of the same thing: the culture being, essentially, the incarnation (so to speak) of the religion of a people. ” (p27)

“The conception of culture and religion as being, when each term is taken in the right context, different aspects of the same thing, is one which requires a good deal of explanation. But I should like to suggest first, that it provides us with the means of combating two complementary errors. The one more widely held is that culture can be preserved, extended and developed in the absence of religion. This error may be held by the Christian in common with the infidel, and its proper refutation would require an historical analysis of considerable refinement, because the truth is not immediately apparent, and may be contradicted by appearances: a culture may linger on, and indeed produce some of its most brilliant artistic and other successes after the religious faith has fallen into decay. The other error is the belief that the preservation and maintenance of religion need not reckon with the preservation and maintenance of culture: a belief which may even lead to the rejection of the products of culture as frivolous obstructions to the spiritual life. To be in a position to reject this error, as with the other, requires us to take a distant view; to refuse to accept the conclusion, when the culture that we see is a culture in decline, that culture is something to which we can afford to remain indifferent.  And I must add that to see the unity of culture and religion in this way neither implies that all the products of art can be accepted uncritically, nor provides a criterion by which everybody can immediately distinguish between them. Esthetic sensibility must be extended into spiritual perception, and spiritual perception must be extended in esthetic sensibility and disciplined taste before we are qualified to pass judgment upon decadence or diabolism or nihilism in art. To judge a work of art by artistic or by religious standards, to judge a religion by religious or artistic standards should come in the end to the same thing: though it is an end at which no individual can arrive (pp 27-28, emphasis mine).

Expository Preaching is Not Enough

Having just returned from a pastors’ conference, I was struck again by the way expository preaching is viewed by some Christian leaders. According to them, expository preaching is the main ingredient for healthy Christianity, and the lack thereof is the reason for its sickness. If only, they say, all pastors were committed to expository preaching, the church would be reformed and revived.

I am committed to expository preaching. I believe expository preaching grows out of a conservative view of Scripture. If you believe that God has inspired Scripture, making it the rule for all Christian life and practice, it follows that you submit to its meaning. Therefore, you desire to understand what has already been revealed, submit to it yourself, and make it plain to others. Expository preaching usually goes hand-in-glove with inerrancy, for when you believe the Bible has been given without error, you are fastidious in your approach to understand the very words of Scripture, not just the themes. Expository preaching also reveals a desire to preach the whole counsel of God, not our pet themes or popular topics. For these reasons, I believe in expository preaching. I am furthering my studies through a seminary committed to expository preaching. I prefer to make the mainstay of my preaching expository series of books of the Bible. (I think you can preach biblical topical sermons by treating several texts in an expository fashion, though it is probably harder than simply expouding one passage of Scripture). We teach students in our church how to do expository preaching.

But having said all that, I think many Christian leaders have a faith in expository preaching which is overblown and looks to expository preaching to do what it cannot accomplish by itself.

It is a tempting position to hold. After all, the Bible teaches us about worship. Surely if we preach expositionally, biblical worship will take place, right? The Bible speaks about what affections we should have for God. If we preach the whole counsel of God, won’t it automatically lead to ordinate affection?

Look around for the answer. You have any number of Reformed or conservative evangelicals who are committed to expository preaching, but who come out on almost opposite ends of the worship and affection spectrum. Compare Mark Driscoll’s church to Ligon Duncan’s. Compare Phil Ryken’s church to the Resolved conferences. Compare John Piper’s church to Mark Minnick’s.  All of these men preach expositionally. Apparently, they aren’t coming to the same answers.

This camel-in-the-room fact leads many to relativise the affections. If such good preachers who are so committed to biblical authority come out at completely different answers as to what it means to worship, it must be because we’re just talking about ’styles’ and various ways of ’contextualising’ the gospel. So as not to shake anyone’s faith in expository preaching as the be-all and end-all, the quite obvious disparity in worship and affections by those committed to expository preaching is played down in favour of a shared commitment to Reformed doctrine.

I think ignoring this disparity is part of the problem. It’s my contention that expository preaching is not a magic bullet, but it must be accompanied by something to have its desired effect.  

The fact is, preaching occurs in a context. It ought to occur in the context of a local church. Within that local church, much of the meaning of expository preaching is fleshed out, specifically our worship-responses to God. In other words, the propositional truth of expository preaching must be modelled and incarnated in a church culture. You can hope that expository preaching will produce piety, devotion, and ordinate affection, but the truth is, propositional truth must be complemented by affective truth. Propositional truth tells us who God is; affective truth tells us what He deserves. Propositional truth tells us how Christians should respond to God; affective truth tells us what that looks like. Propositional truth gives it to us in black-and-white; affective truth colours it in for us.

In other words, you can preach a sound and good sermon on Hebrews 12:25-29, but if you do not complement that exegesis with church worship that models reverence and awe, your expository preaching has not succeeded. If your church culture capitulates to a postmodern view of the affections, if it endorses a warped understanding of reverence and awe, you have done the truth equivalent of drawing a nice black and white outline of a sunset, and then colouring it in with green and brown.  

We would like to think that expository preaching will produce biblical worship and ordinate affection, but it will not do so by itself for a simple reason: Scriptural truth is properly learned in the context of a right Christian tradition. Just as no one comes to the doctrine of the Trinity without inheriting that understanding from the church triumphant, so no one will understand ‘reverence and awe’ without inheriting that understanding from the worship of the church triumphant. No one ‘thinks up’ the hypostatic union by just doing sentence diagrams of John 1:1, and no one comes to a right understanding of ‘rejoice in the Lord’ without seeing ordinate joy modelled by other believers. A right Christology is built on the shoulders of the church triumphant, and a right joy in Christ is built on the shoulders of the church triumphant.  To argue that expository preaching is antecedent to right application is to ignore the relationship that Christian doctrine has always had with Christian tradition. Right doctrine modifies and a corrects the tradition. Tradition gives balance, context and correction to the doctrine. The two are simultaneous tools for Christian living.

 Tradition is not authoritative; Scripture is. But Scripture is interpreted with the help of the Spirit’s work in past believers as well as present ones. Whether we are talking about a right understanding of salvation by grace, or what it means to be of a contrite heart, we do not ignore what the church has said, sung or prayed when we examine the Scriptures for ourselves. What is being done today to the tradition of worship in the West is the equivalent of rejecting all the work done in Nicea, Constantinople, Chalcedon, Augsburg, Westminster and New Hampshire, and re-formulating the doctrine of the Trinity from scratch, just to ‘contextualise it for moderns’. In fact, that’s exactly what some emergents do. Sadly, many conservative evangelicals are guilty of the same deconstructionism in the area of worship.

All the more reason for Christian leaders to connect with our Christian heritage pre-Finney. If we do not understand what the church has meant by loving God, we will probably complement that propositional truth with an affective idea that is a sentimental, or brutal, or sensual. Which will be idolatry. And worse, our people will be certain that their idolatry is pleasing to God, since it is done in a church committed to expository preaching.

Expositional preaching requires a living context to be understood. While the Holy Spirit is powerful enough to make the right applications to a completely blinded heart, He usually uses the natural means of family, church and human culture to give a context to truth. Barring common grace, much in modern culture is useless for teaching the right application of Scripture. That leaves redeemed families and gospel churches to put flesh on the bones of expository sermons. If we make the wrong applications in our own worship services, our devotion to expository preaching is a wasted hope, and a clanging gong.

Vertical and Horizontal Tension?

Is there some kind of contradiction (or tension) between conservative worship and warm fellowship? To put it another way, if a church’s corporate worship is vertical in orientation, does the horizontal aspect necessarily suffer? If so, why is this the case?

I ask this because of personal experience, not because of any theological insight. My short sojourn on this earth and amongst churches seems to confirm what is almost certainly a generalisation: the churches that seek to be ‘God-centred’ gain the reputation of being cold in their human relationships, while the churches that emphasise a friendly atmosphere are almost invariably shallow and light-hearted in the way they speak and sing of God.

 When I have visited churches known for solidly expository preaching and worship that is somewhat conservative, the interaction between members has seemed to me to be minimal or cliquish: the kind of church where visitors are quite likely to walk in and out without much more than a visitor’s card from an usher. Some conservative circles have all the personal charm of a visit to the meat locker.

On the other hand, when I have visited churches where a warmth is felt in the attitude of the people towards one another and visitors are quickly noticed and welcomed, I have all too often been disappointed with shallow and sentimental songs, unnecessary social announcements, and the inevitable howdy-time in the middle of a hymn. Here one feels inclined to give a hearty back-slap to Bob, Mike, and Jesus.

The same phenomenon occurs when a church moves in either one of these directions. When leadership seeks to increase the warmth felt in a service, there is often a corresponding loss in seriousness. Conversely, a church which heads in the conservative direction soon hears of how “it is not as loving as it used to be.” To picture it spatially, when a church stretches upward in worship, it seems to narrow in fellowship; when a church stretches outward in fellowship it seems to shallow in worship. 

Granted, that is not true of all churches. I’m sure some will be quick to mention their church as the happy exception. But I’d venture to say that the exceptions seem to bear out the rule: reverent worship and intimate fellowship seem like strangers in Western evangelicalism.

Why, I ask, is this so?  Why can we not have both? Why can we not have corporate worship filled with awe and reverence, with fellowship that is deep and meaningful? Why does the strength of one seem to necessitate the weakening of the other?

I don’t claim to know. I have several possible answers, not all of which I believe are true. Some I have heard from others; others I have considered from my own analysis. Here goes:

 * People are not used to worship which is entirely vertical in orientation. When you structure a service like that, people begin behaving in a more individualistic way. People need a chance to connect with each other, or else they remain ‘in their shells’. We need to blend vertical and horizontal aspects of worship to have God-centred worship and warm fellowship.

* The kinds of affections that people have come to expect in modern evangelical worship services are a blend of cheeriness, fun, optimism and warmth. If those elements are present, people feel comfortable enough to reach out to others. It’s the ‘break-the-ice’ principle. If those elements are lacking, they feel the service is cold, and it affects their responses to others. Particularly affections like awe and reverence are intimidating to people, and they tend to withdraw. In other words, people have been conditioned to associate warm worship with fun feelings, and anything else feels cold, and has a chilling effect on fellowship.

* The more accessible the worship, the more expressive people will be, even in their interaction with others. Worship which is over people’s heads creates inauthenticity and makes people less willing to open up to each other. A kind of ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ fear prevails.

* Conservatives tend to be intellectuals, who can live in the rarefied air of elevated thought, while the man on the street is suffocating. Conservative churches are too ‘head-oriented’ and not ‘heart-oriented’ enough, which has a cooling effect on the affections of believers for one another.

* Conservatives are conservative in every way, including friendliness.

Those are some suggestions, some shallow, some a bit more substantial.

What do you think, and what do you suppose is part of the solution?

A Good Start

There are some words, like nice or awesome, which have been so overused as to vacuum them of meaning. Whenever the speaker uses one of these words, the word is almost nothing more than an empty placeholder, where the speaker or listener can fill in almost anything he likes.

Sadly, one of those words is the important word culture. Nearly everyone uses the word today, to mean anything from a defense of an ethnic habit to the bourgeois feel of a classical concert, from a reference to popular customs to a serious consideration of worldviews. Everyone slips their own meaning into the word, the true meaning of which has important consequences for every one of us.

There are several books which could help us scrub off the barnacles of irrelevant meaning, and polish the word back to its original, true and useful meaning. The best and simplest start would by a seven-page article by J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Culture. Machen was a 20th-century Presbyterian scholar, and one of the reasons that Modernism did not totally decimate the church. His thoughtful analysis of the relationship between Christianity and culture went largely unheeded: just look at the mess around you. However, his analysis remains, and is worth reading, if you are interested in the scope of the problem, and concerned to think rightly about culture.

You can read it online here, or download it here.