Tozer on Worship Music – 6

We can come and sing hymns in this church and only enjoy the dignity of the music as a relief from rock’n'roll. (Sermon, “Doctrine of the Remnant,” Chicago, 1957)

—Tozer on Worship and Entertainment

Just as the book of Psalms is a lyric commentary on the Old Testament, set to the music of warm personal devotion, so our great Christian hymns form a joyous commentary on the New Testament.

While no instructed Christian would claim for any hymn the same degree of inspiration that belongs to the Psalms, the worshiping singing soul is easily persuaded that many hymns possess an inward radiance that is a little more than human. If not inspired in the full and final sense, they are yet warm with the breath of the Spirit and sweet with the fragrance of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces.

In the hymns all the basic doctrines of the Christian faith are celebrated. Were the Scriptures to be destroyed or made inaccessible to the Church, it would not be too difficult to extract from our hymns a complete body of Bible doctrine. This would, of course, lack the authority of the inspired Word, but it might well serve in a dark hour to keep alive the faith of our fathers. As long as the Church can sing her great hymns she cannot be defeated; for hymns are theology set to music.

Hymns do not create truth, nor even reveal it; they celebrate it. They are the response of the trusting heart to a truth revealed or a fact accomplished. God does it and man sings it. God speaks and a hymn is the musical echo of His voice.

—The Warfare of the Spirit

There fell into my hands some time ago a new hymnbook. It came from a far country and looked inviting. I opened it eagerly with the hope of finding some rare psalm or hymn or spiritual song that I had not known before, but my hope was short-lived. The book was published by a Christian group of the sand-counting school of doctrine and I soon discovered that each hymn was a prosaic lesson intended to indoctrinate the user in a narrow, one-eyed view of Christianity. The breath of sacred poesy was absent from the book. It did not mount up on wings as an eagle but walked solemnly and awkwardly along the ground. What original songs it contained were stuffy, joyless, unlovely and weighed down heavily with the half-dozen doctrines this particular group has chosen for constant and monotonous emphasis. Worst of all, many of the old favorite hymns were there but so mangled and emasculated as to be almost unrecognizable. The editors did not play on David’s harp; rather they used it as a sledge to hammer hard, angular doctrines into the heads of their followers. They did not intend that the hymns should give the singer joy, only that they should bring him into line and make him correct in his doctrinal position.

—God Tells the Man Who Cares

Religious productions which come into being during times of great spiritual blessing are to be valued above those which appear during times of spiritual decline. Especially is this true if the production is a fair reflection of the spiritual state which prevails at the time it is written.

Examples are not hard to find. Take for instance the hymnody that sprang up around the Methodist revival of the nineteenth century. One hymnal put out by the Methodists lies at hand as we write. It was published in the year 1849. It contains 1,148 hymns, 553 of them written by Charles Wesley, and the amazing thing about the book is that there is hardly an inferior hymn in it. One quality which marks the hymns is the large measure of sound doctrine that is found in them. Quite a complete course in theology could be gotten from the hymnal alone without recourse to any other textbook.

The Holy Spirit was upon the Methodists in fullness of grace, and they sang of God and Christ and the Scriptures and of the mysteries and joys of redemption personally experienced. The hymnal is lyric theology, a theology that had been strained through the pores of the men and women who wrote and sang their joyous songs. The hymns are warm with the breath of worshipers, a breath that may still be detected fragrant upon them after the passing of a century.

Lay this hymnal beside almost any of the productions of the last fifty years and compare them. The differences will be found to be pronounced, and to the devout soul more than a little depressing. The last half-century has been for the most part a period of religious decline, and the hymnody which it has produced has expressed its low spiritual state. With the coming of the great religious campaigns, with their popular evangelists and their mass appeal, religious singing started on a long trip down, a trip which from all appearances has not yet ended. Experience took the place of theology in popular singing. Writers became more concerned with joy bells than with the blood of sprinkling. Ballad tunes displaced the graver and more serious type of melody. The whole spiritual mood declined and the songs expressed the mood faithfully.

At the risk of being written off as hopelessly outmoded, we venture to give it as our studied opinion that about the only good thing in the average modern songbook is the section of great hymns which most of them carry in the back—hymns which for the most part were written when the Church was at her flood and which are included now as a gesture of respect to the past, and rarely sung.

—The Price of Neglect

Tozer on Worship Music – 3

Over the last few years the world has gone on to woo the Church (about like water woos a duck!) and has won her heart and hand in what seems to be a case of true love. The honeymoon is still on and the church is now the pampered bride of the world. And what a dowry she has brought to her sensuous and drooling lover! An impenitent and unregenerate populace buys religious books by the millions, to the delight of the profit-hungry publishers. Movie stars now write our hymns; the holy name of Christ sounds out from the gaudy jukebox at the corner pool hall, and in all-night stomp sessions hysterical young people rock and roll to the glory of the Lord.

— The Size of the Soul

The helpless Christ of the crucifix and the vacuous-countenanced Christ that looks out in sweet innocence from the walls of our evangelical homes is all one and the same. The Catholics rescue Him by bringing a Queen of Heaven to His aid. But we Protestants have no helper. So we sing pop choruses to cheer our drooping spirits and hold panel discussions in the plaintive hope that someone will come up with the answer to our scarce-spoken complaint.

—The Root of the Righteous

Then, also, the Spirit gave a bright, emotional quality to their religion, and I grieve before my God over the lack of this in our day. The emotional quality isn’t there. There is a sickliness about us all; we pump so hard trying to get a little drop of delight out of our old rusty well, and we write innumerable bouncy choruses, and we pump and pump until you can hear the old rusty thing squeak across forty acres. But it doesn’t work.

—How to Be Filled with the Holy Spirit

The Greek philosopher Pythagoras divided men into three classes: 1. Seekers after knowledge; 2. Seekers after honor; 3. Seekers after gain.

I wonder why he failed to notice two other classes: those who are not seeking anything and those who are seekers after God.

Let us add them to his list:

4. Seekers after nothing. These are the human vegetables who live by their glands and their instincts. I refer to the millions of normal persons who have allowed their magnificent intellectual equipment to wither away from lack of exercise. Their reading matter is the sports page and the comic section; their music is whatever is popular and handy—and loud!

5. Seekers after God.

—Renewed Day by Day – Volume Two

Evangelical Christianity is now tragically below the New Testament standard. Worldliness is an accepted part of our way of life. Our religious mood is social instead of spiritual. We have lost the art of worship. We are not producing saints. Our models are successful businessmen, celebrated athletes and theatrical personalities. We carry on our religious activities after the methods of the modern advertiser. Our homes have been turned into theaters. Our literature is shallow and our hymnody borders on sacrilege. And scarcely anyone appears to care.

—Of God and Men

Why Listen to Tozer?

A.W. Tozer is found in places where he probably wouldn’t have been invited to preach. His books will be found on the shelves of the charismatic church and the conservative, the Reformed and the Wesleyan, the fundamentalist and the seeker-sensitive. Tozer’s writings were of such penetrating clarity that they resonate with people of very different theological leanings. Perhaps this partly explains his nickname – ‘the twentieth century prophet’. He did not claim any personal gift of special revelation, but his insight was prophet-like: incisive, penetrating and filled with unusual clarity. His bold warnings to the church have nearly all proved well-founded, though not many of them have been heeded.

When a writer is found to have appeal across such broad lines, there are only two ways to explain that. The first is that his writings are so generalised, so ambiguous, and so populist in appeal that almost anyone can pick it up and find some soothing platitudes. Such writing is of such a vague nature that as Tozer himself put it – if it were medicine it wouldn’t heal, and if it were poison it wouldn’t kill. This can hardly be pinned onto Tozer’s writings.

The second possible explanation is that the writer writes with such illumination that his writings are almost always ‘close to the centre’; that all those within the realm of orthodoxy identify with his keen sense of understanding truth. His writings send forth ‘a distinct sound’, a ringing call to orthodoxy. His writings build on the faith of the historical, universal church with the moss of worldly pragmatism or false tradition scraped off.

It is this second explanation that is surely the reason for Tozer’s broader appeal, and one reason to hear his voice on the issues of worship and music. Clarity, incisive vision, and a catholic spirit are very often missing in this debate, and Tozer’s voice deserves to be heard. Tozer’s voice still carries authority to people on both sides of the debate.

Tozer was seldom, if ever, guilty of towing a party line or grinding a denominational axe. He was not afraid of the opinions of men, perhaps to a fault. When reading Tozer, one never feels he is placating the scribes from a particular ‘camp. Tozer’s spiritual independence comes out strongly in his writings; he had little time for the provincialism of many in Christendom, or the desire for Christians to curry favour with one another. Today, it is becoming rarer to find a writer who is not looking over his shoulder as to how his circle of friends or ministerial colleagues will review or regard his work. As such, we can approach Tozer’s writings and not fear a hidden allegiance to one side or the other.

Another reason for considering Tozer’s views is that he was largely self-taught. Tozer valued tertiary education and seminary training highly, but did not have those opportunities himself. As such, he diligently set about educating himself in everything from English grammar to poetry, from philosophy to theology. And Tozer showed no partiality when it came to these theologians. His writings freely quote from Augustine to Wesley, from Spurgeon to A.B. Simpson, from Fenelon to Martin Luther, from early revivalists to John Calvin. Tozer grazed where many seminarians are warned off by their professors; indeed, many would not be able to read from them and profit as he did. While many will regard his lack of formal education as a reason to disregard his views, I see great value in hearing from a man who, as it were, gave all the writers of the ages a fair hearing. He was not prejudiced against any. While he certainly had his own views, he did not judge a writer to be a heretic before he had read him. To me, this places Tozer in a unique position regarding this debate. Certainly it would be naïve to imagine that he was not shaped in some measure by his own denomination. But in Tozer we find a man who studied his Bible, and indeed, most books he read, on his knees. This does not give all his works doctrinal or intellectual infallibility. The point is, Tozer’s experience was to be thrust into the ministry before he could be made into a unbending disciple of one particular theological system.

And to this we must add, if his lack of theological training unnerves some, they must simply consider his orthodoxy on almost every other theological issue he wrote on. His views on the inerrancy of Scripture, the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the Incarnation, substitutionary atonement, justification by faith alone, the need for regeneration, the resurrection of the body and the Second Coming are impeccably sound. If he came to these by reading and studying humbly and diligently, there is sure to be some value in his writings on worship.

Certainly, Tozer had his weaknesses. He was no aesthetician. Nor was he a scholar of the first rank. He was a pastor. He was a generalist who strove to be a competent thinker. And as a pastor, he seems to me to be a model of what shepherds of this age should strive for, at least in the area of learning and personal piety. Given that he had come through some of the more vigorous expressions of revivalism, that he wrote and thought as he did is quite remarkable.

Several years ago I invested in some software that contains everything that Tozer had written. It’s been as invaluable to me as my complete volumes of Spurgeon. I’ve spent some time searching his works for his views on music in worship. What I hope to do in the next months is present a near-complete collection of Tozer’s views on worship music. There are some that I don’t completely agree with, but I don’t intend to cherry-pick only the quotes that seem to support my position. To my knowledge, these will be the collected written words of Tozer on worship music.