 |
 |
|
|
Occasional Essays
and Other Stuff
for Christian
Students
Presented by
the
President of |
American Christianity needs leaders. American Christianity needs Christian leaders. Christian leaders explain the Scriptures, bringing them to bear upon life’s urgent questions. Christian leaders exemplify the life of faith, finding their ultimate satisfaction in God alone. They unite intellectual discipline with ordinate affection, turning their entire being toward the love of God. These essays are dedicated to the task of inviting today’s Christian students to become tomorrow’s Christian leaders.
|
“…Be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine.”
X
X X February 11, 2005 X X X
|
|
Emotion in Hymnody
One objection often raised against a certain kind of church music is that it is “too emotional.” Those who raise this objection often add that the purpose of church music is to communicate doctrine. For evidence they cite Colossians 3:16, “teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.”
I am all in favor of doctrinal hymns. In fact, I agree that everything we sing should express right doctrine. In itself, however, strong doctrinal content does not rule out emotional expression.
I do not believe that music can be too emotional. This is especially true of doctrinal hymns. The regenerate heart irresistibly resonates to spiritual truth. The more profound the truth, the more sensitively it is expressed, and the more clear its relationship to the believer, the more deeply the pious heart will be moved. The ability to evoke and express this right response is what separates hymnody from prose.
What principles, then, should regulate the expression of emotion in church music? Two are especially relevant.
First, though good hymnody may express deep emotion, it is not about the emotion. Right emotion must be grounded in reality. When the focus shifts from the spiritual reality to the emotion itself, the emotion in no longer rightly grounded. The purpose of hymnody is to adore God, not to admire ourselves. By concentrating on our own emotions we transform hymnody into a mode of self-assertion.
Second, good hymnody must attach the proper emotions to the realities that are being considered. We recognize intuitively that hymnody must not express emotions such as anger with God or hatred toward Him. We know that good hymns do not mock God. Simply avoiding these egregious errors, however, does not ensure that a hymn communicates ordinate affection.
This raises a problem. All of our words for emotions are rather vague. They cover a lot of territory. The word fear, for instance, describes the way that one person recoils from spiders, the way that another reacts to a precipice, and the way that someone else feels about failure. One person feels awe when gazing into a starry sky, while another is awed when cherishing a newborn child. A particular man experiences love for his wife, his parents, his children, a good football game, and a plate of spaghetti.
We have mentioned three emotional terms: fear, awe, and love. Each of these words is used to denote several different feelings. A person who is startled by a spider is not feeling the same emotion as the person who dreads the semester finals, though both will say that they are afraid. Someone who is awed beside Niagara Falls is not experiencing the same emotion as someone who is awed by holding his firstborn. The kind of love that is proper toward a faithful dog is anything but proper toward a faithful wife.
Each emotional word describes several different feelings. This fact carries enormous implications for Christian life and worship. We ought to feel and express a range of emotion toward God. We must fill our worship with joy, awe, fear, and love. Not just any awe, or fear, or joy, or love will do, however. We must learn the right fear of God, the right love, the right awe, the right joy.
A wife would have reason to feel upset if her husband showed her the same love that he might rightly demonstrate toward a hound. Dare we think that God does not have reason to be vexed if we offer Him the kind of love that a teenage girl might offer a rock star? We ought to rejoice in our God, but can a pious man joy in God in the same way that a drunkard rejoices in whiskey?
Questions like these are especially relevant to our hymnody. Christian hymns both express and shape our emotions toward God. Wrong emotion (inordinate affection) in our hymns will devastate our spirituality and our worship. In some ways, mislabeled emotions are even more damaging than mistaken doctrines. Doctrines are public and discursive. We can easily examine and compare them. If someone believes a wrong doctrine, then we simply point him to the right one. To show him the truth is to convict him of error.
Emotions are not like that. They are inward, private, and irreducibly personal. We cannot examine another’s emotions in the same direct way that we inspect his theology. Comparing and critiquing our emotions is a much more difficult task than comparing and critiquing our doctrines.
Suppose that two men say that they love their wives. One man’s idea of love is shaped by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, while the other man’s idea of love is shaped by Hugh Hefner. Leaving aside the question of which love (if either) is the proper love for a wife, what is clear is that these two men do not mean the same thing when they talk about loving their wives. At least one of them is not fulfilling the obligation to love his wife.
Therein lies the problem. Each man considers himself to be a loving husband. As long as he believes that he is fulfilling his duty as a husband, he will not change. He will not repent while he believes he is righteous. It is no help if the man insists that he is sincere and that his affection is genuine. A man may love his wife like he loves his dog. If he does, the sincerity and intensity of his love is precisely the problem. When a man assures his wife that he loves her more than he loves any other dog, this is no compliment. The only solution is for the man to stop loving with the wrong love and to begin loving with the right one.
Emotions are powerful things, and a misdirected emotion can do powerful damage. Perhaps this is why some people would like Christian music not to be emotional. That is surely a wrong reaction, however. Our hymns must be emotional, but they must not be about emotion. They must be emotional, but they must express the right emotions for the spiritual realities that move us. X
|
This essay is by president of Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of Central’s professors, students, or alumni necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.
| |
|
|
Central
Baptist Theological Seminary of
Minneapolis | Contact Us |
|
