MetaCatholic

“Mummy, mummy, do all fairy stories begin “Once upon a time”?
“No, dear, some of them begin “When I became a Christian all my problems were over.”

I sometimes wonder whether the mark of the many “biblical” churches is a deep-rooted conviction that God gave us the wrong kind of Bible. It’s true of those churches that spend all their time reducing narratives to propositions, and it’s true of all churches that believe the prayer and worship book of the Bible – the Psalms – is in serious need of replacement with more upbeat praise. Nor is this an entirely recent trend.

Take some verses of Psalms 42-43:

As a deer longs for flowing streams,
so my soul longs for you, O God
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When shall I come and behold the face of God?
My tears have been my food day and night,
while people say to me continually, “Where is your God?” (42:1-3)

Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my help and my God. (42:5,11; 43:5 — the chorus)

Now look at a modern song (which I happen to quite like in itself):

As the deer pants for the water,
So my soul longs after you.
You alone are my heart’s desire
And I long to worship you.

    You alone are my strength, my shield,
    To you alone may my spirit yield.
    You alone are my heart’s desire
    And I long to worship you.

The idea at the start of the psalm has been picked up, but the brutal honesty of faith struggling to hold on in suffering, opposition and depression has completely gone. Struggling to find God, hold on to faith, and cope with the hardships of life seems to have little place in contemporary songs. As those songs become more and more dominant in worship (even being described as “the time of worship” which takes place in the service, the meeting or whatever), so it becomes harder for Christians to have permission to articulate the dark side of life before God

Some of it, no doubt, is due to musical style. As the church borrows from (often yesterday’s) soft pop, it selects an idiom that struggles to rise above the banal and cheerful. But some of it, perhaps, is due to an almost docetic Christology (see this fairly old post by Daniel David Congdon). That is not true formally: these churches are not docetic in creed. It may be true materially: not only does the divinity of Christ subsume his humanity, but the divine action of atonement subsumes the human suffering of the cross.

When it comes to the psalms, it may also be that these churches are docetic about scripture. Its origin as God’s word totally subsumes its human authors, so that people read the psalms primarily to see what God has to say to them. The sense that the psalms are the speech of fallible, faithful, revengeful, loving, believing, doubting, praising and struggling people is in danger of being lost. With it goes the sense that our speech and song before God is not only allowed to be this honest, but in some sense is scripturally authorised to be this honest.