Our parish has recently signed up to the extremely useful Song Select service. This provides, along with the CCLI copyright permissions agreement, access to a massive database of hymn and worship song lyrics for downloading, and either printing or projection. It’s well worth any church considering it, so don’t get the rest of this post wrong: I’m not dissing the service or the idea.
BUT
Bizarrely the songs are delivered without any normal punctuation. In my view this works against comprehension, and in some songs renders them little more than disconnected strings of phrases. I am unsure how easy it is to parse, for example, this (exactly as is):
One day every tongue
Will confess You are God
One day every knee will bow
Still the greatest treasure remains
For those who gladly choose You now
It’s somewhat disturbing that this syntactically challenged and logically unrelated string of phrases hits the number four spot in their current top hundred.
Another feature you may have noticed is the capitalisation in the above selection. Some of this is, of course, a mixture of a house style and personal taste. I would have thought, however, that the whole trend in English is, and has been for a long time, away from capitalisation of nouns and pronouns. Capitalising the initial letter of each line further confuses the sense already lost through lack of punctuation. Where do sentences start and finish? Using capitals for “God” words (beyond proper nouns and titular phrases) also has its problems, not the least of which is inconsistency. This inconsistency is inevitable, and affects the songs of this catalogue as much as any other. However, compared to the problems of sense, it is a minor matter of style.
One feature of the scheme I admire is that (although rooted in an evangelical initiative, and predominantly used by more evangelical and Protestant churches) it does not censor any of the words in its catalogue according to theological taste. That means that anyone who wishes to can see what others actually sing, provided the publisher is signed up to the licensing scheme.
I confess, in that light, to being deeply disappointed by what the most popular songs are. At number one we have Stuart Townend’s “In Christ alone.” Some of it is excellent, and the music is powerful, but it is, in my view, totally ruined by the lyrics:
Till on that cross as Jesus died
The wrath of God was satisfied
That is exactly the distortion of penal substitution that Steve Chalke rightly called “cosmic child abuse“. (Is God really saying, “No, I need more pain, more pain. I’m still really angry. More pain!”?) No song with those words should ever be sung by anyone with a half a brain, or the remotest desire to be biblical. It is a travesty of atonement theory, yet it is currently the most popular song, at least in churches that have stopped using hymnbooks.
Nearly as bad is another of Townend’s songs (which has the same musical power): “How deep the Father’s love” which comes in at number three.
It was my sin that held Him there
Until it was accomplished
No, I say, and a thousand times “no”! This is exactly why I think the doctrine of impassibility matters. My sin doesn’t have that kind of power. It is God’s free choice, Christ’s free will, the gift of love which takes him to the cross and holds him there. (Sin is not in any case a finite amount of a thing or power to be exhausted.) Claiming what this hymn does is simply wrong, and denies the freedom of God. It is a shame that such powerful music (and some quite good lyrics elsewhere – Townend has real talent let down by bad teaching) should be vitiated by such frightful rubbish.
Yet, clearly, for most people, it does not ruin the songs that they are invited to sing such appalling words. They are, and this needs repeating, the first and third most popular songs among churches using this service. That suggests that they are currently the most popular songs among UK evangelicals. Now perhaps evangelicals (and others) do embrace such a travesty of the atonement, as their opponents frequently say. I rather doubt it, although these songs will certainly lead them in that direction if they remain popular. But what I think is happening is that people are having a good sing to powerful and emotive music. Just as they happily sing random phrases strung together without punctuation or logical coherence, so they will sing heretical ones.
Paul said “I will sing praise with the spirit, but I will sing praise with the mind also.” (1 Corinthians 14:15). The second phrase of that sentence has now, it seems, been excised from many modern Bibles.
