Sing with the Spirit, sod the mind
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.
February 10th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
Awesome!
February 10th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
Doug, most people who sing those songs have never been taught anything else about atonement. I just stop singing when we get to those lines–I can’t sing false doctrine.
February 10th, 2008 at 11:16 pm
A great post. I entirely agree with you about the lack of punctuation. The first song makes good sense when punctuated as here:
As for the Townend songs, I don’t much like the parts of the lyrics which you object to, but I can’t agree that they are “heretical”.
If you think that “The wrath of God was satisfied” is the distortion Chalke was talking about, you must have been fortunate enough to avoid the really immoral presentations of the atonement. In fact Townend’s words go very little beyond Romans 5:9-10, unless you insist that the only way wrath can be “satisfied” is by allowing it free rein until it is worked out. The words could just as easily mean that when he saw the moral greatness of how Jesus died God the Father decided that it was wrong to be angry. I don’t think Townend meant quite that, but his words are in fact compatible with various models of the atonement.
I’m sure that Townend did not mean by “It was my sin that held Him there” that my sin had some magic power to compel Jesus to remain on the cross. Rather, surely, he meant that Jesus chose to remain on the cross because he knew that otherwise my sin could not be dealt with. Or he might also have meant that the nails which physically held Jesus on the cross were figuratively “my sin” in that I was complicit in the sin of banging them in. This is poetry, after all, so don’t expect nuanced systematic theology.
February 11th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Having been raised in a fundamentalistic/evangelical/revivalist tradtion and subsequently becoming an Episcopal priest, I have been challenged about using music of all kinds in the liturgy. I love to sing hymns and have growing appreciation for Anglican Hymnody, but I have had a varied background with other forms of music - both white and black Gospel, American Old Timey and Bluegrass, early Country and Western, blues, early jazz, jugbands, TexMex and Western Swing for example.
I have the dream that all of these forms of music could be used, along with traditional anglican music in the liturgy. But words are often problematic. For instance, a lot of early white Gospel/convention songs have great melodies and rhythms, but the words are so often “world denying” i.e., “I want to get to heaven when I die.”
When I can, I just rewrite the lyrics to something more theologically appropriate. I probably will be excoriated for saying that from the song writers, but it seems often necessary. For other genre, usch as blues, the words are so fluid anyway that one can be free to improvise.
I do like a lot of modern praise music, and think there is much snobbery about this subject in the Anglican world. For me, I want to use my mind, a la Corinthians, but I don’t mind when my toe taps and my body moves to the beat, I find it as incarnational as a genuflection.
February 11th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
Thanks, David. I agree with you about the range of music (yesterday we had everything from plainsong to Kendrick at the sung mass). It is the lyrics I have problems with.
February 12th, 2008 at 10:18 am
[...] another post about theology and worship, see: Sing with the Spirit, sod the mind at [...]
February 12th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
So nothing from the last 20 years then? Why not?
February 12th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
Peter, that seems a particularly arsey comment even for you. The answer is in part, however,
a) because we choose the music for the occasion, and there’s comparatively little Lenten music among the more recent output
b) that the Kendrick was written well within the last 20 years
c) because so much of the most recent music is “me and my feelings about God” and inappropriately self-centred indulgence disguised as worship
d) only four days before on Ash Wednesday we sang something written in 2007 (which I hope is recent even by your fault-finding nit-picking standards) and a good range over time is more important than having something instantly disposable on every occasion.
February 15th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
Doug, you took my comment more seriously than I intended. I’m glad you do sing more up to date songs. But, on the basis that the well-known Kendrick songs were written in the 1980s and are considered seriously out of date by today’s young people, I was making a serious point about churches which make a show of including modern music supposedly to be culturally relevant, but in fact completely fail because what they claim to be relevant is in fact dated and irrelevant.
As for “most recent music is … inappropriately self-centred indulgence”, are you familiar with the songs of for example Matt Redman? “Blessed be your name”, for example, certainly does not merit this description. It might even be considered suitable for Lent.
October 22nd, 2008 at 12:43 pm
I can’t sing “the wrath of God was satisfied either”. Try “The love of God was glorified” which emerges from John’s gospel…or, “The Lord with me identified”…