Christianity
Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns, by T. David Gordon
Last year, I read and loved T. David Gordon’s Why Johnny Can’t Preach. (I believe I blogged about it in these very pixel pages.) Gordon’s basic point was that Johnny can’t preach anymore (i.e., preaching in churches today is uniformly pretty shabby) because he can’t read—not read in the illiterate sense, but in the aliterate one. This is the first ever generation of Protestantism in which our preachers, who are asked to compose a rhetorically unified and satisfying half-hour message every week, very likely have never really read a book. Would you want a mechanic that’s never driven a car? A cook that’s never eaten? A football team owner that’s never aged?
(Yes, Dallas fans, it’s just about time for football, at the season finale of which will once again leave us puzzling over who shot T.R. I’ve botoxed all of my old Jerry Jones jokes and am ready for another round; like the man himself, my Jones material is shiny, fresh, and smooth, if a bit pinched and trying a little too hard. It’s kolbberin’ time!)
But, to Gordon. As a sequel of sorts to Why Johnny Can’t Preach, he has returned with Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns. It’s an argument for “traditional” hymns in worship, but in my opinion it avoids all of the cliches and mudslinging that went back and forth as part of the ecclesial “worship wars” in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s. I’d be very interested to read a review or a book that responds to Gordon in disagreement. Should such a work appear, I’d wager that it would allow that Gordon was respectful and well reasoned in his traditionalist apologetic.
Towards the beginning of Hymns, Gordon willingly concedes that contemporary worship music is biblically permissible. This admission up front I think shows that Gordon isn’t out for blood and vying simply to trash contemporary worship songs. (He even cites a couple of recent examples of contemporary songs that may be worthy of inclusion in future hymnals.) At the same time, he makes a very strong case that contemporary hymns aren’t beneficial in the way that traditional ones generally are.
Gordon contends that Protestant worship has never changed so dramatically and quickly as it has over the past 40 years. The boomers were the first generation to complain that corporate worship had to be in a contemporary musical idiom; that preference carried the day in most evangelical churches, but Gordon opines that the shift was a largely unreflective one. Why did worship change so fast? What were (or are) the arguments or theological rationale? In past generations, hymns were selected for hymnals and sung in churches based on a number of criteria: “theologically orthodox lyrics,” “theologically significant lyrics,” “literarily apt and thoughtful lyrics,” “lyrics and music appropriate to a meeting between God and his visible people,” “well written music with regard to melody, harmony, and form,” and “musical setting appropriate to lyrical content.” Not only were those criteria employed, but the passage hundreds of years enabled that there be a long “screening” process by which the church was able to discern which hymns were truly enduring. To contrast that with contemporary worship, are the standards for the use of current worship songs nearly as rigorous? If many churches won’t sing a song over ten years old on a given Sunday, isn’t it shortsighted to assume that all (or most, or some, or any) of them are hymns of lasting value?
By and large (and there are of course notable and worthy exceptions here), many contemporary songs are chosen for modern worship because a) they sound contemporary and “good,” according to a certain standard of contemporaneity, and b) many feel that the worship of God ought to be accessible to those outside the faith, and that “the difference” between worship and other activities should be minimized in order to grant the gospel maximum berth for reception. Gordon questions both of these stances.
Concerning the fact that many churches choose and write songs specifically for their contemporary feel (i.e., songs that utilize the same basic musical principles as pop), Gordon worries about the “meta-message” this practice communicates. He cites many sources, both secular and Christian, which argue that pop music is primarily associated with the ephemeral and transitory. Even if a contemporary worship song quotes scripture directly, it is very possible that what the lyrics giveth, the song structure subtly taketh away:
Even if a substantial minority of the culture associates contemporary music with the trivial, the inconsequential, or the ironic, why would the church wish to use a form associated with the trivial or ironic? And if not, why attempt to put serious content into a nonserious form? People may be amused by it, and some may tap their feet to it, but would Jesus have addressed the rich young man in such a tone?
Good questions. Gordon also wonders whether seeking contemporaneity in worship is even compatible with the ancient nature of the faith: “When we sing praise to an everlasting God, or sing about a Redeemer who died for us over two millennia ago, but do so employing musical forms that imply that the past is passe, we are communicating a mixed message.” Food for thought.
As for the perceived need of the church in its worship to sound and feel like any other cultural activity so that the unchurched can be reached with the gospel, Gordon likewise takes exception. At couple different places in Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns, he observes that Christians will dress up for weddings and expect traditional liturgy and music for them. But why? The obvious answer is that weddings are a sufficiently important and sacred occasion that a much higher than normal level of decorum is appropriate to the setting. Interestingly, then, Christians that dress down for church and sing contemporary hymns on Sundays get spruced up and have no problem at all with traditional music and formality at weddings on Saturdays, not to mention the fact that at them many cry. Gordon asks if something is wrong with this picture. From wedding practices, he argues that people in our culture are readily able to differentiate between “normal” and “special” occasions plus comprehend and be moved by the latter’s formality. He then employs an argument from the lesser to the greater; if we treat the marriage between a man and a woman as so important that it calls for a setting of more gravitas, how much more should we consider that Sunday worship, which commemorates the ultimate wedding (namely between Christ and the church), be sufficiently weighty in its proceedings. A yen for the contemporary cuts against that theological reality. Gordon observes:
Contemporary worship music deliberately attempts to sound like the music we hear every day in the culture around us. It goes out of its way not to sound foreign or different. But if meeting our Maker and Redeemer is different from all of our other meetings, why shouldn’t the various aspects of that meeting be different from the aspects of other meetings? If God is “wholly other” than we, why would a meeting with him look as though he were “wholly like” us? If he is holy, why shouldn’t the language we use when we approach him be holy? If he is sacred, why should we not attempt to construct music that sounds sacred, rather than profane? Why should the category of sacred music disappear?
In Isaiah, God faults the Israelites for assuming the Lord to be altogether like themselves. Does worship that strives for contemporaneity unwittingly fall into that same trap?
Well, this blog post is too long already. There are more lines of thought that Gordon puts forward in support of his thesis. He also deals well with many objections to his reasoning, but I won’t go into them in this space. However, here’s one last pass at his basic program:
The most common argument for employing contemporary worship music is the strategic argument: to reach a culture captivated by pop music, the church must employ such music. But this argument. . . is far from cogent. Most young people do not like this music nearly as much as adults think they do; many sincere seekers of religious truth find its playfulness and triviality off-putting; it is often more obstructive of congregational participation than its traditional counterpart; its casual character reflects and endorses a trivial culture rather than redemptively calling it to repentance and a narrow way. Since contemporary worship music has the many liabilities mentioned previously, its strategic benefits would have to be extraordinary in order to compensate for its liabilities. The meta-message liabilities of contemporary worship music, which tend to promote narcissism, paedocentrism, contemporaneity, and triviality, are significant barriers to overcome.
If any of you are interested in why worship at Providence is the way it is, this would be a book worth reading. In contrast to this post, Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns is actually short and a breeze to read. This may in addition be a good book to have in one’s utility belt in order to talk with other people about how we do worship. I readily acknowledge and struggle with the fact that many folks come and visit Providence and say that they like the teaching and the people but can’t stomach the traditional worship. Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns would be a good conversation piece for such people.
I do, though, have a couple of minor quibbles with Gordon. For one, although I agree with him in his basic assessment of the benefit of traditional worship over contemporary—but please remember, neither Gordon nor I would say that contemporary worship is wrong, or that only worse Christians than we like it—I sometimes think that Gordon is too dismissive of pop music as pop music (in distinction from as worship music). Some pop music, or more specifically, my pop music, is not as inconsequential or trivial as Gordon may imply. “Stones in My Passway” (Robert Johnson), “Mystery Train” (Elvis), “Blue Monday” (Fats Domino), “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” (Muddy Waters), “These Arms of Mine” (Otis Redding), The Band (The Band), side one of Moondance (Van Morrison), side two of The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle (Bruce), all contain secret worlds. A couple years ago, I read a full-length book by Dave Marsh on “Louie, Louie,” for crying out loud—the song!
I also would have wished that Gordon had spent some time interacting with RUF hymnody, which in my opinion avoids many of the weaknesses (though aren’t without their own problems in certain cases) inherent in other contemporary worship songs. Gordon does distinguish between pop and folk musical idioms and seems to imply that folk misses many of the liabilities he assigns to pop, but he doesn’t develop that distinction into the possibility of a hymnic third way that RUF song attempt.
That’s all I got on this one, save for this tantalizing morsel: in my blog I try and talk about serious things, but does the fact that I communicate these things in blog form trivialize everything I’m saying? WHO BLOGS THE BLOGGERS?
General disclaimer: I’ve been reluctant over the last couple of years to start a blog, because I’ve thought to myself that I’d have trouble figuring out things to say, or spend too much time trying to fill a blogospace. But, it seems that one thing I could do would be to keep track of books that I’ve read (plus music), jot down a paragraph about each, and post everything online.
I hope that this list is helpful to people both to give some ideas about what to read (and what not to read), and also to open a window into how I personally process through books and consider issues related to Christ and culture. (In addition, I won’t try to write anything particularly controversial, but I offer these words just as one man’s perspective and maybe some food for thought for others. These aren’t ex cathedra pronouncements that bind anyone into agreeing with me.)