Bailing Water has some good material about Rock Music. The comments have appeared and disappeared so often - I thought I was looking for Brigadoon. Here are some:
Anonymous said...
Joe, I only ask out of boredom, not thinking it will effect anything, but if someone took a Rammstein tune and used "solid" gospel lyrics with it, would that be acceptable in church?
What about the beats and instrumentation associated with Madonna, Britney Spears, Lady Ga Ga or Elton John? OK for church as long as the lyrical content is "solid"?
Do you see any difference between "Indescribable" and "Salvation Unto Us Has Come"?
Is it just a false conception that rock and roll has been historically associated with rebellion? Is it only the lyrics that make something "solid"?
And do you think there is something that defines historic and/or confessional Lutheran worship?
Rob
April 21, 2009 9:06 PM
Freddy Finkelstein said...
Angry Andy uses the phrase “Cultural Discernment.” This is important. This entire discussion was opened by TIMiAM's post regarding the satanic nature of popular music, and I have made the point on this blog, rather recently in fact, that the pagan signature on popular Western culture is now unmistakable, and ought to be recognized as such and regarded with all seriousness. Modern entertainment forms, being distinctly pagan, should not be invited into the Church. The forms and expression of the Church ought to remain as distinct from Society as our true citizenship. We are not of the World, only in it, and we are only in it temporarily.
There was a time when Western culture was overtly Christian. Western cultural forms and Christian forms were similar enough that the Church could adopt cultural forms with little incongruity. Such is no longer the case. While Christian apologists will point to the fundamentals of Western society as Christian, referring to “borrowed capital” from 2000 years of Christian influence, today such capital is only thematic and abstract, institutional in a broad but non-specific and virtually indiscernable sense. Even in an apologetic application, Christian influence in Western society needs to be drawn out and obviated. Today, we are principally a pagan society with Christian overtones.
So how is it that the Church on earth, laymen and pastors alike, can exercise “Cultural Discernment?” How can we equip ourselves to judge cultural forms, given that we are all a product of modern culture, and that aspects of it permeate our thinking and reasoning? Some will say that we need to immerse ourselves in the Bible, and only the Bible, and that nothing else matters. While I appreciate, and don't entirely disagree with this, we have to admit that given this approach, even Scripture will be, and is, twisted by our cultural bias to permit what has become for us culturally acceptable and desirable. Only those things directly prohibited in Scripture will be grudgingly avoided, while everything else will be uncritically embraced, or at most regarded with the ambivalence of “personal choice.”
In my opinion, the answer lies in historical contrast. Supposedly, our pastors have a broad Liberal Arts education, an education of the Great Tradition (a good thing for pastors, especially, to have). Yet, most (that I have met) are culturally illiterate, unable to discuss literature, art, or music in any objective sense, and instead are captive only to the popular forms of their youth – which even by modern standards are no longer relevant. Without the Latin once required for pastoral studies, it seems that most are unable to comprehend the vast history of Western culture from the context its native idiom. The laity, for lack of any such education, suffers all the more. In my opinion, for us to become effective judges of modern culture, we must understand it from the standpoint of its foundation and development through history. We must become students of Western Civilization. The application of Biblical norms does not skip 2000 years to become applicable only today; rather, today is a product of 2000 years of applying Biblical norms. Let's understand that first.
Freddy Finkelstein
April 21, 2009 9:11 PM
Freddy Finkelstein said...
Another theme that has been sounded on this blog entry is that of Confessionalism. Why do we have Confessions and what is their purpose? What authority do they have?
I have often heard, and offered in this forum, the following explanation: "To establish Fellowship and enjoy Unity, it is not enough to say, 'I believe everything the Bible says,' for the very next question is, 'What do you say the Bible says?' Confessions, not the Bible, answer this second question." An appeal to the Confessions of a Church Body distinguishes those who commonly subscribe to them from the heterodox, and confirm their unity under those Confessions. They are definitive in every sense. Klemet Preus, in his The Fire and the Staff: Lutheran Theology in Practice makes this point rather directly.
Charles Porterfield Krauth, in his definitive Conservative Reformation has much to say about this Confessional Principal, as well. Therefore, in the interest of providing a "historical" commentary on the role of our Confessions -- that is, our Creed -- I offer the following excerpt from Ch. V this work. It is rather lengthy, and I apologize for that. Nevertheless, it is important to understand the independently normative nature of our Confessions, and C.P. Krauth does a better job of explaining it than anyone I have read thus far. Pay attention, especially, to the last sentence.
"The thetical statements of the [General] Council and the declaration which follows, exhibit, as we believe, the relation of the Rule of Faith and the Confessions, in accordance with the principles of the Conservative Reformation. Accepting those principles, we stand upon the everlasting foundation – the Word of God: believing that the Canonical Books of the Old and New Testament are in their original tongues, and in a pure text, the perfect and only rule of faith. All these books are in harmony, each with itself, and all with each other, and yield to the honest searcher, under the ordinary guidance of the Holy Spirit, a clear statement of doctrine, and produce a firm assurance of faith. Not any word of man, no creed, commentary, theological system, nor decision of Fathers or of councils, no doctrine of Churches, or of the whole Church, no results or judgments of reason, however strong, matured, and well informed, no one of these, and not all of these together, but God's word alone is the rule of faith. No apocryphal books, but the canonical books alone, are the rule of faith. No translations, as such, but the original Hebrew and Chaldee of the Old Testament, and the Greek of the New, are the letter of the rule of faith. No vitiation of the designing, nor error of the careless, but the incorrupt text as it came from the hands of the men of God, who wrote under the motions of the Holy Spirit, is the rule of faith. To this rule of faith we are to bring our minds; by this rule we are humbly to try to form our faith, and in accordance with it, God helping us, to teach others – teaching them the evidences of its inspiration, the true mode of its interpretation, the ground of its authority, the mode of settling its text. The student of theology is to be taught the Biblical languages, to make him an independent investigator of the Word of the Holy Spirit, as the organ through which the Spirit reveals His mind. First of all, as the greatest of all, as the groundwork of all, as the end of all else, we are to teach God's pure Word, its faith for faith, its life for life; in its integrity, in its marvelous adaptation, in its divine, its justifying, its sanctifying, and glorifying power. We are to lay, as that without which all else would be laid in vain, the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets – Jesus Christ being the chief corner-stone.
"Standing really upon the everlasting foundation of this Rule of Faith, we stand of necessity on the faith, of which it is the rule. It is not the truth as it lies, silent and unread, in the Word, but the truth as it enters from that Word into the human heart, with the applying presence of the Holy Ghost, which makes men believers. Faith makes men Christians; but the Confession alone marks them as Christians. The Rule of Faith is God's voice to us; faith is the hearing of that voice, and the Confession, our reply of assent to it. By our faith we are known to the Lord as his; by our Confession, we are known to each other as his children. Confession of faith in some form is imperative. To confess Christ, is to confess what is our faith in him. As the Creed is not, and cannot be the Rule of Faith, but is its Confession merely, so the Bible, because it is the Rule of Faith, is of necessity not its Confession. The Bible can no more be any man's Creed, than the stars can be any man's astronomy. The stars furnish the rule of the astronomer's faith: the Principia of Newton may be the Confession of his faith. If a man were examined as a candidate for the chair of astronomy in a university, and were asked, 'What is your astronomical system?' and were to answer, 'I accept the teaching of the stars,' the reply would be, 'You may think you do – so does the man who is sure that the stars move round the world, and that they are not orbs, but gimlet-holes to let the glory through. We wish to know what you hold the teachings of the stars to be? Do you receive, as in harmony with them, the results reached by Copernicus, by Galileo, by Kepler, by Newton, La Place, and Herchel, or do you think the world one great flat, and the sun and moon mere pendants to it?' 'Gentlemen,' replies the independent investigator, 'the theories of those astronomers are human systems – man made theories. I go out every night on the hills, and look at the stars as God made them, through a hole in my blanket, with my own good eyes, not with a man-made telescope, or fettered by a man-made theory; and I believe in the stars and in what they teach me; but if I were to say or write what they teach, that would be a human creed – and I am opposed to all creeds.' 'Very well,' reply the examiners, 'we wish you joy in the possession of a good pair of eyes, and feel it unnecessary to go any further. If you are unwilling to confess your faith, we will not tax your conscience with the inconsistency of teaching that faith, nor tax our own with the hazard of authorizing you to set forth in the name of stars your own ignorant assumptions about them.'
"What is more clear than that, as the Rule of Faith is first, it must, by necessity of its being, when rightly used, generate a true faith? But the man who has true faith desires to have it known, and is bound to confess his faith. The Rule cannot really generate two conflicting beliefs; yet men who alike profess to accept the Rule, do have conflicting beliefs, and when beliefs conflict, if the one is formed by the Rule, the other must be formed in the face of it. Fidelity to the Rule of Faith, therefore, fidelity to the faith it teaches, demands that there shall be a Confession of the faith. The firmest friend of the Word is the firmest friend of the Creed, first the Rule of Faith, and then the Confession of Faith.
"What shall be our Confession? Are we originating a Church, and must we utter our testimony to a world, in which our faith is a novelty? The reply is easy. As we are not the first who have used with honest hearts and fervent prayers, the Rule, so we are not the first who have been guided by the Holy Ghost in it to its faith. As men long ago reached its faith, so long ago they confessed it. They confessed it from the beginning. The first adult baptism was based upon a 'human creed,' that is, upon a confession of faith, which was the utterance of a belief which was based upon a human interpretation of divine words. The faith has been confessed from the beginning. It has been embodied in a creed, the origin of whose present shape no man knows, which indeed cannot be fixed; for it rose from the words of our Saviour's Baptismal Commission, and was not manufactured, but grew. Of the Apostles' Creed, as of Him to whom its heart is given, it may be affirmed that it was 'begotten, not made.' The Confession has been renewed and enlarged to meet new and widening error. The ripest, and purest, and most widely used of the old Confessions have been adopted by our Church as her own, not because they are old and widely received, but because they are true. She has added her testimony as it was needed. Here is the body of her Confession. Is her Confession ours? If it be, we are of her in heart; if it be not, we are only of her in name. It is ours – ours in our deepest conviction, reached through conflicts outward and inward, reached upon our knees, and traced with our tears – ours in our inmost hearts. Therefore, we consecrate ourselves to living, teaching, and defending the faith of God's word, which is the confessed faith of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Fidelity to the whole truth of God's word requires this. We dare not be satisfied simply with recognition as Christians over against the Jew, because we confess the Rule of Faith, of which the New Testament is a part, has taught us faith in Jesus Christ; we dare not be satisfied simply with recognition as holding the Catholic Faith as embodied in the three General Creeds, over against heresies of various forms and shades. Christian believers holding the faith Catholic we are – but we are, besides, Protestant, rejecting the authority of the Papacy; Evangelical, glorying in the grace of the Gospel; and Lutheran, holding the doctrines of that Church, of which the Reformation is the child – not only those in which all Christendom or a large part of it coincides with her, but the most distinctive doctrines, though in the maintenance of them she stood alone. As the acceptance of the Word of God as a Rule of Faith separates us from the Mohammedan, as the reception of the New Testament sunders us from the Jew, as the hearty acquiescence in the Apostles', Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds shows us, in the face of all errorists of the earlier ages to be in the faith of the Church Catholic, so does our unreserved acceptance of the Augsburg Confession mark us as Lutherans; and the acceptances of the Apology, the Catechisms of Luther, the Schmalcald Articles, and the Formula of Concord, continues the work of marking our separation from all errorists of every shade whose doctrines are in conflict with the true sense of the Rule of Faith – that Rule whose teachings are rightly interpreted and faithfully embodied in the Confessions afore-mentioned. Therefore, God helping us, we will teach the whole faith of His word, which faith our Church sets forth, explains, and defends in her Symbols. We do not interpret God's word by the Creed, neither do we interpret the Creed by God's word, but interpreting both independently, by the laws of language, and finding that they teach one and the same truth, we heartily acknowledge the Confession as a true exhibition of the faith of the Rule – a true witness to the one, pure, and unchanging faith of the Christian Church, and freely make it our own Confession, as truly as if it had been now first uttered by our lips, or had now first gone forth from our hands.
From The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology: as Represented In the Augsburg Confession, and In the History and Literature of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, by Charles P. Krauth, D. D. J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia, 1871 (pages 165-169)
Freddy Finkelstein
April 21, 2009 9:50 PM
Angry Andy said...
Freddy said " we must become students of Western Civilization"
...interesting that The Core says essentially the same thing: "We must become students of our culture" but for the opposite reasons that Freddy suggests. Go Freddy!
But if you want to be fastidious about the supposed Satanic roots in rock n roll, what about this Blog's reader "TimiAm"?
I see his moniker as a misuse of Gods name. Same with Popeye and several other popular songs who's lyrics use 'I am" as the central theme.
That happens to be God's name for himself. I don't think it proper to go bandying that about.
April 22, 2009 6:44 AM
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GJ - We had absolutely no rock music in our house. We played classical music and hymns on our stereo. We never played rock on the car radio. We like some pop music, but the message of rock, especially now, is essentially Satanic. Children who grow up with classical music and great Christian hymns (not the arky-warky ditties) will develop a great love for good music.
