Here's a comment from the author on his blog. . .I think it's an important clarification, since some of those "issues" are legit:
Jeremy Pierce September 1st, 2010 | 11:50 am | #8 1. My implicit argument here is on the methodology of argumentation. A lot of legitimate criticisms of worship music are in the neighborhood of some of these, but the point is that we need to be very careful that we’re not making an argument against the inspired worship songs included in the scriptures, because a lot of arguments are framed in a way that they apply to certain psalms.
I think this post should show that certain features can be fine in public worship that are often criticized in contemporary worship music. It does not show that it’s all right for those features to become so dominant in our public worship as to remove the variety we find in the psalter. For example, if we never had any doctrine in our songs I think that would be outright sin, and it would be unfortunate if we only had it half the time even. But one song in the psalter (at least) has very little that could be even stretched to count as doctrine, so we shouldn’t object to one song without much doctrine unless we want to be giving an implicit criticism of the Bible itself. The same goes for most of these features.
2. I’ve actually given many of these arguments at points in the past. Some of them seem bad arguments to me now, even I thought they were good arguments at the time. Others seem all right when properly qualified as being about the dominance of certain features that shouldn’t be dominant. But argument 7 has a different feature altogether. It’s a particular argument against a particular contemporary worship song. As I’m envisioning it in the literary context of the post, it’s being presented by a naive person who doesn’t have a clue that Keith Green simply lifted Create in Me a Clean Heart from the pages of scripture. There is the more nuanced argument of Moryam (although I’m not comfortable calling the Holy Spirit “it”), and it’s one I’ve sometimes thought good, but I’ve come to conclude that it isn’t. How I presented it in this post is bad if it doesn’t acknowledge that it does at least come from scripture and that there’s a difference between NT experience of the Holy Spirit and OT experience of the Holy Spirit. So it does, I think, belong here, even on the view that it’s inappropriate for a Christian to ask for something that God has promised. -------------- etc. . . . .
3 comments:
That's awesome. I have TOTALLY heard each.and.every.one of those! A bit sad, really...
Here's a comment from the author on his blog. . .I think it's an important clarification, since some of those "issues" are legit:
Jeremy Pierce
September 1st, 2010 | 11:50 am | #8
1. My implicit argument here is on the methodology of argumentation. A lot of legitimate criticisms of worship music are in the neighborhood of some of these, but the point is that we need to be very careful that we’re not making an argument against the inspired worship songs included in the scriptures, because a lot of arguments are framed in a way that they apply to certain psalms.
I think this post should show that certain features can be fine in public worship that are often criticized in contemporary worship music. It does not show that it’s all right for those features to become so dominant in our public worship as to remove the variety we find in the psalter. For example, if we never had any doctrine in our songs I think that would be outright sin, and it would be unfortunate if we only had it half the time even. But one song in the psalter (at least) has very little that could be even stretched to count as doctrine, so we shouldn’t object to one song without much doctrine unless we want to be giving an implicit criticism of the Bible itself. The same goes for most of these features.
2. I’ve actually given many of these arguments at points in the past. Some of them seem bad arguments to me now, even I thought they were good arguments at the time. Others seem all right when properly qualified as being about the dominance of certain features that shouldn’t be dominant. But argument 7 has a different feature altogether. It’s a particular argument against a particular contemporary worship song. As I’m envisioning it in the literary context of the post, it’s being presented by a naive person who doesn’t have a clue that Keith Green simply lifted Create in Me a Clean Heart from the pages of scripture. There is the more nuanced argument of Moryam (although I’m not comfortable calling the Holy Spirit “it”), and it’s one I’ve sometimes thought good, but I’ve come to conclude that it isn’t. How I presented it in this post is bad if it doesn’t acknowledge that it does at least come from scripture and that there’s a difference between NT experience of the Holy Spirit and OT experience of the Holy Spirit. So it does, I think, belong here, even on the view that it’s inappropriate for a Christian to ask for something that God has promised.
--------------
etc. . . . .
Post a Comment