Worship Music and the Language of Romance

 The Bible nowhere describes the relationship between the individual Christian believer and Christ using romantic terminology. It does describe the Church as a collective body that way - “husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church”. But nowhere does it tell the individual person to think of his salvation in those terms. And yet that language has tended to permeate contemporary worship music since its beginning. And this is one of contemporary worship music’s biggest problems. The fact is that when you use an unbiblical terminology to refer to something as central to the Bible as salvation, wrong theology and a wrong spiritual life can’t help but be the result.

One question that is brought up in this, though, is whether or not The Song of Solomon should be taken as a metaphor for the individual believer’s relationship with God or Christ.

The Song of Solomon serves at least two purposes. The first one was, and is, to teach the people of God what a godly, natural, romantic relationship is supposed to look like. Its second purpose, in its Old Testament context, was and is to illustrate Yahweh’s love for Israel collectively. That then carries over to Christ’s love for the Church in the New Testament. The Church is the New Israel.

As a picture of Yahweh’s love for Israel, this then sets the stage for the writings of the OT prophets later, as Yahweh brings charges of adultery against Israel, and as He threatens her with divorce for her harlotry with the nations, which divorce is finalized in the Book of Revelation, manifested in real history through the Roman assault on Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.

It is also with this divorce motif in mind that Revelation 2-3 also has to be read, alongside of the apostasy passages of the New Testament, namely John 15, Romans 9-11, and the entire Book of Hebrews. Yahweh has divorced Israel, because He requires faithfulness, as any spouse should. Individual churches then also should be diligent in their faithfulness, lest He remove their lampstands, which is just another metaphor intended to illustrate the same ending of relationship with God.

But there isn’t a verse in Scripture, in either the Old or New Testaments, that suggests we should take the Song of Solomon as an illustration of the individual believer’s relationship with God. There have been commentators over the past two thousand years who have tried that, but Scripture simply doesn’t support it. There’s nothing inside or outside of the book that says we should read it and apply it that way.

I Am Of Calvin, I Am Of Wesley

 No matter what your denomination or church tradition may be, honesty requires recognizing that God has worked throughout history in denominations and church traditions other than your own. And humility should lead all of us to listen to what the Bible teachers and theologians of other church traditions have to say. No single denomination or church tradition has ever gotten every last thing right.

The Terror of the Lord

 The presence or absence of quiet meditation in the sanctuary before a worship service goes a long way in telling you what you need to know about a church.

All the robes and candles and incense in the world won’t make up for a lack of holy fear when entering into the presence of the God of all things.

Original Sin

 There have been different views on Original Sin throughout Church history - how Adam’s sin has affected all of mankind down through the ages. Often, though, the assumption has been that infants cannot sin - that it takes some level of consciousness of themselves, of God, of right and wrong, and of the world around them, to sin, a consciousness infants do not and cannot have. But can anybody actually prove that? On the contrary, children prove from a very young age that they are sinners. They often do wrong, and that intentionally, knowing they are doing wrong. The only thing stopping infants from at least some sins often is a lack of mobility. 

John the Baptist leapt in Elizabeth’s womb when Mary, carrying Jesus in her womb, approached them. We can’t understand it, but that was already an acknowledgement on his part of who Jesus was. While this was a special case, it demonstrates that infants are capable of a greater level of consciousness than we tend to expect.

There is no verse of Scripture that says that infants are innocent, in some overarching way. Rather, while infants may not yet be guilty of most specific sins, Scripture teaches us that they are born corrupted by sin.

The majority position in my own Reformed tradition has been that Adam’s sin in the Garden has been imputed to all his progeny, and will continue to be so for all those yet to be born. We are all guilty, in some sense, of Adam’s sin. The remedy, then, is the righteousness of Christ imputed to all those who place their trust in Him. But even if one won’t go that far, one has to affirm that infants are born corrupted by Adam’s sin. When David says “In sin my mother conceived me” (Psalm 51), he clearly wasn’t saying she was in sin when or by conceiving him. It was his own sin in view, whether in terms of corruption, or guilt, or both. And where the corruption of sin is, is there any reason to assert that acts of sin are not possible? Maybe there is, if we don’t understand what sin is. But if hate is a sin - or greed, or selfishness, or even simply failing to love one’s neighbor - then infants can sin, and they probably do far more than we might expect.

Right Worship

 If all right theology, and in fact all right living, begins with the wonder of God, then the answer when a person sins isn’t the endless lamenting of one’s sin or inability, but a returning to the wonder of God.

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One reason why we Christians argue so much about which hymn to sing, which liturgy to follow, which way to worship is that the commandments teach us to believe that bad liturgy eventually leads to bad ethics. You begin by singing some sappy, sentimental hymn, then you pray some pointless prayer, and the next thing you know you have murdered your best friend. -- Stanley Hauerwas