Russell Moore is an editor with his own monthly column, but I guess they needed to boost the page count this month, so he also wrote a piece not so well-thought out. Darwinism is not well understood by many -- perhaps most -- of the people who have adopted it as Religion ("believing what you know ain't so," see my essay on the topic), and evidently also not by Moore, nevermind that he used the word in his essay title. Terminology aside, his point -- Christianity is about enabling the less "fit" (although he did not use that word) to survive and prosper -- is worthy of the magazine. Maybe I'll tell him so, if I can figure out how not to return his terminological insult.
You see, Russell Moore has not given due diligence to the Recent Creation taught in the Bible and supported by good science. So he and his magazine (sort of) sides with the Darwinists on that issue, and he used the phrase "scientific acrobatics" to insult those he disagrees with. I know this because I started out where he is today, when I bought the Lie in public high school. Some 20+ years later, in grad school, my major prof invited me to "look at the evidence" and (because he was responsible for whether I graduated or not, and mostly for intellectual honesty), I did. There isn't any. Everybody who believes the Darwinist hypothesis points to some science not their own. I have been asking anybody doing peer-reviewed ("good") science for their contribution nearly 50 years now, and nobody is able and willing to answer the question. The ones I cannot ask personally, I look at their website, and they always point to somebody else's results. If no scientist can support it from their own science, then there is no science to support it. That's not a hard concept to understand and verify, no "acrobatics" required. But it does take some effort.
The next essay in the same issue was written by some Relationshipistic female, an honest agnostic who sincerely wanted to know if there was a God. She ended her first paragraph
If God existed, he did not endorse contemporary Christian music (CCM).As you know, I (as a thoughtful Christian) share this agnostic's opinion (see "Feeding Garbage to My Soul" in my collected blog posts on that subject). That made it worth reading right there. Nevertheless she became a Christian and her perspective changed -- slightly. Also (she tells us) CCM has changed:
...critics now lament blandness more than bawdiness. "All the songs sound the same, same repetitive chords and voices," wrote one commentator on a Reddit thread titled "Why is CCM so boring?" A pastor named Joshua Sharp complained in the Baptist Standard that most "modern worship lyrics are just prosperity gospel and cut-rate therapy."She goes on to say better things of the lyrics than I could, but then she is very much closer to her conversion experience than I am to to mine today. She quotes another recent convert, "When I'm hearing these songs, I start to mentally connect them to my own experience, and it starts to feel like something so much larger." I don't doubt that, but sooner or later these babes in Christ need to grow up, and their music should grow up with them. That's not happening in the 150-year-old church where I park my fanny on Sunday mornings. There are old Christians in that congregation, and we are not being fed (musically). I'm not the only one to notice.Songwriters in the "Big Four" megachurch worship ministries ... have come to dominate the contemporary music industry with an ambient pop-rock sound that one agnostic friend of mine summarizes as "a bad imitation of U2." Unlike reggase or gospel, this genre displays no distinctive musical characteristics. It is aesthetically and biblically vacuous," wrote pastor and Westminster Theological Seminary professor R. Scott Clark.
She waxes eloquent:
Contemporary worship music aims to cultivate a certain kind of experience, a sense of intimacy with God that critics mock as "Jesus is my boy-friend" music. Without grounding in comprehensive biblical teaching, these lyrics could encourage a shallow emotional state that resembles junior high hormones more than submission to Christ. But there's something deeper happening. Musician Melanie Penn told me that she sees herself "as a kind of heart doctor. I open the artery between head an heart."Maybe that is so, maybe not. I don't know that this church sings any of her songs, but I certainly know that there is a huge gap between my head and my heart when hearing these songs. Maybe not: my head sees these anti-Christian lyrics and tells me that this is not what I want to believe. My heart, informed by the syncopated rock beat that inspires only anger and rejection, agrees. Other stylles of music inspire love or joy or awe. There are Christian love songs, but they didn't sing any in this church the first couple years after I started coming. There's a reason for that: the drummer cannot drum a love song. More recently they do Christian love songs a couple times a year, and the drummer just sits there silent. But there is no connection in the sermon to the music. How can there be? The sermon is (mostly, like when the senior pastor preaches) good theology, and the music is something else.
She goes on:
We laypeople trust that church staff are scrutinizing the theology of the lyrics.It would be a misplaced trust in most churches (including this one). With very few exceptions that I have seen in the course of my life, church leadership are overwhelmingly MBTI Feelers whose highest value is unconditional affirmation. One pastor said it in my hearing, "Never criticize." If they show up on Sunday morning, their theology is good enough.
Contemporary worship songs bring us back to Jesus.Some of them, anyway. One song this church has done for us several times never mentions Jesus at all, but only "the king of my heart," which the song writer equates to the four pagan elements: Earth, fire, air, and water. There is one mention of "ransom" which is a Christian, not pagan, concept, but who would know that?
The author sees CCM as a positive change from traditional hymns -- and maybe it is for getting and discipling new Christians, I wouldn't know --
This may be the reason that God has ordained -- or at least permitted -- such staggering diversity... worldwide, Christians worship in nearly 50,000 different denominations, confessions, and associations of churches. Different people need different goads.She apparently does not realize that CCM is more like a cancer taking over all those 50,000 originally different styles. When I moved to Oregon I visited most of the evanbelical churches in town; some were obviously dying, but (with one exception) the rest all sang CCM. I read that in Germany German-speaking churches sing American CCM in English -- nevermind that they have perfectly good German songs to sing. I've seen videos of African churches where they still sing in their native African languages, but English is the New Latin, the language spoken (or at least partly understood) all over the world. How l;ong before those same feel-good contentless American songs are sung in English there too?
Some of the most joyful Christian music was written 250 years ago. We
don't hear that kind of music in church today because you cannot sing it
to a syncopated rock beat. You can sing joyfully to ragtime, but that 100-year-old
musical style disappeared with the last of the hymnbooks. Not too long
ago I was working with a men's group to sing songs out of the hymngook,
songs these older guys kew and loved, but the piano player couldn't play
"Amazing Grace" as written (in 3/4 time); all he could play was soft rock
(4/4). True music is a dying skill. See also my essay "It's
a Fork" three years ago.