We've noted over the last week or so a certain detachment from reality. On the one end we watched an atheist grasp at something numinous or transcendent or preternatural. It takes a real thing, a serious thing, to make an atheist wonder if God had a hand in it. It's not the sort of conclusion atheists jump to. And wondering if God has had a hand in our liturgy is not a frequent occurrence in church any longer. It's true that Christians mouth the words, but watch how they sing their songs and ask yourself if there is anything divine in it or is it merely maudlin testimony. Read their texts and see if you find yourself moved or if you merely recite vanities. Vain repetition does not have great standing among the writers of Scripture.

On the shallower end of the gene pool is Trevor Magee with his cartoon notions of moral obligation. Apparently he learns more about God on Saturday morning than on Sunday morning, but he really does think he has advice to offer. I'm sure he thinks he's a serious person.

Then there was Fadel's moronic primer on songwriting.

Gaebelein told us long ago (and his involvement with the arts and his national reputation warranted something of a hearing) to give some attention to standards and to exercise discrimination. This we did not do.

Making every allowance for the disparity in today's religious entertainments, there is an underlying thread here. You might think you escaped Fadel's Asylum Art into Majesty Hymns; I wonder if you should take any comfort in that. The standards and the discrimination are absent.

It seems to me that to leave the heart unwarmed, unchastened and unelevated in church is to be worse than pagan. A pagan can be irreverent in the woods; what sort of man can be irreverent in the temple?

Regularly.

As you sit back and try to discriminate between good and better, as you move certain things from the acceptable column into the unacceptable column, and as you throw the intolerable into the dumpster, ask yourself on what grounds you do so. What informs your preferences? Your innate goodness? Your profound spirituality? Your short hair and long skirts? Your tattoos and knitted caps?

I suspect that to the shocked atheist it all looks preposterous, substandard and totally lacking in discrimination.

Are you descended from apes? Are you mentally retarded? Is there a history of mental illness in your family? Has anyone ever used your head as a towel rack? Do you find yourself gibbering for long periods of time? Does the wind ever whistle through your ears and disturb people sitting near you? Are you as illiterate as a professional athlete or an emerging jesus-follower? Have you ever wanted to write a worship song but just didn't know how?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, have I got a URL for you:

http://www.geocities.com/dagwooddyd/topofhead.doc

which I found, unsurprisingly, at http://www.theooze.com/articles/article.cfm?id=1434.

Outside of family, there are few things that give me more joy than making up a song on the spot and listening to it later.  It's not a complicated process, making up something, but it *is* a difficult one.  It's like anything, once you get the knack it's like second nature, but the difference is that unlike riding a bicycle or typing, making something up tends to always catch you by surprise.  For those who fear failure, the process is an incredible daunting thing.  A person has to start with a willingness to temporarily lose something valuable to them, control. 

I'm sure this is exactly how Johann Sebastian felt. No doubt Franz Schubert and Hugo Wolf had dry spells when the songs just weren't coming together; perhaps this method played a role in achieving the sublime art we love today.

I suggest you read this whole document. Admittedly, it will feel like a root canal with a hammer and chisel, but what doesn't kill you will make you stronger. The writing may be atrocious but it is detailed! It even tells you when to take a break, and in one paragraph it makes the point explicitly: "Now you need to write a poem. Get more paper."

This is most helpful.

For those of you still not entirely persuaded that Todd Fadel knows what he's doing, I recall the words of another: "Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves."

Clarity does not work for emergents, obviously, so here is an alternative method more amenable to their genius.

Thou shalt not, I say, thou shalt not...Look at me when I'm talking to you, boy.

We Christians have an obligation not to submit passively to the cultural environment that surrounds us but to develop standards for judging it. The stewardship of leisure is a proper field for pastoral concern. The quality of our minds and thought is being determined largely by what we do with our free time. We can't escape the arts; they won't let us alone. And if I have spoken of discrimination and standards, I have not meant to imply that we should shut ourselves away from what is new and unfamiliar in the arts. We can't develop aesthetic standards and discrimination unless we are willing to be open-minded toward what is new and unfamiliar, even when we don't at first understand it.

Listen to the Apostle Paul: "Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble..." You know how eloquently his words flow as he goes on to speak of "whatever is right-pure-lovely-admirable..." And then he concludes with the imperative, "think about such things"...

We've noted in the past that we are responsible for our own dryness of soul.  At one time it suited us to blame The King or some hirsute Liverpudlians for the problem. But we were warned. The discussions here on Remonstrans tended (for historical considerations) to follow one line of reasoning which featured the warnings of men like Machen and Tozer, but those were two out of many. Frank E. Gaebelein was one who also warned us.

Personally, I think Gaebelein tended to be less helpful on the theoretical end and more useful in expressing the intangible appreciations which are essential to a cultivated heart. He knew real music and real musicians. I don't think he was able to make the connection between the Davidic muse in the O.T. and what we do in the concert hall. But his words here make it clear where the fault lies.

When he speaks of leisure he speaks of it as discretionary time, time we have to do as we please, time not filled with bread-winning. Work was necessary but it was not serious, and there is a nice distinction there; the Christian needs to be serious on his free time. We speak of leisure as time for our own indulgence. Or as Christianity Today would have us believe: time to watch a good movie. A time—to speak precisely—to be a-mused and un-thinking.  Then afterward one can express his spirituality by getting together with other Thoughtless Ones to play find-the-redemption-story.

Now years later we are paying the piper for the tune we called. Now our liturgy has the odor of Hollywood movies, Broadway hits and television commercials. Now we lack the "discrimination and standards" so that Rachel speaks vaguely of some transcendence absent among those who want to speak to us of a transcendent God.

Where do we learn what is true, noble, pure and lovely?

I tremble to recommend a DVD for you to watch. The Art of Piano was written by Christian Labrande and Donald Sturrock. It is an introduction to some of the great pianists like Backhaus, Cortot, Cziffra, Gilels, Hofmann, Horowitz, Moiseiwitsch, Rachmaninoff, Richter and Rubinstein, and discussed by great pianists like Barenboim, Graffman, Kissin, Kocsis, Sandor and Vásáry.

The best way to be introduced to culture is for everyone to consider the same bits; ideally we would all listen to the same recording of the same work by the same performer. If we don't do that, we really run the risk of trying to compare apples and pears. You might listen to Bach because you once heard the Musette which you liked, and I would listen to Dvorák because I once heard the Bagatelles which I liked. I'm not sure what helpful conclusions our discussions might produce.

I believe we understand culture through immersion; fundagelicals are on record as believing we can understand culture through aspersion.

One of the things a DVD like this might accomplish is to offer a framework for how to enter the baptistery as it were. It may help to know where to look and what to make of what we see. As important as I think my opinion of the great pianists is, it probably is not as important as the opinions of other pianists. And your listening to Ashkenazy because I like him is not really a good way for you to come to like Krystian Zimerman (whom I don't particularly).

This DVD will also give you some limited sense of how the world has changed.  As Barenboim said, we must realize that we are talking here about pianists who performed during the times these great works were composed. Some of the great works were composed for these pianists. There is value in entering the field with some notion of the difference that makes.

If you can get some sense of what these pianists where trying to do, you might know what to listen for and how to compare them to today's pianists who are doing something else entirely. To play a work solemnizing a historical event you lived through is very different from playing the work as though it were a museum piece, a standard work of the repertory.

This DVD might help you think of culture less as a parts list and more as a mindset.

________________________
The Art of Piano
NVC Arts
N3984-29199-2

In my younger days I used to read men like Gaebelein with some anxiety. I did not and could not have articulated my misgivings, but there were in my imagination two discrete things: art and religion.

I knew full well that they weren't always discrete things; they had somehow divorced. I'd seen enough art to know better, and even in my dad's study there was for as long as I could remember a print of Dürer's Saint Jerome in His Study. I was by that time aware of the better-known works of Dürer, Grünewald, Rembrandt, Bosch, Brueghel, Chagall; and of course I knew about Bach, Handel, Milton, Bunyan, Dante....

But this is not the sort of thing one talked about at church. You might discuss this with a few friends and cousins, but never with deacons and Sunday School teachers. So when I started reading evangelicals on "the aesthetic imperative", I felt there was something a bit oily about them.

Now of course we live in the wasteland full of marauding cretins like Garlock, Dino, Leith Anderson, Hybels, Makujina, Mark Driscoll...and I wonder whatever became of this wonderful aesthetic imperative.

Now it seems imperative that we find an aesthetic!

Rachel is seriously mistaken if she thinks that she could love God if she attended services at St. Peter's; and if she had a clue as to the role Dr. Tetzel played in its making, she'd find only one more reason to be disdainful of Christianity.

The question remains for the professing believer:

What's with all the garbage, dude? Why is there no aesthetic imperative for you? You have your shabby entertainments and your "arts ministries" but you fool no one. These are pathetic imitations of worldly entertainments. On your very best day you are third-rate. You've got your goofball evangelistic skits and Thomas Kinkade; you have your fundamentalists howling over Oscar Wilde and your wannabe rappers. You've got your Walt Disney Lawgivers. But what have you ever created that left some atheist "wondering if God had a hand in it"?

Does this even matter to you?

A potty-mouth atheist stands before the Michelangelo Pietà too gobsmacked to snap the picture. Later she opines incoherently:

I could write a long thoughtful post on this, but I have to say briefly that I think one of the reasons I (and others) hold a certain disdain for Christianity is because there is such a lack of beautiful imagery in churches in America. Yes, I know some are beautiful with their stained glass, etc, but nothing anywhere on this continent can compare to St. Peter's Basilica. I tell you, if I'd been raised in a place with churches like that, I would probably be a Christian, because just entering that church filled me with joy. It may have been joy purely derived from the gorgeous, perfect, glorious art, but so what? Being surrounded by such creations, things that you can't look at without wondering if God had a hand in it, makes it a lot easier to believe all the stories and doctrine. Because why not? If believing means I get to be in that church or something like it, then okay. It's worth it. But here, so many churches are just square boxes, or big open rooms with a dome and some stained glass, and they inspire nothing at all in your soul. You have to already believe, or something. It's hard to explain.

Meanwhile back in America a believer stumbles into a house of faith needing a toilet and finds pretty much what he was looking for:

My son and I were just a few feet out of the van and I beckoned for my daughter to come in with us. The beat of the music thudded through the brick wall and into the frigid air. In we went to stand by the huge sound board as rappers pounded out something like "I be down with prayer," flashing wanna-be gang signs amid the goofiest collection of candles and posterboards with pithy affirmations, and a half dozen big screens around the room showing glamourized urban scenes and distorted rapid-motion panning of pastoral settings.

[...]

The funniest thing about the whole scene were the 30-something white people sitting motionless in their chairs, sagely watching these rappers gyrate before them. (All the younger set with eyebrow-rings had already dashed out to the lobby, since we were catching the trailing end of whatever show they had put on.)

Now there's some irony you can sing your teeth into.

Here we are in the midst of the Gadarene Sweepstakes and all our statists, Left and Right, are promising us the moon fenced in. Christianity Today is trying to deliver its own set of moonbeam voters to the polls to achieve "carbon neutrality" or whatever other goofball civic duty speechwriters choose to imagine.

Mark Labberton is concerned that the Gospel is too bland. Apparently it is too much like lima beans for his taste. So, like a bad cook, he is dusting every dish with a lot of cayenne pepper. I suggest you take the time to read this flatulence.

He says Jesus calls the church "the salt and light of the world". He doesn't give one of his handy prooftexts so I assume he is referring to Matthew 5 wherein Jesus, speaking to the Jews (and long before Pentecost), calls them the salt of the earth and the light of the world.

Anyway, Labberton is a senior fellow of IJM, and this is its four-fold purpose, much of which comes right from the pages of the New Testament—although I can't recall right now the Greek construction for perpetrator accountability, I'll bet it is not repentance and amendment of life.

• Victim Relief - Relieve the victim of the abuse currently being committed.
• Perpetrator Accountability - Bring accountability and just consequences under the law to the specific perpetrator(s) of abuse.
• Structural Prevention - Prevent the abuse from being committed against others who are also at risk by strengthening community factors that are likely to deter potential oppressors, reduce the vulnerability of at-risk populations and empower local authorities to stop such abuses.
• Victim Aftercare - Provide access to services to help victims transition to their new lives and to encourage long-term success.

Now there's a real pot of beans. Given the emphases of the Evangelists, that last phrase "long-term success" has a bitter irony to it.

And if you want even more flavor, check out the President's letter here.

A reader sent me this request from a prospective churchgoer.

Bill Kinnon is a demanding sort, and this is what he sees as the proper approach to worship. After 100 years of evangelicalism, this is what it comes down to.

He wants what he feels he needs, not what the church tells him he should have. He wants what is modern, comforting, entertaining and free. He wants what satisfies. His experience is that God moves promptly to satisfy his demands; why can't the church?

Of course, Kinnon's tongue is in his cheek and he is flogging evangelicalism for its many and obvious sins, and I'm sure his church will be facing the same criticisms in far less than 60 years. But for now it amuses us to read it.

And it illustrates a point addressed by Francois Fénélon a century and a half ago.

It is true that all holy souls are not capable of exercising this explicit preference for God over themselves, but there must at least be an implicit preference; the former, which is more perfect, is reserved for those whom God has endowed with light and strength to prefer Him to themselves, to such a degree as to desire their own happiness simply because it adds to his glory.

Men have a great repugnance to this truth, and consider it to be a very hard saying, because they are lovers of self from self-interest. They understand, in a general and superficial way, that they must love God more than all his creatures, but they have no conception of loving God more than themselves, and loving themselves only for Him. They can utter these great words without difficulty, because they do not enter into their meaning, but they shudder when it is explained to them, that God and his glory are to be preferred before ourselves and everything else to such a degree that we must love his glory more than our own happiness, and must refer the latter to the former, as a subordinate means to an end.

It's ironic that what Kinnon wants is exactly what evangelicalism told us it should provide. All this time it was telling us it was providing for our felt needs. Now this!

Must be tough.

Daniel Barenboim listens to David Kadouch, Saleem Ashkar, Lang Lang, Shai Wosner, Alessio Bax, and Jonathan Biss play selected movements from the Beethoven piano sonatas, and then he discusses with performer and audience the nature of serious music-making.

I think I should not tell you how much of your entertainment budget this might be worth. I paid $22.49 for mine; you may well find it cheaper. If you can find it through inter-library loan, all the better.

I think you should find a way to listen to it.

I think several things might occur to you. First you may be impressed by the fact that what sounds on first hearing to be a virtuoso performance is, in fact, the work of beginner. Some of you will be gobsmacked, and I think a good gobsmacking is called for.

I think that the majority of you will be very impressed to learn what great effect is accomplished with a (relatively) slight change of execution or with a slightly more informed understanding. Some of you may learn about the discipline of music-making and the discipline of music-listening. Be sure to mind the discussions about form; that alone will be worth the price of the two CDs. And the next time a fundamentalist tells you something about form, or an evangelical vaporizes on different styles of music, you will be able to smile and accord his deep thoughts all the esteem they warrant.

I think Abraham Kaplan's piece on the aesthetics of popular music will take on more meaning.

I think everyone will admire Mr. Barenboim for the great teacher he is.

I think all these things, but mostly I hope. I hope you can get some sense of this "elitist" world so often denigrated by Christians, and you will reconsider what it means to love your God with all your heart and soul and mind. Art is the work of the heart, soul and mind. Not sport. You may get some sense of how important art was to the worship God ordained for the Old Testament and why the church properly took it as a model.

I know this is what it means to be serious.

_________________
Barenboim on Beethoven
Masterclasses
EMI - DVD 5 04890 9

We recently—here at Remonstrans—approached the Christmas season through the reflections of others, reflections we no longer get to confront in church. Because these expressions are so much more provocative than what we do sing, it might be supposed that I was hoping to replace the bad with the good.

Not really. I don't believe the good drives out the bad, I believe the bad drives out the good.

I hope it became apparent that our imaginations are probably never more slighted than at Christmas. God bursts into his creation with light and song and angels and prophecies and miracles and kings and shepherds, but nothing captures our attention like the tinsel and the cookies. Among people who champion seriousness there is an irritating commitment to the trivial and the hackneyed. From the modest samplings of evangelical Christmas shindigs that were broadcast and podcast I also noticed a pathetic devotion to the amateurish and a dedicated pursuit of the nostalgic.

Events that staggered the imagination of angels don't quite meet our expectations. I would say this is a serious problem. The unredeemed seem more curious about our salvation than we are; in our minds it is all about us, in their minds it is all about the marvel of his works. For them it was a wonder to behold, for Mary it was a thing to ponder, for us it is a sentimentality we indulge.

As Kenon Renfrow reminds us, it is about the golden days, the olden days of yore when being all together was a work of the Fates. Yes, the Fates. Perhaps the Moirae visited the Babe in the manger to determine the course of his life. I don't know; ask the angels if they saw any Fates on the premises.

I think it is terribly ironic that as fundagelicalism reaches lower and lower for some pop relevance we spurn the best help we've got. We blather on about passion and relevance and identification and meaning and authenticity, but who would ever know it from our songs?

Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves.

Can there be any hope for us if we cannot be serious and passionate about the Incarnation?

On a lighter (yet infinitely more ominous) note, here we watch the clerics of the future: Beavis and Butthead. They are working through some of the problems of the "ministry, whatever that means". It's like travelling back in time to audit the great thoughts of Augustine, Tertullian and Origen as they seek to make the Gospel relevant in their ages.

"It can be really frustrating trying to market your blog", says the artist on the right, whose works can be seen shamelessly flogged elsewhere on this blog. Some of his things are reminiscent of Doré and Don Silvestro dei Gherarducci.

Or maybe not.

I can imagine the suspense Hayward is experiencing as he counts his pennies, so I direct you to his studio where you can compare his work to that of Kenon Renfrow or Yolanda Adams.

But if you are a "serious" Christian and in a more intellectual frame of mind, consider these changes foreseen by John La Grou:

Consciousness and sentience will be increasingly seen in ways that transcend rational argument. When "self-watching, cognitive machines" mimic (and eventually exceed) human abilities to parse and argue philosophy and theology (any theology), the nature of faith will (must) change and adapt to something far more visceral than text and logic. Religion will become less about inherited doctrine, and more about spiritual attributes which distinguish us from "sentient machines." Aspirations for transcendent, unifying, personal and ecclesial experience (per 2Cor12, Jn17, etc.) will partially displace logic / reason / argument in religious priority. The person of Jesus will stand in stark contrast to the written word.

Welcome to the Church of Pop.

Russ Breimeier and Andree Farias have provided us a useful service by rummaging through dumpsters all over town collecting Christmas CDs. Revealing perhaps more than they know:

The Christmas spirit is alive and well in the music business this year, with more than twenty new releases in the Christian market...

I just wish Breimeier could have been good to his convictions and included some Christmas music full of cussing and crude language because, as he informed us earlier, cussing is useful in expressing strong emotions. (There is nothing as authentic and relevant to the younger generation as a little toilet humor.) I always thought "the Christian market" was the place for relevance and strong emotions.

You'll be disappointed to see that these two clowns failed to include any Christmas collections sung by Elvis impersonators or professional wrestlers, nothing done by chipmonks, assorted vegetables or piano bar flunkies, and there is nothing at all by our most beloved Christian Pirate! Clearly there is nothing ecumenical about his bunch of narrow-minded cretins.

And nothing from Trinity, Willcocks or Cohen.

Looks to me like Russ and Andree just phoned this one in. I think the magazine of evangelical conviction needs to hire better research assistants.

If you still haven't settled on a New Year's Resolution, try this one: Friends don't let friends listen to Christian music.