By James B. Jordan, at Theopolis Institute.

From time to time, when I’ve lectured on how to read the Bible, I’ve used art-music as one example thereof. When we listen to a simple folk song, we hear the same melody over and over again, but this is not how composers write “high” music. Let me amplify.

A composer will put out a theme (melody) clearly and forthrightly. You can hear it without diffculty. And, from time to time that melody will come back, and without diffculty you will hear it again. But what you probably won’t hear, unless you are trained to listen to music, is that the melody is being used in more ways. It may be broken down, and parts of it used in various ways in the overall piece. It may be played in the bass line, or in an alto line, underneath a more prominent second melody or theme. You’ll hear the new melody, and not notice that the old melody is being used underneath. The melody may be stretched out into slower notes (augmented), or played twice as fast (diminished). It may be used like a round (canon; ricercar; fugue), coming in over and over again on top of itself. It may be inverted (switching high and low notes), or played cancrizans (backwards). (A good listener can hear an inversion, but it takes a really good one to notice when the melody runs backwards.) The melody may be taken from a minor key to a major one, or vice versa. A composer will introduce one theme, and then another, and then play them at the same time.

Continue reading at Theopolis Institute.

The best part of the Avengers movie for me was the infighting among the super heroes, and how the conflict disappeared once they had a common enemy. Each hero was unique, with his or her special skills. As in any relationship, marriage, community or committee, the differences are misinterpreted as sources of conflict and competition instead of complementary strengths. Once the heroes were out on the ground, the comical infighting (and misuse of gifts) ceased, and they started operating like the well-tuned orchestra they were designed to be.

Likewise, the gifts of the Spirit were never intended for the recipients of the gifts, but to make them into mediators, intercessors for others. Focussed inwards, the salt and light intended for the world get abused as weapons to harm each other in the Church.

At a macrocosmic level, perhaps the so-called “splintering” of the Christian Church into denominations can be seen in a positive light after all. Each has its unique gift, and it seems that now we have a common enemy in the secular state and/or Islam, we are learning to appreciate each other and learn from each other.

There are those who would, quite mistakenly, love to see the Church united and back under one earthly roof, but that is a recipe for disaster. [1] We are already under one roof, but that roof is heaven, from where Jesus guides and rules us by His Spirit. To try to manipulate His work is to quench the Spirit, whether that be condemning other Christians because their focus is not our focus, or insisting that our baptism is “the” baptism (and here I mean baptists who will not recognize any other baptisms outside of their own denomination, or paedobaptists who think their “will-of-man” man-made carnal baptism somehow unites unregenerate flesh with the Body of Christ).

What we really need is a new view of how God works in this current administration. Whenever the flesh is presented, in faith, upon the altar, the fire will fall. If we are not obedient, and not faithful, our various manipulations, coercions, strategies and tactics are nothing better than the priests of Baal cutting themselves and throwing their unregenerate flesh on the altar. Instead of the increase of the Spirit, the outcome is the strange fire of the flesh: schisms and adulteries, the wrong kind of knife and fire, in the Church. We need passivity towards God before we can have any lasting activity towards the world. The unity we have is not a man-made baptism (which is worthless!) or an “administrational” unity, or even a doctrinal unity (one that never gets off the paper). All this stuff needs to go onto the altar to get incinerated and transformed and brought to real life by the Spirit of Christ. And we need to keep putting it there, every week.

We have churches today who are big on reviving biblical worship, which includes teaching the entire Bible and singing the Psalms—with loud music. This is passivity towards God. The entertainment-style worship is banished, as it should be. But they are so focussed on Church and their own children that the kingdom is neglected. We have other churches who see the Bible and biblical worship as secondary, and focus on our activity towards the world without really equipping the saints with a biblical worldview and the confidence in God which this brings. Christians are sent out without much of a vision of what they are supposed to be doing, or what the end result will be in history. Their minds are filled not with the Bible, but with carnal methodology. There’s no room left for the Spirit in either of these approaches, because they are supposed to be combined as a sum greater than its parts: a marriage of heaven and earth.

One thing I have found with all this Bible Matrix stuff is that it opens ones eyes to “processes.” We are so mentally constrained when it comes to the Bible that we don’t notice how God works using relationships and processes. We have little idea how to join the dots in the history and the narratives. We refuse to see any initiation or causation. The Old Testament is just a whole bunch of weird stuff that happened, and the significance of most of it is hidden from us. So we get huge gatherings of faithful people like the recent Hillsong Conference in Sydney who sing effeminate songs and think the preaching is great, yet their kids are very likely getting more spiritual meat in Sunday School. The Bible teaching is pitiful, and the saints aren’t equipped. A yearly pep-talk by superstars with great strategies for growth (humanly speaking) but little idea of God’s ways won’t cut it in the long run. The turnover in these large congregations is as much a tell tale sign as the stagnation in smaller churches.

One thing these people do get right (as far as I can see) is the freedom of the Spirit intended by God. This comes when we bind ourselves to God (this is the sacrificial process of binding-and-loosing found throughout the Bible. See God’s Kitchen). They get the “loosing” right but not the “binding.” Other Churches get the “binding” right but are not willing to truly loose people upon the world. As in a marriage, Bridegroom and Bride are bound in the Church and loosed upon the world to transform it. As Christians, we get to renew our vows every week. Every week is a new binding and loosing.

Once the Church gets its worship right, and begins keeping baptismal vows and maintaining regular self-examination through Communion and Church discipline, it is prepared to release people into the world. That’s the pattern found in “Covenant renewal worship.” But the Church really does need to release faithful people, with faith in the Spirit to operate through them, not try to keep everything under its control.

The following statement was written by Pastors and Ministry Leaders in Sonoma County. It’s not well-written, and ignores the need for a renewal of truly biblical worship, but it moves us out of the constraints of being merely “church-minded” to being “kingdom-minded.” Remember, the unity of the Spirit in the Church is pictured by God as a flock of birds, or a school of fish, a gathered body moving as one because each member has the same mind, the mind of Christ. [2]

As pastors and ministry leaders within the local church, we have believed and operated with the mindset that all ministries were church related and that they were to be under its government and control. We have not understood the kingdom of God or how it was to manifest on the earth. As a result we have used people to build our churches and ministries.

In doing so we have not honored those called by God to minister in commerce, media, arts, government, social services, and most other occupations outside the influence of the organized church. If individuals could not or would not serve our vision for our churches, we undervalued them as less important — but accepting them as sources of income.

Most of these people have been ignored, and as a result they have become discouraged and disconnected. Many have left in frustration, anger, and disillusionment, believing somehow that they were less spiritual. Others have given up trying to fit themselves into the limited space within the local church structure and ministry. We have attempted to make business executives into intercessors, sales people into children’s nursery workers, business administrators into Sunday school superintendents, and so the list goes on.

As pastors and ministry leaders, we want to tell you that we have been wrong. What we have taught and demonstrated for generations within the church has been shallow and selfish. We are sincerely sorry, and we come in repentance for our bad attitudes, wrong beliefs, and our poor behavior towards you. Please forgive us. We honor you as kingdom people, called by God to the marketplace. We believe you are ordained by God to occupy and to transform your sphere of influence and the territory to which you have been called. We release honor, blessing, and favor on your life and personal calling to the marketplace.

We as pastor and ministry leaders are prepared to stand with you and support you in your God-given ministries. You have dreams ordained by God. It is our privilege and heart’s desire to call them forth and to see you fully established in the destiny for your life. [3]

The various Church models can learn from each other the way in which God miraculously unites Law and Spirit, binding and loosing, vows and freedom. God will keep presenting the Body with common enemies, putting us positions of siege where we will have no other choice but to work together. Every such challenge is a chance for His Bride to shine, walking around with the Son of God in the fire.

________________________________
[1] See A Jew Gets Baptism: ACT III – The Corpse of Constantine, where I take Dr Leithart’s carnal vision of the Church to task. The solution to gnosticism (super) is not carnality (natural). The entire point of sacrifice, of Shekinah, is a union of flesh and fire, a supernatural joining of heaven and earth by the Spirit.
[2] Check out Rupert Sheldrake’s work on what he calls “morphic resonance” in animals and humans.
[3] Quoted in Church Shift by Sunday Adelaja.

The three is a five. The four is a seven. The five is a seven. The seven is a twelve.

Why is it that the audience for modern art is quite happy to take in the ideological message of modernism while strolling through an art gallery but loath to hear the same message in the concert hall? It is rather like communism, which once was fashionable among Western intellectuals. They were happy to admire communism from a distance, but very few chose to live under communism.

ABSTRACT ART AND ABSTRACT MUSIC

When you view an abstract expressionist canvas, time is under your control… But when you listen to atonal music, you are stuck in your seat for as long as the composer wishes to keep you. It feels like many hours in the dentist’s chair from which you cannot escape. You do not admire the abstraction from a distance. You are actually living inside it. You are in the position of the fashionably left-wing intellectual of the 1930s who made the mistake of actually moving to Moscow rather than admiring it at a safe distance…

After decades of philanthropic support for abstract (that is, atonal) music, symphony orchestras have to a great extent given up inflicting it on reluctant audiences… The ideological message is the same, yet the galleries are full while the concert halls are empty. That is because you can keep it at a safe distance when it hangs on the wall, but you can’t escape it when it crawls into your ears. In other words, your spontaneous, visceral hatred of atonal music reflects your true, healthy, normal reaction to abstract art. It is simply the case that you are able to suppress this reaction at the picture gallery…

THE REASON FOR ABSTRACT ART

You pretend to like modern art because you want to be creative. At least, you want to reserve the possibility of being creative, or of knowing someone who is creative. The trouble is that you are not creative, not in the least. In all of human history we know of only a few hundred truly creative men and women. It saddens me to break the news, but you aren’t one of them…

Your have your heart set on being creative because you want to worship yourself, your children, or some pretentious impostor rather than the God of the Bible. Absence of faith has not made you more rational. On the contrary, it has made you ridiculous in your adoration of clownish little deities, of whom the silliest is yourself. You have stopped believing in God, and as a result you do not believe nothing, but you will believe in anything (to paraphrase Chesterton)… To demand the attribute of creativity for every human being is the same as saying that everyone should be a little god.

CREATIVITY IS RARE

But what should we mean by creativity? In science and mathematics, it should refer to discoveries that truly are singular, which could not possibly be derived from any preceding knowledge. We might ask: In the whole history of the art and sciences, how many contributors truly are indispensable, such that history could not have been the same without their contribution? There is room for argument, but it is hard to come up with more than a few dozen names…

We can argue about the origin of scientific or artistic genius, but we must agree that it is extremely rare. Of the hundreds of composers employed as court or ecclesiastical musicians during Johann Sebastian Bach’s lifetime, we hear the work of only a handful today. Eighteenth-century musicians strove not for genius but for solid craftsmanship; how it came to be that a Bach would emerge from this milieu has no consensus explanation… If we use the term creative to mean more or less the same thing as irreplaceable, then the number of truly creative individuals appears very small indeed. It is very unlikely that you are one of them.

If you work hard at your discipline, you are very fortunate to be able to follow what the best people in the field are doing. And if you are extremely good, you might have the privilege of elaborating on points made by greater minds. Beneficial as such efforts might be, it is very unlikely that, if you did not do this, no one else would have done it. On the contrary, if you are at the cutting edge of research in any field, you take every possible measure to publish your work as soon as possible, so that you may get credit for it before someone else comes up with precisely the same thing. Even the very best minds in a field live in terror that they will be made dispensable by others who circulate their conclusions first.

A BETTER MOTIVE

If God is the Creator, then imitation of God is emulation of creation. But that is not quite true, for the Judeo-Christian god is more than a creator; God is a creator who loves his creatures. In the world of faith there is quite a different way to be indispensable, and that is through acts of kindness and service…

Bach inscribed each of his works with the motto “Glory belongs only to God” and insisted (wrongly) that anyone who worked as hard has he did could have achieved results just as good. He was content to be a diligent craftsman in the service of God and did not seek to be a genius; he simply was one. That is the starting point of the man of faith. One does not set out to be a genius but rather to be of service; extraordinary gifts are responsibility to be borne with humility. The search for genius began when the service of God no longer interested the artists and scientists…

THE MODERN CULT OF SELF-EXPRESSION

To be taken seriously in the twentieth century, artists had to invent their own style and their own language… To be an important person in this perverse scheme means to shake one’s fist at God and define one’s own little world, however dull, however tawdry, and pathetic it might be. To lack creativity is to despair. Hence the attraction of the myriad ideological movements in art that gives the artists the illusion of creativity.

In their urge toward self-worship, the artists of the twentieth century descended to extreme levels of artlessness to persuade themselves that they were in fact creative. In their compulsion to worship themselves int he absence of God, they produced ideas far more ridiculous, and certainly a great deal uglier, than revealed religion in all its weaknesses ever contrived. The modern cult of individual self-expression is a poor substitute for the religion it strove to replace, and the delusion of personal creativity an even worse substitute for redemption.

It’s Not the End of the World, It’s Just the End of You

Why do cultures commit suicide? Why are we witnessing a new great extinction of peoples? Why is the economic crisis really a spiritual crisis? Probing the inner workings of civilization in a tour d’horizon of cultural decline, Spengler argues that Europe’s postnational, secular dystopia is a death trap, that the onslaught of modernity has plunged Islam into an even greater crisis, and that the destiny of nations is decided in the human heart, by religion. Christian America, in spite of its follies and gullibility, has the spiritual strength to restore the faith of the West. This book presents, in one comprehensive volume, the wide scope of Spengler’s theories on Christianity, Islam, America, the financial crisis, horror movies, modern art, Israel, Tolkien’s Middle Earth, tribalism, the global balance of power, demography, and sex in the twenty-first century. These highly original essays may provoke you, even frighten you–but never bore you.

“Surf weasel Leithart’s out there getting barreled
and Carson doesn’t find it ‘convincing’?”

Some more on the Bandwidth of the Bible:

Don Carson has written a chapter in “Theological Commentary: Evangelical Perspectives.” It’s called, Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Yes, But… (see Carson’s Evaluation of Theological Interpretation of Scripture. There is a link to the chapter in PDF.)

Very briefly, his assessment is that the revival of biblical theology is a good thing, but anything in this revival that is new is bad. Whatever his assumptions, the bottom line is that no new ground of any consequence has been broken.

[This post has been refined and included in Sweet Counsel: Essays to Brighten the Eyes.]

You must be logged in to see the rest of this post.

Join now for a year for $15!

Thanks to Brian Nolder for this one.

More than thirty years after the release of their hit song, “Down Under,” (1978) Australian rock band Men at Work were hauled into court for ripping their flute riff from a nursery rhyme. The issue came up after discussion on a popular rock quiz TV show. [1]

Most Aussies of my generation knew the original (really uncool) song, and the use of it as a motif in a rock song was, well, really cool. The very fact that it didn’t have a big yellow sticker on it saying “This bit is from Kookaburra,” and the listener picked it up, was gratifying. All good music does this. All good movies do this. TV shows also use subtle allusions to past episodes as a nod to faithful viewers (and no show does it with the concrete-cracking understatement of Mad Men).

In this case of the flute riff, any dunderhead could pick it up. While I think that the current owners of the copyright, Larrikin Records, are a bunch of opportunistic bastards (and though they were once considered indie and cool, I guess they are now really uncool), it pains me that modern teachers of the Bible are too cautious to read the Scriptures in this way, too conservative to pick up the motifs, phrases and structural allusions that are obvious once they are pointed out. They are looking for the big yellow sticker, and it ain’t coming.

How does one identify motifs in music? I mean, you can’t copyright single notes, can you? It is a particular progression of notes in a particular rhythm that makes the motif. It can be shifted to a major key from minor or vice versa, and still be recognisable. A couple of reviewers of Bible Matrix criticized it for getting out of hand in its latter half. But that’s where the real payoff is! If you can’t get beyond the Mosaic nursery rhymes and won’t see that everything that follows sits on top of them and refers to them constantly, particularly structurally, then typology isn’t for you. The Bible doesn’t come with big yellow stickers. Just because you don’t get a book or a painting doesn’t mean it can’t be gotten. Why do so few Bible interpreters have any experience in musical or literary criticism?

The Bible is a subtle beast, but the motifs are recognisable, verifiable, not through the identification of their parts, but the order of them, the structure of them as a literary melody. People who have no musical ear or training have trouble getting things that are blatantly obvious to poets, musicians, graphic designers, and also film makers like Darren Doane, who read Totus Christus and actually enjoyed it. He’s a visual guy, and it’s a book that joins the dots between images.

I’m teaching a generation that has been raised with movies and music at their fingertips. And guess what? After a little instruction, they are able to spot the Bible’s motifs a mile away. Bible interpretation (beyond the basic level) is not for the musically-challenged. James Jordan writes:

Does it help to be a musician to understand the Bible? Yes, because the Bible indicates that this is so.

First, music is the God-appointed way of worshipping Him with His own words. The psalms are to be set to music and sung, and in fact a great deal of Western art music developed out of the complex ways in which psalms were set by art musicians. More than that, however, we find in the Masoretic Hebrew text of the Old Testament a whole system of pitch marks, which indicate the chanting lines for the text as it existed when the Masoretic text was produced. A French musical scholar named Haik-Vantoura has offered a decoding of these pitches, but whether she is right or not in her suggested system, there is no doubt but that the text was originally chanted in worship. [2] Sung worship is typical of all pre-modern worship all over the world.

Second, the Spirit is given to help us understand the Word, and the Spirit is the Glorifier. He is the Breath, the sounding forth of the Word. Whenever words are said out loud, they are said musically. Your speech goes up and down, is loud and soft, is punctuated rhymically by consonants and emphasis, assumes various tones (timbres; such as rough, kind, whiny, etc.). In short, all speech is quasi-musical. The Spirit inspires music, and He is the Music of God, who is Author, Word, Music. Thus, being musical and learning about music should add to our ability to grasp the text.

Third, we find that the priests and Levites were established as the teachers of the Word in Israel; but they were also set up as the musicians in the Temple. By linking these two things, God was saying that a teacher of the Word would be wise also to be a musician. (Levites were also guards, and some familiarity with what that means is also good for a teacher/elder in the Church.)

Thus, we see that God programmed music into the minds and hearts of those set apart to interpret the Bible, and into the minds and hearts of all those in Israel who would encounter the text more generally.

In sum, if we want to train people in understanding the Bible more fully, it is good to train them in musical understanding. Music should be part of the educational preparation of anyone engaged in Biblical study and hermeneutics.

Why isn’t this done today? Because of the influence of Western rationalism, especially through the “science ideal” of the Enlightenment. Poetry, which used to be sung, is sung no longer. Many people don’t realize that even post-Renaissance poetry should be read out loud; it should be heard, if not actually sung. (I have a lot of hope for what may eventually develop out of rap music, despite its sorry beginnings today; it moves toward a restoration of the original form of poetry.) We read silently. We no longer sing or whistle while we work. Philosophy, which is contemplative rather than active and liturgical, has influenced theology and Bible study way too much.

Thus, we don’t live in a social and ecclesiastical context that would enable us to read and understand the Bible as well as we might. Restoring music to our lives will help. [3]

______________________________________
[1] See Men At Work in Trouble for Down Under.
[2] Check these out on YouTube. They are hauntingly beautiful.
[3] James B. Jordan, Music and Hermeneutics. I recommend reading the entire article.

The time of grace has come—
This that we have desired,
Verses of joy
Let us devoutly return.

God has become man,
To the wonderment of Nature,
The world has been renewed
By the reigning Christ.

The closed gate of Ezechiel
Is passed through,
Whence the light is born,
Salvation is found.

Therefore let our gathering
Now sing in brightness
Let it give praise to the Lord:
Greeting to our King.