Carpe Cakem!

A great quote floating around the BHT:

Bob Dylan believes in God, and Richard Dawkins is never going to win an argument against Bob Dylan, cause you need a poet to discuss these things. So let’s just say I’m with Bob.”

-Paddy Macaloon

I had to look up who Paddy Macaloon was: “one of the most underrated lyricists of the ’80s”. Anyway, it underlines a nice passage from Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction. I don’t have it here in front of me now, but he says that the rationalist demands from the artist, “Tell me your secret! You know something hidden about the universe that I don’t. Now what is it!” But the artist is unable to answer his question in a way that will satisfy the rationalist. He can only continue in his artwork.

My friend Jeff Moss, who is now working long-term as a missionary in Hungary, posted this quote on Facebook the same day:

“There is a current and exceedingly stupid doctrine that symbol evokes emotion, and exact prose states reality. Nothing could be further from the truth: exact prose abstracts from reality, symbol presents it. And for that very reason, symbols …have some of the many-sidedness of wild nature.”

-Austin Farrer

Never heard of this guy either. It turns out I should have! English theologian and Anglican minister, friend of C.S. Lewis at Oxford.

I think he’s right on. The enlightenment idea that the pinnacle of human communication is well-reasoned prose…bah! So the best we can do to worship the Lord is to have a 2-hour sermon that took 30 hours to prepare, right? Music, liturgy, art, the Lord’s supper become second class citizens.

As creeds and confessions grow in length, I believe they hit a point of diminishing returns. The more and more you say about God, the smaller he becomes. But the fire and lightning from the mountain is astounding.

My wife wrote a great post on C.S. Lewis’s answer to the accusation that us theists just made up God in our heads.

Check it out here: Puddleglum’s Answer

Just got back from this tonight. It turned out to be mostly a history of the Geneva Psalter (the hymnbook Calvin published) and how it’s origin could be traced back through several interesting sources. This is what I scribbled down:

———-

If this lecture were called “Calvin ON Music”, it would be over in about 5 minutes. He didn’t have much to say about it directly. Luckily, I’ve titled it “Calvin AND Music” so I can talk about lots of interesting things surrounding it.

Luther, as a monk and trained to be a priest had quite a bit of musical training. So the Lutheran’s had a strong musical emphasis from the get go. Calvin on the other hand, was trained as a lawyer. He didn’t know anything about music, but he was smart enough to recruit some folks who did.

The dualism of Calvin is his heavy emphasis on the Bible versus all the Renaissance philosophy he soaked up. He falls into the “soul = good, body = bad” Platonic trap on many occasions. This led him, especially early ton, to think music was carnal and dangerous. His pal Zwingli was especially this way, even though he was a trained musician.

After he got kicked out of Geneva, he went to Strasbourg and met up with Martin Bucer. It turns out Bucer had been heavily influenced by Luther and was singing all kinds of fun stuff. Calvin decided after a while that it was pretty cool and bought it back with him later.

Despite Calvin’s appearance of “Bible Only” psalm singing, it turns out he included a setting of the Nicene creed in his first collection of music.

Church music should be a “unique style”. Actually, the church has always believed this throughout the ages. It shouldn’t be weird, but should be distinguishable from the folk stuff you might sing at home or at a party, or hear on the radio.

A lot of ideas about singing in church can be traced back to the Jewish Temple worship.

Calvin thought that music in church should have “gravity” and not be light and frivolous. Jordan used several examples to prove that this didn’t mean the music should be slow and solemn. In fact, it was often loud and lively.

Jordan made fun of the dreamy Gregorian chant that we hear on CDs now. Historians have a lot of reasons to believe that chant in the mediaval period was more nasal, choppy and rhythmic than we have come to think of it. It was more punchy.

The Psalter degraded the worst with the Scots, who had a split leaf (top and bottom) hymnal so you could hack any melody together with any text. Eek.

The part in the bible about David playing harp for Saul and chasing away the evil spirit? Calvin never commented on it. Too bad.

Also, the part about God “inhabiting the praises of his people” and the singers going before the army in II Chronicles? Also conspicuously missing from any of his commentary. (At this point, I would like to add that I’m not at all surprised. A lecture on music in the Bible from a charismatic Christian is likely to bring up these verses in the first 10 minutes. They demonstrate the seemingly supernatural and spiritual aspect of music. Calvin was REALLY uncomfortable with these ideas, so he didn’t say boo about them.)

Calvin was in the “no musical instruments” camp, despite numerous references to the use of them all over the bible. As you can predict, this broke down quickly after his death and reformed churches all over the place were hooking up pipe organs.

I liked this part: The scandal of 1st century church was that they dared to have temple music (singing psalms WITH instruments) in their own homes. The synagogues had no instruments – only the temple.

Also, Calvin was for all unison singing. This was being conservative too. The old Gregorian chant tradition was unison. For a loooooooooooooong time there was no harmony. Why? Because nobody thought of it? Whatever. More likely it was because of the verse in the bible about the dedication of Solomon’s temple. All the Levites sang “with one voice”. Got that? No harmony fool! This didn’t last real long either.

So there was this French poet named Clement …something. He wrote some songs bashing the Pope and got kicked out of France. Then he wrote some psalm settings. Some friends of his passed the music around and it made it’s way to the court of the king. Suddenly, it became really popular and spread like wildfire (in the secular world, oddly enough). Somehow, Calvin got hold of some of these new hip tunes/poetry and built them into his psalter. Clement later joined Calvin in Geneva and wrote some more poetic psalm settings for him (in French of course). He later died under mysterious circumstances in Italy. Oooooohhooohoooo.

By the way, chanting = singing. Don’t be deceived by how we use the words today. Back then, they mean the exact same thing.

Somewhere in here, Jordan made reference to how it was fun in the 1960s to listen to Gregorian chant and smoke weed.

3/4 time is perfect time, because of the trinity. Y’all know that, right?

Guillaume de Machaut and other composers of that time were not writing dreamy chant music, but more punchy stuff.

He mentioned some (recent) French scholar who dug through all the songs in Calvin’s psalter and tried to figure out where the melody fragments came from. It turns out nearly all of them were old-school plainchant tunes that bad been rhythmically spiced up a bit. The point being that Calvin was very conservative. He wasn’t aiming to shake things up with something crazy and new.

My fav, Thomas Tallis got a shout-out at this point. Gosh, it reminds me how much more I like the early English composers than the French and German ones. Wow.

At this point, it was question and answer time.

Someone asked him what he thought of gospel music. He said that it’s probably OK if you’re singing gospel because your great grandfather did. If you’re doing it to be fun and trendy though: bad motives. In general, he didn’t like it. Says it has “weak words”. The theology of stuff you sing in church should be “accurate”.

Another person asked about choirs. Calvin had no choirs. The reformers were very much on the “we’ve GOT to get the congregation singing again” train. It was backlash to years of non-participation in (many, not all) Catholic churches. However, as much as Calvin didn’t like choirs, it’s pretty plain there are choirs in the bible. There also seems to be some indication that you didn’t have to be a Levite to sing in the temple choir in the OT. Nevertheless, Jordan was personally very much for congregational singing and didn’t think choirs should take up too much time with performances during the worship service.

He mentioned that after Vatican II, the Catholic’s threw out a bunch of their musical tradition and replaced it with bad Irish folk tunes. There are quite a few Catholics (I know some!) that are NOT diggin’ that.

Several times during the lecture, he had the crowd stand and sing a particular hymn to demonstrate a stylistic point he was discussing. They had passed out copies ahead of time. Liked that.

Dismissal to pie and refreshments in Friendship Square. Candles everywhere!

I walked down to Bucer’s for a bit. The band Cadenza Collective was laying down a nice groove. Good stuff.

Webber’s Ancient Future Faith strikes a positive note most of the time. It’s not one of those Christian works where “unfortunately” appears within the first paragraph of each chapter. However, some of his very best comments come from a section in each part of the book titled “Problems Inherited from the Enlightenment”.

Here’s a quick breakdown (a mix of my comments and his):

Problem: The foundation of faith shifting from the person to Jesus Christ to the Bible. The center of our faith went from the God who ACTS to the God who SPOKE. Do we believe in a book or a person?

An emphasis on pragmatism has resulted in an a-theological view of the church. Emphasis on practical ministry and church growth, to the exclusion of theology seems to get results for a while, but you end up with the next generation not knowing what they believe.

The emphasis on individualism has resulted in an a-historical view of the church. This is a biggie. We can’t see farther back than when our own congregation was founded (1970 and 80’s for many American churches). We are often largely ignorant of the 2000 year-old traditions, and even the 500 year old reformed ones.

A loss of a theology of worship. On one hand we have the heady enlightenment emphasis on reason that makes the didactic sermon the center of worship. On the other hand is the romantic stress on emotion.

A rejection of an order of worship and a generally stable liturgy may seem exciting and powerful to one generation, but they are unable to pass it down to the next generation since it has no foundation. Faith transmission falters with free-form corporate worship.

The rejection of symbolic speech. The dominant word-oriented culture inherited from the Enlightenment is based on conceptual language: reading, notions, abstractions, precision, intelligence, clarity, analysis, idea, explanation, linear sequence, and logic. The use of imagery, symbols, and even subtle language is relatively unknown among many of us.

We fail spiritually when we ignore the resources the Holy Spirit has given us throughout the history of the church. For fifteen centuries prior to the Reformation a vast reservoir of spirituality had developed within the church: hours of prayer, exercises of devotion, personal and corporate discipline, communal values, and harmony with nature had been introduced, to say nothing of schools of spirituality such as the monastic movements, the spiritual writings of the early church fathers, etc. Unfortunately, when the Reformers attempted to rid the church of its bad devotional habits, such as the excessive emphasis on Mary, a preoccupation with the saints, the worship of relics, and devotion to the Host, they failed to retain other positive approaches to spirituality that had emerged in the early church. There are loads of these remaining to be recovered.

There are a couple more, but they mostly go back to the emphasis on individualism. That and the reformers being enamored with rationalism.

Todd Hunter, Charismatic Vineyard pastor turned church planter turned Anglican bishop (that took 30 years) had this to say about evangelism proper:

In much of post-World War II evangelicalism, we asked people to cross a finish line. So it went: apologetics, apologetics, apologetics, then, okay, you get it now, you need to make a decision, and you get to go to heaven when you die. What I’d prefer to see is apologetics, enculturation, saying the prayers, and then you come to a line, but it’s a starting line: Are you ready to become a follower of Jesus? Can you now see the big intention of God for the earth and what he was doing through Christ and Pentecost and creating the people of God? Are you willing to join that family and take up that family’s cause through following Jesus?

…

Here’s my real vision: I feel I really understand the postmodern, post-Christian angst of the 16- to 29-year-olds. I know people this age who are sleeping with whomever they want and are vaguely spiritual but not sure they want to be religious. I have a vision of them praying the prayer of confession week after week, and me doing spiritual formation with them, not saying, “Bad dog, you can’t sleep with him or her,” but saying, “Why don’t you come to church every week and just pray this prayer, and then come back and see me in a month?”

Some of these people honestly don’t know what they can believe. I have a vision of saying to them, “Don’t worry about it. I want you to come to church every week for six months. Just say the Creed, and let’s connect every few weeks over coffee.” And we’ll ask, “So, what are you stumbling over?”

I have a vision of liturgy as a tool for evangelism and discipleship, a tool that is grounded in Scripture.

–Christianity Today Interview (9/09)

Interesting, interesting.

I just finished Robert Webber’s Ancient Future Faith.

Magnificently concise and instructive. I need to get a copy and read it again.

Trying to blog about it also brings to light the shortcomings of my current note-taking method.

For the past couple years, I’ve put those tiny multi-colored post-it notes to great use, bookmarking paragraphs if interest and then going back the next day to write a post on each one. These are the things I want most to remember.

Webber’s book isn’t full of pithy comments and quotes though. I think I would be better served by outlining the whole thing.

Alas, there are no shortcuts. Real study takes a lot of energy.

A few key ideas that I love from the book (whatever I can remember just now):

The emphasis on remembering the cultural and linguistic context of Christians throughout history. Instead of trashing everyone who has come before us, we can better appreciate their expression of faith by understanding why they wrote what they did. For example, in the middle ages, the church didn’t have 2 hours Puritan-esque sermons. Well, if you understand the literacy rate (virtually nil), the political situation (serfs and lords), you would see how their Christianity, for better or worse, would be primarily something that was lived and acted out in their communities and to their neighbors. They wouldn’t have written lots of books about it. It was the dark ages. That doesn’t mean there was no creativity, it just means that the records of it have not survived.

He also lays the smack down on rationalism and treating the Bible as an object of textual criticism to be pushed through the logical meat-grinder.

Throughout the book though, he’s very positive. Yes, he smacks down rationalism, but does it in such a nice way as to not bad-mouth any of the reformers, but praise them for all the good the accomplished.

He’s cool with the Catholics, but very up front about how in the 600’s, the Romanization of the Catholic church caused it to gradually absorb all sorts of philosophies from the medieval society – much of which persists until today.

He likes to emphasize the Christus Victor view of the resurrection, rather than exclusively focusing on the penal substitution atonement side of the story.

He’s always asking: “Wait, all these early Christians didn’t have all these long creeds and confessions. Did they really know what they believed? Yes, actually they did.”

He’s big on the Christian year. He’s annoyed by moralism.

I would think he would advocate infant baptism, but he doesn’t mention it much. Instead he favors a return of sorts to the long gradual church membership process so as to more thoroughly integrate people into the Christian community.

A lot to chew on here and a lot of our history that I think it would be really valuable to recover.

Bly takes a chapter to discusses to idea of “the eternal king”, rather an idea about authority and order that pervades our thoughts. The political king derives his power from his figure or idea. Our existing leaders derive their power from him too, though it is more obscured.

The Sun King and his Moon Queen, in any case, held societies together for about four thousand years [in China]. As principles of order, tey began to fail in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe. Under the tittle of Kaiser, Tsar, Emperor, Maharajah, Sultan, Bey – one after another, the kings fell, all through Europe and then throughout its colonies.

During the Middle Ages, kings would take tours of their earthly realms. Hundreds of people waited in English village lanes, for example, to see the king go by. They probably felt a blessing coming from the Sacred King as the physical one passed silently by.

The problem is that when the political king disappears from the lanes, even for good reason, we find it difficult to “see” or feel the eternal King. I am not saying that the king-killing was an error, nor that we should resurrect the king and send him out along the lanes again, but we need to notice that our visual imagination becomes confused when we can no longer see the physical king. Wiping out kings severely damages the mythological imagination. Each person has to repair that imagination on his or her own.

-Robert Bly, Iron John, p.109

I think Gerard would have a lot more accurate things to say about the king (and his role as scapegoat), but I think what Bly is drawing attention to here is right on.

Well, I had to special order Tolkien’s 5th volume of notes on Middle Earth via library loan. I was intrigued by a story titled “The Lost Road” that it contained. Allegedly, this was some sort of time-travel tale involving a couple of blokes from present-day England traveling back to the time of the elves, before the fall of Morgoth. I was hoping it might connect some of the geography in Middle Earth to present day England, France, etc.

Alas, J.R.R. only completed the first few chapters and sketches of a couple more. The main character begins to have dreams of an ocean covering a city and words in a strange tongue come to his mind. Eventually, he meets an angel of sorts in a dream who offers to take him and his father back in time to learn what happened. The whole thing is just a light vehicle for Tolkien to have characters monologue at length about his mythology. Sorry fans. I absolutely loved LOTR and the Hobbit, but have never been able to drum up more than a passing interest in the world itself.

The protagonist is obviously a picture of himself: A young college student who likes to invent languages. Also, the dreams of Numenor are discussed in his biography as a recurring vision that troubled his own youth.

I’m not sure what I was expecting. A fish out of water story? Alas. Unless you are a Tolkien myth aficionado, you need not bother with this one.

Here, Bly isn’t the first to express this sort of sentiment at all.

He’s in the middle of recounting a fairy tale (The Maiden Tsar) where an evil stepmother prevents the hero son from escaping to his destiny on the sea.

She gives the tutor a pin, and tells him to slip it into Ivan’s collar as soon as the ships arrive in sight the next day, and that will put him to sleep. The tutor does exactly that; Ivan grows tired, lies down, and does not wake.

This act of the Great Mother, in collusion with the tutor, is more subtle than the father’s curse, and it leaves no mark: as soon as the ships are gone, the tutor pulls the pin out; Ivan wakes up. But the boy’s growth, or initiatory process, stops just before he is able to bring the wild flowers to the Holy Woman; it is stopped dead by the stepmother. During the moments crucial for his next step of consciousness, he was asleep.

I like it that the tutor, nominally male, and the stepmother, nominally female, do this bad-news work together. The story suggests by the word “tutor” that the educational system, which puts boys and girls to sleep for years, right up through graduate school, is in collusion with the dark side of the Great Mother. Essays on deconstruction theory are written by people with pins in their necks. Each of us knows enough about collectivized education to take this idea much father. The colleges call themselves Alma Mater. And the negative matter in materialism puts whole nations to sleep.

-Robert Bly, Iron John, p. 184

Sorry this passage is a bit confusing out of context. Read that last paragraph again though!

In Iron John, Bly toss around a lot of New Age ideas and Eastern Mysticism. Nevertheless, you can tell he has a hard time taking some of this stuff seriously. As I commented earlier, he doesn’t quite fit in with his intellectual liberal peers:

The people who are wholeheartedly devoted to infantile grandiosity – the Wall Street man, the New Age harp player – why should they go with the Wild Man? They imagine themselves to be the Wild Man already – they are the latest thing in wildness, able to stay up all night playing with their computers, or able to think nonpolluting thoughts for four days running.

-Robert Bly, Iron John, p.36

Haha!