Written by A.W. Workman |
Thursday, July 4, 2024
Essentially, the Psalms are evidence that the songbook of the people of God was one that originally contained a rich diversity of musical styles. We can know this because of the nature of music and because of the history and context of the Psalms themselves. Apparently, God ordained that his people, for centuries, sing diverse melodies, some of which would not have felt like the stirring tunes of their particular generation, but rather the music of other peoples and other centuries. In this, we have a quiet case for using diverse musical styles in our churches.
“But do we have any precedent in the Bible for incorporating diverse styles of worship?”
The question was an unexpected one. One reason plural leadership is so good is because invariably one elder will come up with a question no one else is thinking of. The rest of us were just assuming that it was right and good to expand our church’s styles of musical worship to better reflect our diverse congregation. It seemed to fit with the Revelation 7:9 vision and with the fact that the New Testament advocates generally for Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs (Col 3:16), but otherwise seems to leave the details of musical worship up to the wisdom of the local churches – assemblies which were no longer just Jewish, but were fast becoming also Greek, Roman, Scythian, Persian, etc.
The question got me thinking. How much of a case is there in the Bible for the practice of incorporating diverse styles of music in the regular worship of our churches? After percolating on this for a number of years, I’ve become more and more convinced that a quiet but convincing biblical case can be built that God delights in receiving worship in the many musical styles of the world, just as he delights in receiving worship in the many languages and cultures of the world. And that this case can be built from the hymnal of Israel and the early church – the Psalms. This case is built on the history and context of the Psalms, as well as on the nature of music itself.
When it comes to its nature, music is much like language or culture; namely, like a cloud. Music does not sit still. It cannot. It’s always slowly changing and moving, shifting and developing in ways that clearly reflect where it’s been yet defy even the most skillful predictions of where it’s going next. With music, just add time and you will inevitably get substantive changes in method and style. Seeking to ‘freeze’ a musical tradition as that which truly represents a people is just as futile as trying to ‘freeze’ a language. You can protest all you like, but they will go on changing. They are clouds, after all, not mountains. Their nature is a moving one.
This is where the history and the context of the Psalms come in. We are told that Moses is the author of Psalm 90, which would make it the earliest psalm that we have. Moses was likely living and writing around 1400 BC. Of course, the most famous psalmist is King David, writing 400 years after Moses, around 1000 BC. Yet other psalms are attributed to Hezekiah (Ps 46-48), who was living around 700 BC, 300 years after David. The latest psalm seems to be Psalm 137, “By the rivers of Babylon,” which clearly speaks of the Judean exile to Babylon which took place in the 500s. That means there’s a span of roughly 900 years between the writing of the earliest and the latest Psalm.
That’s a lot of time for a given musical tradition to undergo all kinds of natural internal development. Were you to time travel, you’d likely recognize some elements of the music of the Judean exiles all the way back in the music of Moses. But Moses – were he to travel with you to Babylon – would probably be a little offended at what had become of his beloved Hebrew musical tradition. This is because the changes would have been considerable, perhaps as great as if he were encountering the music of a foreign nation.
Add to this the fact that musical style, again, like language and culture, does not exist in a vacuum. Musical styles borrow from one another, just as languages borrow vocab from their neighbors. Instruments and melodies get adopted from one culture to another at perhaps an even faster rate than words since music itself has a quality that seems able to transcend other natural differences. This is why it’s sometimes been labeled “the universal language.” This means that whatever musical traditions Abraham’s household brought with them from Ur probably picked up Canaanite/Hittite influences in the several generations that passed until Joseph’s time.