I do think that there can be songs written in recent times that are absolutely acceptable for Godly worship. I can't think of one off the top of my head, but the "Olden days writers" did not have a monopoly on true spirituality. And of course there is a lot of rubbish which is passed off as "Christian worship music".
With that laid out at the start, I want to address something that I have noticed in recent times: a heavy focus on Church music, making sure it is "right", and warning at every point of the way that "bad music choices lead to forsaking right Doctrine".
I agree with the general premise of that, but I wonder if some of the problem is that people are making up complex and technical standards for "right music" which quite frankly just baffle the average person, and at the same time NOT warning these people to "Study to shew thyself approved unto God".
There are two basic issues that I see with this approach:
- With the complexity of the musical standards, there is no genuine way for the "layman" to check if the standard is biblical, so the argument basically falls to "You may not understand it but I have done the study so you should just trust me". Forgive me for this, but that is exactly why the Catholics wanted to keep the Bible in Latin all those years ago - so that the poor old regular man would have to trust the "experts".
I for one believe that God has made His Word understandable for the average man, and if something like this is so complex that only a musical expert can understand it, then I seriously doubt it is biblical. It drives many to just say, "if it is so hard to understand, then I just won't even bother to try, and I will just listen to whatever I want". The "technical boundaries" that some put up are incomprehensible to many, and so they just give up on the whole matter. It is basically saying to these people that they are not smart enough to understand God's Word, so they just give up trying.
What you end up with are people who simply listen to whatever they want OR whatever they are told, but they don't bother to study the Word of God about it.
This argument is in fact teaching people to either accept whatever they are told by the "experts" or to ignore whatever they are told by the "experts" but NOT TO STUDY THE WORD OF GOD for themselves.
In my mind I think we should set out what we perceive as Biblical standards for any issue, but we should teach people to study for themselves.
- The second issue is that some appear to spend so much time warning about the "slippery slope" effect etc, that they forget to teach strong doctrine, and they forget to warn others about having strong doctrine. It is sort like they are yelling so loud about "Right music" that nobody notices the wolves sneaking quietly in while everyone is distracted by the "Music issue".
I think it is entirely possible for a church to accept much of this music AND STILL retain a strong doctrinal position. I think it is incredibly difficult, and most probably very unlikely, but I don't see anywhere in Scripture where it states plainly that right music leads to right doctrine and wrong music leads to wrong doctrine.
I DO think we see it happen often, but I wonder if it is partly because the warnings are about wrong music, and while everyone is concentrating on the music the false teachers sneak the bad doctrine in the side door.
Don't ignore the warnings, and the encouragement on doctrine. Doctrines are after all fairly well defined in the Bible.
I have been studying through the seven churches of Revelation lately, and I don't recall any warnings about music to any of these seven churches,but almost all of them are warned on doctrine in some way, or encouraged to stay strong on doctrine.
If music was itself inherently important in such matters, then I would expect it make the list of warnings to these seven churches.
There absolutely is instruction on music - I am not a denier. I just wonder if ALONG WITH the warnings about right music, we ought to also be making AT LEAST as much noise warning these people to jealously guard their doctrine while they consider their music.
I think maybe some are putting too much emphasis on the wrong focus point.
