Category: Theology

What does singing do to us?

When we sing we embody (in-body) the theology that we have read. We take it in, translate, interpret and transmit. In the process are we, perhaps, formed or changed by the medium? Not pushing the metaphor too far, is it in any way like eating – what we eat becomes part of us, we excrete some of it, and it can nourish or poison…

So what we sing, and even how we sing, becomes important in a way we may not have envisaged before. It is one thing to read a text which remains remote, like looking at a cake and not eating it; it is something altogether different to take the text in and to re-transmit it. That we might do by reading aloud. The sheer physicality of singing, the presence of music, steps everything up a gear. Wesley knew that. That is why hymns were so important. The hymns provided portmanteau scriptures or interpretations, theology or doctrine. These were memorised and could be shared with others. And you can never lose them – which can become a bit of an irritation!

Why do you like this hymn or that? Why do you find some hymns abhorrent? ‘A good sing’ says as much, if not more, about feeling as it does about understanding or literary or musical quality. But Britta Martini wants to push us further by asking what is there in the expression of the music or the structure of a text, key or melody, image or metaphor, that causes a hymn to affect us in this way?

What hymns or songs affect you? And how? And why?

We dedicate ourselves to exploration – science/worship compared in a hymn

We dedicate ourselves to exploration,
to sound the height and depth of Godly love,
but if we lock ourselves within our churches
what worth is it to raise our hands above?

Like those who seek in scientific research,
behind closed doors committed to their task,
we find ourselves as lost to human pleading
until we hear the things that others ask.

Each theory bears its fruit in application,
our praise makes sense when others feel God’s grace;
until that time our search, it seems, is wasted,
a stark, unholy vacuum fills this place.
Andrew Pratt 19/2/2019
Tune: INTERCESSOR

After ‘When the church of Jesus shuts its outer door’, Fred Pratt Green, and Jim Al-Khalili’s interview in The Life Scientific of Sir Gregory Winter.

Words © 2019 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England,
http://www.stainer.co.uk.
Please include any reproduction for local church use on your CCL Licence returns. All wider and any commercial use requires prior application to Stainer & Bell Ltd.

Can theology evolve? How can it not?

I was asked: I question whether theology itself evolves, or is it our understanding of it that evolves?

 

An interesting question.

Years ago on BBC radio there was a programme called ‘The Brains Trust’. They answered questions sent in by listeners. One of the panel always used to begin his answer with ‘It all depends what you mean by…’. Well, ‘It all depends what you mean by theology’.

Oxford Dictionaries define theology as – ‘the study of the nature of God and religious belief’ or ‘religious beliefs and theory when systematically developed’. https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/

So theology relates to the study of God and/or religious beliefs. If that is accepted then unless we have total and complete knowledge of God then our theology, our study, must grow and develop as we learn, both as individuals and as humanity. If we believe our knowledge is total we are either, ourselves, God, or deluded. Christians have historically developed theology by reading and interpreting the Bible. Over time people have found different translations and versions of the Bible. Each has offered a, sometimes slight, sometimes great, difference of perspective. Each time believers have altered their theological understanding or resisted the new or different knowledge all based on the ‘same Bible’. Over such differences wars have been fought, people have been taken into slavery and methods of secular government have been developed. And this is all within Christian theology. Add to this Jewish, Islamic, Hindu… you see the reason why the question is not straightforward. Our understanding of God must evolve as we live and learn.

But assume for a moment that the dictionary definition isn’t one we accept. What if we see theology as being simply what God is like. If this is so then surely God is unchanging. Granted (though not by everyone). If this is so we can surely ‘know God’ in some sort of final way. After a lifetime of marriage you may not know your partner/husband/wife. You may still be surprised, delighted or frustrated by them. And your understanding changes, evolves. If not then your relationship will remain in the shallows and never gain much depth. It evolves.

So if we see theology as the study of God or the object of our study it is never likely to be static. It must evolve!

Hymns for today?…for tomorrow?

A friend asked if I knew any young hymn writers – under forty? I was hard pressed, except for a colleague with his fortieth birthday a month away! And other times I have been greeted with, ‘Oh, I didn’t know any hymn writers were still alive!’ But my friend made the point seriously and went on to say that hymns are becoming a bit like madrigals, written in the past and sung by consenting adults in private. Hymn singing seems to be entering a cloistered, a rather esoteric world. Aside from Songs of Praise, where the provision is pretty limited, or Cup Final day, there is little ‘public’ interest in hymn singing, let alone actual involvement. It is becoming, or has become, the preserve of enthusiasts, even if we count ourselves among them. Within the church itself the menu offered is often limited in content and theologically unadventurous, the language that of another age. For that reason, in many Fresh Expressions of church, hymn singing hasn’t even been entertained, and rightly so. It is no longer apt or appropriate; better left in the museum of so called, ‘inherited church’. Then they are not lost for those who remember hymns over a lifetime and for whom they are a resource of inspiration, theology and comfort. While that is a right thing to do, it is a bit like keeping the church open ‘long enough for me to be buried from it.’ So do hymns have any value or purpose in the foreseeable future? I think so, but for this to be the case our perception of them may need to change markedly.

John Wesley knew that hymns enable us to internalise theological belief and form attitudes, but most of us expect hymns to provide a ‘good sing’, often regardless of language or theology. Sadly, this freezes people into thought forms and language which are archaic and not right for the present day. We might well sing ‘There’s a wideness in God’s mercy’, with its allusion to ‘thousands of new worlds as great as this’, but now we know the potential for the existence of such worlds, our focus on a theology which presumed the need for the salvation of humans on this world alone might just need some adjustment. We have inherited a view that our world is timeless and humanity is dominant. A New Scientist bulletin from 4 January 2019 might cause us to adjust our view. ‘…A new simulation predicts that our galaxy will collide with the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud in about 2.4 billion years, a smashup that will actually make the Milky Way more similar to its galactic counterparts […] it will likely collide with our galaxy in about 2.4 billion years, well before the much larger predicted collision with the Andromeda galaxy more than 5 billion years from now.

So where do we go from here? Let me make just a few suggestions that those who write hymns might try to act on.

Doctrine is imbibed through hymn singing. But however firmly asserted and defended it is, inevitably, always to be regarded as provisional unless a fundamentalist position is taken in relation to revelation and scripture. This being the case our doctrine has to be based on human cultural understanding and expressed in the language of the time. Frequently such language is metaphorical. A metaphor which works in one age or language may not always be transferable to another. As hymns are used to state, reinforce and internalise doctrine it might be expected that the language and metaphors that they employ would evolve from age to age. When a metaphor is no longer working it should be discarded. Part of the role of the hymn poet is, I believe, to explore the use of metaphor in order to express belief with clarity in each succeeding generation.

We need to find music that is timeless, yet accessible. Worship music has tended, historically, to follow the styles and patterns of popular music. For instance, much of the worship song genre of the 1970s mimicked the acoustic guitar led folk music of the 1960s, In consequence hymns never quite catch-up and singing yesterday’s song tune makes us seem more out of touch than singing something from 100 years ago. Nevertheless, the folk song/ballad seems to have been the most resilient format, as illustrated by Vaughan Williams, Sydney Carter, John Bell, Stuart Townend, Nordic and Baltic Protestant Traditions and the rediscovery of shape-note singing in the United States.

I believe that the interaction of words and music has the unique potential to internalise hope. We feel and then live out what we sing. Singing can make you feel good. It can transform your emotional, psychological and, indeed, spiritual state. In a sense we are healed by it. While singing in itself is enjoyable, many people seeking a deeper spiritual experience find this when they sing.

Choral singing, though not church choral singing, is increasing in prominence in the United Kingdom. It has become a popular form of recreation for many. It would be perverse if the church, at this point, abandoned corporate singing, which can act as a means of re-creation. But for this to work both poets and particularly composers, need to hear what people like to sing and to work together creatively.

We need to re-examine sung words of Hebrew scripture. We love to sing praise, yet at least a third of the Psalms give voice to lament. If a stranger lets you down it is irritating. If a good friend lets you down you might complain. How much more if you feel God who is, to use a favourite phrase of some contemporary writers, your ‘strong tower’ fails you? Yet we are so often fed words which suggest that when bad things happen this is all part of ‘God’s plan’. If a child is drowned in the Mediterranean escaping from the horrors of bloody warfare is part of that big plan this is not a God I want to worship. To suggest that this is the God we see in Christ is, frankly, blasphemous. Returning to the Psalms will deepen our faith, so that we too will believe deeply enough in God to cry out of our forsakenness when things go wrong, charging God with apparent absence. Jean Calvin, the reformer saw this as strength of faith rather than denial or doubt. It takes our image of a loving God seriously.

Hymns can make theology and build hope. But this is dangerous. Walter Bruggemann in his book Prophetic Imagination suggests that the poetry of the Hebrew prophets enabled them to find hope while in exile when logic said there was none. A salient passage is Ezekiel 37, which marked the turning point for those in exile. The key was in the creativity of poetry. Sung poetry can turn that revelation into embodied hope. At best, hymns can transform our attitudes and expectations when our backs are against the wall. That may be through a reiteration of past experience. Equally it can be through the presentation of a new perspective that suddenly becomes a realistic proposition on which we can base our hope – a fresh revelation. Dead bones can live!

We need to see hymns as an evolving genre. They are never going to be a static form. For many in contemporary society faith makes no sense. Perhaps circumstance or experience leads them to this point. For others there is the sheer illogicality of believing in something intangible, metaphysical. Theologians address such issues in one of three ways. They stay with tradition, they allow tradition to evolve gradually, or they recognise that more radical reconstruction is needed. The works of John Hick, Don Cupitt and John Shelby Spong come into this latter category. Hymn writers rarely move beyond the second position. To do so feels unsafe. Yet Fred Pratt Green could write, ‘When our confidence is shaken/in beliefs we thought secure’ and allow the suggestion that ‘God is active in the tensions of a faith not yet mature’. Arguably, where God is concerned we never can have the full picture, we are never fully mature. We need to be open to the fact that faith, in Sydney Carter’s words, is framed by a creed which can never be fixed or final. All is open to challenge and change: all faith statements, of their nature, must be provisional. People find that either liberating, or threatening, perhaps even heretical. If it is accepted, our hymn text writing may push against the limits of our faith and may even break through them framing new insights, offering new hope.

The role of the hymn poet today ought to be at the cutting edge of Christian thought, working out of a particular context in time and place, seeking to elaborate a theology that holds together faith, while making sense of experience. By faith I do not mean belief. This is more akin to the Greek pistis, trust. And by experience I am not limiting this to simple, personal experience, but including all that we know corporately as human beings, our total sum of knowledge. The opportunity to learn more about the cosmos seems boundless. How much more is there to learn about God?

If all of this is so, then it is incumbent on those who write, compose, choose and sing songs and hymns to ensure that they are as effective as possible. They require us to apply the greatest literary and musical skills that we have in providing a vehicle for theological exploration, expression and development. Those who are responsible for liturgical standards and theological orthodoxy ought, no less, to be open to the evolving nature of hymnody. This will make it a requirement that those who work in these fields are aware of theological, scientific, cosmological, social and literary progress and have the facility to adapt and allow their writing to be informed by these other areas of knowledge. Unless this is allowed, even the most inspired hymns will be suffocated by those who seek to control or constrain their use. The vehicle will become simply a museum piece used by enthusiasts. It is my belief that should this be the case, the church will suffer immeasurably as a consequence, unless it is able to replace the hymn with another medium equal to fulfilling its function. At present I see none.

I am convinced that hymns are still useful; still a lively and relevant component of Christian liturgy, which may yet have a place in revitalising Christian faith and practice in the twenty-first century.