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Bifurcation in Beauty: Dualism of Spiritual/Sacred and Natural/Secular
You have heard, “Life imitating art or art imitating life.” In that vein, art imitates worldview.” Even when someone says, this is his worldview, his art may contradict what he says is his worldview. The art or his aesthetic is a better or more accurate expression of his worldview than other means of expressing it.
You could see what was important to Jesus by His reaction to the corrupting of the temple, His Father’s house. When someone blows his top because you dinged his car, that says something about the priority of his car, more than if you asked him. A person’s music has that way of explaining the meaning of a person’s life.
Worship of and Love for God
One biblical and historical element of worship of God is music. The Bible is full of music. Worship is an offering to God. God regulates the offering. It must be what God wants for Him to accept it.
Someone said, “You are what (or who) you worship.” Whatever you give God, that’s what you think about Him. If you give that to Him, then that expresses who you are, as much as it does who God is.
You can say you love God, like you can say you know God. If you don’t do what He says, you neither love Him or know Him, which overlap. The love shines through what you offer. It is like giving God the present you wanted, not what He did. You love yourself.
The “life imitating art” part of the equation says that art affects life. Life changes by the art influencing it. A person especially changes by the thoughts expressed about God through the music offered God.
The Meaning
What I have written assumes that art means something. It also says that art itself is not subjective and personal. Scripture says this, when it says that God is worshiped in the beauty of His holiness.
Beauty, which relates to aesthetics or art, is not in the eye of the beholder. It is objective in its meaning. Holiness is beautiful. That would mean that the unholy is not beautiful. Everything is not beautiful in its own way. Some is beautiful and some is not.
God separates from what falls short of the perfections of His attributes. That is the holiness of God. God will not receive as worship what falls short of His attributes. He separates from that as characteristic of His nature.
Bifurcation of Beauty
How is it that today churches do offer God the profane, that is, what conflicts with His attributes? Churches bifurcate beauty, just like they do with truth. They separated the spiritual or sacred from the natural or secular. Like there is total truth, one truth like one God, there is total beauty.
Churches and their leaders (or perhaps the leaders just pander to the people) went along with the split. They regarded and treated spiritual things as sentimental and emotional, not on the same plain as the natural and the secular. Church is an escape from the real world.
The music offers that escape and that feeling, which lifts someone emotionally, and is seen as a sacred or spiritual experience with God. That’s what church does as its most essential. People leave with a skip in their step, ready to go in the real world, the secular one, even thinking it was God.
Some churches and their leaders would disagree they do what I described in the previous paragraph. They explain it as something different, so removed from what occurred, because now that is the norm for a church. It’s been done so long, it’s just church now. It follows the trajectory of a revision of true worship, not true worship.
A church with corrupt music and worship doesn’t see its art as negative or corrupted. That is instead something profane to the extreme like a Mapplethorpe exhibit of a crucifix in a jar of urine, pushed by the National Endowment of Arts in the late 1980s. Certain extreme or exotic modern or even postmodern forms, those are wrong. Not the profanity churches now perform and consider worship.
Tell-Tale
Without the church doing much to anything to help it, the world’s culture has decayed. Churches veered off objective beauty, or one beauty. Something is either beautiful or it is not. Beauty is not related to secular or spiritual or even sacred.
Music isn’t sacred because it is used in the church; it is sacred because it is sacred. That also means it is beautiful, because, again, beauty relates to the glory of the Lord. A corruption of beauty, used in worship in the church, does not become beautiful by a church using it, what some today call, “redeeming” it.
The music someone plays and enjoys, and especially for someone who says he is a Christian, by that you can tell who he is. I know some of you readers hate that. You deny it sharply and often angrily. The reasons for the heat also help explain what is happening.
It is easy today for professing Christians to stand up against decadent culture. They can point out what’s very horrible in bad books in schools and their curriculum. Meanwhile, their churches are decaying at perhaps a little slower pace but a continuous one that isn’t far behind the world.
What is light and easy, sentimental and emotional, and entertaining also sells. Salzburg and Vienna and the rest of Europe went for Mozart’s music because of the former, the light and easy, etc. His dad Leopold, however, liked the selling part of it. It wasn’t lost on the religious leaders that Mozart also boosted their prominence and position.
Church Consumers
Entertainment, Not Worship
Church attenders become consumers, which is the opposite of worship. They also confuse that feeling from true spirituality. It doesn’t matter, because that feeling and spirituality are on the same plain. When the congregants leave their meeting, they take that experience as preparation for the real world. That’s also now constituted as God. The people think they’ve associated with God because it is indistinguishable from Him. It is actually more aligned with the world they enter after their assembling ends.
Even Baptist meetings have long encouraged the decadence of consumerism. They entertain a crowd. The feeling is an apparent sanctified one, which is a lie. The one who does this the best, a kind of circus-master, is a wanted commodity. It or he improves the spirit of the meeting, again this superficial, sentimental emotionalism. God is using his talent. Most cannot resist the popularity of it. It is its own pop music.
How could churches permit a philosophy in conflict with God? Some don’t judge music. Even though arts are full of meaning, they relegate it to meaninglessness. It is in this meaningless realm of spirituality, not like what occurs where there is meaning, eight to five, a real life. Many also judge against the extreme and deem themselves better by comparison.
Loss of Discernment
Young people in church often feel left out. If they get this music, it at least might connect them to the real world. This is the acquiescence to youth culture. Their hormones are raging and they chafe under parental authority. They look happier and parents think the church succeeds at keeping them. Its young people are happy. At least they can smile to the rhythm, the feeling, and the allurement.
Churches lose their discernment, described in a biblical way as unable to distinguish the holy from the profane. It occurs through incrementalism. Men won’t separate from it. They won’t say no to it. It gets worse and then doesn’t stop getting worse. To explain it requires something more than a thirty second sound byte. Even if you can, the Bible doesn’t have a play button to give the kind of proof necessary for such diminished discernment.
Country music or Country Western arose in church settings. It grew among church going young people in the Bible belt. They took the sentimentality and feelings that corresponded to the bifurcation of beauty in the church. Country western stars, who began in church, brought a more intense version of it to the world. It produced an even more extreme response.
Holy and Profane
Ryman Auditorium, the temple of country music, looks like a church building. It gives people, especially young ones, that feeling they had at church, making their experience in the world indistinguishable from church. The entertainers at church just do a lesser version of the same thing. This contrasts with Ezekiel 44:23:
And they shall teach my people the difference between the holy and profane, and cause them to discern between the unclean and the clean.
The country stars were good at country music. What started in church succeeded in the world. The success in the world, more excessive in its effect, travelled back to the church. The church accepts it, because that’s the domain of the spiritual.
To Be Continued
The Relationship Between Wokeism and Revivalism in Churches
Some of you may know that right now the Southern Baptists (SBC) convene in Southern California for their 2022 annual meeting. At this very time, Mark Dever and 9 Marks, a Reformed faction of the SBC, produce their journal with the emphasis on revivalism (June 2022). I wish I could be happy to join their concern. Their accepted wokeism proceeds from the same root as revivalism, which is pragmatism.
One would think professing Reformed or Calvinists would insist on dependence on God for conversion and church growth. I don’t believe these men. They use measures as extreme as Charles Finney to produce results. Among many ways, their wokeism reveals their contradiction or hypocrisy.
Jonathan Leeman writes in his introduction, and I agree, “Revivalism depends on God’s Words plus our methods.” I also concur with these sentences:
Revivalism, which depends on our ingenuity and energy, brings short-term gains. It looks fruitful. It appeals to our yearning to see the results of our labors.
The SBC, evangelicalism, fundamentalism, and independent Baptists are all rife with revivalism. The adherents depend on more than the Word of God for the results.
A word to describe a particularly wicked kind of “our ingenuity and energy” and “our methods” is pandering. This manifested itself in the seeker sensitive movement and the purpose-driven movement. A church studies its particular demographic and forms a strategy that conforms to the culture. The region likes either pop rock, rap, or southern gospel through which a church panders to its audience.
In “Six Marks of Revivalism,” Andrew Ballitch writes, “Revivalism can actually make this happen,” referring to meeting conditions that spur church growth. He also writes, and I agree again, “This revivalism was by no means monolithic.” Revivalism changes in how it manifests itself, because it centers on man, not God. The new measures of Finney have morphed into whatever measures seem necessary to produce numbers.
Not that long ago, churches and their leaders decided they needed a neutral name to attract the lost to the church. About one of the journal authors who wrote a few of the articles, the journal says “is the senior pastor of Fellowship in the Pass Church in Beaumont, California.” A part of the church growth movement, which is an insidious form of revivalism, is that you’ve got to market your church with a branding or label. If it’s all God, why not just call yourself “Beaumont Baptist Church”?
Church growth philosophy says it might offend an unsaved person to hear “Baptist.” Someone might think, “Hell fire and brimstone.” You don’t want to have that happen, so instead you call yourself, “Fellowship in the Pass Church.” This practice illustrates a pragmatic mindset in the trajectory of revivalism.
The name “Baptist” carries with it doctrinal connotations. Revivalism isn’t monolithic. Unsaved people don’t like the feeling of “Baptist,” and you can change that feeling, help along the process of church growth and increase your numbers, by choosing a neutral, apparently non-offensive name.
Like we know that gas prices went up before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we know that revivalism in its present iteration panders to unchurched Harry and Sally. That means the “blended worship” that 9 Marks won’t include in its presentation. You also might want to appear “woke” to your younger and perhaps ethnic demographic.
To get and keep a specialized population, you must show support to its grievances. For instance, you should call January 6 more than a “dustup,” as a recent NFL defensive coordinator, Jack Del Rio, did and was fined 100,000 dollars by his team. It means muting strong statements against popular sin, especially homosexuality and even abortion, in the spirit of Tim Keller. You might be complementarian, but you manage your speech so as not to offend egalitarians. Be careful of delineating male and female roles as if those distinctions exist.
Mark Dever, Jonathan Leeman, and 9 Marks promoted and still push wokeism. This matches the spirit of corporate America flying rainbow flags to celebrate gay pride. You can’t go into a McDonalds or Starbucks without rainbows hanging all over.
Have you heard of “virtue signaling”? Wokeism sends a signal to a demographic to attract, gain, and then keep their allegiance. It is a new measure.
Ballitch gives as a characteristic of revivalism, “emotional manipulation.” Wokeism is emotional manipulation. He also lists “reductionist views of conversion.” Revivalism reduced conversion to something short of true conversion. Wokeism better “reconstructs conversion.” It calls for repentance over implicit racism in all white people, specifying group guilt rather than individual.
Critical theory claims special knowledge of racism, a modern form of gnosticism. The true gospel eliminates racial and ethnic barriers and sees everyone the same. Including race in the gospel corrupts it.
With wokeism, wokeness becomes a necessary fruit of repentance like speaking in tongues among the Charismatics. Important transformation of language must accompany the repentance. Leadership attracts followers by modifying language, conforming to wokeism. This easily fits a particular view of the kingdom compatible with the amillennialism of Dever and his church.
Root to Finney’s revivalism was pelagianism. In his Systematic Theology, he denied man’s total depravity. He saw within man a spark of goodness, which he could fan with human measures unto salvation. With man’s sinful condition, his rebellion, the only solution is divine. A theoretical Calvinism with God at center does not reach actual practice.
Is there a particular approach for growing an urban church? Revivalism and wokeism both say, “Yes.” The Bible says, “No.” Don’t do anything different. Just preach the gospel. Don’t change based on white, black, Hispanic, Chinese, African, whatever. Depend on God.
When 9 Marks points out the moat of revivalism in its audience’s eye, it should remove the beam of wokeism in its.
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