Jesus Is My Girlfriend, Part 13
We’ve seen in this series that contemporary worship music has become dominated by songs modeled on romantic, experiential, subjective musical expressions. We’ve further seen that, though such songs are a legitimate stream of Biblical worship expression, they have been historical and Biblical worship models (such as the Psalms or the Book of Revelation) held in balance with objective, doctrinal song content.
We then began to investigate how and why such an imbalance has occurred in arriving at such an experiential overemphasis. We began by seeing that the deep alienation between God and mankind engendered by the Fall leads men to see the world dualistically, as split between the “pure” spiritual realm and the flawed and imperfect physical world, a view which is a result of the simultaneous and inescapable knowledge that men have rebelled against their Holy Creator while they attempt to suppress that inescapable knowledge (Rom 1:18-32).
This split was institutionalized in Platonic thought, which hugely influenced monastic thought, which shaped to a certain extent the way the Medievals viewed Reality, resulting in a Late Medieval and Renaissance perspective which located emotion and instinct in a "religious" zone, while reason and normative life were seen as belonging to the "secular" sphere.
Christian reactions to the rationalism of the Enlightenment fused with Victorian and pietist viewpoints to produce a feminized, experientially-fixated Evangelicalism whose worship music institutionalized these attitudes for that branch of the Church. This was all the easier because there is a legitimate strand of subjective and emotional aspects included in Biblical worship paradigms (for instance, in Psalms 51, 56, 3, 6, etc.).
We also saw, as well, that the Tri-Unity of God speaks to all aspects of the life of the Image-Bearers of God, humanity, including their worship of the Lord, which is to enact both objective and subjective thanksgiving, and to express both change and continuity as the Church gathers before her Maker and Redeemer.
There are further implications for worship in the Incarnation of the Lord Jesus, Who, as the Scriptures and the Creeds teach, was both Fully God and Fully Man simultaneously. As we've seen before, this Fact has massive implications for the expressions of continuity and change in our worship.
Another implication for worship is grounded in the Fact that, in His Divine Nature, the Lord Jesus is Uncreated; He has always existed as the Second Person of the One Triune God, and, as such, He has always been existent as a Spirit.
However, in His Created Human Nature, He had a Beginning, and is both Physical and possesses a Created Human Spirit. Thus, simultaneously, the Lord Jesus is both Matter and Spirit (and therefore Physical and Spiritual, both Created and Uncreated, both Divine and Human).
What this means is that we should understand (and attempt to enact symbolically and otherwise) the truth that our worship is like unto the Lord Who is the Focus of our worship, simultaneously both spiritual and physical, that the Uncreated God condescends to join His Creatures, humanity, meeting us in bread and wine, the spoken and written Word, not only meeting with us corporately in formal worship, but also permanently indwelling believers through His Spirit.
Our spiritual worship (like our bodies, cf. Rom 12:1), should never lose sight of the realization that our physicality is always inextricably tied into that worship. To deny, or attempt to reduce or denigrate the physicality of the worship of God is thus to implicitly deny the Nature of Jesus' Incarnation. So don't do that.
Next week, we'll consider yet another Aspect of the Incarnation for worship.
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