by Matthew Raley In modern philosophy (as I sketched here), the dignity and freedom of the individual have been troubled. Here is how Reinhold Niebuhr summarized one aspect of the problem in The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949, p 21):

Modern man ... cannot determine whether he shall understand himself primarily from the standpoint of the uniqueness of his reason or from the standpoint of his affinity with nature; and if the latter whether it is the harmless order and peace of nature or her vitality which is the real clue to his essence.

In postmodern culture, exhausted with these questions, the individual has become an autonomous consumer of mass culture: self-invented, alienated, rootless, and unaccountable to permanent relationships. She mines her passions in search of vitality, a search for which boundaries, reasoning, and even relationships are impediments.

The postmodern individual understands herself from the standpoint of natural vitality, but in her the outward-reaching wonder of modern romanticism is dead, replaced by an inward-reaching nihilism.

The iPod worshiper I described last week is little different. He or she comes to public worship wanting the freedom to sing alone to God with others who are also singing alone to God. The iPod worshiper knows no other mode for passionate freedom but the personal, subjective, solo mode. Christ and his community are understood from the standpoint of self, which is antithetical to Paul's description of body life in Ephesians 4-5.

(I think the younger you are, the more likely you are to identify with iPod worship. The older you are, the less you identify with it, because to some degree you have experienced a culture held in common.)

To revive evangelical worship, most believers jump to the issue of music style. "Naturally, the style I like is what will revive worship." But I will address music style last in this series, because style needs to serve many, many other considerations. The reason we now have churches full of iPod worshipers is that all other considerations of worship were made to serve style.

What we need to work on exegetically is this problem of individuality-in-community. What is individuality, and what is it for? What is personal freedom, and what is it for? What is the nature of the bond between individual Christians, and what is that bond for? What do individual Christians owe in light of their bond with each other?

If we have some answers to these questions, the matter of what and how to sing may become clearer.

Let's take some direction about individuality from Ephesians.

1. In Ephesians, we understand ourselves not from the standpoint of our past, present, or preferences, nor from our rationality, nor from our natural drives. In fact, we don't view ourselves from the standpoint of self at all, but from that of Christ.

Paul describes a variety of individuals at work in the community of believers, each part "working properly" in the body -- that is, contributing a unique strengths and actions to shared life. But the individual parts all "grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ." (4.15-16)

So the Jewish Christian descended from Levites has a unique role in the Ephesian church. He contributes a practical knowledge of how Israel worshiped, an instinctive appreciation of sacrifice for sin, and also an instinctive knowledge of the deceitful power of self-righteousness. The Greek Christian, a former worshiper of Diana, let's say, contributes very different strengths to the other Christians in Ephesus: he knows the deceit of sexual immorality as a prop for idolatry, as well as the power of Christ to save a man from it.

Niebuhr said, "The Christian faith in God's self-disclosure, culminating in the revelation of Christ, is thus the basis of the Christian concept of personality and individuality." (p 15) The Jewish man and the Greek man have no need to compromise their uniqueness in the community of believers. They are each connected directly to their Savior, Jesus Christ. Niebuhr added, "To understand himself truly means to begin with a faith that he is understood from beyond himself, that he is known and loved of God and must find himself in terms of obedience to the divine will." (p 15)

These two individuals are outward-reaching in their self-understanding. They are understood. Therefore they will come to understand themselves. The inward-reaching iPod believer needs to take out his earphones and leave the tiny world in which he thrives.

2. In Ephesians, we do not efface what we are, or where we came from, but we submit to Christ as he redeems what we are.

The Jewish man and the Greek man remain Jewish and Greek. The Jewish man's emotional life still revolves around the Psalms, while the Greek man's emotional life remains tied to the sound and form of hymns. Nothing will change that. One man is not required to conform to the other. Rather, Christ takes what each man is and Christ expresses his own self in each man.

And public worship reflects their individuality (5.19). Each individual contributes his or her unique strength in Christ to the love of the community, and he also receives strength in Christ from the community. The Greek man rejoices in the Jewish man's testimony, and vice-versa.

In these two points, I find freedom without autonomy. As followers of Christ, the Jewish and Greek men are not self-invented, alienated, and rootless. They are defined in relationship. In that relationship with Christ, they are unique and they are also accountable.

In particular, as I'll sketch next week, they are accountable for how they relate to each other.

by Matthew Raley In working on the problem of how evangelical music can unify people in corporate expressions of God's glory, I have covered a lot of material (first, second, third, forth, and fifth posts). Today, I'll summarize my argument and frame the questions I will address in the coming weeks.

I believe that the problem of unity in worship must be addressed. When churches fail to bring people together in an emotional appreciation of God's character, then an essential spiritual reality is inactive. The unity of the body of Christ, locally expressed, is the engine of growth in Christ's image (as Ephesians 4 says, a teaching I'll examine in future posts). The fact that many churches not only fail to bond people together in the Lord Jesus, but even are the cause of people's depression and alienation, is a shame on our life and culture.

There are two reasons evangelical music fails to nurture this bond today. First, the evangelical reliance on pop music is divisive. Second, evangelicals' lack of engagement with Western art music leaves them blind to basic problems of community and artistic expression, problems that composers have been wrestling with for more than a century.

Pop music, as currently consumed by churches, has demonstrably failed to unify believers. It has produced segmented churches along demographic lines, and the pursuit of this segmentation is a pastoral surrender to people's selfishness. This means that churches reinforce the consumerism of believers in every single worship service, when churches should be calling believers out from the consumer's life -- calling them not just with preaching, but with artistry.

Further, while pop music has demonstrated effectiveness in speaking to people where they are, it has not shown an ability to take people somewhere else. The music industry is predicated on sales, which can only be reliably produced when the music has been engineered to flatter or shock the buyer. The Christian music industry, in particular, must engineer its music this way. It does not have something that will become increasingly important to this discussion later on: it does not draw from vibrant local music scenes.

The reliance on pop music leaves most churches either with a narrow style of expression, or with vanilla sound. The music can unite the worshipers with a narrow style if the worshipers are all from the same demographic. If not, then the style becomes whatever is not objectionable.

In their fixation with pop music, evangelicals miss the way these same problems are playing out in the rest of Western culture.

Art music that continues in the tradition developing from Gregorian chant through J. S. Bach to modern expressionism has lost its intellectual reason for being. The philosophical strains that nurtured musical development up through the first half of the twentieth century are now in various stages of decay.

As I sketched from Reinhold Niebuhr, Thomas Mann, and Theodor Adorno, the specific problem that sickened bourgeois industrial society was how the individual relates to the community. The less freedom the individual felt in the modern period, the more the composer became the priest of alienation, the keeper of individual expression the only ways it could be maintained in an industrial world, through primitivism and insanity.

While the contemporary world of composition has by and large rejected Adorno's exacting dialectic, it has no worldview with which to replace it. Composers today either serve a commercial audience or strain to balance their individual expressiveness with the need to be "accessible" to others. Many succeed in finding this balance, as I believe a composer like Philippe Hersant does in his Héliades (2006), without resolving problems of community.

So, evangelical music is stuck. It is fully invested in pop music styles that do not unify believers, while being ignorant of how the problem of community has plagued composers throughout Western culture in the last century-and-a-half.

How can we get this music moving? Here are three directions I will explore in the coming weeks.

1. Reassert a rationale for individuality-in-community. The worldview of the body of Christ can serve once again as the intellectual basis for a unifying art, a function it did in fact serve in the New Testament church.

2. Sketch the basic materials for a new art music. What current artifacts might prove useful if they were abstracted using some of the tools of Western art music, like counterpoint?

3. Sketch some of the materials and tools I plan to use in creating some new music for corporate worship.

I believe musicians need to resume a role God has assigned them in His Church: the nurturers of unity. I believe that we musicians need to reengage with our craft so as to escape the formulas of style. And I believe that God will bless this labor if we adopt the posture of musicians used to have, that of servants.

In this way, evangelical music can be unstuck.

by Matthew Raley The question I'm wrestling with these days is what to do about evangelical music. I have been arguing (here and here) that sacred music should edify people by bringing them together before God, but that evangelical music mostly doesn't try. Instead, it merely pleases groups as segments of the consuming masses.

I divert today into what may seem an irrelevant story, but I plead your patience.

I think too much attention has been paid to recent demographic changes in America and their impact on evangelicalism. For these changes to have any context, we have to examine developments farther back in Western culture. Today, I'll sketch some problems in modernism concerning human individuality, problems that shifted the foundations of art music generally, and specifically undermined sacred music’s mission to edify, as I'll sketch next week.

Consider Thomas Mann’s character Hans Castorp, protagonist of The Magic Mountain.

Hans is from a bourgeois family in Hamburg. In the decade before World War I, he is about to take up his business career as a shipbuilder. On the cusp of this flatland life of science and profit, he journeys to Davos, high in the Swiss Alps, to visit his cousin being treated for a lung infection in a sanatorium. Hans stays there seven years, during which he has a spiritual and philosophical journey.

What does this fictional bourgeois individual feel about his place in the world?

Reinhold Niebuhr, in his Gifford Lectures (The Nature and Destiny of Man, New York: Charles Scribner's Books, 1941), might have answered that Hans was enduring his own gradual destruction.

Many modernists saw the defining human ability as reason. Niebuhr called these the idealists, tracing their philosophical roots back to the classical anthropologies of Plato and Aristotle, among others. The individual human mind, through the sciences, mathematics, and philosophy, could express its greatness by mastering nature.

Hans comes from this rationalist, dominating culture: the shipbuilder from the flatlands.

But other modernists reacted against this view, as well as against its social consequences. They saw relatedness to nature as the defining human characteristic, a view which Niebuhr called romanticist. The romanticists saw primitive social forms and physical drives as more authentic than the machine-like operations of reason. For the individual to express himself, he needed to reach back to this natural vitality.

Which is why Hans stays on the mountain seven years. There, he is interacting with himself, with the mythic power of the altitude, the snow, the erotic, the night sky. The flatlands were not enough.

Niebuhr said (p 21),

The conflict between rationalists and romanticists has become one of the most fateful issues of our day, with every possible religious and political implication. Modern man, in short, cannot determine whether he shall understand himself primarily from the standpoint of the uniqueness of his reason or from the standpoint of his affinity with nature; and if the latter whether it is the harmless order and peace of nature or her vitality which is the real clue to his essence.

Hans is adrift in this confusion, listening to the perpetual debates of the other residents of Davos, who are a kind of microcosm of European social history and ideologies.

Niebuhr analyzed that history. The bourgeoisie rebelled against the feudal order during the Renaissance, and created the modern world through its relentless application of reason and science. “This bourgeois individual felt himself the master of his own destiny and was impatient with both the religious and the political solidarities which characterized both classical and medieval life.” (p 22)

Hans the shipbuilder ought to be on top of the world.

But by using his reason this way, said Niebuhr, the bourgeois individual destroyed his freedom. Niebuhr asserted that “he lost this individuality immediately after establishing it by his destruction of the medieval solidarities. He found himself the artificer of a technical civilization which creates more enslaving mechanical interdependencies and collectivities than anything known in the agrarian world.” (p 22)

By the 19th century, the bourgeois individual was longing to regain his freedom, and he tried through romanticism (pp 81-92). But early romanticism (e.g. Rousseau) dissolved him into a universal consciousness, and romantic nationalism (e.g. Schleiermacher) swept him into a racial collective consciousness, while romantic nihilism (e.g. Nietzsche) unbound him from every restraint and empowered him with cruelty to express his own will.

It is these debates that Hans spends his time listening to, and the reader waits in vain for some resolution that will transform the shipbuilder into a man of vitality.

Hans finally leaves the mountain and is swept into World War I. The reader’s last look at him is not as an individual, but as a soldier in a mass of others on a flatland industrialized battlefield.

In modern times, Niebuhr said, the idea of individuality is “a tragically abortive concept,” destroyed by both of the modern movements that tried to guard it, idealism and romanticism. We are still living with the impact of this failure, only further down the slope of degradation. The American consumer lacks any rationale for living as an individual in community. He wants to be himself. But his sense of community is so dessicated that he ends up looking and sounding like everyone else.

What this death of individuality did to music is the next part of the story.