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LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2
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>> PAUL: Thank you for your response to Nick’s question.
Along those same lines, how do the confessional principles
assist with choices about music for worship?
>> DR. JAMES BRAUER: OK, Paul. This is where we want to
get with the pastoral decisions of working with a
congregation about choices of music. That's the reason we
have principles to work from. So that the central principle
is obviously that justification is by grace through faith
in Jesus Christ. This is what we hold up to be believed. So
our fifth principle about the purpose of worship is
obviously then going to work from that to offer continually
what God gives in forgiveness, life, salvation and which we
believe every time we gather.
We also want to think in terms of what is that gift giving
and what is the response because we're also going to ask
for fruits of faith within that worship service. So music
can serve both sides. And that's what we need to examine.
How can it assist the gift? How can it assist the response?
You can think of music as a tool, then, for serving this.
It may be three kinds of music, shall we say. Two kinds
have text, that which may be chanted, and you can
distinguish that kind of music from what is sung that has a
rhythmic background to it like a hymn, a psalm. And you can
think of just purely instrumental music. Now, that middle
category with congregation singing a song, it could also be
a part of the congregation, a choir. So those are kind of
the categories within which we work. And under the first
category, chanted, that might be a single voice, a pastor.
It may be the congregation singing something that doesn't
have this rhythm of underpinning.
Then we can ask for each of those moments that has a text
or opportunity to use music -- and were going to focus
first on text-assisted music. Does the music help the
moment of the worship? Or does the music distract from it?
Obviously, if music is powerful in that it can carry and
present a message that's nonverbal in its own way, but
powerful in connecting with emotions and causing people to
have remembrances of other experiences with music or
occasions, then we want to select music which does that
helping side, and not distracting.
Then we can also examine the text itself. Is this a form of
text that helps to make clear what God says, or does it
distort the message? Does it distract from the real message
that God would like us to have? Does it make it fuzzy, or
does the text really bring forth the doctrine and the way
of life of God? So that's a theological question you ask of
the text.
So you can now divide the question about music into the
musical questions and the text questions. In both cases, we
want to use our *lex orandi, lex credendi principle which,
simply put, is what people are going to be believing is
what they hear and experience as text within the service,
what they experience as the elements of worship. We want
those to be entirely of God, Godly, fitting with what he
said. So the pastor’s first response to the principle
applied to music is to think is the text proper. If it's
not proper, then it has no place. Then you ask how does the
music assist the moment of worship. If it's to praise God,
does it totally distract them because it's too powerful
music, or it causes them to remember some other kind of
occasion, then it's not very helpful, and it could be a
distracting type of music and it won't fit.
This connects now to our eighth principle, the one about
culture. And we have to keep in mind that this is a
continuous judgment, a use of critical reasoning and
thinking along with your people every year. So it doesn't
solidify, and it isn't just a repetition from one year, one
decade to the next. This can change over time depending on
the people.
For the cultural adaptation of worship, the continuously
keeping it meaningful and fitting to their way of living,
causes us to rethink a lot of those questions. For example,
in American society, and then globally of course, we had
with Elvis Presley and his generation of music, a sudden
incorporation into the popular music world a strong beat
that runs the whole piece and a simplifying of melody, a
simplifying of harmonic factors. If you would go to the
music that came from the popular music world twenty or
thirty years earlier, you would discover there was a much
wider range of harmonic vocabulary and melodic moves.
Because the beat drove it, and that was the central
experience, and this was, you could observe, borrowed from
the African way of designing music, as opposed to the
European way of making melodies when many melodies at once,
the polyphony, that particular factor being brought as a
central structure to the piece changed it significantly. So
the generations that followed that grew up, and that is
their kind of natural habitat for music, they're going to
be looking for that be quality. In fact, it's kind of
surprising that Lutheran Worship in the two canticles that
we know on Page 158, the Divine Service II, Setting One,
introduced music for "This is the Feast," a brand new text
that is beat driven. Likewise, "Thank the Lord and sing his
praise," after Holy Communion is beat driven music. Now, I
don't know anybody in my circles that thinks of it that
way, but I can just tell you it's very clear when you
examine it comparing to what was in the Lutheran Hymnal for
those kind of texts. They were not beat driven, but
suddenly it was. And this was by a more artistic kind of
composer Richard *Heller and this is true of other
compositions for the service.
So this cultural fit is a changing thing, depending on who
you have. We'll be talking more about it later. But we want
the music to serve, to make clear what God offers in Jesus
Christ, and to express in a way that seems fitting to the
people that gather with you and express their thankfulness
to God in their prayers. And that's a fit you have to
continually work at it.