Musical Pluralism in the 21st Century: A Thousand Tongues Will Never Be Enough

"Presenter: Dr. Harold Best, Former Dean of Wheaton Conservatory of Music and Author of Music Through the Eyes of Faith.

Location: Biola University, La Mirada, CA Time: February 26, 1999

(This is a handout which was given to attendees at Worship! LA)

We live in the most musically diverse country in the history of civilization. In secular culture, the true concept of diversity has been ruined by the academic and social multiculturalists. In the church, the concept has been severely limited by a "traditional-contemporary" dichotomy, coupled to a fear of true, biblically derived newness.

We need to develop a biblical and theological perspective of diversity, derived, among other things, out of a knowledge of the Creator God and a resulting theology of creation itself. We need to understand that diversity is rooted eternally in the way God himself goes about all of his business, including the uninhibited manner in which he thought up and imagined the very creation. God, not a contemporary or trendy arm of culture, is the author of diversity and if the church's musical diversity is to make any sense, it must follow suit on God's ways of doing things, not on current and crimped concepts of how to go about "adding variety."

Once we form a biblical perspective on creational diversity, we can then go on to a concept of human creativity and the amazing diversity that comes of being made in the image of the uncreated Creator and the unimagined Imaginer. Only then can we understand why we must participate in culture while adding to it. That the church, of late, has done very little to add to musical culture is because it has chosen to limit itself to borrowing, following, and adopting, without doing what culture itself does, namely being so forcefully diverse and varied as to be an influence on the church. That the church as a body of newly created creators should only follow what others do, is a theological anomaly. The church will never properly understand or practice true diversity unless it creates in such a way as to take the lead. And who is better equipped to do this than those who have been themselves recreated by the One in whom all true diversity coheres?

As to the interior life of the body of Christ, that is, what this body is mandated to do in its total worship and continual witness, it should be obvious that a theology of diversity should flow organically into and out of a theology of worship and witness. It is not enough to limit diversity to current cultural practices, just as it is not enough to limit worship or witness to those periodic goings-on that are so easily labeled "worship" and "witness." Diversity is an eternal fact, not a passing trend. Just as worship and witness take place by faith alone, so should the practice of diversity.

So, in the context of the near-infinity in musical diversity, and in the face of the biblical mandate to be a new, not just borrowed, creation, how does the local church make musical choices for itself? First and foremost, it makes them by faith - the only thing the just are allowed to live by. Thus, it is not just "what works," what simplistically meets peoples' needs, what, by contrast, shocks the daylights out of them, or what Church X or Y does to guarantee its own local successes. Rather, each church must know the Lord well, must think and act biblically, must know itself and its resources in a totally honest way, and out of these, make choices based on a discerning concept of what diversity means. Local authenticity done poorly is a far better thing than borrowed niceties and imported novelty.

We cannot forget that the church is a community of peculiar, set-apart, new creations. This is not a denial of the world and the artistic leadership and options it provides, but an acknowledgment that being biblically different is part of a vast "scandal," so mysteriously deep and wide that, in the world's eyes, we are foolish and of no consequence, yet enabled to add transformingly to what the world provides us. This certainly has musical implications, in that "being foolish" may turn out to be a proclamation of what it means to be a new creation. The irony of "contemporary" (as in contemporary worship) is that it has become its own settled, frozen, narrowed, tradition. Neither "traditional" nor "contemporary" denotes anything about an originating, new creation. The only difference is that one is slightly older than the other, but both are woefully unfresh, undemanding, and backward looking. It is not that we have dumbed people down in some socio-cultural sense. It is that we have dumbed down the very image of God in each of us.

In order for us to fulfill the biblical concepts of diversity, and in order to offset our present feeble attempts at alternative or blended worship, and our fear of being biblically upsetting, we must pray that the Holy Sprit Himself will "breathe upon the waters"; that He will break us and cause us to break forth with a literally new and unafraid song. We must forge a new synthesis, a new set of musical dialects that we present to Jesus, then to ourselves, and as if God Himself were making His appeal through us, to a fallen, though actively creative, world. This will take courage and will place musical action in its proper light, as an evidence of something greater than music itself rather than the flawed attempt to be like the rest and grow like the rest. Only then will the church discover the delightful truth that a thousand tongues will never be enough and that transformed people are themselves transformers.