Imagination and Song

Reggie Kidd is the real deal. He has written a book, With One Voice, that discusses how Christ being the Singing Savior should impact our worship and connectedness with God. For those perspectivalists out there, Reggie comprises a good Framean scalene triangle when it comes to worship (you need to have taken a theology class with Frame to understand the degree to which you get an education in basic triangular geometry as well as theology in his classes). Reggie teaches Worship at RTS (N). He is a pastor of worship at a local PCA church near Orlando (S). And he has a great personal (existential) interest in music that is a major component of his personal faith walk (E).

Early in WOV, Reggie articulates a rather simple but penetrating observation. He says:

Disbelief today is not a function of logic; it stems from a loss of imagination. When a college student is told by her professor that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John cannot be read as literal truth anymore, it's not the supporting evidence he offers that does her in. Nobody has found Jesus's bones in a tomb. No scandalous news bulletin is 'just in' on the apostles. It's the professor's imperious tone of voice - and the fact that when our student looks around the classroom she sees no hands raised in dissent. She doesn't know anybody whose life is governed by the Gospels...Arguably the chief icon-maker of her day, Walt Disney, taught her to 'wish upon a star' but not to pray to a living God. This is what theologian David Kelsey means when he says that faith is faltering because 'plausibility structures' have decayed; 'authoritative community' has been in decline, and a culture of disbelief has taken over. The facts haven't changed. The things that make the Christian hope thinkable have changed. (pp. 22-3)

Reggie then notes that Paul seemingly anticipated this very problem when he said that the church is the pillar and support of the truth in 1 Tim. 3.15. The Bible offers us the plausibility structure that makes the claims of Christianity plausible - the church worshipping the true God in vibrant community. To once again stir up the kind of imagination that makes Christianity plausible to the culture, Reggie says that the culture needs to see this imagination at work among Christians themselves. He ably notes:

In the fact of the deconstruction of the Christian view of reality, the great cultural task of Christians is the reclamation of the imagination. This needs to be worked out across a broad front...[but] as vital as anything is the way they engage the arts: painting, sculpture, literature, poetry, cinema, dance, architecture, and, of course, music. (p. 23)

The rest of the book flushes out this idea in specific regard to music. For Reggie, "music opens the imagination to the possibility that what we see is not all there is." Reggie believes that the Christian faith is necessarily sung because this is part of how we own our faith better and both internalize it more deeply and externally profess it more convincingly.

When we worship in church, we should expect God to show up in song. We should anticipate our imagination being reawakened and renewed through song. If worship is failing to accomplish these things, something's wrong either with the song or with our reception/expression of it, or both. In many ways, Scripture itself can be seen as a lengthy song of redemption. As a practical matter, many sections of both Testaments are obvious songs/hymns, or exhibit clearly hymn-like meter. The 150th Psalm boldly depicts the grand convergence of eschatological worship, where instruments of all kinds (and this alone is an interesting story) join together harmoniously to praise God.

Reggie is right. Worship is not just about us. Through song, we move closer in our intimacy with God, and God moves closer in his intimacy with us. To believe this requires the kind of imagination that the culture has largely lost. But how wonderful is it to firmly believe such a thing, not just because it sounds good, but because we know it's true because we've experienced it personally!! This is the kind of imagination through song that can reclaim a soul, a nation, a cosmos. As with many other things, the duty of the Christian is to show the world the truth and power of this kind of imagination, and witness God multiplying its effects.