How Pietism Ruined Music
When Luther “turned the world upside down” with his 95 theses, he brought to a climax a long period of radical changes. For a while, the Reformation not only offered people a new church environment, but also brought changes to the church of Rome. But time moves on and new influences began to emerge, in particular Pietism. While Pietism is perhaps better known for its antinomian tendencies, it had other debilitating influences that remain to this day.
In this religious environment, reminiscent of the mystical movements of the Middle Ages, it became important to arrive at a revelation of God through subjective experiences that were not bound by the doctrines of the Church. In this sense, Pietism was matching that other great philosophical movement of its time, the Enlightenment, seeking truth subjectively. However, the Enlightenment, rather than seeking God inwardly, suggested God was just a figment of a person’s subjective imagination.
The Pietists significantly influenced theology which, in turn, led to a change in music, both inside and outside the church. Jaroslav Pelikan, in his book Bach Among the Theologians observed that “Pietist spirituality had, by the time of Bach, acquired an increasingly distinctive tone in its description of the relation between the individual soul and Jesus.”
Pelikan noted that “a study of Pietist vocabulary would certainly show that in both homiletics and hymnody ‘Jesus’ superseded ‘Christ’ or ‘Jesus Christ’ as the most common name, and — perhaps even more significant — that ‘Savior [Heiland]‘ replaced ‘Lord [Herr]‘ as the most common title.”
While initial Pietist distinctives did not immediately revise orthodox doctrine, “Nevertheless, the way Pietism came to interpret the relation of the soul to Jesus entailed a shift in emphasis from objective to subjective, from the idea of ‘Christ for us,’ which had predominated in orthodox interpretations both before and after the Reformation, to a primary interest in ‘Christ in us,’ which had never been absent from orthodoxy but which had been pronouncedly subordinated to the primary concern with the objectivity of the Gospel history and of the redemptive transaction on the historic cross.”
Pietism — and the Enlightenment — freed man from ritual. Now he could worship God in any manner that took his fancy. And so religious music, once tied firmly to the liturgy, could make its own way free from constraints. The result has been the willing acceptance of all forms of music into church worship and an attempt to “baptize” music that doesn’t belong there in in order to make it acceptable.
The solution to the music in our worship, however, is tied to a solution of liturgical issues. As Paul Henry Lang observed in his Music in Western Civilization, “The lack of liturgy, the theological and philosophical insecurity, and the retention of traditions without compelling convictions led to a well-nigh complete disintegration of Protestant church music. This should not be taken to mean a complete absence of music, for this was not the case, but the specific genius of Protestant church music became extinct” (p. 701).
When you hear the phrase “Protestant Christianity” today, it is helpful to remember that the theology of the Reformation has been pushed through the Pietist’s seive of subjectivism and came out somewhat unrecognizable. In this environment it is almost pointless to argue about objective words in Scripture, since the emphasis is on inward feelings, emotions, relationships, rather than an objective Word. Mystical communion with God through prayer replaces the Scripture as God’s ultimate communication to His creation.
By insisting that the liturgy consisted primarily of preaching, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper, Protestantism left itself with little on which to hang the remainder of the worship service. Hymns — the rejection of the Psalter — and prayers, interspersed with a little Bible reading, became the “new” liturgy. Formality became interspersed with informality, a mixing of the sacred and the profane, a mixture the church of the Middle Ages rejected, although in practice not always successful. In this fashion, there is no reason to exclude rock music, since it is not tied to any particular part of the formal liturgy; it is used merely to express a religious sentiment of the moment, just as the hymns had done earlier. Sentiment and liturgy, however, are not identical at all points.
So I have good and bad news for you. Rock music is not yet going to disappear. But there are signs of a return to the Psalter, and this is the beginning of real change.
There is more, however. The beauty of liturgical forms are that they bring together history and doctrine, the key to our faith. Thus the liturgy is driven by objectivity, “Christ for us” rather than sentiment, “Christ in us.” There will be no change in the music, therefore, without a change in the liturgy first. To try to change the music without the liturgy is putting the cart before the horse, an exercise bound to lead to disappointment.
The low view of liturgy, however, also helps explain why contemporary Christianity is challenged by the external culture of another religion and unable to make headway against it. Many Christians have trouble understanding the development of Christendom — the expansion of Christianity and the conversion of unbelievers to accept Christ as King, the Redeemer who did all that was necessary for the redemption of his people. The tendency is to accept that the Reformation gave us a better theology, abandoning the Old Order and replacing it with numerous solas. Unfortunately, when it came to music — real music that put religious principles ahead of aesthetic principles — the Calvinist wing of the Reformation threw the proverbial baby out with the bath water. The Pietists did the same later where Calvinism failed to have this influence. The result for Western culture and church — as opposed to religious — music has been disastrous.
The answer to the rock music debate, then, has something to do with our practice — our liturgy — both ecclesiastical and in the family.
