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The First Christians Didn't Sing with Instruments · Theology Made Podcast

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  [music]
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  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Theology Made podcast.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm Jordan Vale.
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  SPEAKER_00: In today's episode,
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  SPEAKER_00: we're going to look at how the first Christians didn't sing with instruments.
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  SPEAKER_00: Every church you've ever attended has taken a side in a fight, whether it knew it or not.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe your church's side was a pipe organ,
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  SPEAKER_00: the 50-rank kind that makes the pews vibrate on the last verse.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's a grand piano in a choir.
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  SPEAKER_00: More than likely,
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  SPEAKER_00: it's a full band,
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  SPEAKER_00: in-ear monitors, a subwoofer you feel in your sternum, and a fog machine.
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  SPEAKER_00: Somewhere in your church's past,
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  SPEAKER_00: probably even in living memory,
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  SPEAKER_00: people argued bitterly about which of these honors God.
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  SPEAKER_00: Churches have split over it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Families have changed congregations over it.
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  SPEAKER_00: In the 1990s, we gave the fight a name, The Worship Wars.
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  SPEAKER_00: Bum, bum, bum.
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  SPEAKER_00: As if it were new.
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  SPEAKER_00: So here's the record.
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  SPEAKER_00: For roughly the first 800 years of Christianity,
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  SPEAKER_00: the argument didn't exist because the answer was clear.
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  SPEAKER_00: No organ, no piano, no band, no instruments at all.
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  SPEAKER_00: The early church sang.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it sang constantly in prison cells and catacombs and before dawn under the threat of death.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it sang with the only instrument it believed belonged in Christian worship, the human voice.
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  SPEAKER_00: Every traditional life today,
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  SPEAKER_00: from the cathedral organ to the arena stage,
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  SPEAKER_00: is downstream of a decision to overturn that.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the story of how it got overturned includes
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  SPEAKER_00: a Byzantine emperor's diplomatic gift,
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  SPEAKER_00: the finest musician of the Reformation ripping organs out of churches,
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  SPEAKER_00: And your grandmother's organ playing the role,
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  SPEAKER_00: once upon a time, of this scandalous new invader.
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  SPEAKER_00: Cue up the church gasp.
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  SPEAKER_00: The New Testament church is drenched in song.
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  SPEAKER_00: Jesus and the disciples sing a hymn at the Last Supper and walk out of the Mount
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  SPEAKER_00: of Olives while it's still in the air.
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  SPEAKER_00: Paul and Silas,
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  SPEAKER_00: beaten and chained in the Philippian jail at midnight,
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  SPEAKER_00: sing hymns loud enough that the other prisoners listen.
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  SPEAKER_00: Paul tells the Ephesians to address one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.
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  SPEAKER_00: And tells the Colossians the same, singing with thankfulness in your hearts.
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  SPEAKER_00: James' prescription is simple.
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  SPEAKER_00: Is anyone cheerful?
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  SPEAKER_00: Let him sing praise.
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  SPEAKER_00: Scholars can even spot fragments of the church's actual early hymns embedded in
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  SPEAKER_00: the letters, like the great Christ poem of Philippians 2.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now search that entire record for a single instrument in Christian worship.
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  SPEAKER_00: A lyre in a house church, a flute at the Lord's Supper, anything?
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  SPEAKER_00: Nothing.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not one string, not one pipe, anywhere in the New Testament's picture of the gathered church.
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  SPEAKER_00: And here's what makes that deafening, no pun intended, rather than accidental.
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  SPEAKER_00: These people's own Bible commands instruments.
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  SPEAKER_00: This altar they sang from says,
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  SPEAKER_00: praise him with trumpet,
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  SPEAKER_00: praise him with the harp and lyre,
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  SPEAKER_00: with tambourine, with strings and pipe and crashing cymbals.
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  SPEAKER_00: Psalm 150 is practically an orchestra pit.
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  SPEAKER_00: The temple in Jerusalem had employed professional Levitical musicians for a thousand years.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the first Christians, they knew all of this.
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  SPEAKER_00: They sang those very psalms, but they left the harps on the wall anyway.
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  SPEAKER_00: Part of the answer is inheritance.
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  SPEAKER_00: The early church's musical DNA came from the synagogue, and synagogue worship was voices.
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  SPEAKER_00: Instruments belonged to the temple,
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  SPEAKER_00: and in the Jewish mind, they were welded to one thing, sacrifice.
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  SPEAKER_00: Trumpets and cymbals sounded while offerings burned.
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  SPEAKER_00: When the temple fell in the year 70,
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  SPEAKER_00: that entire sound world went silent,
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  SPEAKER_00: and the rabbis kept it silent partly in mourning.
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  SPEAKER_00: The church, meanwhile, had drawn its own conclusion.
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  SPEAKER_00: The final sacrifice had already been offered.
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  SPEAKER_00: The system the instruments accompanied was complete.
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  SPEAKER_00: What remained was what Hebrews calls the sacrifice of praise defined in
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  SPEAKER_00: the same breath, the fruit of lips that confess his name.
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  SPEAKER_00: The other part of the answer was the neighborhood.
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  SPEAKER_00: In a Roman city, instruments came preloaded with associations, and these associations were bad.
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  SPEAKER_00: There was the double reed pipe.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was the soundtrack of pagan sacrifice and of parties that ended badly.
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  SPEAKER_00: Cymbals and drums belonged to the ecstatic cults.
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  SPEAKER_00: The rites of Seinbell were devotees working themselves into frenzy.
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  SPEAKER_00: The theater and the arena had their own instrumental brands.
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  SPEAKER_00: For a convert in Corinth or Carthage, the sound of pipes and cymbals wasn't a neutral sound.
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  SPEAKER_00: It smelled like the old gods.
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  SPEAKER_00: So not surprising, the church fathers, when they discuss instruments, they aren't fans.
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  SPEAKER_00: Clement of Alexandria around the year 200 says to leave the pipe to the shepherds
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  SPEAKER_00: and the flute to the superstitious.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then offers up what becomes the tradition's primary signature.
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  SPEAKER_00: He spiritualizes the whole orchestra.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Lord's instrument, Clement says, is the human being.
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  SPEAKER_00: You are the harp, your tongue is the string.
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  SPEAKER_00: A couple centuries later,
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  SPEAKER_00: the golden mouth preacher, he had the same image, but he gave it a better line.
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  SPEAKER_00: David had a lyre with lifeless strings, and the church has a lyre with living ones.
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  SPEAKER_00: And when Christians did explain what their music was for, they said things instruments can't do.
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  SPEAKER_00: Paul's command was to address one another in song,
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  SPEAKER_00: teaching, and We even have the sound described by an outsider.
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  SPEAKER_00: Pliny's interrogation report to the Emperor Trojan around 1112,
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  SPEAKER_00: the one we met in the Sunday episode a while back,
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  SPEAKER_00: The Christians gather before dawn and sing,
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  SPEAKER_00: he says, alternatively, back and forth, a hymn to Christ as to a God.
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  SPEAKER_00: Voices in the Dark.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's the whole production.
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  SPEAKER_00: There's no stage, there's no drum kit.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the governor of Lithynia found it strange enough to write to Rome about.
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  SPEAKER_00: And in case you think, well,
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  SPEAKER_00: maybe that was just poverty,
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  SPEAKER_00: that they'd have plugged it in if they could,
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  SPEAKER_00: notice how long the practice outlived the persecution.
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  SPEAKER_00: Centuries after Constantine,
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  SPEAKER_00: with imperial basilicas and golden vessels and professional choirs,
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  SPEAKER_00: the church of both East and West was still singing unaccompanied.
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  SPEAKER_00: The name of that style,
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  SPEAKER_00: the one we still use, is the tell, a cappella, in the manner of the chapel.
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  SPEAKER_00: The phrase exists because for most of Christian history, chapel style meant voices alone.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Eastern Orthodox churches, by and large, sing that way to this day.
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  SPEAKER_00: Walk into a Greek or Russian liturgy and you're hearing,
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  SPEAKER_00: in one real sense, the oldest continuous sound in Christianity.
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  SPEAKER_00: So where did the organ come from?
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  SPEAKER_00: And it came from diplomacy, of all things.
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  SPEAKER_00: The organ was a Greco-Roman instrument invented by an engineer in Alexandria
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  SPEAKER_00: a couple of centuries before Christ.
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  SPEAKER_00: And in the empire, it was secular equipment used for circuses, banquets, the hippodrome.
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  SPEAKER_00: Charlemagne's court acquired the technology,
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  SPEAKER_00: and over the following two or three centuries,
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  SPEAKER_00: organs slowly crept from palaces into the great churches of the West,
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  SPEAKER_00: as much for grandeur and civic pride as for liturgy.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I think crept is the best word because the welcome was colder
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  SPEAKER_00: than someone bringing baked chicken to a church potluck.
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  SPEAKER_00: Monastic writers grumbled about the bellows and the noise.
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  SPEAKER_00: And as late as the 1200s,
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  SPEAKER_00: Thomas Aquinas could write matter-of-factly that
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  SPEAKER_00: the church does not use musical instruments such as harps
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  SPEAKER_00: in divine praise lest it seem to Judaize.
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  SPEAKER_00: His word for slipping back into the temple system.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that's interesting.
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  SPEAKER_00: At the Middle Ages high noon,
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  SPEAKER_00: the greatest theologian alive describes instrument-free worship as
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  SPEAKER_00: the church's standing position, even as organs were spreading around him.
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  SPEAKER_00: The organ eventually won.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it won the way technologies normally do, by becoming familiar.
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  SPEAKER_00: By the late Middle Ages, it was the sound of Western Christianity itself.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then came the Reformation, and the fight reopened with a vengeance.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it produced one of my favorite ironies in Church history.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Reformation split three ways.
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  SPEAKER_00: Luther, who loved music, he kept it all.
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  SPEAKER_00: Organs, choirs, congregational hymns, and he wrote a few bangers himself.
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  SPEAKER_00: Calvin and Geneva stripped worship down to unaccompanied psalms.
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  SPEAKER_00: The whole congregation sang in scripture with no instruments underneath it.
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  SPEAKER_00: And Zurich went furthest of all under Gilberts Zwingli,
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  SPEAKER_00: who oversaw the removal of the organs from the city's churches in 1527.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the irony of that is Zwingli was by every account the most gifted musician
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  SPEAKER_00: of all the major reformers.
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  SPEAKER_00: He played something like ten instruments.
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  SPEAKER_00: And he didn't ban the organ because he couldn't appreciate it.
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  SPEAKER_00: He banned it because he concluded that in worship it fed the performance and star of
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  SPEAKER_00: the congregation.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that Reformed conviction sailed to America and still lives.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Churches of Christ sing a cappella to this day
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  SPEAKER_00: and can quote you probably every text in this episode.
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  SPEAKER_00: Some Reformed Presbyterian congregations still sing unaccompanied psalms.
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  SPEAKER_00: And they aren't being eccentric.
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  SPEAKER_00: They're the last people standing on what was once the only position in Christendom.
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  SPEAKER_00: By the 19th century,
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  SPEAKER_00: the organ,
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  SPEAKER_00: the instrument that had entered the church over the objections of monks and against
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  SPEAKER_00: the stated position of Aquinas,
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  SPEAKER_00: had become the very definition of traditional worship.
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  SPEAKER_00: So when revivalists started using brass bands and Ira Sankey's cabinet organ
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  SPEAKER_00: and eventually guitars, the defenders of tradition objected in the name of...
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  SPEAKER_00: The organ.
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  SPEAKER_00: The invader had become the fortress.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then the Jesus people plugged in electric guitars in the 1970s and drums crossed
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  SPEAKER_00: the threshold,
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  SPEAKER_00: and the worship wars of the 80s and 90s ran the whole script again,
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  SPEAKER_00: with the piano now cast as the ancient heritage under assault.
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  SPEAKER_00: Every generation's scandal becomes the next generation's sacred inheritance.
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  SPEAKER_00: The organ your grandmother defended may be one day, dare I say it, the fog machine.
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  SPEAKER_00: Which tells you something important.
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  SPEAKER_00: The church has never actually resolved this.
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  SPEAKER_00: It just kept moving the line and forgetting.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so here's what I'm saying.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because I don't want to disturb noise.
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  SPEAKER_00: I don't think this is a command to unplug your church.
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  SPEAKER_00: I don't do villains.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the instrument question is one
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  SPEAKER_00: where scripture's New Testament silence has been read honorably in every direction.
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  SPEAKER_00: Luther's reading built Bach.
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  SPEAKER_00: And you're not going to catch me prosecuting a case against Bach.
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  SPEAKER_00: But underneath the old acapella conviction was a concern that has nothing to do
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  SPEAKER_00: with pipes versus fenders and whether the drum should be behind a cage.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it has everything to do with us.
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  SPEAKER_00: The fathers resisted instruments partly because instruments performed for people,
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  SPEAKER_00: and a Christian song,
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  SPEAKER_00: as Paul defined it, is something the congregation does to one another.
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  SPEAKER_00: The measure of worship music on the ancient view was never the excellence coming off
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  SPEAKER_00: the platform.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was whether the room itself was singing.
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  SPEAKER_00: And by that measure, we have a modern problem the early church would spot in about 40 seconds.
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  SPEAKER_00: Ask any worship leader,
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  SPEAKER_00: in any style, traditional or contemporary, and they'll tell you about it.
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  SPEAKER_00: The first Christians had no instruments and everyone sang.
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  SPEAKER_00: We have every instrument ever built and increasingly the room watches.
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  SPEAKER_00: Somewhere before dawn,
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  SPEAKER_00: around the year 112,
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  SPEAKER_00: a Roman governor's informants stood outside a gathering they had been sent
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  SPEAKER_00: to investigate,
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  SPEAKER_00: and what they heard coming out of the dark was voices,
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  SPEAKER_00: back and forth,
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  SPEAKER_00: one side answering the other,
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  SPEAKER_00: singing to Christ as to a god,
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  SPEAKER_00: dock workers and slaves and laundry women,
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  SPEAKER_00: no accompaniment,
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  SPEAKER_00: no performance,
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  SPEAKER_00: every person in the room carrying the sound together at real risk,
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  SPEAKER_00: because the song was the point,
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  SPEAKER_00: and that sound, it was strong enough to worry an empire.
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  SPEAKER_00: So here's the question this history leaves on your music stand,
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  SPEAKER_00: and it applies to every church and every style with anything on the stage or nothing
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  SPEAKER_00: at all.
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  SPEAKER_00: If everything with a plug and a pipe went silent this Sunday,
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  SPEAKER_00: would your congregation still be singing?
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  SPEAKER_00: Because that part,
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  SPEAKER_00: the room full of ordinary voices,
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  SPEAKER_00: addressing one another about Christ,
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  SPEAKER_00: that's the instrument the first Christians refused to replace.
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  SPEAKER_00: Everything else is arrangements.
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  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening to Theology Made.
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  SPEAKER_00: If you enjoyed this and found it helpful,
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  SPEAKER_00: please like and subscribe on whatever platform you're listening on.