Breakthrough...

So I'm (is it annoying to start a sentence with 'So I...'?) listening to Kari Jobe's Majestic album (with DVD version of 'Forever' inserted which I'll get back to in a minute) and the issue I have with modern worship songs hit me.

I have frequently questioned, even called into question, their theology. This album is no exception. In fact, from the song above when I heard the line 'Heaven looked away' it was like a record (yes, a record, showing my age) scratching. There is a theology out there that the Father turned His back on Jesus when He was on the cross, that He couldn't look. That always sounded to me a bit schizophrenic. Still does. So this verse troubled me. I was able to somewhat temper this by noting that the verse says 'Heaven' and not 'the Father' and so, I suppose, there could be something in that. But I haven't considered what heaven looking away actually means.

The album, along with Jobe's modern Christian voice pattern, resonates well on an emotional core. It 'feels' really powerful. And then I realized: that's it, that's what both bothers me and moves me. It is the emotional content. 

I'm currently reading about a particular Orthodox view of the Spirit and they clearly link the Spirit and the Son together inseparably. One without the other is just not possible. A critique by some of Western theology is that the Spirit and the Son are often parsed and pursued separately and several of the songs on this album sing to the Spirit. Yet in those same songs they throw 'God' in there and talk about His (God's? The Spirit's?) presence. Here is the verse in question:

"Holy Spirit You are welcome here
 Come flood this place and fill the atmosphere
 Your Glory God is what our hearts long for
 To be overcome by Your Presence Lord."

Spirit, God and Lord are all throw in there in what sound to me like a convoluted stew. Is this a Trinitarian verse? We are often so 'Jesus' focused that the theological language such as those in the song above veer either into a quantum type of theology where we are asked to hold any such questions in a superposition of unknowing or we veer rapidly toward a Oneness theology where it's all Jesus.

But the songs 'feel' really good. And our experiences, whether individually or corporately, are often projected into these songs and their emotional import and we conflate the 'spirit' with 'emotion' and when these emotional highs happen, especially when they occur collectively, there is a 'move of the Spirit' in the church.

I'm an old raver so understand the fever pitch of when a club is lit and the DJ builds that story into the perfect crescendo and you 'feel' it and the energy is unmistakable. And this is often the high we (or is it me?) seek when there. I cannot say this is necessarily a bad thing as it can unify and bring people together. Jesus is quoted as saying that where two or three are gathered in His name there He is in the midst. So in that regard, is it really so bad? 

After all, these are some musicians - not theologians - who wrote a worship song.

In the context of the argument that the Western churches often separate the Spirit from the Son, there is some validity to that argument. Many songs cry out to the Holy Spirit. Is it worship to the Spirit or is it a rallying cry to the church for focus and sensitivity to the fact that if we are calling on Jesus as Lord the Spirit is already in our midst? 

"From the filioque Protestantism has at times deduced a separation of the Spirit from Christ and, consequently, having preserved the idea of the transcendence of Christ, it has substituted the presence of the Spirit for the presence of Christ." (Theology and the Church, p. 108)

On the flip side, these churches are actively seeking the Spirit so the critique about the Magisterium - primarily Catholic though often in the more staid Protest Churches as well - being set up in place of the Spirit it throws some cold water on that argument as many in the non-denominational (or post-denominational) church would agree about the 'dead' churches for whom the Spirit has been stifled and this pursuit of experience, pursuit of the Spirit, is a response to that longing.

This is where Tradition has become a caricature and is a negative word equated to being spiritually cold and dead. If it is an emotional high that is sought then absolutely this appears dead. But if willing to absorb the 'Tradition', not in a negative way, but as passed on for hundreds, even thousands, of years because it is a carrier of Truth than perhaps we're all missing the mark.

We all have the same vision, no matter how splintered we are as a human community and no matter how much the language we use is different and no matter how much we struggle to communicate this truth and no matter how much our selfish desires to be 'right' interfere.