You Are What You Sing

 Note: This is a slightly edited repost from September, 2010.

If you’ve been to an average American church, no doubt you know what a cheesy Christian song is all about.  From “Shine Jesus Shine” to “From The Inside Out” to “I Can Only Imagine,” solid theology is out and emotions and feelings are in.   I like what Stephen Nichols has to say about this.  Commenting on “I Can Only Imagine,” he writes that it

“…Has a rich sound and explicitly religious, even Christian, lyrics, but in the end it presents a rather vacuous theology.  These crossover artists remind me somewhat of the Osmonds.  They are wholesome, safe, and clean-cut, especially compared to their purely secular counterparts, but you can listen for a long time and not hear anything overtly Mormon.  Perhaps the same could be said of Christian crossover artists.  They too are wholesome, safe, and clean-cut, but not much Christianity crosses over with them.”

“In some ways this problem confronts more than the crossover artists.  The whole sweep of CCM may come under its purview.  CCM itself attempts to crossover, combining tastes and styles of the popular culture with the sensibilities and (a modicum of) the lyrics of church music.  How well it straddles that fence becomes a point of debate.  One problem that arises, however, is what CCM communicates in general about evangelicalism’s ambivalence to culture.  While the early days of Jesus music had an edge, arising as it did from the streets, CCM today has dulled the edge, producing music that is safe, not all that complex and artistically ranking a little below the songs on pop albums that don’t make it into radio circulation.”

“CCM has become ghettoized, the Christian suburban youth’s counter to what their unchurched friends listen to.  James Davidson Hunter refers to this dynamic as parallel institutionalism, which means that you can listen to Christian music on Christian radio stations or at Christian concerts or on CDs brought at Christian stores.  You can even download Christian ringtones for your phone bought, hopefully, from a Christian-owned-and-operated kiosk at the mall.”

“Hank Hill, the character from the animated series King of the Hill, sagaciously quipped in relation to Christian rock, ‘You aren’t making Christianity better, you’re just making rock and roll worse.’” (p. 134-5).

Since Christians learn much of their theology from the songs they sing in corporate worship (and privately), no wonder American Christianity is a mile wide but only an inch deep.  You really can’t expect Christians singing quasi-Christian pop music week after week to mature into doctrinally sound believers (cf. Heb 5.13).  The phrase “you are what you sing” might be a little cumbersome, but there is for sure some truth to it.

Get this book by Stephen Nichols: Jesus: Made In America (Downers’ Grove: IVP, 2008).

rev shane lems

The Jesus of American Consumerism (or: The Commodified Jesus)

 Here’s a great piece from Stephen Nichols’ wonderful book, Jesus: Made in America.  Nichols asks the question: “What happens to Christ in this culture of consumerism?  This question becomes all the more urgent when the negative influence of the commercialization and marketing of Christ gets noticed by a watching and increasingly more cynical public.”

“Such marketing of Christianity hasn’t escaped the ever-sardonic, animated show The Simpsons.  In an episode entitled “She of Little Faith,” disaster has come to Springfield as a rocket, launched by Homer Simpson, crashes into the church.  Left without resources to repair the church, the congregation consents to allow Mr. Burns, looking rather devilish, to rebuild the church join the condition that it operates like a business.  The church will now be sponsored, like a NASCAR team, complete with banners and commercial announcements by the pastor during the sermons.  Pews are replaced with theater seats, and kiosks surround the interior of the church auditorium, along with concession stands and JumboTrons.”

“Amidst the gaping mouths and wide eyes, the sagacious character Lisa is dumbfounded.  She asks, ‘What are they doing to the church?” only to be met with the reply, “We’re re-branding it.  The old church was skewing pious.  We prefer a faith-based emporium with impulse-buy items.”  The new church is also re-branding Jesus.  Throughout the building , the sacred and the secular mix, as religious icons appear alongside corporate logos.  One such icon is a prominently placed statue of Jesus, complete with a lasso.  When Lisa skeptically asks about it, Homer replies that Jesus looks like a cowboy ‘because he’s all man.’  Disgusted, Lisa leaves the church, embracing Buddhism through the help of Richard Gere, playing a caricature of himself.  By the end of the episode she realizes that leaving Christianity means leaving Christmas, which means leaving presents.  The siren call lures her back.”

Here are Nichols’ conclusions.

“Escaping consumer culture indeed is tricky business.  Materialism, since the time the golden calf hopped out of the fire for the Israelites in the wilderness, seduces and draws us in.  The seduction becomes all the more entangling when these commodities and products, their makers tell us, aid in the task of evangelizing.  Why wouldn’t you buy the T-shirt, bumper sticker or wall plaque if, as an added bonus, someone might come to Christ because of your bold and unashamed witness?  In a culture with such pressures, commodifying Christ becomes all to easy.  Equally, such selling of Jesus becomes all too problematic, if not lethal, for the church and the gospel.  The truth is, to many in the watching world, consumer Christianity is sacrilegious, not to mention that it just plain looks silly, which is precisely the lesson taught in this parable of The Simpsons episode.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Here’s the book info: Stephen Nichols, Jesus: Made in America, pages 175-176.

shane lems

New Book: Reading the Bible as the Story of Redemption

  Here’s a new book that has to do with reading God’s Word rightly and for profit: Welcome to the Story by Stephen Nichols.  In just over 150 pages, Nichols introduces the main storyline of the Bible, how our lives fit into that story, and how to read the Bible (story).  This is a helpful “big picture” introduction to profitable Bible study.

To give a little more detail, Nichols discusses creation, fall, redemption, and restoration.  He then gives some specific examples of individuals in the Bible’s story and examines the main point of the story (God’s glory).  In the last section, Nichols explains what the Bible does to us and through us.  He closes by giving some practical advice for reading the Bible.  Along the way, Nichols covers most of the main truths of the faith in this book, including sin and bondage, salvation in Christ, Christian service out of gratitude, and so forth.

As a sort of minor side note, the only tiny quibble I have with the book is the amount of anecdotal stories Nichols used.  I realize this is subjective, and some people may appreciate it, but in my opinion there were simply too many illustrative stories.  It seemed like they made up about 20% of the book.

If you’ve done any amount of reading in redemptive-history (or biblical theology – i.e. Clowney, Vos, Horton, etc.) this book will be too elementary for you.  However, it is the perfect one to give to Christians who don’t really understand or know the overarching story of Scripture.  It also might be a good book to use in a high school setting.  I’m thinking about giving it to a few visitors at the church I pastor – visitors who are just learning about the grand story of the Bible.

Though there are already quite a few decent books that explain redemptive history in an introductory manner, and though there are a few good books out there that give practical advice on reading the Bible, this is the first I know of that puts these two things together.  If you want both of these things in one book, put Welcome to the Story on the top of your list (it’s only around $10)!

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Pious and Secular America

Back in 1958 Reinhold Niebuhr published a collection of essays which he titled, Pious and Secular America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958).  The first essay has the same title of the book, and I found it to be quite thought-provoking and penetrating.  Notice the depth of these quotes.

“…Here we are in the 20th century, at once the most religious and the most secular of Western nations.  How shall we explain this paradox?  Could it be that we are most religious partly in consequence of being the most secular culture?  That would add a special depth to the paradox.”

“Our secularism is of two varieties.  [1] There is a theoretic secularism which dismisses ultimate questions about the meaning of existence, partly because it believes that science has answered these questions and partly because it regards the questions as unanswerable or uninteresting. [2] There is a practical secularism, which expresses itself in the pursuit of the immediate goals in life.”

“We are somewhat embarrassed by the fact that we are the first culture which is in danger of being subordinated to its economy.  We have to live as luxuriously as possible in order to keep our productive enterprise from stalling.”

In this fine article, Niebuhr also goes on to discuss how the Enlightenment and evangelical Christianity merged on the Western frontier which resulted in political and religious sentimentality: “The heaven of evangelical Christianity and the utopia of the Enlightenment were…blended on the frontier.”  I’ll have to blog on that at a different time.  Meanwhile, I recommend finding this article and reading it if you’re interested in this religiously secular reading of American history.  You’ll appreciate this article if you like the works of David Wells, George Marsden, Michael Horton, or Stephen Nichols, just to name a few.

shane lems

Cheesy Church Choruses

If you’ve been in (or are currently in) an average American evangelical Christian church, no doubt you know what a cheesy Christian song is all about.  From “Shine Jesus Shine” to “I Can Only Imagine,” solid theology is out and emotions and contemporary are “in.”   I like what Stephen Nichols has to say about this.  Commenting on “I Can Only Imagine,” he writes that it

“…Has a rich sound and explicitly religious, even Christian, lyrics, but in the end it presents a rather vacuous theology.  These crossover artists remind me somewhat of the Osmonds.  They are wholesome, safe, and clean-cut, especially compared to their purely secular counterparts, but you can listen for a long time and not hear anything overtly Mormon.  Perhaps the same could be said of Christian crossover artists.  They too are wholesome, safe, and clean-cut, but not much Christianity crosses over with them.”

“In some ways this problem confronts more than the crossover artists.  The whole sweep of CCM may come under its purview.  CCM itself attempts to crossover, combining tastes and styles of the popular culture with the sensibilities and (a modicum of) the lyrics of church music.  How well it straddles that fence becomes a point of debate.  One problem that arises, however, is what CCM communicates in general about evangelicalism’s ambivalence to culture.  While the early days of Jesus music had an edge, arising as it did from the streets, CCM today has dulled the edge, producing music that is safe, not all that complex and artistically ranking a little below the songs on pop albums that don’t make it into radio circulation.”

“CCM has become ghettoized, the Christian suburban youth’s counter to what their unchurched friends listen to.  James Davidson Hunter refers to this dynamic as parallel institutionalism, which means that you can listen to Christian music on Christian radio stations or at Christian concerts or on CDs brought at Christian stores.  You can even download Christian ringtones for your phone bought, hopefully, from a Christian-owned-and-operated kiosk at the mall.”

“Hank Hill, the character from the animated series King of the Hill, sagaciously quipped in relation to Christian rock, ‘You aren’t making Christianity better, you’re just making rock and roll worse.’” (p. 134-5).

Since Christians learn much of their theology from the church/worship songs they sing, no wonder evangelicalism is a mile wide but only an inch deep.  You can’t expect Christians singing quasi-Christian pop music week after week to mature into doctrinally sound believers (cf. Heb 5.13).

shane lems