Worship Part 2: Banishing the Author

What Shouldn’t We Sing?

If you have not yet read part one of this three part series, then I highly recommend that you do so before reading this as I intend to build on the foundation I laid previously. In the previous article, we looked at the qualifications of worship songs, what the Bible has to say about what musical worship is, and what it should be. In this article and the next, I want us to look at the other side. What are the disqualifications of worship songs? What are the songs we shouldn’t sing as a congregation, and why? I realize that this is an extremely controversial topic with a lot of emotions at play, and I am going to suggest some things which many will disagree with, so I ask the reader to have patience, humility, and mercy with me as we study this together.

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The Disqualifier

In the last article, we looked at how worship music is a method of instruction. As a teaching tool, it must be the word of Christ which is being taught by the song, and nothing else. Most obviously, we should not sing songs for worship which say false things about God. Paul says this clearly just before writing to the Colossian church about the instructive nature of worship music. He writes in Colossians 3:9, “Do not lie to one another, since you put off the old man with its evil practices.” Of course bearing false witness is also condemned by God in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:16), and elsewhere throughout the Bible along with commands to love truth (Proverbs 13:5, 1 Corinthians 13:6, Ephesians 4:29). This seems to many people to be a relatively non-controversial statement. However, there is more to this than you might initially think, especially as it is paired with Colossians 3:16 and the command in John 4 to worship God in spirit and truth.

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The Unbeliever and Worship

Let me just say this plainly— unbelievers can’t worship God. They cannot worship God in spirit, for they are spiritually dead (Ephesians 2:1–3). Hebrews 11:6 says, “And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who draws near to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.” Dead men work dead works (Matthew 12:35, Ephesians 2:1–3), and it is only because Jesus has regenerated us, and acts as our mediator with God that we might worship Him (1 Timothy 2:5), now having been cleansed in ‘conscience from dead works to serve the living God,’ (Hebrews 9:13–15). It’s concerning to me that many would think I should stop here, but, as we will come to see, the other half is true as well— unbelievers can’t worship God in truth either. This leads me to conclude— and I understand that what I’m about to say is hard, but it must be said— that we cannot sing songs written by unbelievers for Sunday morning worship.

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The Nitty Gritty

In order to really understand this, it’s going to take a fair bit of explanation. I apologize but, if you’ll indulge me, this is going to get a little bit philosophical for a moment. We need to understand that there is absolutely no case in which the meaning of a song— the teaching of a song— is anything other than exactly what the author meant when they wrote it. This is true of all communication; the meaning of any communication is the meaning which the author intended it to mean. In his book ‘Validity in Interpretation,’ E.D. Hirsch Jr. makes a helpful observation of this issue. He deals with the idea that meaning is separate from an author, calling it the theory of semantic autonomy, saying on page 5, “The theory of semantic autonomy forced itself into such unsatisfactory, ad hoc formulations because in its zeal to banish the author it ignored the fact that meaning is an affair of consciousness not of words. Almost any word sequence can, under the conventions of language, legitimately represent more than one complex of meaning. A word sequence means nothing in particular until somebody either means something by it or understands something from it.” The Bible itself attests to this fact for us. 2 Timothy 3:16–17 heartily confesses the marriage between the divine biblical Author and what He wrote. Deuteronomy 18:18 and 2 Peter 1:21 further proclaim that the meaning of the words of scripture is dependent on what the authors meant. We can even see this in the way New Testament authors speak about Old Testament passages— called introductory formulas— saying things like ‘the prophet Isaiah said,’ ‘just as the Lord spoke through Joel the prophet,’ and so on (Matthew 4:14, Acts 2:16, Romans 10:19–20).

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Hermeneutics

This might seem like a fruitless point to make for some of you, but this guards us from so many errors. It’s not the case that songs mean whatever the reader wants them to mean, which would be something close to what postmodernism might teach. It’s also not true that songs mean whatever their lyrics, the words themselves, could reasonably, or possibly, mean. Here’s your two-cent theological word for the day, this is called ‘hermeneutics.’

‘Hermeneutics’ is the study of the rules of interpretation, and there are different approaches to hermeneutics. One approach is to say that the meaning of communication is dependent on whatever it means to the reader— a reader-based hermeneutic (postmodernism). Another approach would be to say that a text means whatever the words could possibly or plausibly mean— a text-based hermeneutic. Against both of these, and any other approaches, the Bible affirms that words mean whatever it is that the person who said or wrote them intended for them to mean— an author–based hermeneutic, also known simply as ‘authorial intent.’

By affirming authorial intent, the Bible denies all other approaches to interpretation. God through Peter denies a reader-based approach by saying in 2 Peter 1:20–21, “…no prophecy of Scripture comes by one’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever made by the will of man, but men being moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” Paul also denies the idea that the text (words) of something are what determine meaning. Writing in 1 Corinthians 9:9–10 he says, “For it is written in the Law of Moses, ‘You shall not muzzle the ox while it is threshing.’ Is God merely concerned about oxen? Or is He speaking altogether for our sake? Yes, for our sake it was written, because the plowman ought to plow in hope, and the thresher to thresh in hope of sharing the crops.” Paul tells us here that there is an author behind a written work, and that author had an intent in writing what they wrote, even if that’s not contained in the dictionary definitions of the words they chose (see also Matthew 15:8). For in fact, although Moses writes only about oxen, his intent is that we should realize that if God cares so much about beasts, how much more so must He care about men (Matthew 10:29–31).

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If We Banish the Author

Words mean what the people who write them intend them to mean. How does this work with worship? If you believe that words don’t mean what the author intends, then, no matter your hermeneutic, when you apply that belief to worship, anything is fair game. If the meaning of a worship song, or all songs in general, is separable from its author, then we can use absolutely anything written by anyone of any faith for corporate worship. We result in eclecticism. If we say that we can use worship songs written by heretics, then Mormon worship songs should be judged alongside hymns by the great Charles Spurgeon, with the same assumption that the words likely have an orthodox meaning. If we say that words can mean anything other than what the author intended, then words can, and do, mean anything anybody wants. Indeed, words would then mean anything and everything, and so nothing at all.

There is a recent Amazon bestseller, ‘Reaching God Speed’ by Joe Kovacs, which takes this idea to its logical conclusion. To be fair, Kovacs affirms that song lyrics mean whatever the song writer intended, however he also says that all songs have an additional, higher meaning. He writes this, concluding his second chapter on page 42, “The Word, which is God, is secretly embedded in countless songs, even if the human songwriters had no intention of including any message from their Maker.” Earlier in chapter two Kovacs explains how all songs have a biblical message, separate from the beliefs and likely the intentions of the author. On page 7, he begins the chapter with an example, saying, “‘Stairway to Heaven’ is actually proclaiming— both directly and metaphorically— the message of God in the Bible, and most likely without the conscience knowledge of band members Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, who wrote the ballad.” Kovacs goes on in the chapter to explain that the ‘lady’ in the song is a prospective convert (p. 11), the ‘piper’ is God (p. 10), and the ‘word’ in verse 1 of the song is the Bible (p. 11). Although this might all sound like a fringe belief, it serves as an example to us. We have to be honest that if we say that the meaning of song lyrics is dependent on anything other than the author’s intent, then practically anything can be used as a worship song.

Before we bring this chapter of our study to a close there’s a couple more things which I think we need to talk about. If we deny authorial intent, not only do we become eclectic with our song choices, but the songs we choose also lose meaning. Let’s look at a few examples: It Is Well and Amazing Grace. Most modern Christians are very familiar with the song It Is Well and the tragic story surrounding its writing. Horatio Spafford lost his four daughters at sea, and, as his boat passed over the place where his daughters died, he penned the famous hymn. What most people don’t know— and much of this is recorded in the book ‘American Priestess’ by Jane Fletcher Geniesse— is that Spafford later revealed himself to have never been truly saved as he began to proclaim his heretical teaching of universal salvation, and eventually went on to found a sexually schizophrenic cult in which his wife declared herself as the Bride of Christ and he was proclaimed to be God. Now, in order to sing Spafford’s song in good conscience, we might reach to say, ‘Well the words are true and it truly worships God, so it doesn’t really matter what the writer believed.’ Enter Amazing Grace, a song which was written by a man with an incredible story. After working in the slave trade for some time, the now converted John Newton, who went on to become an abolitionist, writes the words, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found, was blind, but now I see.” If we say that the beliefs, the intentions, the life of Horatio Spafford have no impact on the meaning of his song It Is Well, then we also can’t say that the beliefs, intentions, or life of John Newton have an impact on Amazing Grace. We don’t get to just trade up or pick and choose when an author’s life puts meaning into a song; either it does or it doesn’t.

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To Be Continued

Parts two and three of this series were originally written as one long article, which I broke in two, so if you’ve arrived here at the end of this article, I would highly encourage you to continue on to the final part in our study of worship. We mostly looked at the wisdom of other believers, the foolishness of the lost, and the implications of the way God talks about communication. While hearing wisdom from mature saints is good, it is not a replacement for God’s word, and so, in the next part, we will focus much more on the clarity and precision with which God has spoken on this topic. If you want to continue to learn about authorial intent and the other approaches to interpretation, you can check out Dr. Abner Chou’s class, called Hermeneutics, in the Institute for Church Leadership’s library.