SINGING, IN THE BODY AND IN THE SPIRIT

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Dec 2003 by Guthrie, Steven R

Paul's exhortation to sing, then, is bound up with his emphasis throughout the Epistle on the unity of the body of Christ. Music voices the shared life of the church. It is not accidental that the commands to sing in Eph 5:19 lead on to the exhortation in verse 21: "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ." Music is both an image and a means of attaining to this unity. Structurally, the command to sing is the hinge connecting two sections of the epistle. Chapters 4 and 5 urge the Christians to put away the kind of self-gratifying and self-interested behavior that destroys community. The second half of Chapter 5 and the first half of Chapter 6 paint a picture of healthy community life, in which each member senses and responds to the needs of others.

Significantly, this ability to sense and respond to another's needs is exactly like our ability to sense and respond to the needs of our own physical bodies. "Husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies," Paul says. "After all, no one ever hated his own body but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church-for we are members of his body" (5:28-30). In the structure of the argument of Ephesians, the Spirit uses song in leading us from a life of self-absorbed sensuality out into a life of others-oriented sensitivity.

Music, of course, does not remake us; the Holy Spirit does. But it seems possible that music may be one means by which the Holy Spirit makes us people who feel and respond. We are brought to our senses. We are drawn out of the darkness of self-absorption and become aware of the world around us, our place within and responsibility to it. In song we move in a dance of sympathy with the others who are singing, and by the body are drawn out of ourselves and into the Body.

4. The voice of many voices. Because music sounds out the unity of the Body, Bonhoeffer urges Christians to embrace unison singing above all other musical forms.36 In song, Christians are able "to speak and pray the same word at the same time . . . ; here, they can unite in the Word. . . . Because it is bound wholly to the Word, the singing of the congregation . . . is essentially singing in unison.37 It is this unison singing, he writes, that is most truly "singing from the heart, singing to the Lord, singing the Word; this is singing in unity."38

Bonhoeffer is surely right to identify a connection between congregational singing and the unity of the church. However, his emphasis on unison singing represents a misunderstanding of the distinctive contribution of music to worship. It also points toward an inadequate view of Christian unity.39 Music provides a compelling sounding image of life together; but it is a shared life in which the distinctive voice of the individual is not negated by communion with the other. In music, we encounter identity which preserves particularity. As we sing together, different sounds-your voice, and mine-occupy the same time and the same space, without obstructing or negating one another. Roger Scruton observes that other activities-dancing, sport-embody orderly and aesthetically pleasing social interaction. Music, however, provides a particularly potent model for life together: