The Limits of Our Demystified World

“…I desire you to consider, I say, that these functions imitate those of a real man as perfectly as possible and that they follow naturally in this machine entirely from the disposition of the organs-no more nor less than do the movements of a clock or other automaton, from the arrangement of its counterweights and wheels.” René Descartes, L’homme

We live in Descartes’ world, but do we belong here? Is this the world as it ought to be?

Descartes wrote his Meditations on First Philosophy to prove (a) the existence of God, and (b) the distinction between the soul and Body. It was not out of great piety that he undertook this metaphysical task. He wanted to clear a space for the advance of the sciences by demystifying the physical world, reducing it all to mechanical bodies. Descartes is infamous for having conducted experiments on cats, dropping them into boiling water and watching their responses. He was at peace in his conscience because after all, given that animals do not have souls and that everything that does not have a soul is simply a mechanical body, animals must be simply mechanical automata. But of course, by that standard the human body is also mechanical.

Catherine Wilson informs me that Descartes caused quite a stir in his day for these views. This world is God’s world which he has ordered and which operates according to his good plan. People of the time viewed messing with it through technological science as impious, even demonic. Descartes’ project was to transform our view of nature—to demystify it—so that we could understand its principles of operation, rework it, and make ourselves masters and possessors of it, as he put it in part IV of his Discourse on Method.

I confess that demystified nature seems perfectly right and holy to me. This is a dimension of the medieval mind that I cannot fathom. It reminds me of my first (and last) reading of the Arthurian tale. People were slaughtering each other and throwing away their own lives for reasons of honor and medieval propriety that was completely beyond my ken and seemed tragically needless to me. Similarly, medieval notions of a physical world with moral and spiritual content, including notions of holy ground and holy space, strikes me a superstitious. The Temple and its contents in the Old Testament is different, of course. If God explicitly sets something or someone aside as holy then it’s holy.

In going down this road, Descartes was following Francis Bacon who was trying to accomplish the same goal and overcome the same opposition. We see this not only in his scientific writings included in The Great Instuaration, but also in the Essays. In “Of Riches” (#34) he promotes the view that anything can be bought and sold without impropriety, in contrast to Naboth’s view of his vineyard. Today, you can sell your church building or bulldoze it and put up a gas station. No problem. It’s just a building. Symbolically, it presents problems when what is architecturally a church building is transformed into an art gallery (Upton MA), a public library (Seacliff NY), or a café (Newton MA)

But am I missing something? In demystifying nature, Descartes made everything mechanical, even the human body, and thus the appropriate object of rational control. Yet, we have enough health left in us that we have not gone the whole distance in that direction. The human body is still holy in a sense. We speak of “desecrating” a corpse, an vacated human body. Is this just superstition? We might donate organs or even our whole body for research purposes. That required passing a significant threshold. But we would not donate our bodies for fertilizer in the family garden, or as food for the poor. The secret of Soylent Green was a horror.

We view other things as in a sense holy, or objects of reverence, such a things pertaining to civil religion. The flag requires particular treatment. You don’t throw it in the garbage. It must be disposed of with care and respect. We treat graveyards and battlefields the same way. Try building a shopping Mall or amusement park when the north and south spilled blood at Gettysburg or Antietam.

So are we being superstitious in these things—the battlefields and our bodies (for which we show greater respect when we’re dead than when we’re alive)? Should we fully rationalize and demystify? Or have we overly demystified? Have we hollowed out our understanding of some things that are actually more multidimensional? I think it is extremely unlikely that we have got it just right?

The Church's Praise and Mine

 Genevan Psalter, 1562

Ben Miller, my pastor, on his blog "Relocating to Elfland," has this helpful reflection on church music, pop culture, our narcissism, and our abandoned heritage. This helped me think about myself and my worship...or should I say the church's worship which, by God's grace, is mine.

The Songbook Comes With It

By Rev. Benjamin Miller, Franklin Square OPC



A few thoughts on singing, and particularly singing in the church, prompted by a second listen to Volume 88 of the Mars Hill Audio Journal:

Bay Psalm Book 1640

First, most people would agree that singing is a form of culture; but what we mean by “culture” has evolved dramatically in the last half-century, which in turn has changed the way we think about singing. In older usage, a culture was a set of traditions and forms among a particular people with a distinctive history; in more recent usage, culture is largely a conglomerate of consumable products (“pop culture” means basically stuff that is popular, i.e., what sells). Bach’s music, for example, was part of a Western culture that predated and outlived him; Bono’s performances are part of marketable culture driven by consumer demand. Celtic folk music was once an expression of a people and their history, the sort of thing one would find played and sung by the locals at a pub in a certain part of the world; Dropkick Murphys are “one of the best-known rock bands in the world, thanks in part to their ability to tap into the working-class and sports fan culture that permeates Boston and the New England area but even more so due to their reputation for phenomenal live shows” (this from their official website). The band has taken something from what was once a culture (in the older sense of the word) and gainfully commodified it for the international market (i.e., placed it in the conglomerate of pop “culture”).

Second, in the older understanding of a culture, singing was not predominately a spectator sport; it was not mostly something a crowd watched while a few performed. Rather, a culture had its songs, and the people in that culture sang them, together. This was true of the biblical Hebrews (e.g., Ps 137:3–4), it is true today in many cultures of the southern hemisphere, and it was true not long ago in the United States (one thinks of the forgotten genre of songs called Americana).

These are my observations, for which no one else is to be blamed; but now let me assume their validity and apply them to the church.

Antiphonal in Latin, 14th c.

When the average North American evangelical thinks of singing in worship, he or she thinks in the idiom of popular “culture,” that is, he or she thinks as a consumer. This is true not only of worshippers who expect to watch and listen to a praise band up front (whether such a spectator event qualifies as “worship” in any biblical sense of the word is a question I will not pause to address here); it is true also of those who expect to participate in congregational singing. The driving issue is whether “I like” this or that song, whether this music suits my tastes and meets my needs/wants. But we think this way about music and song because we think this way about culture in general. What is really radical to us is the idea that we should embrace certain songs – that we should learn not only to sing them, but also to love them – because they are a part of a culture to which we are coming (or better, in which we find ourselves) as God’s people. The Psalms are the songs of “our people,” and so we should love them, and sing them. Christians in the Reformation tradition are part of a heritage, a culture, that has bequeathed to us a wonderful corpus of music, and we should be learning it (not to mention songs of Christendom predating the Reformation, and some of much later origin). If we were honest, however, this makes about as much sense to us as the idea that we should sing certain songs because they are “American.” Says who? What if I don’t like these songs? It doesn’t fit our sovereignty complex with respect to “our” music. Who has the right to tell us what we must listen to, or what we must sing?

The question might be turned around: Who asked you whether you wanted to be an American? Or a Westerner, or an Easterner? African or Irish or Bolivian? And who asked you whether you wanted to be born among God’s covenant people? Short answer: nobody. These are your people, this is your heritage, your culture, your story. And the songbook comes with it. Which means that in the church we should pick up our songbook, dust it off, and start singing. Together. With gusto. A joyful noise, and all that. Thank God He’s the only judge here; all the others are over at American Idol.

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I can add that when I first began attending church as an undergraduate in Toronto in 1983, I had no experience of church life. The hymnody of the church was alien to me, but it never crossed my mind to question it and suggest a musical style that was more familiar to me. If this is what Christians sing in church then I will sing this in church. And I discovered that it was a fine tradition of music anyway. "Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah" was very satisfying to belt out. I was used to listening to a wide variety of music, from Scottish folk music to jazz and classical to punk music like the Stranglers. The old hymns were just another pleasant dimension of the musical universe to discover. I have since developed my own tastes. I prefer Welsh hymns, anything by Johann Crüger (1598-1662), and the Genevan psalms using the tunes of Louis Bourgeois. But the church of Christ today should sing the praise of the church throughout the ages, otherwise, as Pastor Miller says, the church's worship becomes an extension of pop culture and commercial entertainment feeding what is already our appalling self-absorption instead of Christ-absorption as organic parts of his glorious body, the church.