Hamilton the Musical, or When You Need to Pull Your Car Over and Cry to a Broadway Tune

I am not what you might call trendy. (As every previous student, friend, and general acquaintance nods their head vigorously.) So I am a little late to the Hamilton frenzy, but boy am I glad this play exists. If this means nothing to you, I suggest this article from the now unfortunately-shuttered Books and Culture to get you up to speed.

Basically Hamilton represents a classic unexpected success story. A musical about an oft-neglected founding father with a mostly minority cast that covers the scope of Alexander Hamilton's fascinating life. I don't want to give background here. Read the article. I just love that it happened. There is much to bemoan about our culture; Hamilton is something eminently worth praising.

This post is nothing but budding fanboy praise. I have it on my phone and have been listening to it almost constantly. We have been listening as a family, too. My daughter now regularly requests it when she gets the chance. It has usurped Jack Johnson as her most requested artist. We dance together in the kitchen as we listen. 

We have been trying to teach our kids about music in a more systematic way. We are starting with Bach, listening to a ton of his music, reading a biography about him. I want my kids to understand the power that music can exert, and not just the easily accessible stuff. I want them to love the hard stuff, too. I want them to be moved as they finish Beethoven's Ninth, Dvorak's New World Symphony, Bach's Cello Suites, Vivaldi's Four Seasons. 

But I want them to love this stuff as well. I was listening to the soundtrack the other night while out running errands. It was dark and I was thinking about my kids and how much I love them, how blessed my life is by them. And then I heard this song that plays after Hamilton's son Phillip was killed in, ironically, a duel defending his father's honor. And it just got me. I had to pull off Arapahoe onto a side street and cry. I'm taking sobs. I can drive through misty eyes. I've done that plenty in my life. This was different. As I got myself under control and pulled back onto the main road and drove home I was so grateful for that chance to cry. I got home and hugged Owen tight and told him I loved him and how proud I am of how he is growing.

We talked in my class the other day about "knowing" truth through our emotions. Emotional knowledge is dangerous. Our emotions can just as easily mislead us as benefit us. But when you can trust your emotions, when they lead you to the Good, well, there is nothing else so capable of moving our souls. And music, perhaps more than any other art form, has the power to take us there.

At Least Fundamentalists Sing and Dance

When I was younger and newer to faith my beliefs were simple and my reactions emotional to much of what happened at church. I had no qualms in raising my hands, dancing and jumping around, saying things like "hallelujah" and "yes, Lord" in the middle of worship songs. Call it age (maturity?), call it less faith, call it whatever you want, but I don't do that anymore.

I think in many ways my faith has changed and not always for the better. I miss the emotion; perhaps I relied on it too much in my youth, but I miss it nonetheless. I am smarter now, better read, even a better man in a number of ways, but I still can't help feel like I am missing something.

This was heavily on my mind as I read a section of Chaim Potok's The Promise (a follow-up to The Chosen, a book many of us probably read in high school) this past week. Potok was a Jewish novelist whose novels tended to focus on the collision of faith and the burgeoning systems of thought--sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc.--that marked the twentieth century. I do not know how devout Potok was in his Judaism, but he is a humane writer in the very best sense of the word and has compassion on all of his characters across the spectrum of Jewish religiosity. 

The particular scene that stuck out was an engagement ceremony between the son of a highly regarded Hasidic rabbi and the daughter of a mostly nonobservant family. After the formalities of the engagement are completed, the tables and chairs of the synagogue are moved to the side and the party begins. For hours, these highly devout, highly fundamentalist Jews sing and dance and drink wine. The narrator is more moderate in his beliefs but both he and his father leave the event in awe of what they have witnessed.

In processing the event as they walk home, Rueven, the son, tells his father that despite the beauty of the evening "[w]e can't ignore the truth, abba." In other words, it was fun to get swept up in the emotion of the evening, but let's not get carried away: what these fundamentalists believe is wrong. His father replies: "'No,' he said. 'We cannot ignore the truth. At the same time, we cannot quite sing and dance as they do. He was silent a moment. 'That is the dilemma of our time, Reuven. I do not know what the answer is.'"

I dwelled on those words--"we cannot sing and dance as they do." I feel that way. I cannot sing and dance as I used to, as I know other people now still can. It is not that the substance of my belief has changed dramatically--if anything, I am far more aware of the doctrinal claims I am making these days. It is simply that whatever emotion bound up in simple faith allowed those expressions in my youth is mostly dried up. What good is liberation to a higher truth if it prevents you from singing and dancing?

Unapologetic

Today I started reading a book that I have been looking forward to for a long time: Francis Spufford's Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. Spufford is a British author and novelist as well as a believer. Unapologetic is his effort to show that Christianity is not merely a matter of believing a set of facts but living a set of emotions. I read the first chapter, and Spufford already has pulled me in with something very near and dear to my heart. I have nothing to add; simply read this:

The point is that from the outside, belief looks like a series of ideas about the nature of the universe for which a truth-claim is being made, a set of propositions that you sign up to; and when actual believers don't talk about their belief in this way, it looks like slipperiness, like a maddening evasion of the issue. If I say that, from inside, it makes much more sense to talk about belief as a characteristic set of feelings, or even as a habit, you will conclude that I am trying to wriggle out, or just possibly that I am not even interested in whether the crap I talk is true. I do, as a matter of fact, that it is. For the record, I am not pulling the ultra-liberal, Anglican-going-on-atheist trick of saying that it's all a beautiful and interesting metaphor, snore bore yawn, and that religious terms mean whatever I want them to mean. . . I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions. No dancing about; no moving target, I promise. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don't have the feelings because I've assented to the ideas. (18-19)

God is Impassible and Impassioned

What we believe about God--not only elementary questions about ontology--but our deeply held theological beliefs about the way he manifests himself, relates to us and the rest of creation, relates to the other members of the Trinity, are vastly important for determining how we will navigate the complexities of this world. What we believe about God defines how we will react when life is hard, when we read the news, when the next big disaster--either manmade or natural--strikes. We cannot be too careful or too thoughtful about what doctrines we claim on this count.

There was a guy a few years older than me on my small group in Texas who had suffered a traumatic accident when he was a child that had impaired both motor and psychological functions. He was still able to hold a job and even graduated college, but there is no doubt that this accident shaped his life, and continued to do so down to the time I met him, when the accident would have occurred some 20 years in the past. He was one of few people I have ever been around who just did not like me at all. While he was attending our small group we read through John Piper's book Desiring God. Piper, committed Calvinist that he is, has a chapter early in the book where he talks about the sovereignty of God and how it extends to every part of our lives and the events of this world. I happen also to subscribe to this doctrine, finding it biblically necessary as well as deeply comforting. To this young man, though, this doctrine was abhorrent. If God was in control, why would he have allowed this terrible accident to happen when to this man he was just a kid? I challenged him by asking how he found comfort in a God who was out of control of the events of this world but felt sorry for us when bad things happened? If that's all God is good for, then why bother? He walked out of the room, never to return. 

I don't like this story, but what it did teach me is how inclined we are to believe what we want to believe about God and how dangerous and limiting that position can be, based as it generally is on our limited experience in this world as well as our own experience of emotions. This background, along with many other similar stories, has made me very grateful for the opportunity to read Rob Lister's recent book God is Impassible and Impassioned: Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion. Lister, a professor of theology at the Southern Baptist's flagship institution, takes aim at the rather recent and widespread movement broadly called Open Theism, which essentially puts forth that God is changeable, adaptable, and deeply emotional (passible). While most adherents of this belief would not be so bold as to state their beliefs that baldly, it seems to have taken root at the popular level that God feels our pain literally, that prayer changes his mind, and that he is not completely sovereign over his creation. On this last point, I was having a conversation with a Pentecostal friend in Tulsa last summer and when I told him that I believed God to be sovereign over everything in this world, good and bad, you would have thought by the look on his face that I just kicked a puppy. We are charitable enough to God, it seems, that we want to leave him off of the hook for the bad stuff that happens in this world.

Lister hones in on the question of divine emotion in this book, taking aim at the two poles in the conversation: on the one hand, those staunchly impassible (inability for God to be moved at all) who deny any emotional involvement between God and creation, and on the other hand those for whom God is deeply impassioned, an emotional rollercoaster on par with, well, us.

The first half of the book is an historical exploration of the Church Fathers, the Medievalists, and the Reformers who, Lister contends, held the doctrine of divine impassibility while allowing for God to be moved by passions. Many of the Open Theists, including their grandfather Jurgen Moltmann, argue that the Church Fathers were unduly influenced by the Greek metaphysics of Aristotle, positing a removed and unfeeling deity, and therefore refashioned the emotional God of the Bible into a Greco-Christian hybrid, ignoring the many scriptures pointing to God's emotion. Lister rebuffs these claims, maintaining that the Fathers were obedient to the Bible above all else, and asserting that the Open Theists, presumably free from murky philosophy of their own, are merely beholden to a newer philosophy of deity, one that makes God very much like us. 

This survey I found to be the most worthwhile part of the book and recommend the book for the mere chance for one to read the words of such a diverse group of early believers. I hope I never lose the thrill of reading Augustine or Aquinas or Calvin. If I could offer one critique of the book, it would be that the original chapters in the latter portion, particularly chapter nine, are merely derivative of what has come before. Lister at times even requotes material already handled in the earlier portions of the book. This critique is minor because Lister seems aware of this himself. While laying out the thesis for the work, he holds that he is not creating something new so much as subtly redeveloping or reemphasizing an ancient doctrine.

Lister's essential charge against the Open Theists, and others who emphasize God's emotion to the diminishment of his sovereignty, is that they mistake divine emotion as being of the same substance as human emotion. For example, these thinkers have a tendency to sort of glibly assume that when the Bible says God is angry we are to interpret this within the framework of our own experience of emotions. This tendency is not limited to the negative emotions. When told that God is love--a quality that is not entirely emotional at all--we moderns assume that God would define love roughly how we do. This is a grave error: to anthropomorphize God until he resembles us, to make God in our image and in our likeness.

The reality of divine emotion, and Lister is firm in the fact that God does experience emotion, is that it is far different than what we experience. When we are aroused to an extreme emotion we often lose control. I don't need to provide examples of this, it being self-evident and as close to universal as people get. It is ludicrous to think that God experiences emotion in the same way. Lister's main contention here, and one I happen to agree with, is that when God is moved to emotion it is only because he allows himself to be: no external stimulus forces God into an emotional display.

An interesting question, and one that popped into my mind as I read the prefatory chapters, was, what about Jesus? He suffered. Experience emotion and hunger and thirst and tiredness. And, he was God. The concluding chapter is about the incarnation and it answers these questions beautifully. Lister proposes that the reason God had to become man is because God could experience no lack if he remained always in his triune glory. In other words, God could not suffer as God, but had to become man to suffer. The Apostle Peter hints toward this in his first epistle: “Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin” (4:1). Earlier in Peter’s letter he writes that Christ bore our sins “in his body on the tree” (2:24). Peter teaches us, then, that the divine nature didn’t suffer at the crucifixion, but the fleshly body of the God-man Jesus Christ. This distinction between the divine nature and Christ’s body in no way discredits the work of the cross. As Lister argues, the work of Christ on the cross is enhanced when we have a proper view of the suffering of Christ on the tree. He quotes Catholic theologian Thomas Weinandy on this score: 

Even if one did allow the Son of God to suffer in his divine nature, this would negate the very thing one wanted to preserve and cultivate. For if the Son of God experienced suffering in his divine nature, he would no longer be experiencing human suffering in an authentic and genuine human manner, but instead he would be experiencing "human suffering" in a divine manner which would be neither genuinely nor authentically human. . . Thus to replace the phrase "the Impassible suffers" with the "Passible suffers" immediately purges the suffering of all incarnational significance.

In other words, in trying to show that the divine nature suffered on the cross, we actually dilute the power of the human suffering of Christ. The miracle of the incarnation, of the reality of God-become-man, is that Christ emptied himself of his rights to divinity and experienced things as a man that he could never experience as God. That is how he could atone for our sins: it was not the divine nature that was crucified at Calvary, but the human nature in all of its depravity.

I could write much, much more about this book, but will relent there if anyone has even read this far. This book has encouraged me and enlivened me to think about what I think about God and to be careful about this thought process. How thankful I am that God is not like me, yet has chosen out of his great mercy and grace to be passionately for me in all things. He has shown us, through Christ, a standard for experiencing emotion and clinging to the unchanging truths of God. 

Mumford and Sons, Church Music, and Emotion

One thing most of the cool Christians my age seem to find agreement on is that contemporary church music is cheesy, manipulative of emotions, and overall not nearly as good as it used to be or one day could be again. You hear this all of the time, as well-meaning Christians struggle to control their disdain for Christian radio and other such enterprises. And I get it, and feel the same way a lot of the time. (Jeremy Pierce, writing in the now shuttered First Things blog Evangel, nailed people like me and all of these other dissenters to the wall a couple of years ago with this truly excellent post. If you get anything out of this post, let it be this.) For me what is most lamentable, though, about the current state of Christian music isn't how cheesy or "positive" it is, but how much it is exactly like the music of the world. Really, it's true. Listen to a pop music station and then listen to Christian radio and see if, apart from lyrical content, you can tell any difference at all. This lack of originality is unfortunate and unfitting for people who see themselves as filled with the Spirit of a quite creative God. 

But another thing people seem to take aim at is the emotional response provoked by contemporary worship songs. You know what I am talking about: the songs with the mindless lyrics that you repeat ad nauseum while the music swells in the background and, darn't, you just can't help but lift your hands in worship. This critique finds eloquent expression in Jordan Bloom's article in The American Conservative (non-subtle plug: if you are a conservative in the sense of holding traditionalist views, such as respect for the land, appreciation of both the basic dignity of all humans as well as our fallenness, and essentially hold to the ethical traditions of the great faiths of the past, and are not conservative in the sense that whatever big business decides to do next is awesome, subscribe to The American Conservative; it is truly fantastic). Bloom takes aim at the emotionalism and manipulation at work in the band Mumford and Sons. There is an ironic note to make here: most all of the cultured Christians I have been around who disdain contemporary Christian music freaking love Mumford and Sons, a band who quite unashamedly practices the same things they purport to hate when they are done by Chris Tomlin or Hillsong. Perhaps it is the British accent or the fact that Mumford isn't afraid to throw out an f-bomb every now and then to show just how dern serious they are, but in any event hanging outside a venue before a Mumford show you are likely to see a lot of the cool Christian kids with beards and skinny jeans and iPhones talking about how more "spiritual" music (we can't be attaching labels like Christian to a band like Mumford) should sound like this. And to them I say, I've got a Creed album to sell you. (Full disclosure: I dig Mumford and Sons.)

But I take issue with some of Bloom's complaint. Mostly, the idea that worship music shouldn't be laden with emotion. Presumably austere, Orthodox style music with lots of chanting is the ticket. Don't get me wrong, Bach is great. We listen to him over dinner most every night. People will still be listening to Bach in 200 years. I don't think they will be listening to Hillsong or Lecrae or Mumford and Sons, or, God help us, anything else on pop stations. But I don't like the notion that because Bach is great we should only listen to Bach. This is akin to the notion that you should only watch movies from the AFI Top 100 or read books that were put on a list by Mortimer Adler. Sure, you should watch Citizen Kane, and, yes, everyone should read them some Plato at one time or another, but it does not follow immediately from this that you should not watch Dawn of the Dead or read Stephen King. Both of those, in fact, should be done as well. 

As to the substance of Bloom's complaint, that worship music is cheaply manipulative and emotional, Jonathan Edwards took care of this one far better than I ever could have some 300 years ago. The New England of Edwards' time was aflame with revival and, as revivals are wont to do, this one encouraged some rather grandiose displays of religious fervor, prompting the polite and thoroughly British inhabitants of the area to bristle at all of this barbaric emotion. Edwards, writing in a tract called, aptly, "Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival," has this to say: "I should think myself in the way of my duty to raise the affections of my hearers as high as I possibly can, provided that they are affected with nothing but truth, and with affections that are not disagreeable to the nature of what they are affected with."

Now Edwards isn't endorsing people dancing with snakes or shouting weird things while waving flags, necessarily. What he is saying is that if God is really as awesome as the Bible says he is, grace is as great and freeing as promised, and Jesus really will one day come back to make all things new, then it is probably a fine response to be excited about these things. Which makes pretty good sense. Bloom's thought that this type of emotive response is all heart and no head strikes me as too simplistic as well as too judgmental. How can he possibly know what is going through every worshiper's head? And why is it wrong to get lost in reverie?

Edwards' point, and our goal, ought to be to be worshipers who worship in spirit and in truth. Who love the Lord our God with all of our heart, mind, soul and strength. To be able to raise up holy hands or bow our heads reverently in awe of this world, the work of our Creator's hands, and his promises to us.