Evangelicals, Catholics Try to Adapt to Gays' Legal Wins

1. Evangelicals, Catholics Try to Adapt to Gays' Legal Wins Tuesday, 28 Oct 2014 12:04 PM By Jennifer G. Hickey With advocates of gay marriage achieving legal victories, many conservative Christians and evangelicals are trying to adapt to the evolving change in the courts and broader society. “One of the embarrassments that I have to bear is that I have written on some of these issues for 30 years. At a couple of points, I’ve got to say I got that wrong, and we’ve got to go back and correct it,” Southern Seminary President Albert Mohler said yesterday at a Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) conference on homosexuality, reports Nashville Public Radio. Mohler says his error was in preaching that homosexuality is a choice, but remains firm in his belief that it is sinful. He also told the audience that Baptists know what the Bible teaches, but need to figure out how to apply those teachings to the present day, according to Nashville Public Radio.

2. Pope Francis: “Evolution Is Not Inconsistent With The Notion Of Creation” Religion News Service | By Josephine McKenna Posted: 10/27/2014 5:43 pm EDT Updated: 10/28/2014 11:59 am EDT VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope Francis on Monday (Oct. 27) waded into the controversial debate over the origins of human life, saying the big bang theory did not contradict the role of a divine creator, but even required it. The pope was addressing the plenary assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which gathered at the Vatican to discuss “Evolving Concepts of Nature.” “When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so,” Francis said. “He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfillment.” Francis said the beginning of the world was not “a work of chaos” but created from a principle of love. He said sometimes competing beliefs in creation and evolution could co-exist. “God is not a divine being or a magician, but the Creator who brought everything to life,” the pope said. “Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.”

3. “Thus, this work of creation has been going on for centuries and centuries, millennia and millennia until it has become what we know today, because God is not a demiurge or wizard but the Creator who gives being to all entities. The beginning of the world was not a work of chaos that has some other origin, but it derived directly from a supreme principle which creates by love. The Big Bang, which currently appears to explain the origin of the world, does not contradict the intervention of a divine creator but demands it. The evolution of nature is not inconsistent with the notion of Creation because evolution presupposes the creation of beings that evolve... “The scientist must be moved by the confidence that nature conceals, in its evolutionary mechanisms, potential that our intelligence and freedom can discover and implement in order to develop the design of the Creator. So, no matter how limited, the action of man partakes of the power of God and is able to build a world fit for his dual life, bodily and spiritual, to build a humane world for all human beings and not for a group or class of privileged people.”

4. Music and Worship • References • Technical Development A. Musicology B. Beauty C. Physiology of Music • Biblical Development A. Directive/Descriptive/Principle B. Textual Exposition • Sacred Music—Standards and Hymnody • FAQs • Summary/Conclusion

5. Standards • Content • Arrangement • Instrumentation

6. www.bible.ca Alexander Campbell (1788-1866) “[Instrumental music in worship] was well adapted to churches founded on the Jewish pattern of things and practicing infant sprinkling. That all persons singing who have no spiritual discernment, taste or relish for spiritual meditation, consolations and sympathies of renewed hearts should call for such an aid is but natural. So to those who have no real devotion and spirituality in them, and whose animal nature flags under the opposition or the oppression of church service I think that instrumental music would... be an essential prerequisite to fire up their souls to even animal devotion. But I presume, that to all spiritually-minded Christians, such aid would be as a cow bell in a concert.” recorded in Robert Richardson's biography, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, Vol. 2., p 366)

7. www.bible.ca Benjamin Franklin (1812-1878) “If any one had told us, 40 years ago, that we would live to see the day where those professing to be Christians who claim the Holy Scriptures as their only rule of faith and practice, those under the command, and who profess to appreciate the meaning of the command to 'observe whatsoever I have commanded you' would bring instruments of music into a worshipping assembly and use it there in worship, we should have repelled the idea as an idle dream. But this only shows how little we knew of what men would do; or how little we saw of the power of the adversary to subvert the purest principles, to deceive the hearts of the simple, to undermine the very foundation of all piety, and turn the very worship of God itself into an attraction for the people of the world and entertainment, or amusement.” (Benjamin Franklin, Gospel Preacher, Vol 2, p. 411, 419-429)

8. www.bible.ca Benjamin Franklin (1812-1878) “Instrumental music is permissible for a church under the following conditions: 1. When a church never had or has lost the Spirit of Christ. 2. If a church has a preacher who never had or has lost the Spirit of Christ, who has become a dry, prosing and lifeless preacher. 3. If a church only intends being a fashionable society, a mere place of amusements and secular entertainment and abandoning the idea of religion and worship. 4. If a church has within it a large number of dishonest and corrupt men. 5. If a church has given up all idea of trying to convert the world.” (Ben Franklin, editor of American Christian Review, 1860.)

9. www.bible.ca David Lipscomb (1831-1917) “Neither he [Paul] nor any other apostle, nor the Lord Jesus, nor any of the disciples for five hundred years, used instruments. This too, in the face of the fact that the Jews had used instruments in the days of their prosperity and that the Greeks and heathen nations all used them in their worship. “They were dropped out with such emphasis that they were not taken up till the middle of the Dark Ages, and came in as part of the order of the Roman Catholic Church. It seems there cannot be doubt but that the use of instrumental music in connection with the worship of God, whether used as a part of the worship or as an attraction accompaniment, is unauthorized by God and violates the oft-repeated prohibition to add nothing to, take nothing from, the commandments of the Lord. It destroys the difference between the clean and the unclean, the holy and unholy, counts the blood of the Son of God unclean, and tramples under foot the authority of the Son of God. They have not been authorized by God or sanctified with the blood of his Son.” (David Lipscomb, Queries and Answers by David Lipscomb pp. 226-227, and Gospel Advocate, 1899, p. 376-377)

10. www.bible.ca John William McGarvey (1829-1911) “We cannot, therefore, by any possibility, know that a certain element of worship is acceptable to God in the Christian dispensation, when the Scriptures which speak of that dispensation are silent in reference to it. To introduce any such element is unscriptural and presumptuous.” (J. W. McGarvey, The Millennial Harbinger, 1864, pp. 511-513)

11. www.insearchofthetruth.org Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892) “'Praise the Lord with the harp.' Israel was at school, and used childish things to help her learn. But in these days, when Jesus gives us spiritual food, one can make melody without strings and pipes. We do not need them. They would hinder rather than help our praise. Sing unto Him! This is the sweetest and best music. No instrument is like the human voice.... “David appears to have had a peculiarly tender remembrance of the singing of the pilgrims, and assuredly it is the most delightful part of worship and that which comes nearest to the adoration of heaven. What a degradation to supplant the intelligent song of the whole congregation by the theatrical prettiness of a quartet, the refined niceties of a choir, or the blowing off of wind from the inanimate bellows and pipes! We might as well pray by machinery as praise by it.” (The Treasury of David, comment on Psalm 42:4)

12. www.stempublishing.com STEM Publishing: C Knapp: Musical Instruments Harry A. Ironside (1876-1951) Lectures on Daniel, pages 47-50 “The special place given to the great orchestra is very noticeable; as much so as in large worldly religious gatherings at the present time. It excites the emotions, and thus, working upon the feelings, gives people a sense of devotion and religiousness, which after all may be very unreal. In the Old Testament dispensation musical instruments were used in the ornate temple services; but there is certainly no warrant for it in the New Testament. People may call it worship to sit and listen to a trained, and possibly unconverted, choir and orchestra rendering sweet and touching strains; but music simply acts upon the sensuous part of our natures, and has nothing to do with true adoration of the Father and the Son, which must be in spirit and truth to be acceptable to God. Those who plead for its use, because of the place it had in Old Testament times, should remember that that was a typical dispensation... A minister once remarked to me that many aesthetic persons attended his church to worship God in music; so he sought to have the best performers and the finest music it was possible to obtain, as otherwise the people would not attend. What a delusion is all this!”

13. crossandquill.com Cheryl Stansberry Western Civilization Research Paper, Fall 2007 “The cantata, a genre of vocal music in the Baroque period and a key part of the German Lutheran service, was primarily used in Bach’s music. A deeply religious man, Bach signed his cantatas 'S.D.G.', which stands for Soli Deo Gloria—'to God alone the glory' (Schippe 237). Many other forms of music known today have Christian roots such as the sonata, the symphony, and the oratorio. Most forms of music began as psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs and the outgrowth from there progressed as the monks and churches spread throughout the ages. Ambrose (340-97) first had members of his congregation sing psalms antiphonally and allowed all people to participate in the morning and evening church services by setting the words of his hymns to 'an easy metrical form, the iambic diameter' (Schippe 316). Biblical stories were dramatized and performed in song as early as the ninth century. A well-known church drama in the tenth century was Visitatio sepulchri (The Visit to [Christ’s] Sepulcher). Schmidt notes there is good reason to believe the opera evolved out of church dramas that appeared five hundred years before the Renaissance (Scippe 316-17). The works of Handel, Beethoven, Mozart, and Mendelssohn among others have greatly been influenced by the words of the Bible; oftentimes the music itself directly reflected that influence (Schippe 328-29).”