Is Music The Exception To Inerrancy? (Re-Post)

January 15, 2008 @ 11:28 pm by Pressed

This is a re-post. I originally made this post back in July of 2007. It should sound quite familiar to the post I made 6 months after this post since this has been something I’ve been thinking and writing about for awhile now. In view of recent posts I thought I would re-post this one in order to give more context to this thought process.

The essence of inerrancy is that the Scriptures are free from any mistake or untruth. The role that inerrancy should play in the church is essential to what the church believes, to what the church teaches, and to how the church accomplish its purpose. Everything that we do involving worship, ministry, evangelism, fellowship, and discipleship should be inseparably linked with inerrancy if we truly believe the Bible to be the infallible Word of God.

At some point I may delve into how important inerrancy is in ministry, evangelism, fellowship, and discipleship, but for right now I mainly want to focus on worship. While there are many aspects of worship, my main focus for this post is the music we sing, more importantly the words of the songs. Here is my question: If we are going to sing music with lyrics about God and to God then shouldn’t those lyrics stem from the message of the infallible Word of truth? Shouldn’t truth be more important than whether or not a song makes me feel good, makes me tear up, or sounds good musically? Now, don’t get me wrong. I love music. I love the way music effects my emotions and I love the way good music sounds… but what good is it if the music we sing and the words that are written are presenting God in a false light or representing half truths or untruths? What good is it when the words of songs make huge presumptions upon God that have no basis in the truth of Scripture? I think the church should be careful about what it teaches in both its discipleship and in the message of the songs we sing.

If someone were to come into most Baptist churches and teach a discipleship class that made blatant assumptions about God and twisted scripture to say something that it doesn’t really mean, I believe that on some level people would notice and they would have a problem with that. This is a good thing. Christians should constantly be on guard for things like this. But what happens when someone gets up and sings a song in church that makes assumptions about God or presents a message that just isn’t quite right? I think for the most part it goes completely unnoticed. But why? Why do we not have the same standards for a message in song as we do for a message that is taught? Is music the exception to inerrancy? Can we just do or say anything in music that we wouldn’t normally do or accept in any other setting?

The number one reason that music becomes the exception is because poeple just don’t think. When we listen to music it is like we just shut our brain off. As long at the music sounds good and has an emotional element to it that makes me feel a certain way then we call it good. We mindlessly sing songs without thinking about what the words mean. For example, there is a lady in our church who said to me one day, “I can’t sing the song Wherever He Leads I’ll Go.” She said that everytime we sing that in church she just stops singing. When she looked at the words she was singing she thought to herself “if God called me overseas would I really go?” She had decided that she wasn’t sure she would go wherever God would lead her and therefore she couldn’t sing these words to God. This is a perfect example of someone who actually thinks about what they are singing to God. It was her wisdom that really got me to thinking about this in the first place. When we sing “I surrender all” or “Wherever He Leads I’ll Go” are we being honest in the words that we sing? The truth is most people just mindlessly sing the songs as worship without any thought to whether or not they would really go where he would lead and with no thought as to whether or not they are actually surrendering all to Jesus. If we give very little thought to the words of songs and how they might apply to life then it makes it easy to slip messages, words, or even assumptions into a song that may not follow the consistency of inerrancy in Scripture. We could easily sing messages about God that aren’t quite true or that don’t line up with Scripture and not even notice. The sad part is we could be singing a false message and we could be calling it worship!

While I believe that those who plan worship should consistently think about the words of each of the songs that they pick, I also believe individual Christians should consider the words they are singing and really ask themselves if they believe what they are saying or singing to God.

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