In the tenth volume in its Liturgical Studies series, A New Song for an Old World, Musical Thought in the Early Church, Calvin Stapert discusses the relationship between the emerging church and the musical culture of the late-antique Mediterranean world. Believing that Christian ideas about music have been â??truncated and twistedâ?? by naturalistic thought since the Enlightenment, Stapert seeks to persuade contemporary evangelicals to embrace the patristic heritage of liturgical music based up the Psalms. This volume is Stapertâ??s brief for a reformation of evangelical worship.
Certainly Stapertâ??s volume is timely. Itâ??s hardly news to Christians living in China and Pakistan that they live in a culture largely opposed to their fundamental beliefs, but for many Western Christians itâ??s a relatively new sensation. While the aggressive secularism and growing atheism of our culture certainly was not a characteristic of Roman antiquity, our contemporary emphasis upon â??diversity,â?? distaste for dogmatic pronouncements, and hedonism was. Romans sometimes condemned Christians as â??haters of mankind.â?? As that charge is again made today, it might benefit Western Christians to see how the Fathers urged believers to order their lives in the face of such a broad societal malediction. With music apparently an important part of the ancient world, what role did the ancient church believe music should play in private piety and public worship?
In chapters dealing with song in the New Testament, the relationship between the church and pagan society, and writings referencing music by Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Ambrose, Chrysostom, and Augustine, Stapert surveys the sources. Although he makes it clear that he is not an expert in this material, Stapert is skillful in assembling and referencing the work of other writers (and he is generous in his quotations of both primary and secondary sources). His chapter on Augustine is particularly well done and his observation that music for Augustine was a form of rhetoric (and a thus a subcategory of the trivium instead of its own branch in the quadrivium) is insightful and illuminative.
Stapert concludes that â??the early Christians can inspire and encourage us by their courageous and unwavering posture against the corrupt and very popular culture of their day. They can teach us that we need to draw a line, and they can encourage us to stand bravely behind that line.â?? The line for Stapert means that the â??whole Psalter with its full-orbed expressionâ?? should be the central element of Christian music, that the essential stance of the church should be countercultural, and that the Neoplatonic idea (by way of Boethius) of a musica mundana (or divine music of the spheres) should be the foundation of Christian aesthetics.
Lurking in the shadows of Stapertâ??s book is the contemporary evangelical praise service, with its â??seeker friendlyâ?? popular aesthetic, scriptural amnesia, and manipulative stagecraft. His text is a useful indictment of the genus, at least from the viewpoint of the Church Fathers.
Michael Linton A New Song from the Old World
