History: the ever present danger of baby and bathwater

The most interesting thing about early church singing is that almost without exception no instruments were used. They almost certainly sang – the bible talks about their singing in Acts 16:25 and 1 Corinthians 14:26 – but they didn’t use any instruments.

This is strange, because in Judaism there was singing with all sorts of instruments (See Ps 33, Ps 150). Two things influenced this almost total rejection of instruments:

First, Jewish practice by the time of the church had become centred on synagogues. Unlike the temple, which at its peak had probably hosted some pretty impressive instrumental worship, synagogues had much more stripped back unaccompanied singing with a focus on teaching the scriptures. Jewish Christians would have been used to this.

Second, instruments reminded Christians of something they deeply feared: Paganism. That’s why Clement of Alexandria (who lived AD115 to about 216) told Christians to ‘no longer employ the ancient psaltery, trumpet, timbrel, or flute’, which ‘inflame desire, stir up lust, or arouse anger.’¹ The only exception he allowed was for some instruments (cithara and lyre) at Christian agape meals. Likewise John Chrysostom (347-407) decided that it was only because of Old Testament people’s ‘dull temperament’ that God allowed instruments: as a concession, not an ideal.² Instruments reminded the early Christians of pagan worship of idols; they were so keen to distance themselves from it that they deprived themselves of something the Bible clearly celebrates.

Musicians use the term ‘a cappella’ to refer to unaccompanied singing. This literally means (in Italian) ‘in the chapel style’, because of the way Christians sang together for hundreds of years.

The lesson for us here is a simple one: don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. In distinguishing ourselves from the world, and the practices we disagree with, we need to be careful not to sell ourselves short, and deprive ourselves of something great.

That said, there is nothing wrong with great unaccompanied singing. But it is a good lesson to be aware of how we tend to hold art forms guilty by association. I’ve heard people say that we can’t use a certain style of music because it is ‘pagan’. I’ve heard church services criticised for being ‘too much like a rock concert’. No doubt there are things about pagan music and rock concerts we want to reject, but I suspect we often do so too quickly, without doing the hard work of filtering through what is good, bad and indifferent.

1 Clement of Alexander, ‘The Tutor of Children’, in Lawrence Johnson, Worship in the Early Church: An Anthology of Historical Sources (Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2009), para 832; Quasten, Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity, 73.

2 John Chrysostom, ‘On Psalm 149’, in Johnson, Worship in the Early Church: Anthology of Historical Sources, para 1470. Likewise Nicetas of Remesiana, ‘On The Usefulness of Psalmody’, para 3197.