There’s been a bit of a debate over on the tavern recently about highly “feminised” (I’m not keen on that term but we’ll let it slide for the moment) worship – that is, worship of the highly intimate, “Deep love” variety (as one writer put it, the “Jesus is my boyfriend” school of songwriting) and I’m a bit curious about all this.
Now, I have my own complaints about worship music, but they’re mostly because it all tends to fall into the Three Chords And A Capo Sha-la-la-la Oooh Jesus *clap*clap*clap* camp (and also because it’s all pitched for basses and I’m a tenor, but that’s another issue). There’s no arguing that an awful lot of modern worship is, bluntly, nonsense – happy choruses designed as much to make to congregation feel better about singing them as they are to glorify God – but that doesn’t mean there aren’t good modern worship songs, and it would be frankly remarkable if worship song writing had died with the decline in popularity of the pipe organ in contemporary music; it’s just that there’s so much more of it now that it’s hard to sort the wheat from the chaff (much like, say, games for the PS2 – the fact there’s a lot of crap doesn’t mean things like Ico and Disgaea aren’t works of utter genius).
But the intimacy thing has got me thinking, and I’m interested in hearing some thoughts: Where does this idea of an “intimate” relationship with God come from? Where are we instructed to approach God in the same way we’d approach a human lover, except (to paraphrase that great philosopher, Homer Simpson) “replacing Baby with Jesus”? The wonderful Lark News ran a story about this a couple of years back. Satire aside, though, I guess the concern is that it’s using the same language to talk about divine love in the same way we’d talk about human or erotic love, and that at best, that feels weird and inappropriate and, at worst, downright blasphemous.
But I’m trying to understand this one, so, what are people’s thoughts? Where does this idea of intimacy in worship come from, and is it a good and/or healthy thing?
I know what you mean, but I don’t think it’s completely off. Song of Songs is sometimes interpreted as a picture of God’s love for his people. And the church is the bride of Christ, that’s pretty romantic. Yes, if all you ever sing is slushy love songs to God that’s bad because it gives us a distorted picture of what God is like. But I don’t think they’re all blasphemous.
Song of Songs may sometimes be interpreted like that, but I kind of think that’s unhelpful because it really actually is a piece of erotic poetry, written about the feelings between two extremely horny people a very long time ago. To use this as a basis from which to talk about the Love of God is, frankly, a bit creepy.
OK, I agree with you on Songs of Songs, but I think the marriage metaphor stands. It’s used in Hosea too. Perhaps the language of love and passion is too easily seen as devalued currency, but in its right place, it can be holy.