The Music of Kenny D, etc.

Okay, so maybe you’ve read “Inorganic Music,” a recent post over at Mike Cope’s blog. And maybe you’ve read some of the 100+ comments.

Either way, don’t walk, run to Ken Danley’s blog and read his latest, “Greener Grass."

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"Unfortunately, most of the theology I learned in seminary was in the translation mode. Take this biblical image and translate it into something more palatable to people who use Cuisinarts. The modern church has been willing to use everyone's language but its own. In conservative contexts, gospel speech is traded for dogmatic assertion and moralism, for self-help psychologies and narcotic mantras. In more liberal speech, talk tiptoes around the outrage of Christian discourse and ends up as an innoucuous, though urbane, affirmation of the ruling order. Unable to preach Christ and him crucified, we preach humanity and it improved. . . . By the time most of us finish qualifying the scandal of Christian speech, very little can be said by the preacher that can't be heard elsewhere."

William Willimon in Peculiar Speech: Preaching to the Baptized

What Willimon describes helps me to understand why early leaders of the American Restoration Movement insisted that we"call Bible things by Bible names." When we use biblical vocabulary to discuss biblical realities, it's so much more likely that we will truly go back to to the genuine message of the Bible, to the Word of God that will endure forever, to the truth that we cannot live without.

But the problem with back-to-the-Bible movements is that, because of human sin, they come to use biblical passages, always word for word, in order to support teachings that are less than and foreign to the Word of Christ. The fact that Satan can both quote and apply the Scriptures fails to make them wonder if, perhaps, they're doing it the devil's way rather than God's.

By the grace of God, such movements, if kept alive, produce a few people who announce not what has been repeated to them by others, but what they have recently heard when prayerfully, closely listening to the Word of God.