Organs, Candles, Dr. Baxter, and Stuff . . .

SOME REFLECTIONS
Robert R. Meyers

One of the bulletins printed each week by the congregation where I worship happened to fall into the hands of Dr. Batsell Barrett Baxter, an unusually capable Church of Christ minister. Dr. Baxter wrote an “open letter” in the Gospel Advocate for November 8, 1962. He addressed an unnamed group of Christians, pleading that they think carefully upon certain views expressed in the bulletin being mailed out to them. With the courtesy one expects from this fine person, he refrains from naming the congregation and he remonstrates without any touch of rancor. His thoughtfulness is deeply appreciated, but there is probably no Christian in the Riverside congregation of Wichita, Kansas who would object to having the congregation’s identity known. Since none of us here believes in his own infallibility as an interpreter of Scripture, we are glad to have the opinions of others available for study. We know that one’s own views need a corrective force operating against them if they are to achieve balance and stability.

Our brother was concerned about comments in our church bulletin which showed that many of us consider the use of a mechanical instrument in worship a matter of opinion, rather than of faith. We can hardly see how it can be a matter of faith, since faith comes by hearing or reading and we neither hear nor read anything about the instrument in the New Testament. Any discussion of the instrument must necessarily fall in the realm of opinion. The rehearsed response to that statement, of course, goes like this: Whatever is not of faith is sin; the instrument is not “of faith” (i.e., cannot be read about in Scripture); therefore the instrument is sinful if used in worship. But the response is wearing thin and not many are willing to grant it much power these days. All of us know too well that there is also no word on baptismal tanks, electric lights, public address systems, song-books and communion trays, although all of them play their respective roles in our corporate worship services.

The truth is that it is becoming increasingly clear to many in the Churches of Christ that our arguments against the instrument are for the most part not arguments at all, but quibbles. I can say this without a trace of embarrassment, because neither I nor the congregation with which I worship have even the remotest desire to introduce a mechanical instrument into worship. I have said to many here that no one would protest more quickly or more strongly than I if some group in this congregation tried to introduce an instrument against the conscience of even one person. But I now understand better the discomfort I experienced as a boy preacher reading the printed debates between the “digressives” and our own “sound and loyal” brethren. It never seemed to me that the non-instrumentalist won quite so convincing a victory as our side claimed he did. I dared not formulate my doubts too clearly because I was then committed by training to my party more strongly than I was committed to the objective search for truth. So I was able to keep my mind from believing that which it was not possible for me to believe and be a “sound preacher.” It would have been fatal to my hopes. I wanted to be a party champion, and was encouraged in this wish constantly by those who taught me.

I now know no arguments strong enough to permit disfellowshipping over an instrument. I say this, I repeat, with no thought of using one in any worship service with which I have to do. I am in a college chapel where three times weekly an organ plays during the singing of hymns. I dislike the combination. Far from “bringing in an organ,” I would urge my own strong preference for a cappella singing. So, I know, would most disciples in the congregation where I worship. But since we find no divine law directed against the instrument, we refuse to consider our Christian brothers who use one as being in hopeless error. We feel that if God could speak clearly and to the point about the sins of gossip, lying, theft, murder and adultery, he could also speak clearly and to the point about instrumental music if it were a damning error. He did not do so. We conclude that its use is a matter of opinion, to be worked out among children of God in a spirit of love and forbearance.

A disturbing thing to me is that not a few teachers and ministers in high regard among the Church of Christ share this view, but fear to speak it publicly. I know for an absolute fact that there are men on the faculties of Church of Christ colleges who feel this way about the use of the instrument. Only recently I have heard, via an unimpeachable source, that an unusually capable Bible teacher told his students in a Church of Christ college that the Greek language offers no help at all in our efforts to brand the instrument as sinful. Our attempts to use and abuse psallo will not stand the scrutiny of honest and trained minds, he argued.

I cannot refrain from asking a question of all such men: How long shall the masses of Church of Christ people be deprived of your insights in such matters? Isn’t it time to say openly and frankly how weak our position is, so that we may be saved from charging our closest religious kin with wilful and pernicious error?

The old “law of exclusion” argument is brought up by Dr. Baxter in his gentle rebuke to us. This argument has been inconsistently employed for decades. If one is really serious about excluding an organ only because the New Testament says nothing about it, then he must also exclude the baptismal tank, the lights, the songbooks and communion trays already mentioned.

The rehearsed response to that statement is well known to all of us: “The tank, lights, books and trays are all aids. They play no active role in the service. But the organ makes noise, and it is an addition.” In other words, the addition of a public address system as an aid in amplifying the voice and thereby making the service more effective is all right. But the addition of an organ to increase the beauty of the service is an “adding to” and is all wrong.

One hardly knows what to do with an argument like this, because if it really does make sense to a man, it will probably be impossible to refute it. If one believes that God will send men to punishment over such semantic subtleties as this, no amount of logic is likely to have any effect upon him.

But since there is spreading disillusionment about the validity of some of our arguments on this problem in times past, it may be of value to consider some things. Insofar as the organ adds beauty to a service, it functions exactly as do our other beautifying objects in the church building. Having once yielded to the baptismal mural or the anodized aluminum communion set, we have already admitted the validity of aesthetic concern. If we can have a richly carpeted platform, with matching decor, and curved and gilded communion tables, we can hardly object to the instrument on strictly aesthetic grounds. It may not please one’s own particular sense of beauty, but he no longer has the right to deny this kind of concern on the part of his brother.

Insofar as the organ aids singers to get a tune, it functions exactly as do our tuning forks and pitch pipes. That quaint old argument that the tuning fork has sense enough to get quiet when the worship starts will hardly appeal to modern churchgoers. The worship is in progress at the time the pitch pipe is blown. A mechanical noise is heard in the building. It is an unauthorized noise. Yet who among us would regard it as a sinful innovation over which brothers ought to split? Actually, the fact that the organ makes sound — short or prolonged — is of little importance. A neon light buzzes throughout many of our services, and a public address system hums. The noises are slight, of course, and I am descending to the kind of scholastic quibbling often employed by those who detest the organ, but the point is that relativity of this kind surely cannot matter greatly to God. He is attuned to the melodies of the human spirit, not to physical noises of any kind (including those of our throats), and what really matters to Him is the harmony that comes up from that spirit.

Insofar as the organ assists in quieting an incoming audience, it functions exactly as do our stained glass windows, our carpeted floors, and our usher who whispers, “Quiet inside, please.” It is used to create a quiet, worshipful atmosphere and since we have already accepted the use of several objects and techniques for that purpose which are not mentioned in Scripture, we can hardly challenge the organ except on grounds of personal preference.

Before we turn from musing on this point to other matters, perhaps it would be helpful to some dissenting reader if I repeated that the congregation which listens to such views as these does not intend to have a mechanical instrument in its worship. Some would be extremely uncomfortable with one, in view of their backgrounds. Others have no objection, but prefer our tradition of purely vocal music. But we have no thunderbolts from heaven to hurl against our brothers whose preferences differ on this matter. Who will provide us with the clear and indisputable “Nay!” which would mark the instrument as unalterably condemned by God?

“But How Far Will You Go?”

Our brother Baxter worried about “how far we will go.” In twenty-three years of preaching, how famous that phrase has grown for me. When the church I knew as a boy wanted to put a rubber “runner” down the aisles, some local and area evangelists wondered “how far” we would go. “It’s not just this runner, brethren, but what comes next that concerns us,” they said. The convenient thing about this “how far will you go?” argument is that it distracts attention from the issue at hand and projects it to some potentially horrible future. When a bogey man is created on the distant horizon, people forget all about the harmlessness of the present plan and are promptly frightened away from it.

But my home church, like your home church, was not sufficiently frightened, for after a while we all digressed to carpets on the platform, indirect lighting, modern buildings, church kitchens, baptismal murals public address systems, handsome guest ledgers, central air conditioning, and well-equipped nurseries. Oddly, once we had these things, the evangelists simply enjoyed them along with the rest of us. But they kept up their posture of defense against “sectarian innovations” by attacking all sorts of conveniences which other religious groups had, but which were still in the future for us.

Dr. Baxter asked us, in his kindly note, whether candles would be next. I find this interesting. Suppose they were, for aesthetic reasons only, what then? Is the baptismal mural all right, but candles all wrong? I find candles in the Bible sooner than I find the incandescent bulb. And since the bulbs most of us use are so shaped or concealed as to increase the beauty of our surroundings, we have already admitted again the correctness of aesthetic concern. So if we wished to put candles on the communion table just because they look nice there, should this be cause for alarm? Wouldn’t this be purely a matter of our own preference? The truth is that candles would frighten some of us because we have not used them for aesthetic effect. Like so many things that were wrong when I was a boy (kitchens, carpets, stained glass), we must wait until we have them and then, miraculously, they are all right.

Many of these things are feared because they are put to what we consider to be improper uses by others. But it is a mark of insecurity to be put off from benefits simply because some abuse them. The most sacrificial Christian saint I ever knew, an elder, once offered to buy prayer cushions for those who felt that by kneeling they could better speak with God. A deacon, whose spiritual sensitivity seldom revealed itself, declared that it was too much like Catholicism to him and that he would quit church at once if they were bought. The elder would not so offend a brother, and dropped his suggestion at once. His spirit was commendable. But when do we begin the serious task of teaching some brethren who are so easily and unnecessarily offended? Paul said to avoid offending them, but in the next breath he said, Teach them! If our preachers and colleges and journals do not teach the weak brothers who are offended at anything they have not had before, how will they ever become strong brothers? We need to read Romans 14 more carefully.

What our present position means, if we pander forever to the “weak brother,” is that we are bound eternally to limp along with one who may come to enjoy holding us back. Our weakest link forges our strongest taboos and prohibitions. It was surely not meant to be so. The admonition to study and to grow must mean something. I have observed many times that the weak brother (self-styled when he wants to win a point; actually he really thinks he is strong, and that others are weak) has the biggest club ever given to a human being in institutional circles. Every time something is done to which he objects, he simply says, “That offends me, and causes me to fall, and you mustn’t offend your weak brother.” So we must stop. There must have been, in God’s marvelous wisdom, some way to call a halt to this. And there is, in Paul’s own words: Teach him! If he stays weak too long, perhaps he is enjoying his weakness overly much. When that becomes obvious, perhaps we should pay less attention to the anguished cries that ascend every time we try to take one more painful step toward increasing the beauty of our services, or making them more relevant to the society in which we live.

Akin to the “how far will we go?” argument is the “hole in the dike” remonstrance, which suggests that unless we denounce the instrument and any other practice not officially sanctioned in our party, we shall very soon let in an ocean of vile and evil practices. The whole ocean does not necessarily come flooding in unless no one attends to the dike at all. One can regulate the flow. Why pretend otherwise? We do not see that viewing the instrument as a matter of opinion, for example, must lead us directly to open membership. We immersed an adult Presbyterian the other day, after explaining why we could not accept him as a participating member otherwise. We find no law governing frequency of observance of the Lord’s Supper (nor can anyone), and we are charitable toward brethren who interpret this matter differently from ourselves, but we still continue weekly communion as an expression of love for Christ, and we have never even considered a change.

We feel no compulsion to hold joint services with our Christian church brothers. We acknowledge their sincerity and the proofs of their commitment to Christ, even when we realize that differences in interpretation might strain a closer fellowship. We wish only to be free Christians, who can believe what the Bible seems to us to teach without being frightened by those who say we are outrunning good sense and departing from the Christian community.

It is not so much where such independent spirits will go, left to their own freedom and good sense, as it is, Where will their fiercely authoritarian brothers drive them? Can we not have a thought which is true to our own reading of Scripture? I am fearful that if one says, as Dr. Baxter does, that these folk will let the whole ocean in because they have made a small hole in the dike of Church of Christ traditions, they will lose respect for the cogency of brotherhood opinion. If coercion is then tried, they may be driven farther than any of them ever wanted to do.