THE MUSIC QUESTION: WHAT WILL HAPPEN?

Since the time that a melodeon was introduced to the Church of Christ in Midway, Kentucky in 1851, the question of instrumental music in worship has been very much with us. One of the elders of the Midway church slipped his Negro slave through the window one night and purloined the melodeon, stashing it away at his farm home. Unfortunately that theft did not resolve the issue, for another instrument was brought in. Our folk resorted not only to thievery but name-calling, vindictiveness, violence and finally open division, with both sides guilty of shameful and inexcusable behavior. The real problem was obviously something far more serious than a music box.

The instrumentalists and anti-instrumentalists have now been a separated people for three-quarters of a century, despite the fact that they otherwise have a great deal in common. No one any longer has to impose on his conscience, for he can go to a church that has the instrument or to one that does not, and oftentimes they are in the same block or across the street from each other. But still the issue will not die. The anti-instrumentalists make the matter a test of fellowship, refusing to accept the others unless they give up the instrument and become like themselves. The instrumentalists see such a demand as an imposition upon their liberty in Christ and inconsistent with the plea, “In matters of faith, unity; in matters of opinion, liberty; in all things, love.”

There have been numerous debates, both oral and written, some of which were conducted in a brotherly and reasonable manner, but these have brought us no closer together. The debates have bequeathed to us some rather odd terminology, such as psallo and gopher wood. Our folk know little about teakwood or bois d’ Arc, but gopher wood we know. But the debates belong to a bygone day, and that is probably just as well, even if they did cause us to see each other now and again.

More recently some of our leaders got together in St. Louis. After talking about gopher wood for awhile, an editor from Texas, who was supported by some professors from Abilene, suggested to the instrumentalists that they should give up the organ for the sake of unity. A brother from Milligan, who knows us better than most, graciously conceded that this was a reasonable request and one that should be considered. He suggested, however, that the proposal could be made more persuasive if our folk would first give up the Sunday School for the sake of unity with the hundreds of non-instrument Churches of Christ who object to that practice on the same grounds as the instrument.

St. Louis apparently did not help matters any, and so the issue lives on, not only alive but kicking. Emanating from Memphis is The Spiritual Sword, edited by Thomas B. Warren, Ph.D. (Vanderbilt). The theme of its October issue is Instrumental Music in Worship is Sinful. It is all there, including psallo and gopher wood. Thirty-six of its forty-eight pages are given to this theme, the editor concluding, “Thus, it is seen that the Bible plainly teaches that instrumental music in Christian worship is sinful.” He says this while Guy N. Woods, an editor of the Gospel Advocate in Nashville, is on record with the complaint that a large percentage of the members of the non-instrument Churches of Christ do not believe that the instrument is sinful. The instrument may be “plainly sinful” to Editor Warren, but it isn’t all that plain to our Christian Church sisters and brothers and, according to brother Wood, to a large number of our own folk!

If you say The Spiritual Sword is far right-wing and that the music question is a dead issue in more moderate Church of Christ circles, then I have more to say. When a new Ph.D. from one of the nation’s leading universities was being interviewed recently for a teaching position at one of our better known colleges, he was asked only two questions about what he believed. One was his view on the inspiration of the Scriptures and the other was his position on instrumental music! After going through a tough discipline at a demanding graduate school, designed to equip him to cope with the crucial issues of a troubled church in a confused world, his prospective colleagues asked him about instrumental music, believe it or not!

But this has its encouraging note. While the young Ph.D. stated his non-instrument position, he made it clear that he would not make it a test of fellowship. If his position was not approved, it was at least tolerated, for he was accepted into the teaching program.

So, it I am asked what direction the music question will eventually take among our folk, I would say it will go the way of that young Ph.D., which is of course the position this journal takes, and it is the one held, I am persuaded, by the majority of people in the non-instrument churches. After all, we can’t become more spiritual, more responsible, and more knowledgeable, which we are doing, without having a higher view than to predicate brotherhood upon methods, upon which believers have always differed.

When I say, therefore, that the music issue is alive and kicking, I really mean that it is a dying issue that is being kept alive artificially by the likes of The Spiritual Sword, and that what we hear are really death pangs. They do protest too much! Their tribe is decreasing among Churches of Christ, and they can see the handwriting on the wall, not unlike Bull Conner when he got out the water hoses and police dogs in the face of a changing South that would never again be the same.

The Church of Christ of tomorrow, insofar as the music question is concerned, will be like the one Ouida and I are a part of here in Denton. Oh, yes, we do have a piano! It is used by the day school that is housed in our facility and which we help sponsor, and it is in full view. It is no big deal. We pay no more attention to it than any other equipment used by the school. But a visiting minister, “orthodox” of course, criticized our elders for even having it in the building. “I know you don’t use it in worship,” he conceded, “But it gives offense to the others in town.” Our elders lovingly laughed in his face. They are simply fed up with that kind of nonsense. Think of it: in a university city where thousands of kids sit precariously on the edge of eternity a minister of the gospel makes a big deal out of the presence of a piano in a church-school facility! Well, as I say, that tribe is decreasing. Our church will always be a cappella because of both tradition and conviction, but it will not be made a test of fellowship. Several Christian Church families have joined us. We receive them on the same basis as if they came from a Church of Christ, for we are all the Body of Christ together. We can have churches that have the instrument and churches that do not have. That will be the position of more and more of our churches as we grow older and more spiritual.

In time more and more of our more affluent churches may have organs in their marriage chapels, which would not be inconsistent. When the church sings corporately in assembly it is something distinctively different from a wedding. Many of them would like to have such a convenience now. They simply lack the courage to do it, but in time they will.

The best argument against the instrument is not what you read in this special issue of The Spiritual Sword, but what you would see and hear if you visited our congregation in Denton. My neighbor, whom I have taken to some of our services, is most impressed with our praise to God in song. “My, what singing!,” he says again and again, and all he hears is the human voice. An instrument would get in our way. We have one, but do not use it — mainly because we don’t need it! In a lot of instrument churches I hear the instrument more than the human voice. So we accept the challenge of Isaac Errett when the instrument first began to be an issue. He conceded that some churches, to listen to them sing, needed something to help them along, while others did not. His challenge was that each church should demonstrate which is best by their own fruit, rather than to argue about it.

So, to all our militant instrumental brothers, and there are those in the Christian Church that are the counterpart of The Spiritual Sword, we invite you to visit us in Denton. We’ll not argue with you about the instrument. We’ll love you —and sing to you a cappella. And once you’ve heard our beautiful songbirds, who carry folk along like me, you’ll never again get bogged down in an article on psallo, and you’ll go back home and urge your folk to open their mouths and sing to the Lord!

Roy Deaver, in this special number of The Spiritual Sword, tells how Don Morris, late president of Abilene, spoke at the centennial celebration at Thorp Springs, where Add-Ran College began (now TCU), and where a non-instrument church remains. Brother Morris told the story of how the instrument was introduced back in 1894. Joseph Addison Clark was the old pioneer who had started it all. His son, Addison, was now president of the college. They were having a gospel meeting and the son had resolved to introduce the organ and use it during the meeting. His own father pled with him not to do so, presenting him with a petition signed by more than a hundred of their brothers and sisters.

The son turned from his own father and told the organist, “Play on, Bertha.” The father and over a hundred others walked out and started another church. Brother Morris broke down and wept as he recalled the story, and it is something to weep about. Whether or not the organ per se is a sin, that was certainly sinful, and there is something dreadfully wrong when brethren, even a father and son, will let something like a music box splinter family and church alike. As we look back in our history there are things to weep over as well as things to gladden our hearts. Had I been at Thorp Springs with Brother Morris, I would have wept with him.

But President Morris went on to say, “We of Churches of Christ today are the real heirs of the first years of Add-Ran and of the gospel taught in the first Texas churches. This is true because today we continue in the slogan first used by Texas pioneers and the Campbells before them: ‘We speak where the Bible speaks and are silent where the Bible is silent.’ “ In other words, his own non-instrument folk are the only ones of the Restoration Movement that have remained faithful. We are the true heirs, no one else, since we do not use the instrument.

The late Abilene president spoke these words in a part of Texas where there are at least six or eight different kinds of “faithful” Churches of Christ, each of which claims to be “the real heirs” of the Movement that speaks where the Scriptures speak and is silent where the Scriptures are silent, and all of which are non-instrument. They are all divided over other things, such as cooperative enterprises, Sunday Schools, and communion cups.

A different speaker, such as the elegant G. B. Shelburne, J r., could point to the time in his own memory when the Church of Christ did not have the Sunday School. He could tell how it was introduced in church after church, over the protests of sincere brothers, and how the church was divided. It would no doubt be a sad story, something to weep about, and he would insist that his people are the real heirs of the Movement since the Scriptures are silent about Sunday Schools.

But our good brother Shelburne has “cups” (for communion) in his church, and there were those who left his group when they were introduced —and they are the real heirs since the Bible plainly says that Jesus took “the cup.”

But even that group has divided over whether “the cup” should be wine or grape juice, and the anti-grape juice party are the real heirs because …

Is that enough? And they can all tell the sad stories of division, with members of the same family sometimes publishing separate papers, castigating each other as leaders of warring sects. It is all very sad, and I can weep with each party as the story is repeated again and again. But I just can’t buy that old bromide that We are the true heirs, everyone departed from the faith except us.

Since we of the non-instrument Churches of Christ are good and intelligent people, it should begin to dawn on us that something is wrong with our thinking, for the more we talk about “restoring the New Testament church” the more we divide. People could justly conclude that our intention is to divide Christians rather than to unite them.

I am convinced that there is a fatal flaw in our thinking about “restoration,” and it hangs as an albatross about our necks. In that speech at Thorp Springs brother Morris expressed it all too well: “We believe that this is the true pattern for church organization, for purity of worship, and for all things religious. To use this pattern is more important than excelling in numbers or affluence. We look to the New Testament as the guide in restoring the Lord’s church, and we pray that He may bless us as we attempt to follow it.”

That’s the speech that every party leader makes! Each one looks at “the true pattern,” and, directed more by its silence than by what it actually says, sees something different from all the rest, so he must start his own “faithful” church.

The facts of our history force me to conclude that “restorationism” is divisive. If we presume that the New Testament constitutes a fixed pattern whereby “the true church” is restored in its work, worship, and organization, we are doomed to be a people of multiple sects. The New Testament itself, including the churches of the New Testament, allows for much more diversity than we have allowed. The Scriptures can be our guide without being a detailed blueprint, and the New Testament nowhere makes any such claim as being a fixed pattern. It provides us with norms and principles, but it allows for differences, as the churches of the primitive era were different from each other.

We must face the fact that the Bible simply is not the kind of book we have made it. Those who insist that it is a fixed pattern that legislates all the details should go to the Scriptures themselves for such a claim. The Bible makes no such claim. It is something that we have imposed upon the Bible to our own hurt. Had God intended that it be something like an architect’s blueprint, He would surely have done a better job than to give us a blueprint that leaves us in utter confusion, divided and sub-divided.

The music question will be settled as we come to see that it is not a question of Scripture to start with, as is true with so many things upon which we differ, but upon the silence of Scripture. We are going to differ in areas where the Scriptures do not speak explicitly. We all agree that drunkenness is a sin, but we will differ as to whether drinking a cocktail is a sin. In the first the Bible is explicit; in the second it is not. So we must allow for differences. We all agree that singing is approved of God, for here the Bible is explicit, but we will differ on such details as an accompaniment or whether only the Psalms can be sung, as is insisted upon by some of the Scot Presbyterians. Such preferences must be allowed so long as those who hold them do not seek to impose them upon others.

Enough of our people are coming to recognize this solution that it is encouraging. The time will never come when we will all see such things as instrumental music eye-to-eye. I f this should happen, then there would be something else. We should not expect it otherwise. We will come more and more to accept each other as sisters and brothers because we are sisters and brothers, not because we agree on this or that point of dispute. —the Editor