"God Likes Music of All Kinds"
In his chapter God, My Heart, and Music in the book Worldliness: Resisting the Seduction of a Fallen World, Bob Kauflin writes,
Actually, it seems that God likes music of all kinds. No one style can sufficiently capture his glory or even begin to reflect the vastness of his wisdom, creativity, beauty, and order. That doesn't mean some kinds of music aren't more complex or beautiful than others. It just means no single genre of music is better than the rest in every way.
Tellingly, Kauflin offers no biblical support of his own for these statements.
I believe that wrong claims such as these (by Kauflin and others) about God and His supposedly liking "music of all kinds" is one of the chief reasons that we have the debacle that we have musically in the Church in our day.
- 2715 views
[Joel Shaffer said:]Your reliance on Deuteronomy 12:30–31 to argue all ANE musical practices were “wicked” misapplies the text, which prohibits idolatry (e.g., child sacrifice), not neutral forms like lyres and other instruments used in processions or poetry set to music.
You misinterpret what the passage says. God did not just prohibit idolatry; He prohibited what they did in their idolatry. That prohibition included inquiring about the musical aspects of their idolatry.
[Joel Shaffer said:]Your use of Achan (Joshua 7) is irrelevant, as his sin involved taking devoted items (Joshua 6:18–19), not cultural exchange. Solomon’s trade with Hiram (1 Kings 5) and Ophir (1 Kings 10), blessed by God (1 Kings 3:13), supplied instrument materials, corroborated by archaeology like Hazor cymbals (Braun). Dismissing this as “nonsense” isolates your view from biblical and scholarly credibility.
Divine revelation about under-the-ban cities/peoples is not irrelevant at all.
The Israelites had been in Egypt for more than 400 years. The nations whom God put under the ban were very far away. When Israel would come into the land, God prohibited all interaction with those people. There was no cultural exchange between Israel and those under-the-ban peoples such that Israel borrowed any of their kinds of music, least of all any of their kinds of occult music.
Without any evidence of any interaction with those under-the-ban nations in Scripture, you merely assume to be true what you want to be true.
As for the "trade" passages, they do not prove anything about Israel's adopting occult kinds of Canaanite music for the worship of Yahweh. According to your reasoning, we should find Israel importing instruments from the surrounding wicked nations--not the materials that were used to make musical instruments.
Furthermore, we should read of Israel's seeking out the finest pagan makers of occult instruments and bringing them to Israel to teach Israel how to make such occult instruments that please God. We, however, read of no such "cultural exchange."
In addition, it is telling that when all the nations that came to hear and learn from Solomon's God-given wisdom brought gifts to king Solomon, there is not even the slightest hint of anyone bringing their excelling occult musical instruments to him as gifts.
Any notions that the nations all around Israel had excelling occult musical instruments and kinds of music that were acceptable to God for use in worship are baseless notions.
Aaron: ...But Don’s got a point for sure, too, because, as modern music shows, you can do a very wide variety of “styles” on the same instruments.
What mitigates in this case, though, is that music hadn’t been around as long and the means of preserving musical memory weren’t so advanced. There were no recordings, little or no musical notation systems, no published works. The result is that “styles” would have been a much simpler concept and much more scoped by the instruments themselves.
This, too, I think we need to subject to the standard of sufficiency. IF certain musical styles are hated by God (beyond the semiotic and associational difficulties we have mentioned), then He could have led His people to notate musical style in a way that served to warn us of those dangers.
So the lack of a notation system pretty strongly suggests that it wasn't deemed necessary. The Word of God is sufficient without including a music notation system and without including warning about styles.
So the lack of a notation system pretty strongly suggests that it wasn’t deemed necessary. The Word of God is sufficient without including a music notation system and without including warning about styles.
I’m not sure sufficiency can argue that way. But maybe…?
Someone could counter argue that, God having chosen to limit the Bible to 66 books completed millennia ago, there’s a lot we have to derive from a broad sufficiency. It ends up being a question of categories, maybe. Can we generalize that if Scripture doesn’t instruct us about a whole category of things, those things are not important, or we shouldn’t build an ethic based in inferences? I think that would not hold up.
To me, it’s a stronger argument to just face the fact that we do not have information in Scripture about _______ (fill in the blank) and so we have to carefully derive anything we try to establish from Scripture on that, and assign our work an appropriate level of certainty (the more complex the deriving, the lower the certainty.)
Furthermore, we should read of Israel’s seeking out the finest pagan makers of occult instruments and bringing them to Israel to teach Israel how to make such occult instruments that please God. We, however, read of no such “cultural exchange.”
In addition, it is telling that when all the nations that came to hear and learn from Solomon’s God-given wisdom brought gifts to king Solomon, there is not even the slightest hint of anyone bringing their excelling occult musical instruments to him as gifts.
Rajesh, you’re continuing to vacillate between two standards. When there’s a point you want to establish as true, biblical silence is enough for you, but if someone else wants to make a contrary point, they are required to have more than silence and must produce chapter and verse. So is the standard that Scripture has to say something or is it that it doesn’t have to say something?
(For my part, the correct answer is that “it depends,” and we’re talking about reasoning in valid ways both from what it says and what it does not. So valid reasoning becomes increasingly important when the case for a view is complex.)
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
You claim that you are not using the appeal to authority fallacy and only using their evidence. Later, you say that there are no scholars that "have come to a different conclusion . . . You won't find them. They don't exist."
By talking about the uniform conclusion that you assert that all the scholars have reached, it is clear that you are appealing to their authority (in arriving at that uniform conclusion) and not just their evidence. In addition, you are using the argument from consensus fallacy when you say that there are no scholars that disagree.
I hate to point this out to you, but you are putting your own spin on the appeal to (argument from) authority fallacy. It's not a fallacy to appeal to authority when the authority is relevant, there is a unanimous consensus, and there is strong (archeological) evidence to support the claim. The fallacy occurs when people rely on a weak or unrelated authority or ignore evidence in favor of the authority's status. When experts in a field completely agree, they are citing the evidence itself because the experts reflect the collective findings of their field.
Let me give you another example of why your “anything goes” view of Appeal to Authority is problematic. If your spin on the argument from authority fallacy is true, then flat-earthers could argue that round Earth proponents are appealing to authority when they make the claim that the earth is round based, even though every expert/scientist in their relevant fields agrees with the mounds of evidence that demonstrates the earth is round. If everything is "appeal to authority" than nothing is.
I suspect that all the scholars that Joel cites above presuppose that instrumental music is inherently either neutral, amoral, or good. Having such a presupposition certainly affects how one reads whatever data or evidence one claims to be evaluating in a scholarly fashion. I and many others hold that presupposition to be entirely untenable.
Presuppositions matter if they distort evidence, but scholarly work is judged by data, not assumptions. Braun’s “Levantine musical koine” is based on primary sources (KTU 1.108, Hazor cymbals), not philosophical bias. Ugaritic texts, trade, archaeology stand regardless of scholars’ views on music’s morality, as they document historical practices, not ethical claims.
You misinterpret what the passage says. God did not just prohibit idolatry; He prohibited what they did in their idolatry. That prohibition included inquiring about the musical aspects of their idolatry.
No, you are arguing from silence and ignoring the overwhelming archeological and historical evidence. ANE cultures, whether it was in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Canaan, had similar instruments. As Aaron has pointed out, and the surviving Ugaritic texts confirm, ANE music styles were instrument-driven, limited by the instruments themselves. For instance, certain lyres/harp, ancient Israel’s kinnor (1 Chronicles 15:16), and the Canannite Ugaritic knr (KTU 1.108), likely had 5–7 strings, tuned for pentatonic scales, per Burgh. The music was so similar because the instruments were so similar. The poetry set to music was similar. The only difference was that Israel's similar music style that was driven by the same instruments used by the pagan ANE nations, were used to worship Yahweh with them.
Discussion