"[C]ongregational praise is a commanded duty that can be audibly discerned; we should hear congregational praise when it is sung"

On a practical level I agree with a lot if that. The same thing is true when a person sings to the congregation but their voice is difficult to understand. Sometimes a person’s voice sounds almost opera like and I for one have no idea what they are saying.

Doesn’t necessarily mean that praise teams can’t be used more biblically with some adjustments to the common format, but makes some very effective points about some significant problems with the praise team approach.

Alex, what are the hermeneutical problems you mention?

[dmyers]

Doesn’t necessarily mean that praise teams can’t be used more biblically with some adjustments to the common format, but makes some very effective points about some significant problems with the praise team approach.

Alex, what are the hermeneutical problems you mention?

Let me first apologize for the abbreviated nature of the argument here, because I do not wish to write a book-length argument. But here is (part of) how I reason. When the New Testament authors employ Greek, I assume that they ordinarily employ it in a manner similar to the Greek Old Testament. For three centuries, the Greek Old Testament had been the Old Testament employed by the Greek-speaking Jews, and for many of them it would have been the only book with which they were familiar because “books” were rare when they were in the form of manuscripts written on papyrus or animal skin (Porter, 2000, p. 1099). Therefore, I assume that when they use the same words to describe what is done in the Christian assemblies as were used to describe what was done earlier in the pre-Christian assemblies of the Israelites that they ordinarily meant the same thing. Specifically, when Acts 2:42 says that, among the things they were “devoted” to was “prayers” (ταῖς προσευχαῖς), they probably meant the same thing by the term as was meant in the Greek Old Testament. In the Greek Old Testament, “prayer” was employed to refer both to what we would call “spoken” prayer and to what we would call “sung” prayer, or praise (Nichols, p. 33).

In his claim that the when the NT writers employ Greek that it can be assumed they do so as those who wrote the OT in Greek, misses one big and indisputable essential, namely context.

Earlier in the essay he refers to the Acts 2:42 passage where it describes the church corporately and/or collectively

And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers

But suddenly a giant leap is made. He immediately decides that the writer of this Acts passage, because he is Jewish and was writing in Greek, must have had in mind an OT contextual reference to prayer which he conveniently and magically calls a “pre-Christian” assembly, namely the Israelites. In others words, he simply ignores the ecclesiastical and exceptional context of the Acts passage and imports into it (eisegesis) and OT congregational context.

Even if he were right in his premise and conclusion, he is wrong in his hermeneutic. You do not simply get to make such assumptions. And this is but the beginning of many assumptions and forms of eisegesis which simply nullifies his premise and conclusions.