Steve Pettit and the Skillman family

Don wrote:

No more time for this subject today. Spent most of the day conducting the funeral of one of our deacons. What a great man. Trusted the Lord 18 years ago in the same room we conducted the service. Almost all his family, except his wife, unbelievers. Many coworkers in attendance, also lost. A great privilege to serve them today.

That is lovely. I spent the entire afternoon with folks from my church, putting together a float for the local Christmas parade. We’ll be handing out Gospel tracts, candy, info about our weekly children’s bible club, and invitations to our Christmas Eve service. I imagine many people here involved in ministry were doing similar pious things today!

Don wrote:

But my point at this time is simply to argue with Jay who seems to think that good words make good music no matter what the genre or style it is presented in.

What I’ve asked for is Scriptural criteria to objectively judge the genre and style of music. It has not been provided. For my part, there has been no deliberate tap-dancing or unwillingness to “see” anything. We do congregational hymns in my church, with some newer material, all done with congregational singing. I have no ax to grind, here. We do have women lead singing, though, so perhaps I’m disqualified from commenting further!

Music is the product of human hearts, it has to reflect the heart. Christian music these days is imitative, not creative. It imitates the products of the world rather create products of the Spirit.

This is well-meaning, but has no substance. Music in past days was intrinsically a product of the Spirit, but now it’s a product of the world? How so? This goes back to my perennial question about how to objectively judge style and genre, along with the intent of the performer/writer.

This discussion, and the others on related threads, has inspired me to collect all my thoughts in one place. I think I’ll be wild and crazy and do a video discussion on this subject, and use Riley’s article and Don’s article as starting points. If I remember, I’ll post the link here when it is done.

I’m off now. I have pious things to do, like re-read my sermon for tomorrow and touch a few things up.

Nearly 60 years ago I asked sincere questions of others. When I didn’t understand, I was told that it was my inability to understand their “clear” teaching. Eventually I was dismissed with a large measure of condescension. Some things never change. Thankfully I and my younger “convergent” brethren have found better and more patient Biblical teachers. BTW, I consider them Biblical fundamentalists.

Now excuse me while I go do something truly spiritual and watch college football.

But my point at this time is simply to argue with Jay who seems to think that good words make good music no matter what the genre or style it is presented in. The argument about music is not an argument about the words. That’s all I’m saying today.

And again, that’s not my point and hasn’t been for years. I even explicitly said as much a few days ago. I’m open to having my mind changed, but not if the only way to do so is to either agree with you that I’m saying something that I am not or to agree with someone because music theory / cultural studies says we should.

Bert,
I have seen you comment a number of times about guilt by association, but I am not clear exactly what you mean when you say that. Could you explain specifically what you mean by guilt by association concerning music?

[Don Johnson]

As for this topic, I’m not interested in attempting to analyze any particular piece of music because not one person here arguing the other side would agree. You are committed to your presuppositions, I think they are unbiblical. Music is the product of human hearts, it has to reflect the heart. Christian music these days is imitative, not creative. It imitates the products of the world rather create products of the Spirit.

This is where these conversations always end. “I would explain how some music is sinful but you wouldn’t believe me anyway…so I won’t.” I have NEVER even had one person give me the opportunity to try to understand by explaining how to analyze music. Why would you expect anyone to believe what you say if you can’t even demonstrate how to identify what is sinful and what isn’t?

Rajesh, guilt by association is a standard fallacy of informal logic, one of the family of “association fallacies” which are part of “genetic fallacies.” With regards to music, if we say “music form A is bad because it’s correlated with sinful behavior B”, we are using guilt by assocation.

Most arguments against modern music in the church take this form, sad to say. Don is trying—to his credit by the way—to move past this point by suggesting musicological arguments. Unfortunately, the arguments he points to are…..you guessed it, guilt by association.

Rule of thumb; if your argument could be used in an informal logic class to illustrate fallacies, you’re doing it wrong.

And really, a lot of the difficulty with arguing music is that we don’t have any ironclad premises with which we can practice traditional, Aristotelian deductive logic (premises lead to certain conclusion). As a result, we are left performing inductive logic (hence the inductive fallacy, by the way), and we will then need to proceed with far less certainty than we would if using deductive logic.

To draw the picture, I can point to the fact that people respond to certain patterns in music with unease, fear, and the like—think the music in Alfred Hitchcock movies, or any horror movie for that matter—or we can point to other music which seems to induce a “weepy” response (think chick flicks). So within a certain likelihood that someone will respond that way—many do not—we can say with some level of certainty that certain musical forms will seem to induce certain emotional responses.

The difficulty comes when we try to connect those emotional responses—OK, sometimes flat out manipulations—with sin. Is it always sin to portray something as fearful, or tear-inducing? And sometimes, the use of the same tune with the same instrumentation can have wildly different effects. For example, Weird Al Yankovic uses the music from the shower scene in Psycho to accompany the devouring of Bob the Duck in his version of Peter and the Wolf—to great comedic effect.

So is it horror, or humor? Depends on which association you choose, no? In the same way, some point to the dissonance and reverberation of the electric guitar as evil—but when you hear the same musical hints in Bach’s toccata and fugue in d minor, we proclaim it as a masterpiece. Now if we are to play Bach on the electric guitar, or Van Halen’s “Eruption” on the organ, or Stairway to Heaven on the harp, what is the moral value? Is Stairway to Heaven wrong on the guitar, but OK on the harp?

Again, the problem with guilt by association is simply what association we’re using. You can “prove” any cockamamie idea with it, and that’s why it proves….absolutely nothing, except for the fact that the person is unable or unwilling to make a real argument.

So, if musical form A was specifically designed by an evil intelligent being with the purpose of promoting sinful behaviors or serving some other sinful purpose(s), we would no longer be dealing with guilt by association because the problem(s) with the music would not be based on correlation but intent of the designer, correct?

Still guilt by association. Let’s illustrate using a parallel:

So, if tool A, the club, was specifically designed by an evil intelligent being named Cain with the purpose of promoting sinful behaviors (specifically killing Abel), we would be entitled to proscribe all striking instruments capable of killing someone (hammers, axes, baseball bats, etc..) because of that association.

Of course not—civilization would collapse if we uniformly applied that logic. Some things are simply tools. The use, or even design, of a tool for sin does not preclude its use for good purposes.

And as I’ve noted multiple times in this thread, the origins of rock & roll lie in black Gospel. So as I’ve noted with my Weird Al/Bach/Van Halen/Led Zeppelin illustrations, when you try to do guilt by association, you always have competing, often conflicting assocations. Is it Ozzy Osbourne of the Swan Silvertones? You can “prove” anything, which means you can prove absolutely nothing, using such an argument.

Ah, but your analogy fails because you are assuming that a musical style is parallel to a neutral tool that can be used either for a good purpose or a bad purpose. You would have to prove that a musical style is inherently neutral to make your analogy work.

Sorry, Rajesh, but what you’ve done there is to assume your conclusion, a logical fallacy also known as begging the question. If you wish to demonstrate that music is more than a tool, the onus is on you to prove that musical style is an inherently moral question—not on others to prove it is not. Important point, because in general, proving a negative is impossible, logically speaking.

And again, look through the Venn diagrams—your example is, even with your exception, a guilt by association fallacy. And for that matter, since hammers are used in music—that’s what strikes the strings on the piano, and really all percussive instruments—you’ve really implicitly conceded my point. Think about it a moment.

Who says that the correct starting point for any discussion of music is that it is neutral and not an inherently moral thing?
You assert that musical styles are inherently neutral. Where is your proof?
Your point about hammers is irrelevant because I never made any claims about hammers. You are the one that is saying that musical styles are inherently tools like hammers. Prove that is the correct starting point.

[RajeshG]

Kevin Miller wrote:

This is where I disagree with you. In my opinion, a set of notes in a particular style has no inherent meaning other than that assigned by it’s associations within our culture. If rap music is unusable for Christians, it is unusable because it contains certain cultural associations, and the strength of these associations is relative for each person. Circus music has the meaning of circus music because of it’s association in our minds with circuses. Two hundred years from now, people who have never heard of circuses might assign a completely different meaning to that style.

Do you have a biblical basis for your opinion that “a set of notes in a particular style has no inherent meaning other than that assigned by it’s associations within our culture”?

How do you know that is true?

[RajeshG]

Who says that the correct starting point for any discussion of music is that it is neutral and not an inherently moral thing?

Are you saying that some styles or some tunes may make you think of sinful things? In that case, it is the association with sinfulness that you personally see in the tune, and someone else may not have the same experience that you have had and thus do not see the same sinfulness. It may be wrong for YOU to dwell on that music, but that is because of your own thoughts and not on some inherent moral quality to the music itself.

[Jay]

But my point at this time is simply to argue with Jay who seems to think that good words make good music no matter what the genre or style it is presented in. The argument about music is not an argument about the words. That’s all I’m saying today.

And again, that’s not my point and hasn’t been for years. I even explicitly said as much a few days ago. I’m open to having my mind changed, but not if the only way to do so is to either agree with you that I’m saying something that I am not or to agree with someone because music theory / cultural studies says we should.

So… why then post lyrics and say “evaluate this”? That was what I was responding to, and led to this latest go round.