Theology That Bites Back
“Bloom implies that all popular music ‘has the beat of sexual intercourse.’ Taking exactly the same view, Steven Tyler of the hard rock band Aerosmith boasts: ‘It’s rhythm and blues, its twos and fours, it’s f***ing.’ In general, neither friend nor foe acknowledges that the monotonous beat of hard rock (and, indeed, of much rap) …
“For example, the Bible requires that public prayer be kept as brief as possible, given the duties and needs we have in prayer. At first glance, this seems counterintuitive, but it only seems this way because our carnal flesh is very religious. The Bible says that God is in heaven, and that we are on …
“Thus the Lord himself is going to substitute his work for man’s, and he will build lasting cities, different cities, the true cities of Judah, cities which will be under another sign and controlled by a power other than Cain’s” (Ellul, The Meaning of the City, p. 27).
“I do not use the word popular as the opposite of high, serious, or good. It cannot be stated too often, or too emphatically, that this usage is both illogical and ahistorical. In every period and place, it is possible to cite works that possess both popularity and artistic merit” (Martha Bayles, Hole in our …
“Now, some people believe that this topic was dispatched by the late political philosopher Allan Bloom, whose best-selling critique of higher education, The Closing of the American Mind, contains a chapter on the pernicious effects of rock. But as I shall show later, that celebrated chapter displays a near-perfect ignorance of American popular music (whose …
“It is still possible to find the tough, affirmative spirit of the blues in contemporary forms. But increasingly, that spirit is rejected in favor of antimusical, antisocial antics that would be laughable if they weren’t so offensive” (Martha Bayles, Hole in our Soul, p. 3).
“A breach has been made with the past, which allows us to envisage a new aspect of architecture corresponding to the technical civilization of the age we live in; the morphology of dead styles has been destroyed; and we are returning to honesty of thought and feeling” (Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, …
“Since the death of the apostles all preaching has been uninspired preaching. But God, in His inspired Word, commands uninspired men to teach His Word. Lack of inspiration means that error can creep in, and looking around at the modern Church, we see that a great deal has. Because of the possibility of erroneous preaching, …
“Babylon, Venice, Paris, New York — they are all the same city, only one Babel always reappearing, a city from the4 beginning mortally wounded: ‘and they left off building the city'” (Ellul, The Meaning of the City, p. 21).
“We do not — at least that class of Englishmen who study literature do not — perform ceremonies gracefully, nor attend them with much enthusiasm, and we doubt whether any ceremony can modify the nature of the act which it accompanies. The Elizabethan sentiment was very different. About ceremonies in the Church there might be …
