Warum als Kirche singen? Jonathan Leeman argumentiert überzeugend:
- It’s how we the church own and affirm the truth of God’s Word.
- It’s how we engage our affections with God’s Word.
- And it’s how we both demonstrate and build corporate unity.
Singen schafft einen alternativen emotionalen Zugang:
At one point I write that the reverberations of singing God’s Word should begin to reprogram the very way in which a Christian experiences emotion and affection. We can let our emotions be trained by sports enthusiasm, by television commercials, by movies, by the songs on the radio, by whatever our culture defines as masculine or feminine. Or we can let our emotional lives be formed by the church’s singing of God’s Word, by the Psalms, by centuries of wonderful hymnody, and by the choruses of the saints today.
Singen hat nicht aber nicht nur Gefühlen, sondern auch mit Selbstbeherrschung zu tun:
Music is a tough topic in the church today because it’s an emotive medium and we live in an emotivistic culture. We idolize our emotional states, which typically tends toward exalting the more extreme emotional states as somehow more real, alive, and desirable. But learning to engage our emotions with God’s Word is not simply about learning to feel, it’s also about learning self-control, knowing what role emotions should play in the whole scheme of things and how to moderate them for the sake of loving and serving others. It requires a more complicated formula than an emotivistic culture recognizes. Rejoicing with those who rejoice, and grieving with those who grieve (1 Corinthians 12) requires the spirits of the prophets to be subject to the control of the prophets (1 Corinthians 14:32). It’s about learn to feel, but learning to feel in a way that builds up the whole body.
