This post was chosen as newsworthy at Sensus Divinitatis News….

In a comment on another post Roger Saner wonders “if Christianity is going to be split amongst those who believe the one true Gospel of Jesus (which is about repenting from your sins so that you’ll be saved from the coming judgement) and those …

In case you’re one of those still passing around this tired old urban legend, let me set the record straight by quoting something I wrote on another blog.

“For years now, when using or making music intended for Christian worship, people have rationalized their conformity to popular culture by repeating the widespread myth that Luther (sometimes in the myth it’s Wesley) used drinking songs as the basis for his great hymn tunes.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Luther (Wesley too) abhorred the idea of borrowing a tune or style already saturated with secular connotations. Why the myth, then? Because of a misunderstanding. One of the many forms of music (i.e. sonata, fugue, minuet, rondo, etc.) is called “bar form”—three or more stanzas, each divided into two Stollen (section a) and one Absegang (section b)—and it happens that Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” is a perfect example of this musical structure. So Luther did indeed write a bar tune, but it was not based on a barroom tune. (If you want to look it up yourself, check out the article on bar form in the Harvard Dictionary of Music, or just Google it and read the more obviously scholarly articles that pop up. You’ll learn that many Lutheran chorales are in bar form, and that the Star Spangled Banner is another good example.)

Next time somebody tells you that Luther based his music on the popular tunes of the day, ask him if he learned this from a musicologist—or if he’s just perpetuating an urban legend to justify the church’s increasing conformity to the world.”

The trouble with this mindset is that, once songs become disposable, the incentive to write good ones diminishes; the desire to write well becomes subordinate to the need to write quickly and in quantity. We are likely to get plenty of bad songs in this environment, but we will insist on using them because the existing songs are “too old”.

The church has not always done it this way; the older tradition (in the western church) is more cumulative. A typical Protestant hymnal frequently contains elements of Latin plainsong (”O Come, O Come Emmanuel”), Reformation hymnody (”A Mighty Fortress”), Methodist revivalism (”O For a Thousand Tongues”), 19th century revivalism (”When We All Get to Heaven”), spirituals (”Lord, I Want to be a Christian”), and 20th century gospel (”I’d Rather Have Jesus”), among other things. The arrival of new songs did not mean the automatic end of all of the old ones; “Great is Thy Faithfulness” did not relegate “Now Thank We All Our God” to obscurity. These songs, while different in style, could exist in a common repertoire, be accompanied by a common instrumentation and be sung in a common setting. Not everything from every era was retained, but there was no notion that the old songs HAD to be replaced en masse, simply because new ones had been written. The mindset today is much different.

The saddest part of this whole scenario is the likelihood that the worship wars will never really end. As long as the old must constantly give way to the new, people who actually value the old songs will clash with devotees of the “latest and greatest”. We may not be fighting over hymns 20 years from now, but I suspect that we’ll have the same sort of ugliness over Chris Tomlin’s songs, which will seem quite dated by then. The combatants and battlefield will be different, but the nastiness and lovelessness will be strangely familiar.