"Chronological Snobbery"

"It is a disturbing fact that our culture can affect our manner and style of worship more drastically than we give credit... culture affects us in deep and serious ways and we had better wake up to it or find ourselves at culture's mercy. The call for the church to be truly countercultural (to borrow John Stott's phrase), an "alternative society" as Dawn labels it, has never been more urgent than it is now..." (GPTG 75)

Are we slaves to our culture? And, if so, how are we serving it? Since we are a musical class, let’s just deal with liturgy and music. “Liturgy, media, instruments, and vehicles of worship are never neutral, and so exceeding care must be given to the ‘law of unintended consequences’. Often the medium overwhelms and changes the message” (GPTG 64). Too often in the modern church, the goal of the liturgy is to feel less “churchy”, and the music is chosen just because it is called “Christian” and appears on K-LOVE. No thought is given to whether or not the music and words are helpful, unhelpful, or just plain distracting.

 However, let’s dig just a little deeper. Why do we do what we do? We are so quick to throw away the traditions of the past before we investigate the reasons behind them. Our author writes, “’Chronological snobbery,’ to use C. S. Lewis’s phrase, applies to those who suggest that we have nothing to learn from the two millennia since the resurrection of Jesus Christ and that worship is purely a matter of taste” (GPTG 77). We are often too tempted by our pluralistic culture to love the new, “better” liturgy and throw the old away. Instead, we should be “calling the church to the Bible- its simple principles and patterns” (GPTG 69). We cannot rely on our feelings; we must be grounded in the Word which is applicable to all cultures. What Derek Thomas has written feels like cold water thrown in our faces. We can wake up to see that we were sleeping, or we can get angry, roll over, and fall back to sleep.