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The implicit question I left hanging at the end of last week’s Payneful Truth has been taken up and asked by a number of people in the few days since. 

We can all agree that we don’t want theologically dodgy emotional manipulation in our singing. But what is the place of emotions in singing? 

The best form of the question came in an email from Jack:

You say: “Singing for us is a form of speech—to one another and to God. It’s a more emotionally-charged form of speech, but it’s one facet of the word-based personal relationship we have with God and with one another.” Sure. But what then do we make of the ‘more emotionally-charged’ nature of singing? Clearly song is more than just speech (not wanting to detract from its intrinsic wordy-ness). I'd be keen to hear how you would give an account of the purpose of that emotional charge if ‘atmosphere’ is the wrong category.

What is that ‘extra’, then, that singing or music adds? What’s the ‘charge’ in its ‘emotional charge’? 

The position that I’m arguing against sees singing as a way of creating an atmosphere or getting people into the right spiritual mood; of arousing certain feelings within them that open them up to experience God and his truth in a new way. 

But do I have Jonathan Edwards against me? 

In a famous paragraph (that I heard quoted again at the Reach Australia conference just last week), the great New England Puritan said this: 

And the duty of singing praises to God seems to be appointed wholly to excite and express religious affections. No other reason can be assigned why we should express ourselves to God in verse, rather than in prose, and do it with music but only, that such is our nature and frame, that these things have a tendency to move our affections. (Religious Affections, I.II.9) 

Is Edwards arguing in favour of what I’m opposing? Is he saying that God has given us singing to get us in the mood, as it were; to excite our affections and warm us up to a certain kind of Christian feeling that we don’t get just from the Word? 

Well, no—not if I understand him correctly (which is no easy thing). In fact, I think Edwards’s argument may help us to answer our question about the emotional nature of singing. 

A Treatise Concerning the Religious Affections was written in the context of the New England awakening, and the many dramatic and visible manifestations of emotion (or, as he would say, ‘affections’) that were evident at that time. Edwards wished to argue:

* that these religious affections could be quite appropriate and genuine—and that, indeed, true religion very much consisted in the affections;

* on the other hand, that the existence of ‘religious affections’, even high and intense ones, was no indication at all of true Christianity;

* and that true religious affections had various distinguishing characteristics by which they could be recognized.

The well-known quote (above) comes from the introductory section in which Edwards notes that a Christianity without the affections is hard to imagine or support. Why, he asks, did God give us singing if our affections have nothing to do it?

However, it’s not only singing. Edwards also lists prayer, the sacraments, and preaching as God-given spiritual activities that involve the whole person; that affect our hearts and move us to grasp hold of God in love and faith. If Christianity was purely a matter of intellectual understanding, and not of the affections (Edwards argues) why not just give everyone a commentary to read on Sundays, rather than preaching a sermon to them? The sermon does more than just convey information: 

God hath appointed a particular and lively application of his word, in t