Theologians believed that the Bible taught a holistic dualism where material and immaterial combined to compose man; thus, while the body and spirit are both good and constantly interact and influence one another, and physical expression is part of the way God created his people, biblical worship should aim at cultivating both the intellect and affections as well as calming the passions.

In blog posts over the last several weeks, I have been trying to help us understand what kinds of influences and values have converged to produce the culture in which we Christians in the West now find ourselves. I’ve explored some of the worldview values that have shifted; today, I’d like to begin exploring how those values have impacted the broader culture. As I’ve said before, understanding the world around us is critically important as we seek to know how to rightly live holy lives in our world.

The Industrial Revolution, often said to have begun with the development of steam power in the early 1800s, also had significant impact on culture and, consequently, the church and worship. As technological advancements made communication and travel easier, local folk cultures began to lose their distinctiveness, and a new mass culture emerged. This newly formed “pop” culture had as its core mass appeal and commercial interests. “New” or “contemporary” became axiomatic values since with technology, new is usually better. C. S. Lewis helpfully explains how as a result of the rise of machines, “what other ages would have called ‘permanence’” now became simply “old” and “outdated”:

It is the image of old machines being superseded by new and better ones. For in the world of machines the new most often really is better and the primitive really is the clumsy. And this image, potent in all our minds, reigns almost without rival in the minds of the uneducated. For to them, after their marriage and the births of their children, the very milestones of life are technical advances. From the old push-bike and thence to the little car; from gramophone to radio and from radio to television; from the range to the stove; these are the very stages of their pilgrimage.1

This belief that new is always better is often an unconscious assumption; in other words, a significant change in culture has created a shift of worldview.

Emotion

One important philosophical shift that occurred as a result of the Enlightenment and had significant impact on broader culture was the emergence of the naturalistic category of “emotion.” When theologians and philosophers prior to the Age of Reason spoke about human sensibilities, they used nuanced categories of “affections of the soul,” such as love, joy, and peace, and “appetites (or passions) of the body,” like hunger, sexual desire, and anger. This conception of human faculties appears all the way back in Greek philosophers, who used the metaphors of the spankna (chest) to designate the noble affections and the koilia (belly) for the base appetites. In the New Testament, the apostle Paul employed such categories as well, urging Christians to put on the “affections” (splankna) of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience (Col 3:12) and describing enemies of Christ as those whose “god is their belly (koilia)” (Phil 3:19).

This way of understanding human sensibility dominated Christian thought and philosophy from the Patristic period through the Reformation.2 The affections were the core of spirituality and were to be nurtured, developed, and encouraged; the appetites, while not evil (in contrast to Gnosticism), must be kept under control lest they overpower the intellect. Theologians believed that the Bible taught a holistic dualism where material and immaterial combined to composed man; thus, while the body and spirit are both good and constantly interact and influence one another, and physical expression is part of the way God created his people, biblical worship should aim at cultivating both the intellect and affections as well as calming the passions. With music in worship, for example, second-century theologian Clement of Alexandria argued, “We must abominate extravagant music, which enervates men’s souls, and leads to changefulness—now mournful, and then licentious and voluptuous, and then frenzied and frantic.”3 Rather, the church’s hymnody should employ “temperate harmonies.” Likewise, Augustine later insisted that while the affections were at the core of Christian religion, the passions must be controlled by reason,4 Thomas Aquinas likewise maintained a distinction between the soul’s affections and the body’s passions,5 and sixteenth-century Reformers such as Calvin agreed, considering worship to consist centrally of pious affections,6 while yielding entirely to “fleshly desires” was sin.7

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