Let them praise his name with dancing, making melody to him with tambourine and lyre! For Yahweh takes pleasure in his people; he adorns the humble with salvation. Let the godly exult in glory; let them sing for joy on their beds. Let the high praises of God be in their throats and two-edged swords in their hands, to execute vengeance on the nations and punishments on the peoples, to bind their kings with chain and their nobles with fetters of iron, to execute on them the judgment written! This is honor for all his godly ones. Praise Yahweh! (Ps 149:3–9).¹

Sociologists tell us that we live in Postmodern times, and in many important ways that is true. The old Modern consensus has broken down. Where the Modernists believed that there is objective truth and that we can know it, Postmoderns ridicule any notion of “the truth.” That is why we hear people speaking about “my truth.” What, however, if I told you that when looking at worship many churches have actually become very Premodern—and by Premodern I mean that many Christian churches have unknowingly regressed to Old Testament types and shadows. Specifically, I refer to the use of musical instruments in Christian worship.

The Way It Was

Probabilities are that you have never seen or participated in a worship service that does not use musical instruments, but it has not always been this way. Did you know that there is no evidence the apostolic church used musical instruments? Can you imagine a small group of Christians meeting in a cemetery, a house, or outside of town in some secluded place, hauling a Greek organ or any other musical instrument? The probabilities that they used musical instruments are vanishingly small.

We know with certainty that the ancient post-apostolic Christians rejected musical instruments in Christian worship. For this essay, our witness was a major figure in the Eastern and Alexandrian church, Clement of Alexandria (c. AD 150–c. 215). We do not know much about his life except that he became a student of Pantaenus († c. AD 190), head of the catechetical (instructional) school in Alexandria. This is the same school in which Origen later taught. On Pantaenus’ death Clement became the teacher in the school until he was forced to flee the persecution of the Christians by the emperor Septimus Severus (AD 193–211).² One of his surviving works is the Paedagogus (the Tutor), a work composed of three books (think of Calvin’s Institutes, which has four books) and focused on the practical rather than theoretical matters.³ Christ is the Word (Λογος) incarnate and the Tutor.⁴ That same Word who instructed the church under the types and shadows is he who became incarnate.⁵ For Alexandria rationality was very important. Sin is contrary to reason.⁶ We are created with a “rational soul.”⁷

In book two, Clement turns to a series of questions about Christian morals and behavior. He warned against extremes regarding food (feasting and fasting) and urged moderation (not total abstinence) in drinking wine.⁸ After a treatment of simplicity of life regarding cups and vessels (2.3), he turned his attention to Christian behavior at feasts. There he warned strongly against “revelry” at “rational entertainments” generally and against intoxication specifically, with which musical instruments were associated.⁹

For if people occupy their time with pipes, and psalteries, and choirs, and dances, and Egyptian clapping of hands, and such disorderly frivolities, they become quite immodest and intractable, beat on cymbals and drums, and make a noise on instruments of delusion; for plainly such a banquet, as seems to me, is a theatre of drunkenness.¹⁰

He reminded his readers about Paul’s admonition regarding putting off the deeds of darkness and not spending time in “orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality” (Rom 13:13). He argued that “such instruments” are unfitting for a “temperate banquet,” since they are “more suited to beasts than to men.” They are for charming stags and indulgence.¹¹ Even “chromatic harmonies” are to be abandoned.¹²

If musical instruments are inappropriate for a Christian banquet, how much more are they to be excluded from “the divine service”?

The Spirit, distinguishing from such revelry the divine service, sings, “Praise Him with the sound of trumpet;” for with sound of trumpet He shall raise the dead. “Praise Him on the psaltery;” for the tongue is the psaltery of the Lord. “And praise Him on the lyre” (Ps 150:3, 5). By the lyre is meant the mouth struck by the Spirit, as it were by a plectrum. “Praise with the timbrel and the dance,” refers to the Church meditating on the resurrection of the dead in the resounding skin. “Praise Him on the chords and organ.” Our body He calls an organ, and its nerves are the strings, by which it has received harmonious tension, and when struck by the Spirit, it gives forth human voices. “Praise Him on the clashing cymbals.” He calls the tongue the cymbal of the mouth, which resounds with the pulsation of the lips. Therefore He cried to humanity, “Let every breath praise the LORD,” because He cares for every breathing thing which He hath made.¹³

Clement’s figurative interpretation of the instruments as types and shadows of new covenant worship was the way the Fathers typically interpreted them.¹⁴ Indeed, it is the way the Reformed interpreted them in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This hermeneutical move should not be ignored or passed over lightly. What was implicit in Clement would be made more explicit later on. He assumed that like the instruments of war in Psalm 149, the instruments used by the Levites in old covenant worship (2 Chron 29:20–36) were likewise fulfilled by the death of Christ.

It is almost as though Clement had Psalm 149 before him as he wrote, since he turned immediately to the function of instruments in war. “Man,” he argued, is a “pacific instrument” but musical instruments are “warlike.”¹⁵

The one instrument of peace, the Word alone by which we honour God, is what we employ. We no longer employ the ancient psaltery, and trumpet, and timbrel, and flute, which those expert in war and contemners of the fear of God were wont to make use of also in the choruses at their festive assemblies; that by such strains they might raise their dejected minds. But let our genial feeling in drinking be twofold, in accordance with the law. For “if thou shalt love the Lord thy God,” and then “thy neighbour,” let its first manifestation be towards God in thanksgiving and psalmody, and the second toward our neighbour in decorous fellowship. For says the apostle, “Let the Word of the Lord dwell in you richly” (1 Cor 3:16). And this Word suits and conforms Himself to seasons, to persons, to places.¹⁶

I have emphasized his allusion to the progress of redemptive history. We no longer use instruments because they are not suitable to Christian worship. Clement’s is a twofold objection: it belongs to our pre-Christian life and to the types and shadows. He makes the first clear in this passage, but then he continues by arguing that while we may “sing and play the harp or lyre,” we do so spiritually or figuratively.

And does not the ten-stringed psaltery indicate the Word Jesus, who is manifested by the element of the decad?¹⁷ And as it is befitting, before partaking of food, that we should bless the Creator of all; so also in drinking it is suitable to praise Him on partaking of His creatures. For the psalm is a melodious and sober blessing. The apostle calls the psalm “a spiritual song” (Eph 5:19; Col 3:16).¹⁸

According to Clement, in the new covenant, Christians make melody figuratively just as we war against the sin, the flesh, and the devil not with literal weapons of war but with spiritual weapons.

As odd as Clement’s approach to musical instruments in Christian worship might seem to us, from the perspective of the Fathers and the Medieval church, and even much of the Reformation and post-Reformation church, our practice would be considered bizarre. Instruments were virtually unknown in the Medieval period. Traditionally, Pope Vitalian (†672) is typically credited with permitting the first organ in Christian worship. Organs were not permitted in St John’s Lateran, where the Pope worshiped, because they were not considered sufficiently solemn. All the Reformed rejected musical instruments as remnants of types and shadows. In his commentary on Psalm 33:2, Calvin’s rhetoric is typical of the Reformed view of musical instruments:

There is a distinction, however, to be observed here, that we may not indiscriminately consider as applicable to ourselves, every thing which was formerly enjoined upon the Jews. I have no doubt that playing upon cymbals, touching the harp and the viol, and all that kind of music, which is so frequently mentioned in the Psalms, was a part of the education; that is to say, the puerile instruction of the law: I speak of the stated service of the temple. For even now, if believers choose to cheer themselves with musical instruments, they should, I think, make it their object not to dissever their cheerfulness from the praises of God. But when they frequent their sacred assemblies, musical instruments in celebrating the praises of God would be no more suitable than the burning of incense, the lighting up of lamps, and the restoration of the other shadows of the law. The Papists, therefore, have foolishly borrowed this, as well as many other things, from the Jews.¹⁹

You might think that Calvin’s view was extreme, but most of the church for most of its history agreed with him. He was merely repeating the most ancient Christian view of the movement of redemptive history and, consequently, of instruments in worship. How instruments came to be used in Reformed worship services is a long story, but the very short version is that the laity (including civil magistrates) wanted them and the ministers did not. The ministers lost the fight but not the argument.²⁰ What we think of as normal did not, in fact, begin to become so until the eighteenth century.²¹ Many Reformed Christians were still singing a cappella in the early twentieth century.

Next time we will consider Psalm 149 in its own context.

Notes

1. My translation.
2. The persecution was triggered, in part, by the ridicule of the emperor by the learned class in Alexandria.
3. “The Instructor being practical, not theoretical, His aim is thus to improve the soul, not to teach, and to train it up to a virtuous, not to an intellectual life.” Clement of Alexandria, The Instructor, 1.1, in Fathers of the Second Century: Hermas, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus, and Clement of Alexandria (Entire), ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, vol. 2, The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1885), 209.
4. Clement, The Instructor, 1.1; 1.7.
5. Like all the fathers, Clement saw one covenant of grace in multiple administrations: “Accordingly, of old He instructed by Moses, and then by the prophets. Moses, too, was a prophet. For the law is the training of refractory children.” Clement, 1.11, p. 234.
6. Clement, 1.13.
7. “And Christian conduct is the Operation of the rational soul in accordance with a correct judgment and aspiration after the truth, which attains its destined end through the body, the soul’s consort and ally.” Clement, 1.13, p. 235.
8. “But towards evening, about supper-time, wine may be used, when we are no longer engaged in more serious readings.” Clement, 2.1, p. 243.
9. Clement, 2.4, p. 248.
10. Clement, 2.4, p. 248.
11. Clement, 2.4, p. 248.
12. Clement, 2.4, p. 249.
13. Clement, 2.4, p. 248.
14. “There are many passing references to music scattered throughout the writings of the Fathers. Most of the passages deal with psalmody and vocal music, but a few are concerned with musical instruments. The authors of these passages were almost unanimous in rejecting the use of musical instruments.” David W. Music, Instruments in Church: A Collection of Source Documents, vol. 7, Studies in Liturgical Musicology (Lanham and London: The Scarecrow Press Inc, 1998), 27, 43.
15.  Clement, The Instructor, 2.4, p. 248.
16. Clement, 2.4, p. 249; emphasis added.
17. A decad is a ten-stringed instrument.
18. Clement, 2.4, p. 249. We should disagree with the editors when they infer that he approved of instruments in worship “even though he turns everything into a type.” The point of turning the instruments into a type is to leave them in the types and shadows.
    NB that Clement understood “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” as classes of songs in the biblical Psalter. He would have had the Septuagint and would have seen the headings for the psalms there. This became traditional, though it is largely forgotten today. For more on this see, R. Scott Clark, “Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs in the Septuagint.”
19. John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, trans. James Anderson, vol. 1 (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2010), 538–39.
20. Yet again we are reminded that the Christian Nationalist utopia may not turn out to be so glorious after all.
21. Paul James-Griffiths, “The Earliest Church Organ,” Christian Heritage Edinburgh August 20, 2016.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• R. Scott Clark

  

  R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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