Committed Critic

I can’t say that I own a lot of Bruce Springsteen music, but I love the tape of his that I have. He’s an excellent lyricist writing from a working class perspective, kind of like Bob Dylan but easier to follow. Plus his music has a ton of energy. Here is the verse of his that most catches my attention these days, from the song “Badlands” (1978):

Workin’ in the fields
till you get your back burned
Workin’ ’neath the wheel
till you get your facts learned
Baby I got my facts
learned real good right now
You better get it straight darling:

Poor man wanna be rich,
rich man wanna be king
And a king ain’t satisfied
till he rules everything
I wanna go out tonight,
I wanna find out what I got

Well I believe in the love that you gave me
I believe in the faith that could save me
I believe in the hope
and I pray that some day
It may raise me above these badlands…

The best word to describe the tone of the song as a whole (full lyrics here) is probably defiant. The singer seems to have no real expectation that his circumstances will improve, but he’s trying to convince himself (and his lover) that he’s determined to savor life anyway.

I don’t really think Springsteen is trying to be religious in any strong sense of the word, but the allusion to faith, hope, and love is a nice nod to people who know their Bible (1 Cor 13:13). It also highlights how much the idea of hope is wrapped up both in religious faith and in the experience especially of people who live on the border between poor and working class, which Springsteen likes to explore (see his remarkable song The River). It is no great stretch to see commonality between Springsteen’s words here and places in the Gospels that promise reversal of fortunes for the downtrodden (e.g., the beatitudes in Matthew 5 or the Magnificat in Luke 1:46ff).

There’s something here that should challenge religious folks, especially those of us who buy into an apocalyptic worldview where God is supposed to some day put everything right. I don’t know if Springsteen is a Christian, but what’s interesting is that his lyrics here don’t demand any particular religious commitment as the foundation for his hope. And since the situation of the song’s narrator doesn’t seem to offer good earthly reason for hope either, it begs a question: Should we see the song as just reflecting a human tendency to hope for the future whether we have any good reason to or not? And if that’s what humans do, should Christians suspect that our own apocalyptic faith is the same thing, just a groundless hope for a better future?

There’s an assumption in much academic study of religion that religious beliefs and texts arise ultimately from the needs of their adherents and authors, rather than from any explicit kind of divine revelation. That’s not quite to say that people invent their religion out of thin air, but rather that people express hopes or fears that become stories and religious doctrines, which eventually undergird a religion.

I suppose that as a confessing Christian, I’d have to say that this is what the other world religions are in their essence. Certainly God may reveal Godself in different ways to different peoples, but it is difficut (I would argue impossible) to reconcile Christian apocalypticism with the beliefs of religions that make competing claims. So I feel compelled to reject religious pluralism and assume a kind of exclusivism for Christianity. (I’m not a doctrinal purity zealot, but I would argue that some common belief or confession such as “Jesus is Lord” is necessary for Christians.)

The scary thing is that I can’t prove (even to myself) that a developmental process grounded only in wishful thinking isn’t the source of all religions, including mine. And as I’ve suggested here before, the only real reason that I find compelling for holding that Christianity is different is the resurrection of Jesus. This is a strong reason in my view, but it is hardly as thoroughgoing as, say, common Christian claims that the Bible is absolutely perfect and therefore obviously the word of God. Scripture is certainly beautiful, powerful, and brilliant, but its inspiration is impossible to prove even though I believe it, and its supposed perfection is hard to substantiate unless it’s simply assumed and posited at the outset.

Returning to where I started, I love Springsteen’s lyrics, because of their power, their apparent authenticity, and in this case the biblical intertext they play with. I also like that they force me to think critically about my faith, which used to really scare me, but which now just makes me (hopefully) less smug.

Ten years ago today, Rich Mullins died in a car wreck at the age of forty-one.

Some might remember that my first post when I started this blog last year quoted a Rich Mullins song, and I’ve mentioned him often enough that Matt has even poked a little fun for it.

I have a lot of reasons for loving Mullins. The poetry of his songs moves me in a way unlike the work of any other musician, and as a theologian I find him to be a kindred spirit. I believe the values he embodied reflect the way of Jesus unlike anyone I know personally, and I aspire (perhaps unrealistically) to model my life after his. He’s my hero.

Stories about Mullins’ life have grown into legend, but really they’re plausible enough. They’re just not common.

His hero was Saint Francis of Assisi, who started a religious order known for its vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Mullins and his best friend Beaker started a sort of religious order of their own that they called the Kid Brothers of St. Frank. Their first goal was to follow Francis’ vow of poverty, which they interpreted as a life of simplicity, and a practice of sharing, almost indiscriminately.

As a result, Mullins redirected all his money through his accountant, who paid him an annual allowance of $24,000. The rest went to Mullins’ church, to the other Kid Brothers of St. Frank, or to people he encountered in need.

He also decided that God would have him use his musical gifts for something more than the Christian music industry, so in the middle of his recording career, he went back to college as a 34-year-old to earn a degree in music education. In the last years of his life, Mullins moved to a Navajo reservation in New Mexico to teach music to the kids there.

He was the best kind of idealist: he structured his entire life so that he would live out his ideals rather than just talking about them.

Ragamuffins

Mullins took the word Ragamuffin (from a book by Brennan Manning) as the name of his band, and their performances suited their name. While Mullins’ studio albums are polished enough, recordings of the Ragamuffins’ live performances reflect a mismatched group of musicians for whom community appears to have been more important than precision.

Mullins would even say in concert that he disliked anything that was too perfect, and that instead the mess of life (and, to a degree, music) is what makes it interesting.

In the end, I think he was just too passionate about his music and his message to care much for precision. He was shamelessly sentimental at times, both about life and about God, but that just reflected who he was at his core: a poet.

Maybe the thing that makes Mullins unique among popular Christian musicians is that his lyrics are so relentlessly human. He may be sentimental when he talks about God, but he is rarely simply pious. His music is compelling for me because he was utterly genuine: his non-conformity was grounded in his passion, not in a bid to attract listeners.

The lyrics I want to quote are from a song that hardly mentions God at all. Mullins died single, but at one point he was engaged to be married, before the relationship apparently fell apart.

He recounts his pain with striking passion:

Another hour deeper in the night,
Another mile farther down the road.
A man can drive as hard as he can drive
And never get as far as his heart was meant to go…

Another tune forms in my head
More harmonies, more empty words.
Oh, I could play these songs ’til I was dead
And never approach the sound that I once heard.

I remember when I was just a kid,
Listening in the sky,
Believing that the wind would stir…

Maybe she could come to Wichita
And maybe we could borrow Beaker’s bike,
Let the road-wind tie our hair in knots
And let the speed and the freedom untangle the lies

Maybe fear can vanish before love
Oh God, don’t let this love be denied––

’Cause I know the river is deep,
I found out that the currents are tricky.
And I know the river is wide,
And the currents are strong.

And I could lose every dream
I dreamt that I could carry with me.
But I will reach the other side.

Please don’t let me have to wait too long.

While I love including long quotations like this (hopefully you all will humor me), this has been a difficult post for me to write. It’s not that I’m particularly emotional about the anniversary–I didn’t really even know who Mullins was until a couple of years after he died. But even though I’ve been planning on writing this post for at least a couple of weeks, I can’t seem to capture who he was, and that’s frustrating.

I recently bought a book about Mullins called An Arrow Pointing to Heaven: A Devotional Biography; it has a lot of great material, but it is poorly written and also frustrating. (The author uses lots of quotations from Mullins, but then he explains them all with what amount to tedious paraphrases of the quotations that were clear enough already.)

It makes sense that a book (or a blog post) would only poorly capture the work of a musician, and frustration is a fitting emotion for describing Mullins’ legacy: he lived a life of pain wrapped up in a desperate desire to serve God, and the rest of us are left frustrated by his early death, wishing he could have gone on writing and recording.

I wish I could convince everyone reading this to appreciate Mullins’ music the way I do, but I know I can’t, so I won’t bother with any links. You can type his name into youtube and watch some concert clips, but he can be off-putting at times, and in any event no one of the clips will do justice to the complexity of his person and his music.

Still, this is a man who is worthy of being remembered and honored, so I’ve done what I can.

For all the negative points I made about the Epistle of Barnabas, it does offer a beautiful portrait of redemption as the reenacting of God’s creation of humanity. Paul had written, “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. Look! The old has passed away, the new has come.” Barnabas simply restated that using the language of Genesis, and if his wording was a bit convoluted, nevertheless the image was powerful.

The image is also timeless, as evidenced by a pair of songs Gary Miller wrote for Acappella in the late 1990’s.

For those who don’t know me, the Chrisitan music group Acappella is the reason I know next to nothing about popular music from the eighties and nineties. In high school I had no fewer than 35 albums from their organization’s various groups (including Acappella, AVB, the Vocal Union, Keith Lancaster, Sweet Deliverance, His Image, and New Life Quartet), and it is no exaggeration to say that back then I could sing 300 of their songs from start to finish––and for many of them, I could sing most of the harmony parts. I’ve been to at least 10 of their concerts in 5 different states, and I’ve performed songs of theirs at church and school events with four different groups of friends spanning high school and college.

(I have a feeling that Matt, Cody, and Micah all have an idea of what I’m talking about.)

These two songs have their campy moments (the first one, no kidding, includes the lines “Let freedom ring!” and “Let children sing!”), but in both of them Miller does a beautiful job of using the creation story from Genesis, as Barnabas used it, to describe the work of Christ.

The first song speaks broadly, describing the fall of humanity and the change of the world order brought about by Christ:

from Let There Be Love
by Gary Miller (1999)

Once there was love, long ago
Sweet innocence, long ago
Please tell me where did it go?
Our of our hearts, out of our world

Then someone came in the night
Came to lead man to the light
Turn us around, make us right
Bring love to our hearts, love to our world

Let there be peace around the world
Let there by joy around the world
Let there be hope around the world
Let there be love around the world

The second song is more personal, beginning with God’s promise to Abraham and going on to proclaim God’s will as the starting point for believers’ lives and decisions, by virtue of the new beginning which God creates within people:

from Begins
by Gary Miller (1996)

To an aged man God spoke
Words that sounded like a joke
Soon his wife would bear a child
A saying hard to reconcile

So he asked, Can this thing be?
Can a nation spring from me?
With a body grown so old?
In a word this man was told:

Your life begins with God
Your love begins with God
Your hopes and you dreams
And your plans begin with God
Begin with God

I was standing on the edge of the road
Hopelessly alone in the dark
In the beginning I was empty and void
In my mind, my soul, my heart of hearts

The creator came and moved in my life
He spoke and turned my darkness to light
Day by day he’s rearranging my ways
He’s my Lord, my God, my King

The first song, of course, transforms the line “Let there be light” (Gen 1:3) into “Let there be love.” The second song is more subtle (though just barely), using the reference to the dark as well as the words empty and void, to point to the unformed earth of Gen 1:2 as a metaphor for a person’s life before they are recreated by God.

I don’t have a lot of reflections to add, except to say that I find these lyrics both beautiful and powerful. They’re another example (as I noted before of contemporary song lyrics) of how intertextuality can help theology become art.

I’m also kind of interested in the thoughts of any other Acappella junkies. Anyone want to compete for bragging rights about Acappella album collections, concert attendance, or whatever? If you were a fan when you were young, are there any albums of theirs you still listen to?

Before I go on to the other theological texts that use the Genesis 1 creation story, I want to tabernacle, so to speak, among the readers of John 1 for a time. In particular, I want to quote excerpts from a pair of songs by contemporary Christian musicians that take John 1 as their starting point. (I have to say at the outset that most CCM artists are awful, but these two have real substance, in my opinion.)

The first is a song by Michael Card, called “The Final Word” (Card, above left, also wrote “El Shaddai”):

You and me we use
so very many clumsy words.
The noise of what we often say
is not worth being heard.
When the Father’s Wisdom wanted
to communicate His love,
He spoke it in one final perfect Word.He spoke the Incarnation
and then so was born the Son.
His final word was Jesus,
He needed no other one.
Spoke flesh and blood so He could bleed
and make a way Divine.
And so was born the baby
who would die to make it mine.

And so the Father’s fondest thought
took on flesh and bone.
He spoke the living luminous Word,
at once His will was done.
And so the transformation
that in man had been unheard
Took place in God the Father
as He spoke that final Word.

The second song, by Rich Mullins, is called “It Don’t Do” (Mullins, above right, also wrote “Awesome God”):

It don’t do to preach the gospel
If you don’t live the Christian life
It don’t do to dream about heaven
If you never look up and see the skyIt don’t do to preach on Matthew
If you have not yet read Mark
It don’t do to scream about the judgment
If there is no love in your heart

It don’t do to preach on Moses
If you bow down to the golden calf
It don’t do to think about glory
If you never dare to laugh

Word became flesh and He dwelt among men
He let us see Him with our eyes
He let us hold Him in our hands
And before you say whatever you will
I think you better do the best that you can
Or it won’t do

Now, as far as these two artists go, I should note up front that Michael Card is probably the squarest musician I’ve ever heard, and (the late) Rich Mullins could push mushy sentimentality to its very limits. However, both know the Bible, both exhibit thoughtful theology in their lyrics, and both (as far as I can tell) lack the kind of pretension that makes Christian rock music look so silly sometimes. Card approaches John 1 as a theologian, Mullins as a preacher.

Card, though he perhaps conflates John with the other gospels, does a pretty straightforward interpretation of the text; his language is fresh enough to help us see the text as we may not have seen it, and yet the point his song makes is essentially the same as the point of John’s gospel.

Card often uses his music to teach, and in this case he presents a clear explanation of a theological truth in terms of the scriptural text it comes from. For my tastes, his language is too obvious to be good art, but then his audience is the generation before mine, and his prioritization of clarity above art seems intentional. In any event, I appreciate the clarity with which he communicates one of the messages of John 1 here.

Mullins does something more interesting in my opinion, first of all by bringing in 1 John 1, a passage closely related to John 1:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have handled, concerning the word of life –– indeed, life was revealed, and we have seen and we (now) testify and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and which was revealed to us. That which we have seen and heard, we (now) are proclaiming also to you, so that you, too, may have fellowship with us.

It isn’t entirely clear if 1 John intended for the “word” to refer to Jesus in the same way the Gospel of John did, but it is a reasonable interpretation, and so Mullins pulls them together to make his point.

The point, which Mullins of course makes more effectively with his lyrics than I can with my words here, is that God did not remain in heaven and speak words only at a distance. Rather, in Jesus Christ, God’s word became flesh (John 1) so that we could see it up close and handle it (1 John 1). So in a sense, God put his money where his mouth was, not asking anything of humanity that he would not do himself.

But Mullins does not stop with that theological claim; instead, he suggests that God’s action in the incarnation puts a claim on us as Christians. Because God’s word became flesh, our own words (of testimony, see 1 John 1) must become flesh too, in our actions.

Mullins plays (as John did) off the multiple meanings of “word,” linking it to our common experience of knowing (and being) Christians who speak far too many words with far too few actions. But instead of repeating, say, the cliché that we should practice what we preach, Mullins couches the plea in the terms of a pair of unexpected scriptural texts. This catches our attention with an unexpected challenge coming from a familiar text, and at the same time it enriches our reading of Scripture by suggesting connections we may not have seen before.

Scripture and Song as Theology

One reason I’m writing on these two songs is that good Christian music (whether CCM or church hymns) often does the same thing that Scripture does: it uses accepted traditions in creative ways to move us and motivate us, and in many cases it builds new theological truths that either were not present, or else were not apparent, in the originals.

To put it plainly, Michael Card and Rich Mullins are doing roughly the same thing John did. While Christians typically believe John’s text is inspired in a more profound sense than the works of modern musicians, nevertheless there should be a certain consistency in the way we listen to both kinds of “texts.” In both cases, we not only should learn from what we hear; we also should enjoy it. Scripture is not only revelation but also art.

It is my impression that God intends for us, at the same time that we believe in and obey Scripture, to appreciate it as something beautiful he has given us through the creativity of people created in his image.

I’ll open my first post with my favorite song lyrics:

We are frail, we are fearfully and wonderfully made,
Forged in the fires of human passion,
Choking on the fumes of selfish rage.
And with these, our hells and our heavens, so few inches apart,
We must be awfully small
And not as strong as we think we are.

With all due respect to Rich’s insight, right now I think there is perhaps no greater indication of how small and weak humans really are than how much our perception of a situation can change based on a little stress or a single night’s sleep. Maybe I’ll post again in the morning.