Sensual Spirit

In a superb 2003 article in JETS Stephen Guthrie examines the role of singing in worship, working out some stirring pneumatological reflections on Paul’s exhortation to sing Psalms in Ephesians 5.

He notes that Paul’s exhortation occurs in the context of a contrast of the children of light and the children of darkness. The children of light are those who have been filled with the Spirit, and one of the central things the Spirit does is to make them “singing people.”

But why?

The reason, Guthrie explains, has to do with the “embodying” character of the Spirit’s work. Contrary to some tendencies of Christian theology, the Spirit does not rescue from the body and senses but renews them. The Spirit is the agent of Jesus’ incarnation, and the agent for the resurrection, both Jesus’ and ours. In short, “the Spirit brings the life of sense and embodied experience from darkness into the light” with the result that the body comes to light.

Through sin, human beings have become unresponsive, to God, to creation, to others. The Spirit’s work is to renew responsiveness, “to remake us from sensual people into sensible people.” Appealing to Paul and Augustine, he notes that “The sensual have, both literally and metaphorically, lost their senses. It is the alcoholic who is least able to appreciate the wine he drinks. It is the lecher, the playboy, who is least able to perceive and respond to the beauty of his lovers.”

Music is one of the Spirit’s instruments for this renewed attentiveness and sensitivity: “As we sing together we attend to the activity of our own bodies in making sound, and we regard and respond to our own song as we hear it resonate in the slace around us. We hear and attunes ourselves to the sound of others’ voices. We respond not only to people, but to the physical qualities of sound we are creating with others and the physical and acoustical properties of the space in which we sing. Moreover, we submit ourselves together to a tempo, a pattern of melody and rhythm, and we respond dynamically to the shape and movement of our musical interaction.”

He cites Robert Scruton’s comments on the efficacy of music in forming community: “the coordination of movement in dancing and marching grands a vision of social order. but the movements here combined are seen as apart from one another, each occupying its exclusive space and expressing its distinctive goal. In music, however, all distance between movements is abolished, as we confront a single process in which multiplicity is simultaneously preserved and overridden. No musical event excludes any other, but all coexist in a spaceless self-preservation . . . . It is as thought these many currents flowed together in a single life, at one with itself.”

Theologically stated, Scruton is describing the perichoretic communion symbolized, established, and nurtured by common song. We sing Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to become what we are, the body of Christ in the Spirit.