Demystifying the Sacred-Secular Divide and Removing the Profane from Doxology
During the American holiday of Thanksgiving, my mother loads our table until it seems to protest beneath the weight of at least three pies, tureens of gravy and cranberry sauce, a pan of roasted sweet potatoes, a pot of mashed potatoes, a platter of turkey, deep bowls of broccoli and greens, gleaming silverware, and flickering candles. Our family circles up behind chairs to grasp hands and thank God for providing for us, not just at this feast, but every day of the year.And really, it’s those every day family suppers that allow us to appreciate this holiday at its fullest potential. It’s not the food—but it is the food, because it’s a vehicle for deeper communion and enjoyment of each other’s company. Food, and the practice of eating together with my parents and sister, connect my family to all families across time and space and direct my heart into fuller gratitude for my family and the work of God in knitting us together and providing for our needs.At the dinner tables of loving families is evidenced the exquisite mystery of the world created by the God who incarnated himself: that all the world in Christ is sacramental, the meeting place where heaven and earth, so long estranged in our minds, kiss until they are indistinguishable from each other.As theologian Alexander Schmemann posits in For the Life of the World, “Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating into something strictly utilitarian. A meal is still a rite—the last ‘natural sacrament’ of family and friendship. To eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that ‘something more’ is, but they nonetheless desire to celebrate it. They are still hungry and thirsty for sacramental life" (16).
As the nuclear family relies on these everyday sacraments of eating and drinking to knit them together, so the family of God looks to a deeper reality, the Sacraments of food (communion) and water (baptism) to enrich our worship of and relationship with Jesus Christ, the one in whom material and immaterial, humanity and divinity are perfectly united.
However, since the Reformation, Protestants have grown afraid of the mystery of the sacraments and have relegated them largely to once-a-month symbolic rituals in their urgency to ensure that created things never become objects of worship. Commendable and necessary as it is to flee from idolatry, our departure from the sacraments has taken on Gnostic tendencies in our avoidance of mixing the physical and spiritual.As Leonard Vander Zee, in his book Christ, Baptism, and the Lord's Supper, puts it, we have grown “too insensitive to the world as God’s creation and to the incarnation of Jesus Christ into our actual fallen humanity. In this essentially dualistic worldview the sacraments, which by their very nature function through material elements, cannot bear the weight of spiritual reality" (10).Now, we don’t know how to rightly relate ourselves to material things, so we divide up all the world along lines of that which is acceptable for Christians and that which is not.Perhaps the most obvious example of our confusion is in our veneration and fear of music, a created thing difficult for us to classify as material or spiritual, as it simultaneously ministers to our spirits and inspires our bodies to, almost involuntarily, move to a beat.But no matter, we need not delve so deeply as this, for evangelicals seem to have “solved” the problem of music, at least, with the imaginary line we all to some extent acknowledge: the sacred-secular divide. The sacred-secular divide is that set of (usually) un-verbalized rules about which music can be consumed and produced by Christians and which should not. Within the fuzzy boundaries of the sacred and secular, Christian music is “sacred” and, therefore, acceptable, and anything outside of that is “secular” and is to be rejected.
However, ascribing “sacredness” or “secularness” to created things, like music, rather than acknowledging that all the world is instead sacramental, reveals modern threads of Gnosticism in American evangelicalism, which prevents the church from effectively engaging modern society and functionally divorces Christ from his creation.
Part I: Against Gnosticism (we cannot divide sacred from secular)
Perhaps to accuse the American church of heresy sounds a tad extreme. But since her early years, the church has struggled with Gnosticism, the appealing ancient Greek understanding of the world that divorces the physical (what is “bad”) from the spiritual (what is “good”).Apostles Paul and John preached against Gnosticism and the Gnostic-Christian syncretism adopted by the early church, first, because in Christ’s bodily death and resurrection, believers are redeemed both body and soul. We have an embodied spirituality; if we didn’t, what we do in our bodies wouldn’t matter to God, making it acceptable for us to do whatever we want. In fact, the early believers to whom Paul and John wrote their epistles picked up this manner of thinking and thereby justified their own sexual immorality.The funny thing about Gnosticism is, while it sounds so antiquated and illogical to us who are "enlightened," for people of the first century it was the height of extra-spirituality and enlightenment.Even funnier (but not really), is the language of “sacred” and “secular” does a similar deed as Gnosticism under the guise of extra-spirituality. In contemporary American evangelicalism, the sacred (or, that which is made by Christians, since that’s what we’re really saying) is considered good, and the secular, that which is “of the world,” is viewed as bad. So even though we would never confess Gnosticism, and of course never intend to exhibit such tendencies, we operate in a manner more consistent with Gnosticism than Christianity in our approach to art and music.To be sure, some music is downright pornographic and ought be rejected on all the same grounds as visual porn. On the other hand, it’s not as if music written by Christians is automatically good, nor does it ensure its content is biblical (Exhibit A). A sacred-secular framework for viewing the world produces in us an interesting discrepancy between what we choose to ingest musically and what we produce.Some of us refuse any music written by unbelievers and completely sanitize our lyrics of anything resembling real life. Gnosticism, because it downplays everything about the physical world, consequently inspires evangelicals to downplay physical suffering. How many Christian songs have you heard that briefly acknowledge pain, only to remind us of a “spiritual” truth intended to do away with our pain? Our Gnostic proclivities leave little room for such things as physical suffering, and so one of our primary means of grieving with one another through music, which touches us at all levels, becomes just another way we are disallowing one another to grieve.On the other hand, some of us ingest non-Christian music so we might stay connected to and aware of modern society. However, just as ministering to alcoholics doesn’t justify getting drunk yourself, so too, ingesting music that doesn’t draw us closer to the person of Jesus becomes sin when we allow it to inform our identities or worldviews.
Since neither music produced by Christians or non-Christians inescapably fits all of our ideals, clearly we need a new framework for judging both music and the world.
Moreover, the term “secular,” is really just a misnomer because it denotes something apart from Christ, when in actuality, Christ is present with his creation—all of it; nothing exists that he doesn’t touch and cannot redeem. Human beings have been alienated from God because of sin, yet nowhere in the Bible does Jesus command us to avoid them on such grounds. So clearly, so-called secularism cannot be the basis for rejecting certain types of music. God commands us to flee only that which causes us to sin.Because Christ is maker of and Lord over all creation, and he makes everything good, then in reality nothing is truly secular, and the sacred-secular divide functionally divorces Christ from his creation. In the economy of God, such a division is actually a false dichotomy coined by a bunch of Protestant Gnostics. Our sacramental world can’t be split up along lines because every speck of it belongs to Christ.
Part II: Toward a change of language (all the world is sacramental)
So if nothing is secular, does that make everything sacred then? No, not exactly.In a sense, we can say human beings are sacred. By a biblical definition, sacredness means holiness. As such, sacredness in the Old Testament was ascribed to priests, sacrifices, and the temple of God. But now we are the priests; now we are the sacrifices; now we are the temples of God. We are all these things because Christ became all of these for us and united us fully to himself.If we are to follow God’s command, “Be holy, as I am holy,” we had better believe we are capable of holiness, or we are claiming God’s commands are impossible for us to fulfill. This is not a claim for perfect living, but a profession that all things are for him, by him, in him, and we are to do everything as unto him. So humans are sacred, and believers must see all their activities as consecrated to the Lord.As the redeemed people of God, we have the opportunity to contribute to the sacramental economy of God’s kingdom on earth, making good music that points to him.By this point, perhaps some of you of the Reformed tradition are recoiling slightly because you don’t think I have a hearty enough view of human sin. “How can anything about totally depraved humanity be sacred?” you may well be asking.Certainly, humanity is sinful to the roots, and nothing good comes from us to the extent that we can earn our salvation. However, redeemed by Christ and one with him, we can no longer speak of ourselves as totally depraved.Living in the “already-not yet” reality of the kingdom of God means we still face temptation and still sin. But if we continue to profess that nothing good comes from us post-conversion, we don’t have a high enough view of Jesus’s ability to fully redeem us and make us totally one with himself. Sin does still come from us, yes, so to say humans are sacred doesn’t mitigate that; rather, it increases the weight of redemption. Sin is still great, redemption greater.Plus, if nothing good can come from me, it’s okay for me to write sub-par music, right?Aside from human beings it’s inappropriate to call created things sacred, though. As such, language like that of the sacred-secular divide has no place among the confession of the church because it’s a heresy that alters more than our musical tastes. It affects everything about how the church lives and interacts in the world in general.
Gnostic sacred-secular terminology betrays the tendency of modern evangelicals to function as deistic rationalists, and we wind up either as super-spiritual legalists totally cut off from modern society or as people so evacuated into modern society we are indistinguishable from it. We have drawn our lines in the wrong places.
According to Schmemann, the sacred-secular divide clouds the way in which we do mission and the sort of life to which we invite people.The spiritual legalists among us invite the world to the life of sectarian piety, the kind that rejects all music not written by Christians and makes all “secular” life meaningless.For the “activists” who run with the world to the extent they see life itself as social activism, life is instead about “winning back” the world for just purposes, and the activities of identifying with unbelievers by entering “their” spaces (e.g. in drinking or as-previously-termed “secular” music) are carried too far, and they get drunk while ministering to alcoholics or fill their minds with pornographic content for the purpose of relationship (12-13).On either end of the spectrum, the kind of dichotomized theology evinced by the sacred-secular divide mis-images God and invites the world into a life that isn’t life at all.To prolong usage of the language of the sacred-secular divide is to accept modern Gnosticism and invite profanity into our doxologies. And so we must rid our minds and conversations of the tendency to dichotomize the world into “sacred” and “secular.”
Instead, we must acknowledge the whole created world as sacramental.
As Schmemann says:
“Nowhere in the Bible do we find the dichotomies which for us are the self-evident framework of all approaches to religion. In the Bible the food that man eats, the world of which he must partake in order to live, is given to him by God, and it is given as communion with God. The world as man’s food is not something ‘material’ and limited to material functions, thus different from, and opposed to, the specifically ‘spiritual’ functions by which man is related to God. All that exists is God’s gift to man, and it all exists to make God known to man, to make man’s life communion with God. It is divine love made food, made life for man. God blesses everything he creates, and in biblical language, this means that he makes all creation the sign and means of his presence and wisdom, love and revelation: ‘O taste and see that the Lord is good.’” (14)
Part III: Rid yourselves of all profanity in doxology
In other words, we must no longer reject certain types of music or art simply because they fall into a poorly defined category we ourselves have concocted. In a sacramental world, all of creation gives glory to God, and to arbitrarily define goodness and badness breaks apart the spiritual-physical union Christ himself crafted in his body on the tree, and it interrupts our witness of him to a dying world. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, my very life and work reflects upon my Lord’s—so I better be intentional about it.In fact, sometimes the best representations of sacramentalism come from artists who aren’t believers but still beautifully represent truth about God, his kingdom, or the human condition. Evangelicals, especially Millennial ones, are frustrated with the dishonest and unrealistic representation of the world found in the majority of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) and are turning to other kinds of music, often in rebellion to sectarian-minded advocates of the sacred-secular divide. However, listening to non-CCM music isn’t inherently sin.For any music, CCM or non, it is helpful to recall Paul’s instructions for food sacrificed to idols (which, interestingly, follow a discussion about partaking in the life and death of Jesus through the sacraments): do what’s within your conscience, but remember in our sacramental world, you can live in holiness or in sin, and what we take in to our hearts and minds affects what we produce with our lives.Changing the language we use to describe our world, and focusing on living lives and making art that is sacramental would give our music the truthfulness, beauty, honesty, and excellence we’re so drawn to in music not born under the CCM label.When we acknowledge that music, like all other created things, is sacramental, and then we create accordingly, we begin to remove what is profane from our doxologies. With this single shift to admitting the whole world, including music, is sacramental, we might surprise ourselves with how many of our complaints about our music get silenced and how many of our discrepancies get softened.For instance, the sacramentality of music, because it points to Jesus, demands excellence and beauty in our work. It mandates our realness and honesty, which is how we primarily relate to those outside the church. Similarly, sacramental music is that which truly laments and rejoices so we can minister to one another. When we don’t live and create sacramentally, it’s easy to get sloppy and sinful in our work, but sacramental music reforges the necessary union among beauty, excellence, and truth, art and theology.
Doing away with the sacred-secular divide opens us up to the very thing the church and the world in which she resides are so hungry for: the presence of Christ amidst his creation.
Like a table laden with sumptuous dishes and delicacies, the sacramental world is rich in beauty and meaning, and it is this world for which God intended us. By restoring the sacramental to our vocabularies and our religion, we might find life a bit more beautiful, enjoyable, truthful, and our music good.