Divine aseity, the superfluity of creation, and the unnecessary act of music-making
Christians sing a lot, but why? Why did God make music in the first place? Can the way we answer these questions change how we think about worship? In today’s “talking head” video, we take on these questions and more.
If you enjoy this video, please consider subscribing and leaving a comment on YouTube! I’ve been chewing on these ideas a bunch recently and would love to hear your thoughts.
Video Transcript
Hey everyone, this is John Caddell. I’m in my backyard here in South Carolina, and it is freezing in the middle of the day, which is very unusual for South Carolina, even in winter.
Thanks for clicking on this video. I write liturgical music in the Anglican tradition and started posting music on this channel back in the fall. I have a lot more music I plan to publish in the coming months, but I also spend a lot of time thinking about music and liturgy and theology and how they all relate to each other, so I wanted to branch out a bit and try a “talking head” sort of video format. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, awesome, please let me know in the comments what you think, I’d love your feedback. And if this is not your thing, no worries, I have more music coming soon.
My goal for this video is to lay the foundation for a theology of music and then tie that in to our theology of worship. I think many pastors, worship leaders, church music directors, and the like have a robust theology of worship, which is great, but not as often of music. We can answer questions like “What is worship?” and “How does one worship rightly?” but we have a harder time with questions like “Why does music have such an important role in public worship?” or even “Why does music exist in the first place?” These questions may not be as urgent as others, but given the ubiquity and importance of music in our churches, I think it makes sense to ask, “why? Why do we do this?” And, as I hope to demonstrate, our theology of music can tell us a lot about what we really think is happening in worship.
The answer we often hear to the question of why music exists is “so that God’s people can worship him in song.” Essentially, this view holds that God’s purpose in making music was to provide his people a means by which they could worship him. Though well-intentioned, I want to argue that this is actually the answer to a different question. That question is something like, “For what use did God make music?” This is a similar question, but it isn’t the same because of the distinction between purpose and use. I’m gonna define purpose as the fundamental reason for which something exists, and use as simply what is done with something. Purpose has to do with motivation, use has to do with function. There definitely can be overlap between these categories, but when we remove the distinction entirely, it creates problems for our theology of music, of worship, and even of creation in general.
One simple way to see the necessity of this distinction is in marriage. Why I married my wife is not the same as the uses of marriage. I married my wife because I love her. The desire which motivated me to get down on one knee and give her a ring was my affection, my longing, for her. The uses of marriage are many things, some of the bigger ones being companionship and children, and smaller ones being things like tax benefits. But if my wife were to ask me, “Why did you marry me?” and I was to answer “companionship and children,” or even “tax benefits,” I would quickly find myself sleeping on the couch, right?
The conflation of purpose and use becomes problematic in a similar way when we apply it to our thinking about creation. If we say that God’s purpose in making something was to fulfill the use he had in mind for it, we end up putting him in the position of needing to do something.
Let’s return to our original question to see how this works. We can say that one of the uses for which God made music is worship—no problems there. We can even say that worship is a high use for music, maybe even the highest—still no objections. But if this was God’s purpose in making music, his fundamental motivation for making it, the desire which caused him to make it, this would suggest that there was some kind of need external to God for which he had to act. There was a problem for which God had to come up with a solution.
If the solution in this case is that God made music, and the problem which yields that solution is that God needed to provide us some means by which we could worship him, we then have to ask, why did God need to do that? Does God need to be worshipped? In fact, does he need anything at all?
The answer to these questions is “no,” and that’s because of the doctrine of God’s self-sufficiency, or what we might call the aseity of God. This is the belief that God has no needs. There is nothing outside of him which he must have, nothing he is or ever has been obligated to do. To see this in Scripture, we can look to Psalm 50, in which God rebukes his people for thinking that God needs their sacrifices. He says, “If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is mine, and all that is in it.” God has no need of anything in creation, and even if he did, he would already have it because he made it.
Now, I totally understand if at this point it feels like we’re way off of the subject of music, and we’re just quibbling over semantics. But I say all of this because the question of music opens us up to thinking about God’s self-sufficiency and why creation exists at all, and what we believe about that can work its way back down and change what we believe about music and our work as musicians and worship planners and pastors. And, I believe this is actually something we commonly get wrong without realizing it. I know that personally, I misunderstood this in my first few years of ministry.
Especially among Protestants, we often talk about God’s glory and how God made all things to show forth his glory. We say that the purpose of our lives is to glorify God. All of this is true and good, but if we aren’t careful, we can implicitly take on the erroneous belief that God needs to be glorified, that God made us so that he would have someone to glorify him. It is indeed the chief end of man to glorify God, but it is not the chief end of God to make man so that God could be glorified.
God is totally self-sufficient and has no needs. Therefore, God does not need to be glorified, he only chooses to be glorified by what he has made. Furthermore, he doesn’t need to be worshipped, he didn’t need to make some means for us to worship him, and finally, he didn’t need to make music.
So why did he do it? If there is no external need for which God made music, why did God bother making it and giving it to us?
The answer is actually really simple. If you’re a musician, all you have to do is ask yourself the same question. Why do you make music?
You might make music in order to earn a living, or to provide ambiance at a restaurant, or to get a group of burly men furiously headbanging at a metal show. But, if we apply the purpose-use distinction to our music-making, these are the uses of music. Behind them lies a purpose, a reason. Why do people try to earn a living making music when more lucrative vocations exist? Why do we like background music at restaurants? Why do we go to concerts?
I think the reason we make and listen to music is that we like music. It brings us delight. It does nothing to ensure our health or well-being. It fulfills no need which, left unmet, would bring about pain or death. We make music not out of necessity, but only out of want.
It’s the same way with God, and even more so. We make music; he made music. And he made it for no other reason than that he loved it.
Bear in mind this is just an illustration, not a factual description, but it’s as though, when God was creating the world, he came up with music and thought, “Oh, that’s brilliant.” He imagined tones and timbres and rhythms and melodies and harmonies and spoke them into being for the joy of having made them. Music, for all its immense beauty, is superfluous, unnecessary.
I think that, among all the things God made, music is especially good at revealing what Robert Farrar Capon calls the sensus lusus, or playful spirit of God, in his book The Supper of the Lamb. It is the sense, to quote Capon, “by which he relishes the elegant superfluity, the unnecessary variety of the world.”
God could have made a world in which only one musical scale was possible. There would be C and D, but no C♯ nor D♭. This would have been fine, right? You can make lots of great music with just C major. Yet in the world he made, there was not just one note between C and D but an infinite number of notes which we call microtones, allowing for infinite possibilities of musical scale and harmony. A measure of music is not by nature four equally spaced beats, but a canvas upon which infinitely complex rhythms may be painted. As Mr. Stravinsky would remind us, the high register of the bassoon does not sound the same as an alto saxophone or even an oboe.
The endless variety of music is, to me, a clue to understanding why God made it in the first place. What purpose could God have in making music which demanded so much variety? Whether it was worship or love songs or anything else, there’s just no way that this degree of variety was necessary to fulfill any external purpose. And that’s because it isn’t necessary!
We can see this in virtually every aspect of creation. If the purpose for which God made trees was merely that people could have wood or food, why would God set about making tens of thousands of tree varieties when one would have done the job? If the purpose for which God made colors was merely that we could tell apart one thing from another, why would he bother making such a vast and beautiful spectrum of colors? What can we say about those things which have less obvious uses, like the planets and galaxies and the strange creatures living in the deepest parts of the ocean?
The only explanation is that all of creation is superfluous. Nothing ever needed to exist. it only exists because God loves it and he wanted it to exist.
Furthermore, we can also recognize all of creation as a gift. Because the creation of the world was not necessary, God’s decision to make it and place us within it and give us dominion over it was a free and extravagant gift of grace. We get to enjoy all of the goodness and the beauty of what God has made. We get to savor the fruit of every tree, to marvel at the deep sea creatures and the cosmos, and to enjoy music in all its beauty.
So, there is my attempt at a foundation for a theology of music. That is, in my estimation, why music exists. So much more can and has been said about the nature of music within a Christian framework, but I want to turn in the second half of this video to the subject of worship. How does this view of music as the superfluous gift of a self-sufficient God inform our thinking about worship?
In the Anglican liturgy for Holy Communion, we conclude the offertory with words taken from 1 Chronicles 29, where we say, “All things come from you, O Lord, and your own have we given you.” This is such a beautiful and succinct description of what it means to worship God. All things come from God as a free gift of grace, and in worship, we offer that gift back to God in thanksgiving. The word Eucharist, which is another term for Holy Communion or the Lord’s Supper, comes from the Greek word for thanksgiving, which is indicative of what’s really happening in our liturgy.
In effect, worship is saying, “God, everything that you have made and done for us is so beautiful and good, and we thank you for it. Yet, we know that, just as the builder of a house has greater honor than the house itself, so also are you more beautiful and good than all of creation. You are goodness and beauty. And so, we offer your creation back to you like a child offering a gift to her parent. We know that you don’t need it, and it ultimately came from you in the first place. But in this offering, we aim to reciprocate in a very imperfect way the love you have shown us using the good things which you have made. You don’t need this gift from us, and we don’t need to give it to you. We simply get to do it. We delight to offer you this gift because you first delighted to give us all things.”
This is what we do with music. Music in the context of worship is an offering of that which God has made by which we praise and thank him for who he is and what he has done.
It’s fitting that we should worship God with music because music is beautiful. God is beautiful and he is the source of all beauty, so it is right that when we worship him, we use beautiful things like music. We know that God can make all the music he wants for himself. He could summon the angelic choirs and make hymns more beautiful than any human being has ever heard. Yet, like that child offering a gift to her father, we lift our meager song because it is one of the most beautiful things we can do. And, when we offer it in faith, our heavenly Father delights in our song in the same way an earthly father delights in even the most tiny, insignificant gift from his child.
There are all kinds of benefits we receive when we sing together in worship: our hearts are lifted up, we’re encouraged and comforted, we’re drawn into union with one another, we’re catechized and instructed in the faith. These are all wonderful, superadded graces given by God, but they are the uses of worship music, not the purpose. They are the functions of worship music in the life of the church, not the fundamental cause for the church’s song. The purpose which precedes all uses of worship music is the offering of praise and thanksgiving to the Triune God. For the beauty of his creation, for his holy incarnation, for his precious death, for his glorious resurrection and ascension, for his heavenly intercession, for his promise to come again, and for all other blessings, we bundle up all of the beauty and goodness we can find and lift it up to God, saying, “All this comes from you!” And, we get all those benefits, the functions of worship music, thrown in too.
I find this conception of worship to be such a joy and relief. It points to the character of God as one who is not egotistical, needing to be glorified because he’s vain. To use a very twenty-first century metaphor, our worship is not “content” to him—it’s not something he consumes for entertainment because he’s bored or dissatisfied with us. He is not a harsh critic of our worship either, but one who delights in our out of tune singing and “fifth rate poems set to sixth rate music,” to quote C.S. Lewis. When God does criticize his people’s worship throughout the Bible, it’s specifically because they’ve forgotten the character of God and of true worship, and have instead begun worshipping him in the way that idols are worshipped, idols who are egotistical and exacting and needy.
When we believe in the aseity of God, the superfluity of creation, and the extravagant grace he has poured out upon us, we can receive music and all of creation for what it truly is: a free gift which God made because he delighted in making it and giving it to us. And our response to his grace is simply to offer it back to him, singing: “this comes from you, and of your own have we given you.”