“Organs, Hymns and the Protestant Reformation”

October 15, 2006

Scripture Reading:  Psalm 66

Rev. Dr. Carol  L. Kerr

 Blue Point Congregational Church

To understand why we sing hymns with a tremendous organ accompanying them here at Blue Point Church in the 21^st century, you first have to understand a bit about the Protestant Reformation in the 16^th century.  The Protestant Reformation was started by Martin Luther .  He was a monk at the time.  He was a deeply spiritual and troubled man.  He came to believe that faith alone justified one in the eyes of God.  This was different from the Catholic church at the time which believed that countless prayers, sacrifice and holy living, the things that you did, and not your faith justified you in the eyes of God.

 Luther, however, ministered quietly until an incident that happened in 1517.  At that time the papacy was trying to raise money for some building projects it had going in Rome.  To do this, it sold “indulgences.”  People could buy several indulgences and depending on how much they spent their deceased relatives would be let out of purgatory that much sooner.   To protest this Luther posted 95 thesis on the door of the church in Wittenberg.  (This was a common practice at the time.)  Luther believed that after confession the sinner is freed from his burden not by the priest’s absolution, but by inner grace and faith alone.  Therefore, the priesthood served no necessary function.  Each individual  could make his or her own interpretation of the scriptures according to his or her own conscience.  We cannot understate how revolutionary this was at the time.  It is as if someone said that neither the Supreme Court or any other body could interpret the constitution of the United States but only the conscience of the individual citizens. 

As you can imagine Luther’s position did not go over well with the Catholic Church.  He was excommunicated.  Northern Europe at that time was a power keg ready to be lit.  The monarch vied with the Catholic church for regional power.  The middle class wanted to rule their own affairs and not be told what to do by the church which was grand and wealthy.  They felt that the church was out of touch with their lives.  Luther’s 95 thesis and the ensuing controversy lit the power keg and it exploded.  Lutheranism swept over Germany.   There were terrible years of religious and political wars that ripped Europe apart.  In the end, Protestantism was victorious. 

As Robert Greenberg, professor of music, explains, all of this and particularly Luther himself had a profound effect on church music.  First, let me talk about instrumental music which is music without words.   We all have listened to instrumental music and have had at times a powerful experience like a burst of light, or a glimpse of some higher reality and truth.  In other words, listening to instrumental music,  we all have had a transcendent experience none the less.  We have had a rush and a thrill that we can’t verbalize.  We have realized some important and powerful truth through instrumental music alone.  This experience could be interpreted two ways.  The first way is that it is bad.  That is that the person has had some hedonistic and individualistic rush of intuition.  The person did not think about God at this moment.  So they entered some other godless reality.  This was the way that the Catholic Church had interpreted the effect of instrumental music up until the Reformation.  Instrumental music was suspicious and not allowed in church.  Or, instruments were allowed only in the most minimal way accompanying the words of plain chant.   The other way is good.  One could interpret this experience in the exact opposite manner.  You could say that through the music you have had a profound loss of ego and you have transcended your own body and have come to a place where you are available to be influenced by divine things.  Like I said earlier, Luther rejected the idea that only through good works can one be redeemed.  He believed that human kind was already redeemed by personal faith.  Therefore,  it followed that all good works, secular or religious, were also acts of faith and as such spiritual in and of themselves.  For Luther, the creation of music itself, any kind of music is a spiritual act.  Since human kind was already redeemed by personal faith, all good works, secular as well as religious, were spiritual documents.  So, the Protestant church flung open its doors to all kinds of instruments and the grandest of all is the pipe organ.  Bach was born 36 years after the Protestant Reformation.  Bach delivered on Luther’s belief.  Bach created powerful organ music that swept the worshiper up in a spine tingling rapture.  As such their egos were united with some greater reality and they were open to hear the word of God.   

Another radical change that the Reformation brought was that the church service was to be spoken in the language that everyone understood and not Latin like in the Catholic Church.  They insisted upon hymns which could be understood and sung by people, and they wished to get away from plainchant hymnody, most of which could only be performed by monks.  Soon church hymns became the core of the German culture.  Everyone with the least qualification knew the hymns as well as he or she knew the Bible.  They were sung everywhere and not just at church.   

So there you have it.  That is why we here today so many hundreds of years later and in a land thousands of miles away are celebrating the 50^th anniversary of a great pipe organ, the Austin, and are dedicating our worship to the many many hymns that it accompanies so well.