A cappella is good, actually
What you can learn about the Church of Christ from its position on instrumental music
If you want to understand what Pepperdine is and how it works, you need to understand a few things about its relationship with the Church of Christ. And if you’re going to understand anything about the Church of Christ, one good place to start is with the most visible of its distinctive traits: its insistence on removing musical instruments from the church’s corporate worship.
In this essay, I’ll offer some Church of Christ arguments in favor of a cappella worship, correct some misunderstandings, address some common objections, and hopefully shed some light on the Church of Christ generally, all with an eye toward understanding Pepperdine’s heritage of faith.
First, a brief word on the Church of Christ. Early leaders of the movement sought to unite the world’s Christians by restoring the practices of the first-century church, casting off manmade traditions and the doctrinal accretions of the centuries, and returning to biblical Christianity as they understood it. This came to mean rejecting all creeds and catechisms of the intervening years in favor of what were taken to be commonsense readings of the biblical texts. The rejection of creeds was driven not by the belief that any one or other of them contained falsities but by the belief that the Bible itself was a sufficient encapsulation of true Christian doctrine.
The elevation of the Bible was also motivated by the drive toward Christian unity—different sects favored different creeds and catechisms, but surely all could agree on the authority of the Bible!
The church’s position on musical instruments in worship was informed by its study of the New Testament. One of the main hermeneutical principles of the Church of Christ is the notion that we should regard explicit biblical commands as more authoritative than mere examples, and that where we have no biblical example, we may be forced to infer God’s will for us. The shorthand for this hermeneutic is Command, Example, and Necessary Inference (CENI).
In searching the New Testament for guidance on how to conduct the church’s corporate worship, these Christians found explicit commands to sing (e.g., Eph. 5:19, Col. 3:16, 1 Cor. 14:26) and examples of Christ singing with his disciples (e.g., Matt. 26:30) but no suggestion that instruments be used. So, they concluded that corporate worship should feature unaccompanied congregational singing.
At this point, you may be thinking, “Hold on, what about the Old Testament? Weren’t harps and lyres and cymbals involved in Jewish worship at the Temple?” Church of Christ writers grant this point, but they regard such commands and examples as part of the old covenant, superseded along with ritual sacrifices and other requirements of the Law.1
You may also be wondering whether the New Testament’s silence on such matters as microphones and electric lighting implies that such modern amenities are as unjustified in worship as are musical instruments. To this objection, the Church of Christ has generally responded by distinguishing between two types of biblical silence:
What was available but specifically not mentioned.
What was not mentioned because it was not available.
Musical instruments (available to the early church but not mentioned) are thus unauthorized, whereas electric lights (unavailable and thus not mentioned) cannot be judged by the same metric.2
This was roughly the understanding of George Pepperdine, the founder of what has become Pepperdine University, who wrote, “The use of instrumental music in worship is nowhere found in the New Testament. It is an unauthorized addition, which violates the principle of worshipping according to scriptural authority in much the same way that adding roast beef to the Lord’s Supper would violate the same principle.”3 Roast beef, like the harp, was available to the early church and known to feature in Jewish worship at the Temple, but its absence from all New Testament descriptions of worship justifies excluding it from the church’s modern practice.
If you are encountering these arguments for the first time, it may now seem to you that members of the Church of Christ must be insensitive to the charm of instrumental music—its unmatched ability to stir the hearts of its listeners. Only a philistine could prefer the austerity of a cappella worship to the richness of accompanied singing, you may suppose. But this principle regards only the church’s corporate worship, not other settings.
George Pepperdine specifies that “instrumental music in the worship is not omitted because of dislike of music. Beautiful music on the various instruments is very appropriate in the home and in the concert. It is cultural and enjoyable as an Art. However, the Lord’s apostles, guided by the Holy Spirit, did not include instruments in church worship.”4 Likewise, the tastiness and nourishing power of beef are not reasons to introduce it to the Lord’s table, even if it would broaden the meal’s appeal!
Church of Christ writers have also offered more theological reasons to prefer a cappella worship, including that the sung word better honors our rational nature, and that it better coincides with Paul’s admonishment against unintelligibility in the first letter to the Corinthians.5
These days, the Church’s insistence on a cappella worship is sometimes regarded as a quirk of a particular sect arising on the American frontier, but it has actually been the majority practice of the historical church, a fact that is embedded in the term a cappella—”in the style of the chapel”.6 The earliest church fathers are unanimous in recommending unaccompanied singing, and even a millennium later, Thomas Aquinas condemns the use of musical instruments as fitting only the “more coarse and carnal” worship of the old covenant.7 Following the rise of musical instruments in the worship of the medieval Latin church, Calvin restored for Geneva the early church’s practice of unaccompanied singing.8 Even today, other denominations observe the same practice for more or less the same reasons. The Eastern Orthodox Church has traditionally worshipped a cappella, as do many Mennonites and Primitive Baptists.
Whether you find any of these arguments persuasive or not, I hope you at least understand something about their motives. The Church of Christ reached these conclusions in a spirit of Christian unity, carefully applying human reason to the text of the Bible, and ultimately coinciding in judgment with the historical practice of the church. And if you ask me, that seems like a pretty good way of doing things.
See Everett Ferguson, A Cappella Music in the Public Worship of the Church, revised ed. (Abilene, TX: Biblical Research Press, 1972): “Instrumental music, therefore, was an important feature of the temple worship, and it was closely associated with its sacrificial system. Here may be a significant clue explaining the absence of instrumental music in early Christian worship. Early Christianity saw the sacrificial system and temple worship as superseded by the sacrifice of Christ and the worship of the church” (31).
See Ferguson, supra note 1: “Any non-use of instrumental music was not in the same category with non-use of a public-address system. Instrumental music was available and was part of the surrounding religious practices” (79).
George Pepperdine, More than Life (Pepperdine College Bookstore, 1962): 25.
Pepperdine, supra note 3: 25.
See Ferguson, supra note 1: 87–91.
See Ferguson, supra note 1: “To abstain from the use of the instrument is not a peculiar aberration of ‘a frontier American sect’: this was easily, until comparatively recent times, the majority tradition of Christian history” (83).
Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 91, article 2, in the response to objection 4: “In veteri autem testamento usus erat talium instrumentorum, tum quia populus erat magis durus et carnalis, unde erat per huiusmodi instrumenta provocandus, sicut et per promissiones terrenas” (my emphasis).
See, e.g., Iohannis Calvini in librum Psalmorum commentarius, pt. 1, Ps. 33:2: “I have no doubt that playing upon cymbals, touching the harp and the viol, and all that kind of music, which is so frequently mentioned in the Psalms, was a part of the education; that is to say, the puerile instruction of the law: I speak of the stated service of the temple. […] But when they frequent their sacred assemblies, musical instruments in celebrating the praises of God would be no more suitable than the burning of incense, the lighting up of lamps, and the restoration of the other shadows of the law” (Trans. James Anderson). (“nec vero mihi dubium est quin cymbala pulsare, canere ad citharam et nablum, totumque illud musicae genus, cuius mentio frequenter in Psalmis recurret, pars fuerit legalis paedagogiae: loquor de solenni templi cultu. […] sed dum sacros suos conventus peragunt, nihilo magis ad canendas Dei laudes congruere arbitror musica instrumenta, quam si quis suffitus, lucernas, et similes Legis umbras in usum revocet.”)
Tickled to see someone invoke CENI! Really important hermeneutical principles that make sense of a lot of historic CoC positions, but that are often overlooked or flattened. No, your grandma wasn't just legalistic, she inherited a sophisticated way of reading the Bible that made sense in context, but that has largely not been passed down to the past generation or two.
In addition to theological/hermeneutical considerations (which are real and important!), I think sociological analysis a la Doug Foster (ie: the chapter on instrumental worship in The Story of Churches of Christ) is helpful in fleshing out the story. The divides w/in the Stone-Campbell movement over instrumental worship heightened post-American civil war, with lines often falling roughly along North/South lines. As the SCM evolved from a frontier revival movement into a more mainstream denomination, wealthy northern churches adopted expensive organs while southern churches suffered post-war economic disaster. From a southern perspective that was indicated a distinct lack of charity, and symbolic of general northern vice. Not having instruments was virtuous because it indicated you were spending money on "better" things (wrap this up with some "God loves those whom he chastens" theology, and you reinforce the idea that "simple," "impoverished" worship is more pleasing to God.)
A through line of Church of Christ practice is an emphasis on simplicity. Our church buildings are unadorned and austere, we don’t have a complicated church calendar, and, yes, our singing is unaccompanied. Like you say, a capella music is not just a strange quirk of the CofC that one can take or leave; it’s not simply an aesthetic preference. It is borne of a theological commitment to simplicity in faith and practice. For this reason, to reject a capella music is to reject something fundamental about the Churches of Christ.