If the widespread testimony of the Christian Church is against instruments in worship, we should be very cautious about uncritically rejecting that view and thinking that modern practice to the contrary is more faithful. And this was the common practice up until the 19th century. The Reformed churches applied the Scripture principle most thoroughly to the practice of worship.” Ĭharles Spurgeon observed that musical instruments were “ rejected and condemned by the whole army of Protestant divines” from the Reformation onward, except for Lutherans and many Anglicans who reject the RPW. The first stage of the reformation of worship established the formal principle of the Reformation: sola scriptura. The reformation of worship happened in stages. The Reformation saw itself as recovering not only the biblical pattern of worship, but the praxis of the early post-apostolic church. Their reintroduction was highly controversial…the introduction of instruments in worship accompanied the rise of sacerdotalism in medieval worship. “Gradually, over the course of the thousand years before the Reformation, the medieval church reinstituted progressively aspects of the Mosaic ceremonial cultus including the introduction of musical instruments which had been suppressed in churches until the tenth century. Scott Clark writes that “ the early post-apostolic church sang only inspired songs without accompaniment…the patristic church, though in favor of the use of music in worship, was quite opposed to the use of instruments in worship.” While the Western Latin Church introduced instrumental music in the late medieval period, the Eastern Orthodox Churches continued to sing praise a capella as they do to this day. This fact is widely recognized by historians and evident in the fact that the term a capella comes from Latin by way of Italian, meaning “ in the style of the church. It is not an overstatement to say that the legacy of the Church is largely against musical instruments in corporate worship. The Christian Church rejected instrumental music in worship for most of church history except in two periods: the dark ages of Roman Catholicism in the 14th to the early 16th centuries (with a few isolated instances prior to that), and again in the 19th century to the present. The History of Instrumental Music in the Christian Church. In this post we will confirm this biblical interpretation by the overwhelming witness of church history. We demonstrated how instrumental music-as part of the ceremonial worship of the old covenant-has been abrogated and is no longer part of public worship in the new covenant. In our last post we saw how the Regulative Principle of Worship (RPW) is the standard by which we should approach the question of instrumental music in the corporate worship of the church.
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