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IV. The Question of Secular Sources

The next difficulty that I had with Mr. Woetzel’s article was the fact that he almost exclusively quoted secular sources regarding the morality or immorality of music. Also, these sources were not well documented, so it was not possible to find them and form an unbiased view of their writings.

There are several thoughts here, the first of all is that consulting secular sources has in the long run always had an adverse effect on the Church. Let me mention only a few, such as the effect that Aristotelian and Platonic philosophies have had on the Roman Catholic church and by extension on the Protestant as well, obscuring many of the truths in Scripture behind a system that tried to explain everything. Think here of the modern movement towards theistic evolution where people are trying to synthesize the evolutionistic world view of science with the Truth that God created everything. Another example is the modern deliverance ministry that casts demons out of Christians and has its followers constantly living in fear of the great powers of Satan comes from getting too much information about the spirit world from non-Biblical sources. I could list more, such as the corporate model of running churches, but that is beyond the scope of this writing. Suffice it to say, we must be extremely careful before letting any secular philosophy into the church, even if it is seemingly to her benefit.

When looking at these quotes my first question was, what were the motives of the authors of these various books? Each author has an axe to grind, ideas that they want to disseminate, and many of them are strongly tainted away from the truth. Especially critics are ones that we need to be wary of, because they have their own personal tastes that will color what is written. And often they aren’t authorities on what they’re writing about. An example here is what film critics have said about the recent Lord of the Rings movies. First they say that they haven’t read the book and then they complain that they can’t understand the movie. They condemn lack of intelligence, etc., but then praise its silliest parts. Critics need to be taken with a barrel of salt in every venue, including that about music, because they’re paid to be critical.

We as Christians need to hold to the Bible first and foremost and to its principles. The principles of the world will always be anti-Biblical, because the Bible is the antithesis of this world system and this world’s realm will do everything to corrupt the message of the Truth from both sides.

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Copyright © 2003 J.M. Diener. All Rights Reserved.