FEATURE
DRUMMED OU
Evaluating Music for
• Drums are acceptable in worship as long as they don't play certain rhythms. • Drums may not be seen in worship, but may be played as part of a prerecorded accompaniment track. • Drums arranged as a drum kit may not be played in church, but traditional African drums like bongos and djembes may be played in church. • Drums arranged as a drum kit may not be played in church, but a wooden box rigged to sound like a drum kit (a cajón) may be played in church. • Drums are not to be played at all in church, but they may be played at youth events, however the youth like it. • Drums at church should either be contained behind a sound barrier or electronically mixed so they don't disturb sensitive ears. That's a sample of various stated and unstated customs restricting the use of drums in worship I have encountered in various Adventist churches. Given the diversity of approaches, it seems there is no 16
Alberta Adventist News
agreement on what principle or set of principles guides the use of drums in Adventist churches. In this essay, I propose (1) we have been looking for such principles in the wrong place and (2) our practice is better than our theory is. Philosophical Frame work: Time and Reason To explain what I mean by that, I will need to introduce two different ways of reasoning about things relative to time.1 The first comes from an assumption baked into the grand tradition of Western philosophy since Parmenides: what is really real is what doesn't change. Consequently, to make reliable inferences, we need to find ways to think about what is in time and changes by relating it to what is outside of time and cannot change. Much of science, for example, operates on this assumption by explaining changes we observe in the world as the operation of unchanging laws of nature. I will call this the analytical mode of reasoning because analysis often means defining unchanging structures of reality in terms of their constituent parts.2 With that said, what if
OCTOBER 2020
what's really real really does undergo change? As a Christian, I understand God as the Creator and Sustainer of all that is; He is the Being in whom everything else that exists holds together (see Acts 17:28). While God has revealed properties of His being that are consistent through all time — for example, His character (see Malachi 3:6) — He has also shown us in His sanctuary that His experience — thus, His ultimate reality — is subject to change. Though the bisection of the space where God dwells — a division that demarcates a two-phase heavenly ministry of the Son before the Father — the architecture of heaven shows us that ultimate reality involves change and time. The biblical sanctuary further demonstrates that what's real about where God dwells is not completely disconnected from human reality, so we do not need to escape from our changing world into a changeless, divine reality to connect with God. Rather, we connect with Him by joining our stories to His story, especially as told in the sanctuary and its services. This has profound and far-reaching implications for
