Last week we listened to sound as the oldest language of reverence.
We saw — or rather, heard — how the resonance of a single vibration can bridge the human and the divine, turning sound into worship. But might not something that can move us so deeply move us in the wrong direction, and mislead us?
If grace and music are both forms of resonance, as we posited last week, then we must ask:
- How can we spot the line between grace and self-deception?
- Is music a spiritual medicine or a spiritual menace?
- Does it truly uplift, heal, and quiet the soul — or does it just feel like it does?
These are the questions I want to begin to explore this week.
Music — and indeed sound as a whole — touches parts of us that words alone often cannot: the nervous system, the pulse, the breath, and perhaps even the ego, which delights in feeling significant. What does sacred music touch within us? Is it what religion calls the “soul,” or is it what the ego calls “me”? I’m going to suggest that whether music lifts or deceives the spirit depends on whether it touches the spirit within us, or simply the ego.
To begin, I want us to listen to two verses of a rendition of Amazing Grace that was shared with me by Michael. Here is the first verse. The voice is plain, unaccompanied, unembellished. To me, it sounds like confession — a human spirit acknowledging its dependence on grace:
Amazing Grace 1: Penitent
And here is the last verse of the same performance, By this time, the song has become wrapped in accompaniment and is thick with triumphal tone:
Amazing Grace 2: Triumphant
The melody is the same, but the words and the musical arrangement are different. Do penitence and triumph go together, as they seem to do in this song? Should we respond to grace with humble thanks or a fist-pumping “YES!!!” and go celebrate with a night on the town? Can we do both?
The question is: spiritually, is the song moving us in the right direction, or is it leading us astray?
Our many discussions about grace in this class have focused on the key truth that grace is an unearned gift. Does one of those two verses of Amazing Grace feel more like a humble acknowledgment of that gift, than the other? And does it matter?
Such questions are hardly new. Long before neuroscience gave us brain scans, Plato worried that certain kinds of music would soften the character of citizens and corrode communal discipline. Melody and rhythm, he said, were not innocent pleasures. They were moral technologies (not his word then, but it’s probably the word he would use today) that shaped the spirit of a people. He feared that music that was aimed at mere emotion could erode virtue.
The early Christian fathers inherited Plato’s anxiety. Clement of Alexandria, a second-century theologian, warned that ornate melodies courted sensuality — that beauty could imitate holiness while stirring appetite. In the 4th or 5th century, Augustine, who loved music as deeply as he distrusted it, confessed that he sinned when he was “moved more by the singing than by what was sung.” Augustine understood the danger: that reverence might shift from truth to tone. In that phrase lies the whole theological unease with sacred music: its power to transfer devotion from God to the sound of devotion.
The Protestant Reformers inherited and intensified this suspicion. Ulrich Zwingli — founder of the Reformed Church in Zurich and a trained musician — abolished instrumental music in worship altogether. Not long after Zwingli’s death, in Geneva, John Calvin restricted congregational singing to the psalms, in unison and without harmony, fearing that polyphony would seduce the ear away from meaning.
Music was not to excite; it was to instruct.
Luther, in contrast, took the opposite gamble: that popular melody would make theology singable. Here is a part of his hymn A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, paraphrasing Psalm 46 and becoming the defining anthem of the Reformation.
[A Mighty Fortress Is Our God]
His hymns made piety accessible to the masses. Hymns were no longer the preserve of priestly singers but acts of communal devotion. But they also opened the door to sentiment. The Reformation left us with a double inheritance — music as discipline and music as expression — and the tension between them has never fully resolved.
Islamic thought followed a similar path. The 13th/14th-century scholar Ibn Taymiyyah condemned samāʿ, which means listening to music for spiritual elevation. He viewed it as a form of intoxication that blurs moral judgment. Yet the Sufi mystics, especially the Dervish dancers, embraced samāʿ as a means of ecstatic remembrance of the Divine, believing that sound could dissolve the boundary between the human and the holy.
They drew, knowingly or not, on the insight of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (11th/12th century), who wrote that music mirrors the heart’s state:
- If one’s love is directed toward God, music magnifies it.
- If one’s love is directed toward the world, music magnifies that instead.
The music is neutral; the truth lies in the listener.
Across these traditions runs a common thread: the fear that emotion can counterfeit enlightenment, that rapture may masquerade as revelation. This anxiety does not arise from superstition; it arises from realism. Music acts directly on the nervous system.
It can simulate transcendence. Hymns that begin in devotion can end in indulgence.
And yet, would the alternative — a world without rhythm or resonance — be spiritual anesthesia? No society has endured silence for long. From Calvin’s Geneva to Puritan England, from Islamic jurists forbidding samāʿ to Stalinist and Maoist bans on jazz or opera, authorities have repeatedly tried to suppress music. But song and rhythm always return. Anthropologists have never found a culture without patterned sound.
Whenever melody is forbidden, it eventually finds its way back — in breath, in chant, in whisper.
The human response to music oscillates between trust and mistrust, intoxication and abstinence. Maybe what we call worship is simply the cultural etiquette for managing that oscillation—a choreography for handling overwhelming feeling. If that is so, the danger is not that music misleads the soul, but that the soul, enlarged by sound, mistakes its own enlargement for the presence of God.
The ancients believed that melody reached into the soul. Neuroscience has confirmed that it reaches at least into the midbrain. When music pleases us, the brain releases dopamine—the same neurotransmitter associated with reward, anticipation, and addiction. The chills we feel when a phrase resolves, the warmth that fills the chest at a perfect cadence—these are chemical signatures of pleasure.
Here is an example that chills me every time — and I’ve heard it a hundred times.
It is heartbreaking on several levels, and not only because of the words:
Ferrier: “What is life to me without thee?”
(from Offenbach’s Orfeo ed Eurydice)
And yet — neurologically — such patterns are measurable, predictable, and, increasingly, reproducible synthetically. A well-timed modulation, a rhythmic drop, a satisfying harmonic resolution will trigger dopamine release in most listeners regardless of style or culture. Film composers, pop producers, and now AI systems exploit these predictable responses: they can manufacture the sensation of transcendence without any accompanying insight or transformation.
This does not reduce music to mere chemistry. Rather, it shows how closely biology and metaphysics intertwine. We experience music as meaningful because our bodies respond to it as pattern—a tension moved toward completion. Our nervous system recognizes coherence and calls it “true.” But coherence can also be counterfeited.
A pattern that feels meaningful can pull us in two directions. It can heighten tension — as in this famous example from film:
[Jaws]
Two notes, nothing more — yet the mind senses threat.
Rhythm alone can teach us fear.
Or music can resolve tension, restoring inner order.
Here is Beethoven, gently calming the nerves in the Pathétique:
[Resolution: Pathétique]
And here is one of the most satisfying resolutions in Western music—the close of the Hallelujah Chorus:
[Hallelujah]
Each of these moments — fear, peace, triumph — is the body recognizing pattern and responding with chemicals of anticipation and release. But the body does not always tell us what the pattern means. That same circuitry can also deceive. The brain does not distinguish between the relief it feels in a symphonic cadence and the relief it feels when a parable suddenly makes sense. Both sensations feel like truth.
This confusion of intensity with authenticity is what Augustine was worried about.
He wasn’t denouncing music. He was naming a temptation as old as worship itself:
the temptation to take the thrill of emotion as evidence of God.
The modern worship band and the ancient psalmist share this vulnerability as well as an ability to induce a feeling indistinguishable from revelation. Harmonic progressions and dynamic builds lift our spirits. Roberta Flack, one of my favorite singers, is a good example. The gentle opening of her Bridhe Over Troubled Water only hints at the passion that is to come:
[Bridge Over Troubled Water]
Whether it’s a temple psalm, a monastic chant, or a football stadium megachurch worship spectacular, the structure of the sound is what produces the sensation of transcendence. The feeling of truth arises from the convergence of rhythm, harmony, and shared emotion.
Of course, this does not mean that God is absent from music that moves us.
It simply means we must be cautious about assuming that every shiver of emotion is down to the Holy Spirit rather than to the human ego responding to good design, the human chemistry reacting to a drug. The physiology is real; the interpretation is ours.
What a congregation or an audience calls “the Spirit moving” may, in purely physiological terms, amount to no more than a well-timed crescendo—but again, that does not rule out God working through the very channels biology provides.
Empirical studies of group singing show that collective rhythm synchronizes breathing and heartbeats. Bodies literally entrain — they get on board, they go with the flow.
Specialized neurons in the hypothalamus work overtime to produce oxytocin — the hormone that fosters trust and bonding (especially between a nursing mother and her infant) — which is then released into the bloodstream through the posterior pituitary gland.
But communal song doesn’t feel sterile like a chemistry lab. It feels like communion with the other bodies around us. The sensation of unity is genuine—even if the metaphysical conclusions we draw from it (that “God is present,” that “God blesses America,” and so on) are not guaranteed by the biology itself.
It is not that the music is lying to us. It is simply telling a truth more general than we usually think—the truth of our capacity to be moved together. What we make of that feeling of being moved is on us.
From a psychological perspective, the danger is not in the sound but in the story we attach to it. Emotion demands interpretation: “Why am I feeling this way?” A surge of awe could mean God really is near, or that the performer is a genius, or simply that we are synchronizing with others and amplifying the effect. Each interpretation builds a different world.
The distinction matters, because music’s emotional truth is universal, but its spiritual direction is not. Consider the chest-swelling Hallelujah! from Handel’s Messiah, which we heard earlier, or a rousing stadium anthem:
[God Bless America]
or a proud nationalist or religionist march:
[Onward, Christian Soldiers]
or Mozart’s magnificent Amen ending the Lacrimosa movement in the Requiem, which seems to me to dramatically up the ante on what begins as a humble plea for mercy:
All of these can all produce a physiological (or is it spiritual?) feeling of exaltation.
The feeling of uplift proves only this: we are responsive creatures, wired for resonance.
But whether that resonance produces compassion or hardens pre-existing conviction
does not depend on the music alone. It depends on what the heart brings to it—and what story the mind attaches to the feeling.
In that sense, the suspicion of music voiced by the philosophers and theologians we’ve met was not misplaced. They sensed, long before functional MRI, that music acts as a moral amplifier. It magnifies whatever it touches — faith or fanaticism, humility or pride. To encounter beauty is to become susceptible. What happens next depends less on harmony than on discernment.
This is why worship requires vigilance — not out of fear, but for awareness. Because any intense experience, even a transcendent one, can be interpreted in more than one way. A well-made hymn, a soaring chorus, a swelling orchestra—all can lift the soul
or merely inflate the ego.
Music opens the heart; discernment decides what enters.
That’s enough for today. Your turn. Is worship music spiritual or emotional? Can you tell the difference? Does it matter?
C-J: Working with trauma, as I do, I think these remarks were meaningful and accurate: depending on the narrative people carry, music can feel violent or it can be healing and restorative. We are energy, and we do vibrate with the universe. I believe ego and trauma are adaptive responses to survival. But when we truly surrender to a higher sense of self — without form, shape, or the history we identify as “I” — that is where restoration and healing take place.
When we come face to face with something we cannot do for ourselves, music becomes a beautiful tool in meditation, in yoga, and in many forms of therapy. Children healing in a hospital, children in the operating room — music helps them. Even in my own life, sometimes I want silence, and then I want to replace that silence with what I feel I need. A melody from nature can be enough.
If I’m angry, though, I’m afraid of my anger, because anger is reaction, not responsibility. And I think that’s at the core of what belief systems ask of us: responsibility to what we believe is our intentional purpose through a creator or a revelation we inherit or discover in our history.
This was very beautiful. I think it was accurate and very personal. I think God’s intention has always been that vibration we started with when we approached this topic.
Don: I’m struck by the fact that it’s estimated about a third of Scripture is written in lyrical prose, designed to be sung or chanted. I think God is behind music, and it shouldn’t be dismissed for that reason.
And I wonder: if Martin Luther were here today, what would he say about modern music? Every generation seems to draw a line around what musical arrangements are acceptable. Nobody today is offended by Luther’s contributions, but in his time he was radical.
It seems like a moving target — a goalpost that keeps shifting. What counts as religious music? What does not? And does that circle back to the beginning somehow, or is it an endless evolution we have to keep navigating?
C-J: It’s reflective to ask: does the change come from my ego and my understanding of the experience, or does the music itself change me? For me, when I can’t self-regulate, music is very important to restore balance, to help me see through a different lens, to become at peace with myself, and to work through what I feel God is leading me toward.
For me, it’s about taking responsibility for my own narrative, rewriting it into something more accurate perhaps — and also taking responsibility for how that narrative affects my choices and how I interface with the world around me.
Dave: Dr. Weaver had an interesting point about a third of Scripture being lyrical. I think that before the written word, that was a way to make memory easier. We remember lyrics to hymns more easily than we remember straight text because they’re tied to multiple anchor points in the brain. I’m sure that’s one reason Scripture was lyrical: it was easier to pass on from generation to generation. Now it has multiple meanings, but back then I think it was a tool to help people remember.
David: Is that manipulative?
C-J: Yes — intentionally and productively. When we teach children math or anything else through song, it serves a good purpose. It’s an excellent tool.
Donald: On the question of music “moving us in the right direction”: who decides what the “right direction” is? Young people might disagree with older folks on what “right direction” means musically. Music morphs; it changes. If I’m told to listen to music from the 1990s, I might not get it — but music from the 60s and 70s speaks to me because that was my era.
We attach memories to music. We used one particular piece for three different funerals in our family, and now that piece carries all that emotional weight. So is the “right direction” the music itself, or the associations we attach to it? Who decides? That’s complicated.
C-J: Did either of you want to add more? I’ll say this: all art different from our own is an acquired taste. The beauty of it — like the Spirit — is that whether I’m looking at visual art or listening to music, the question is always the same: what does it reveal in me?
Art reflects the artist’s narrative. Sometimes it’s political, sometimes it’s the soul revealing itself, sometimes it’s a cry for help. We use that art to reach our own inner experiences.
And sometimes art is deliberately provocative — like the banana duct-taped to the gallery wall. It challenges what we call true art.
To me, all this is an expression of God through human instruments, and through nature — the sound of birds, geese migrating, newborn kittens. These things trigger us. True art inspires us, enlarges us, makes us want to share it or create something ourselves.
Carolyn: When it comes to emotions, we all feel them differently. This morning something kept running through my mind: when Moses came down from the mountain after meeting God, he heard music and made a distinction about it.
I think every personality is drawn to certain music. I don’t have answers; I’m glad to be in this class for that reason. There are chemical changes in the body, even moving from a simple chord to a more complex one. Some musicians say certain transitions are “trite.” There’s so much to this.
And I’d ask: where in the Bible do we first see music used? David is obvious, but earlier than that?
Kiran: When I joined the Adventist church, I attended music seminars about syncopation and so on. They claimed that if you reversed Michael Jackson songs or hip-hop tracks you’d hear “Hail Satan.” For three years I didn’t listen to secular music.
Certain music would trigger certain behaviors for me. But I also had a problem with religious music: it only expresses a narrow range of emotions — devotion, loyalty, thanksgiving. But what about frustration, anger? You can’t express those in religious music.
Sometimes I just want noise so I can focus. Instrumental electronic music helps me work — though others might find that strange.
I think we make too big a deal about “good” vs. “bad” music. Music expresses emotion, just like we do — and we contain both good and bad.
Also, in many traditions, music is controversial. In Islam, some consider it haram. But I think music is simply expression. Maybe mirror neurons explain some of it: we feel what the music expresses.
C-J: Historically, Jewish tradition always had music — clarinets, cymbals, flutes, lyres. Their music expressed sadness, repentance, restoration, joy. That full spectrum Kiran described was there. Early Christian worship brought in voice first, then instruments as buildings changed.
Carolyn: But thinking back to the Garden of Eden — when did music start?
Kiran: I looked it up. Genesis 4:21 mentions Jubal, “the father of all who play stringed instruments and pipes.” That’s the first mention.
Reinhard: I believe music in worship began with David organizing choirs and musicians among the Levites. And music continues into the Kingdom — Revelation shows angels and elders singing.
Most churches today include music as essential to worship — without it, the service feels incomplete. Music elevates us spiritually. And there’s a physiological dimension: endorphins rise, cortisol falls, serotonin rises. Music helps with stress. Christian music helps me calm my life. And I believe music will be a big part of worship in heaven.
Carolyn: If you’ve ever been a minister of music, then you know there is so much discord among believers. What we’re discussing is really important because people judge based on performance, texture, style. You’re either “right” or “wrong.” Music leaders in church walk a tightrope.
C-J: Back to indigenous people: in small tribal communities, music unified people. A drumbeat, a cadence, a human voice — these drew people together in grief, drought, fear, or celebration. Music unified rather than isolated.
Some religions and traditions judge what counts as “true art,” but really the beauty is in how music gathers people. Our differences matter; they enrich the whole. True community — like true ensemble — needs many voices.
Michael: Both music and singing together bring awe that diminishes the ego and connects us to God. So I may gently disagree with David that it’s “manipulation.” If it’s true awe, the ego falls away.
Don: It raises the question: who are the “music police”? Sometimes I hear a song and say, “That’s not music.” But someone else loves it. Who decides?
Donald: Exactly. We seem to have two conversations: music in general, and music in spiritual life.
When we get back to spirituality — who is the “music police”? Should there even be one?
In visual art, the same question arises: is Warhol’s tomato soup can “art”? Who decides? And in church, who decides which music is acceptable?
Carolyn: Ask the music committee.
Donald: And they think they’re the police. At my church, when contemporary music starts, the organist leaves the platform. He feels he’s the police. He hasn’t bought in.
David: The point I was trying to make earlier was: you have to be your own policeman — or policewoman.
Carolyn: When you’re a leader, you don’t always have that option.
David: Good point. Very good point.
Donald: Don asked me to come back to the question of visual art and grace. On that day, I might be the police — because I know a little more about it. But how do we know who’s qualified? In photography school, they tested us by having us arrange fifty color discs in order to see if we had the perception to continue.
So sometimes the “police” believe they’re qualified. But in church, once a certain style of music is used, it’s condoned. At my church, when contemporary music begins, the organist walks away.
Reinhard: To me, music is God’s gift to strengthen us. Let me share a story: an Indonesian missionary in Papua once became lost in the vast jungles of that land, remote from any town or even village. He was aware of wild animals around him and feared for his life. So he did the only thing he could do. He prayed—and suddenly heard sacred music from a great distance, even though no people were nearby. That strengthened him.
Sacred music strengthens our relationship with God and with each other. In worship, it brings us to life.
David: Across history, people have tried to protect themselves from the peril of beauty by shaping music itself — deciding what should be sung and how. The result was what we might call a moral architecture of sound: plainchant, psalms, chorales, polyphony, anthems — all designed to organize emotion into meaning, to help the spirit and the ego tell themselves apart.
Next week, in our third talk, we’ll look at how these architectures developed — from monophonic plainchant to complex polyphony — and how each tradition tries to balance passion with restraint.
If today we learned that music can lift or deceive the soul, next week we’ll see how communities try to guide (police?) that power.
[Simple chime]
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