Music across cultures: between Asia and America

(originally written December 25, 2023)

When I lived on Jinmen Island, Taiwan, in 2012, my American friend Samuel had a party to dedicate his new apartment. At the dedication, the local Taiwanese pastor, also named Samuel, gave my friend Samuel and his wife Jarita a Chinese hymnbook. He said, "Americans gave us their hymns a long time ago. Do you sing Chinese hymns in America?" My friend said no. "Then bring this hymnbook with you when you go back to America, and introduce our songs to your American church, as a fair exchange."

Later that year I came to Chiang Mai, Thailand, and started studying the Rawang language. At the Rawang church, I asked the pastor why they sing hymns translated from English, rather than using Rawang traditional music. Pastor Yosep said he felt the hymns were "glorious." I was sad about this, because I thought Rawang people were losing their culture, but I didn't know the full story yet.

Aminta Arrington, in her book Songs of the Lisu Hills, tells how English and American missionaries and Lisu believers worked together to translate hymns into Lisu in the 1920s, but that their process of translation was really more like inculturation -- they adapted the lyrics to the Lisu culture, and sometimes the end result was even more vivid and poetic than the original English!

I started to see the same thing in some of the Rawang songs -- for example, the song "When I See the Blood" in English starts with Jesus on the cross and alludes to the Passover story with the words "I will pass over you", but the Rawang version starts with the Passover story in Egypt, and makes the connection explicit, maybe because the original Rawang audience didn't yet have the Old Testament translated, and so they might have been learning about Passover for the first time when they learned the song.

Another example is the song "Jewels", where the Rawang version uses adverbs like "brim brim shor" to illustrate how God's people will twinkle and shine like stars, and says explicitly that "like Jesus' body shines, we will shine", highlighting the connection between Jesus' resurrection body and ours, whereas the English version is just a little more boring to my ears, "they will shine in their beauty, bright gems for his crown." 

The 2011 Rawang version of "Jewels", in an improvement on the 1950 version, says that those who love the Lord are honorable and valuable like jade, a common precious stone in northern Myanmar, which the Rawang audience would have seen regularly and maybe even participated in mining. The song was thus connected closely to objects in their daily life, which probably explains why the Rawang church in Chiang Mai sang "Jewels" often, whereas I had never heard it in America, and according to my Facebook friends, American Sunday schools for children used to sing it, but don't anymore -- the English version is written to say that little children are the jewels, but the Rawang version says it about all believers.

Some Rawang hymns were created just for the Rawang people, rather than being translated from English. Two of these, which were used in the 1950 primer, but didn't make it into modern hymnbooks, are "Of Old We Rawang", and "Men of the Household", which tell the story of conversion from spirit-worship to worship of God, and the need to study hard in learning to read his Word, at a time when Rawang literacy was just becoming available. 

In the 1968 primer, the song "From Every Land Created" mentions surrounding ethnic groups, saying that God loves all people from north and south, east and west, Jinghpaw, Burmese, Shan, Lisu, and all others, and that if they repent, they will have eternal life.

Another song from this book, "In the Beginning", starts with the creation of the world, tells how early humans got mixed up with evil spirits, how believers have now been rescued from the hand of evil spirits by Jesus, and how they now are to trust in Jesus and follow God's path. According to the chorus, this path includes not drinking alcohol, not chewing betelnut, repenting, not sacrificing to spirits, and worshiping Jesus. Some of these rules are from the Bible, and others like the prohibitions on alcohol and betelnut were new rules that Rawang and Lisu Christians considered important boundary markers for their newly believing community.

To recap, Rawang hymns were sometimes translated from English, sometimes translated from Lisu, and sometimes created first in Rawang. The ones that were translated were often adapted to Rawang culture, and as we have seen above, were sometimes even more beautiful than the original English songs.

It is true that musical styles and tunes have been borrowed from other cultures, but the words are an authentic expression of Rawang language and culture for their time.

In July 2023 at the Rawang American conference in Omaha, one of the first songs we sang was "Shvri:ngie". I immediately recognized the tune -- it was a song first released in 1996 in Taiwan, called "一切歌頌讚美" or "Praise The Lord". As it so happens, after coming back to the U.S. from our first year in Taiwan in 2008, my sister and I did teach this song to our home church, and they loved it just as much as the Rawang, with its catchy chorus, "Praise the Lord, Halleluya". 

And so our story has come full circle. From Taiwan to America, to Thailand, to Myanmar, and back to America again, music crosses cultures in many directions, and really does make the world go round.

For more song translations and reflections, see the following posts:

Rawang songs: 

• "Rawang Land" (about missing one's homeland) and "The Greatest Love Story" (Christmas)
• The Path of Love (romantic)

Mandarin worship songs:

• Lord, I Believe
• The Path of Grace
• Precious Cross

faith is the wick

Are we saved by faith alone?

Salvation, that is, a life eternally transformed by relationship with the Holy Trinity, is like the burning of a candle.

Faith is the wick, hope is the wax, love is the flame. 

The candle burns by the wick alone. Faith is the faith(fulness) of Jesus Christ, which we join by loyally trusting in him and depending on him. (Faith as both trust and loyalty, and the faith of Jesus Christ in his Father and his faithfulness to us as the ground of our own faith response is a big topic in NT studies right now.) Our relationship with God was reconciled by his death on our behalf, and our access to continuing benefits come through this continuing relationship of trust.

The candle burns by wax alone. Hope is the strength that comes from our identity as the community who are somehow seated at God's right hand in the enthroned Messiah, waiting for him to come reclaim his world and, meanwhile, to bring us daily sustenance by his Spirit.

The candle burns by the flame alone. Love is the transformation of potential energy into heat and light, by doing good for others' benefit because we have received God's love, giving vision to other eyes and lighting other candles, and fulfilling the purpose for which we were made. 

Are we saved by faith alone?

Now, if this question is really asking, "Can I know for sure in the moment that I raise my hand in an evangelistic meeting that I am going to heaven?", our answer will be different. Because here we are asking not about the burning but about the lighting of the candle. But the lighting includes the burning, and all three elements (wick, wax, and flame) are involved, even if in nascent form. And if the lighting is done by God, then we don't know for sure if the lighting began when we raised our hand or long before, or even not yet -- but we can know that if we truly turn to him, God promises to save us. 

Now, you ask, what about repentance? To be honest, I wasn't thinking of repentance when I thought of this analogy, and would really need another analogy to incorporate it well. But I see repentance in the candle in three ways: a change from coldness to warmth, a change from reliance on other power sources than the wax through the wick, and a change from hiddenness to transparency. (Actually, this last one is more properly termed confession, but it is a part of the change.) And ultimately, there is a change of life direction from self-preservation to empowered self-giving. 

This brings me to a point I have been thinking about a lot recently. Every aspect of salvation that we "perfect" or essentialize is in a way a metonymy or synecdoche. What I mean is that we speak of one part when we mean it to stand for the whole. 

Baptism saves us, not the removal of filth from the body, but a pledge of a good conscience toward God. So baptism is a concertina word, as Jimmy Dunn puts it, including sometimes the sign only, and sometimes both the sign and the thing it signifies, and sometimes being a shorthand for the whole conversion process. 

Repentance is the same. It indicates a change of heart and mind that includes sorrow for sin, a change from unbelief to faith, a change from trusting in other things to trusting in Jesus, and specific actions that we take to repair damage and restore others whom we have wronged. A concertina that expands and contracts from a change of heart to an act to an entire process that includes both.

Faith in a way stands for all the other elements of our response to God when we hear the gospel, and yet is more than just the most prominent part of our response, because it invades and motivates every other action. And because it draws from Christ everything it needs, it truly is like a wick (or like a straw in a milkshake, to change the metaphor). 

Now back to the candle. I think I hear someone saying now, "Your definition of salvation as a life eternally transformed by relationship with the Holy Trinity is mixing justification with sanctification." Well, yeah. Because sanctification (or as I prefer to call it, transformation) is not optional. Justification through the cross (another metonymy) reconciled our relationship with God. It's a different metaphor, but let's call this restored relationship the oxygen in the room. Transformation started at the moment of ignition. Our relationship with God was reconciled in a potential way at the cross, and in an actual way when we started to believe, that is, when the wick was ignited and the flame burst forth, burning the wax stored up in the candle through the wick as it combined with the oxygen in the room.

And the burning continues. 

No analogy is perfect, and this got more and more complex as we kept talking about it. But I would rather parse out these folds of ambiguity and see more and more of the whole picture.

Inspiring this three-fold analogy is a faint echo in my memory of Deacon Braxton at the end of almost every sermon, repeating the prayer of St. Ionnikios of Olympus (762-846)...

Our hope is the Father

Our refuge is the Son

Our shelter is the Holy Spirit

O Holy Trinity, glory to You. 

Imagined gospel backgrounds

Zane Hodges says the Gospel According to Saint John was written as an evangelistic book to help people start to believe in Jesus, and yet mentions faith but not repentance, and thus repentance is not required for eternal life. John MacArthur counters that John the Evangelist was writing after the Synoptic Gospels were written, so John assumed that readers had already learned about repentance from them, and so he decided to focus his gospel on the importance of faith.

While we are conjuring hidden backgrounds and motives to the gospel writers, a much more fun story is told by Dom Gregory Dix in his book The Shape of the Liturgy. Suddenly we see the practice of the eucharist in house-churches popping up behind the text everywhere in the New Testament, and it's lovely:

One remarkable feature of the N.T. allusions to the eucharist is the rich variety of meanings they already find within the single rite of the broken Bread and the blessed Cup. It is the solemn proclamation of the Lord’s death (1 Cor. 11:26); but it is also the familiar intercourse of Jesus abiding in the soul, as a friend who enters in and sups with a friend (Rev. 3:20). It fulfils all the past, as the ‘true’ (Jn. 6:52) and the ‘secret’ (Rev. 2:17) manna, the meaning of all sacrifice (Heb. 13:10), the truth of all Passovers (1 Cor. 5:7; Lk. 22:18). But it also looks forward to the future beyond the end of time, as a mysterious anticipation of the final judgement of God (1 Cor. 11:30-32), a foretaste of the eternal Messianic banquet of heaven (Lk. 22:30), a ‘tasting of the powers of the world to come.’ (Heb. 6:5) It foreshadowed the exultant welcome of His own at that Second Coming (1 Cor. 11:26), for which those who had first lost their hearts to Him in Galilee looked so wistfully all their years after, that the echoes of their longing murmured on in the eucharistic prayers of the church for centuries. By the time the New Testament came to be written the eucharist already illuminated everything concerning Jesus for His disciples—His Person, His Messianic office (Jn. 6:33, 35, 48), His miracles (the accounts of the feeding of the multitude are obviously 'coloured' by the eucharist), His death and the redemption that He brought (Jn. 6:51). It was the vehicle of the gift of His Spirit (1 Cor. 12:13b), the means of eternal life (Jn. 6:53-54), the cause of the unity of His church (1 Cor. 10:17). This is not an exhaustive analysis of New Testament teaching about the eucharist. Nor do I suggest that all these passages are intended to be directly about the eucharist (they are not) but that in all of them the experience of the eucharist is at least colouring and affecting the author’s presentation in some cases even of other matters, which is what is significant for our purpose. They shew that the church had found in the eucharist an entire epitome of ‘the Gospel’ before our four gospels had been written.

Later in his book, Dix goes on to suggest that the image in Revelation of God on his throne surrounded by the elders reflects how a bishop and presbyters would sit in the living room of a Roman villa where the house church would typically meet, taking the seats like the father and his family members. Again, I don't know how true it is, but it's fun to think about.

It's definitely more imaginative than the Hodges-MacArthur debate.

Paul Timothy Jones on Practicing the Discipline of Diversity

Timothy Paul Jones, Perspectives on Family Ministry: 3 Views, pages 218-221.

Practicing the Discipline of Diversity 

So how can we lead our churches to practice the discipline of diversity? I now serve as one of the pastors in an inner-city congregation where we have set our sights on pursuing kingdom diversity, and I can tell you from personal experience that the process is far from easy. It is painful and costly and complicated. Over the past several years in my context, the process has consisted primarily of four steps, repeated over and over and over: 

(1) Learn your place. Know the demographics of the neighborhoods around the places where your congregation gathers, and be aware of socioeconomic strata or ethnic groups that your ministries may be overlooking. 

(2) Listen to your place. Humbly hear the challenges that people in your neighborhood face; learn to see life from their perspective. Listen to them long enough to know the barriers that would keep them from feeling welcomed in your church. 

(3) Love your place. When you walk through your neighborhood, do you feel a surge of affection for these people? Do you become choked up as you recognize how much you want the people in this place to hear the gospel? When you look into people’s eyes as you pass by them, do you love these people? Stop wishing that your context looked more like someone else’s context. Quit whispering to yourself, If only we had this, then we could really do ministry well. God will provide all that is needed to accomplish the task that he has given to you in the place where you are. Love the people and the place where God has positioned you and your church. In a multiethnic context, that will mean developing multiethnic relationships. You cannot grow a multiethnic church while leading a mono-ethnic life. 

(4) Develop leadership that looks like your place. If you want to see older believers mentoring younger believers but everyone who leads your church is in their twenties or thirties, your church will struggle to gather mature men and women to disciple younger generations. If your context is multiethnic but your leadership isn’t, your congregation will remain mono-ethnic. Diversifying leadership doesn’t require your congregation to develop a large staff. What it requires is gospel-centered leaders who reflect the beautiful diversity of your community and who are placed in visible positions of authority. It means submitting yourself to their wisdom and making yourself accountable to them. In time, it will mean releasing your authority and giving it to people whose perspective and background may be quite different from your own. If you do not raise up diverse leadership, you will never move toward diverse fellowship. 

These steps are not flashy or fast; they are incremental and mundane. I do not pretend that following these steps provides a quick or easy solution to the problems of segmentation and segregation in the church. That is primarily because I do not believe there are any quick or easy solutions to these problems. 

Lasting transformation happens through tiny actions repeated over years and decades—through “liturgies,” in the best sense of the word—not through massive shifts that happen in moments or days or months. The most difficult aspect of implementing this process is simply staying focused on the same commitment for the long term. And yet, I do believe that, over time, these simple steps can multiply the diversity of our congregation and provide a more effective witness to the watching world. 

From time to time, someone with children or youth visits the church and asks one of the leaders, “What do you have for my children?” 

Typically, the leader’s response is a recitation of activities that the church offers for children and youth. This isn’t necessarily wrong, and it’s probably the response that the potential attender is expecting. And yet, here’s what I prayerfully envision: I long for a church culture in which the first response to this question is a sweeping glance across the entire congregation accompanied by the words, “All of this! We have all of this for your children—older people, younger people, places to serve, words that build them when they are broken, answers when they wonder, corrections when they wander. Here in this multitude of languages and ethnicities and generations and socioeconomic backgrounds, we have all this and more for your children. Oh, and here are some activities that might interest them as well . . .” 

Even if we don’t use these precise words as a response, this is the attitude that I long to see in every aspect of our discipleship as we learn to practice the discipline of diversity. 

Regardless of which model of family ministry God guides your church to follow, be certain to include practices in that model that prepare your people to pursue the discipline of diversity. 

Because of the reconciling work of Christ’s cross, unity in diversity is not so much a goal to be achieved as it is a gift to be received. God has already broken down the barriers between his people through the blood of Jesus Christ. 

Practicing the way of life that prepares you for the gift of unity expressed in diversity isn’t easy. And yet, whenever a church pursues this reality, the resulting kaleidoscope of colors and cultures shouts out the supernatural power of the gospel to the watching world. 

Through unity in diversity, the people of God testify visibly to the capacity of the gospel to accomplish a reality that the world cannot.

Holy love and other delicious virtue pairings

As I was visiting with my friend Jon last night, we got to talking about what it means that God is love, and yet his love doesn't squish him into whatever shape we want to imagine him to be. 

I was reminded of a lecture by Bill Mounce on the BiblicalTraining app, where he said that God's love is a holy love -- and, I'm not sure whether Mounce said it or I just thought it, but the implication is that God's holiness is a loving holiness. Or maybe I heard it on Michael Bird's lectures based on his book Evangelical Theology -- which says, "God’s glorious-holy-lovingness is the most definitive aspect of his character. In other words, God glorifies himself through the expression of his holy love." (p.201)

Anyway, this reminded me of how James Clear in Atomic Habits (p.102) said that the best French fries are the ones that are "golden brown and crunchy on the outside and light and smooth on the inside." He calls this dynamic contrast.

Things are just better when they are complex like that. Two things complementing each other. 

Holiness and love. See Psalm 85:10-11 below for more delicious virtue pairings. 

Psalms 85:1-13 NIV

[1] You, Lord, showed favor to your land; you restored the fortunes of Jacob. 

[2] You forgave the iniquity of your people and covered all their sins. 

[3] You set aside all your wrath and turned from your fierce anger. 

[4] Restore us again, God our Savior, and put away your displeasure toward us. 

[5] Will you be angry with us forever? Will you prolong your anger through all generations? 

[6] Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you? 

[7] Show us your unfailing love, Lord, and grant us your salvation. 

[8] I will listen to what God the Lord says; he promises peace to his people, his faithful servants— but let them not turn to folly. 

[9] Surely his salvation is near those who fear him, that his glory may dwell in our land. 

[10] Love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss each other. 

[11] Faithfulness springs forth from the earth, and righteousness looks down from heaven. 

[12] The Lord will indeed give what is good, and our land will yield its harvest. 

[13] Righteousness goes before him and prepares the way for his steps.

https://bible.com/bible/111/psa.85.1-13.NIV 

Calvin on vocation

John Calvin draws the following inferences on vocation from Jesus's parable of the workers in the vineyard who were all paid the same even though they started at different times (Matthew 20:1-16):

- [M]en were created for activity and... each has his divinely appointed station, so that he shall not sink into laziness... 

- [O]ur whole life is useless and we are justly condemned of laziness until we frame our life to the command and calling of God.

- [T]hey labour in vain who thoughtlessly take up this or that kind of life and do not wait for God's calling.

- [O]nly they are pleasing to God who work for the advantage of their brethren.

Let me restate these in a positive way:

- We were created for activity

- We each have our divinely appointed station

- Our whole life becomes useful when we frame it to the command and calling of God

- We will not labor in vain if we thoughtfully wait for God's calling and then take up this or that kind of life that he calls us to

- We are pleasing to God when we work for the advantage of others

Source:

John Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Volume 2, pp. 265-266. Translated by T.H.L. Parker. (Calvin's Commentaries.) Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972.

Michael Gorman on Paul in one sentence

Paul in one sentence:

Paul preached, and then explained in various pastoral, community-forming letters, 

a narrative, apocalyptic, theopolitical gospel of God’s shocking faithfulness and grace, 

(1) in continuity with the story of Israel and 

(2) in distinction to the imperial gospel of Rome (and analogous powers), 

that was centered on God’s crucified and exalted Messiah Jesus, 

whose incarnation, life, and death by crucifixion were validated and vindicated by God in his resurrection and exaltation as Lord, 

which inaugurated the new age or new creation, 

in which all members of this diverse but consistently covenantally dysfunctional human race who respond in self-abandoning and self-committing faith thereby participate in Christ’s death and resurrection and are 

(1) justified, or restored to right covenant relations with God and with others, and adopted into God’s family; 

(2) incorporated into a particular manifestation of Christ the Lord’s body on earth, the church, 

which is an alternative community to the status-quo human communities committed to and governed by Caesar (and analogous rulers) and by values contrary to the gospel; and 

(3) infused both individually and corporately by the Spirit of God’s Son so that they may lead ‘bifocal’ lives, 

focused both back on Christ’s first coming and ahead to his second, 

consisting of Christlike, cruciform 

(1) faith(fulness) and 

(2) hope toward God and 

(3) love toward both neighbors and enemies (a love marked by peaceableness and hospitality), 

thereby bearing witness in word and deed to the one true God and the Lordship of Christ, and 

participating by the power of the Holy Spirit in God’s mission of reconciliation and restorative justice in Christ, 

even at the risk of suffering and death, 

all in joyful anticipation of 

(1) the return of Christ, 

(2) the resurrection of the dead to eternal life, and 

(3) the renewal of the entire creation.

Gorman, Michael J.. Apostle of the Crucified Lord: A Theological Introduction to Paul and His Letters (p. 183). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition. 

(bolding mine)