Jamin Bradley

I don’t have a problem with hymns. However, I do have a problem with the “hymn culture” of some Protestants. Our hymns were written well after the time of Jesus—many of the most popular ones being created in the last 500 years. Yet hymn culture treats these songs as sacred, as though God only inspired and blessed a few worship songs 1,500+ years after Jesus and not before or after.

I get it: We don’t always like new music, for we are people of nostalgia and believe the old ways are best. But Protestant hymns often become sacred cows, splitting churches over preference, not spirituality. Yes, there are plenty of new worship songs that are awful, but hymnals are full of bad theology, too (not to mention many patriotic songs that don’t belong there at all).

The logic doesn’t work out. We had to leave older musical traditions of the church to establish hymns in the first place. If we found that move acceptable, then we have communicated to future generations that they can (and perhaps should) do so too—yet we rebel against them when they do! We can debate the many differences between hymns and modern worship songs and their strengths and weaknesses, but we can’t equate preference with sacredness. Only the Orthodox Church can hold to a logic that claims the original is best/right/sacred.