Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns Quotes

“Biblically, then, neither music nor song is merely a matter of entertainment or amusement. Both are very serious business, both culturally and religiously. Song is the divinely instituted, divinely commanded, and divinely regulated means of responding to God's great works of creation, preservation, and deliverance. Worship song is both the remarkable privilege and the solemn duty of the redeemed. Therefore, to suggest that worship song is "merely" or "just" anything,
whatever that "anything" is, is to deny the very teaching of Scripture about the importance of worship song in God's economy-an importance so great that it characterizes the life of the redeemed in the world to come.”
― T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal

“Don Martindale, Johannes Riedel, and Gertrude Neuwirth, trans. and ed., The Rational and Social Foundations of Music (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958). Also cf. Augustus Delafield Zanzig, Music in American Life, Present & Future (London: Oxford University Press, 1932); Alphons Silbermann, The Sociology of Music, trans. Corbel Stewart (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963); and Wayne D. Bowman, Philosophical Perspectives on Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).”
― T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal

“in the current situation, for some individuals the only aesthetic criterion they recognize is contemporaneity.”
― T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal

“People
who would find it odd if we repeated the Gloria Patri or Doxology four times don't find it odd that we repeat the refrains to these choruses numerous times, even if they are less theologically significant.”
― T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal