JB in CA: If anyone is being narrow in this discussion, it’s the one who believes that the choice of music during worship should be determined entirely by contemporary contextual relevance.

Sure, someone who thinks choice of music should be determined entirely by contemporary contextual relevance is being narrow. But so too is someone who thinks it should not be influenced by that at all. I’m saying neither.

“Appropriate” and “inappropriate” are not the same as “good” and “evil.”

Exactly, and appropriateness is a culturally-relative thing.

Maybe you use the term differently, but according to the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, “cool,” in this sort of context, means “trendy,” “funky,” “with it,” “hip,” “groovy,” “phat,” “kicky,” etc. I fail to see how music that evokes a sense of cool under those descriptions would be any more appropriate to worship than lyrics such as “When I survey the funky cross” (to adapt an earlier example you gave).

Nope, it was I who used the word, and I didn’t use it in that sense. I simply meant awesome. It’s creative. It’s an excellent use of the combinatorial abilities God gave us, and it sounds interesting to me, so I’d be curious to hear what it’s like.

f you replaced the music of a hymn with the music of a contemporary worship song, you would no longer have a hymn, even though you might still have the lyrics to it.

I was talking about playing Come Thou Fount of Every Blessings with the usual melody and chord changes but with a calypso beat and musical arrangement. I was thinking about cases like Holy, Holy, Holy with distorted guitars and a rock beat the way the early 90s Metal Praise album did. It’s certainly using contemporary music, but it’s still the original hymn.

The “exactly one emotion” meant exclusively the appropriate ones as deemed by you. I’m not sure the pairings you gave are the best way to think about things. Some of them seem to me to be false dilemmas or false disjunctions (certainly with agape and eros), and I’m not sure the second member in every case is always bad (e.g. self-interest is neutral, and community-individuality are both good in the appropriate ways). My main point was about limiting ourself to certain emotions. Your focus on the singleness rather than the limitedness might be a distraction.

A screaming guitar lick with a hard-driving base and sinister vocals may be appropriate for evoking the attitude of rage, but it’s hardly appropriate for evoking an attitude of worship.

I can name plenty of examples that do have exactly that effect in me and lots of others. “King of Kings” by Barren Cross, “Myriad” by Kansas, and several songs of the aforementioned Metal Praise album are actually more effective for me than most hymns at bringing out an attitude of worship, since the words in many hymns usually go by way too quickly for me to contemplate them, and a driving beat with very well-executed lead guitar doesn’t lead me to a state of rage or depression but more often creates a state of awe. As I said, this is all relative to the individual or to the culture in the cases of larger groups with similar responses.

Absolutely spot on!