DANCE AND THE CHURCH 1

The Testamental Differences Regarding Dance.

In many churches the coffee cup has now become as or more important than the communion cup. How do you like your coffee--straight, sugar and/or cream, latte, or cappuccino? Then too, how do you like your worship? Do you like it cold or hot? If you like it cold, attend the traditional service at 8:30 a.m. Or, if you like it hot, go to the contemporary service at 10:30. Choose the style that suits your taste. Churches today are dividing, not over substance, but style. What God has joined together--the one body of Christ--style is tearing apart (contra Eph. 4:1-6). There have now grown to be churches within local churches.

"It's difficult to get people to come to church," said A.W Tozer, "when the only attraction is God." So churches now offer other attractions. In audience driven congregations, preaching is down, but entertainment is up. Churches self-hype their services by calling them celebrations, and offer a smorgasbord of attractions that vary from rock music to drama to skits to multimedia presentations and now, to something called liturgical or sacred dance. Recently a website advertised a book with the title, "Dancing into the Anointing: Touching the Heart of God through Dance." Of course, all these varieties of worship attempt to find justification from a proof text somewhere in the Bible.

In the context of local church worship, questions about dance do arise. At least two psalms invite the Hebrew nation to praise the Lord "with dancing", to "Praise Him with timbrel and dancing" (Psalms 149:3; 150:4). They did it. Why shouldn't we? If persons like David danced before God (2 Samuel 6:14), then we should take our cue from him. Do these scriptural incidents give justification to the use sacred dance in church worship as modern proponents of it claim? Does God need or want the dance of moderns to praise Him? Can dance, we might ask, really bring people closer to the heart of God?

DANCE IN THE OLD TESTAMENT: WHAT IT WAS. It must be known first of all, that between the biblical and our world, there is great cultural disparity. Modern dance does not equate to that mentioned in the Bible. Because God invited the Israelites to dance before Him does not mean that He invites the church to do the same today. To the Hebrews the occasion for dance was important. Their culture was wedded to dance. Feasts and sacred days of Israel's religious calendar provided occasions for Israel to express their praise to the Lord via the medium of dance. At those times even the bed-ridden were to exalt the name of their God! (Psalm 149:5). As one scholar has summarized, "Much of what we consider everyday life was so bound to sacral concerns in biblical times that the cultic/secular dichotomy is not as useful in classifying dance as the occasions on which it was performed."[1]

Those who employ the mention of dance in the psalms as a proof text to validate the use of dance in worship today should note that the psalmist also invites Israel to use timbrel, lyre, two-edged sword, trumpet, harp, stringed instruments, pipe, cymbals in their praise to the Lord. Do the proponents of sacred dance also use these instruments in their praise of God? Mention of these instruments points out the cultural disparity between our day and that of ancient Israel. And if the instruments in that context are foreign to our culture, then so too, it might be suggested, is the type of dance the Hebrews employed in their worship of God.

In the Hebrew religion and culture, dance was both a participatory and spontaneous exercise of praise to God rather than choreographed activity performed by a dance troop before the visage of a gathered congregation.

DANCE IN THE OLD TESTAMENT: A DEFINITION. Such dance in the Old Testament was processional. Of the several words used for dance in the ancient Hebrew language however, the root meaning of the most frequently used word (hwl) means to "perform a whirling dance." Used often to describe the post-war emotions of the Hebrew people, it "was a dance to express the emotion of joy, particularly as the way to describe women who danced when their men returned safely from war . . .."[2] The word suggests spontaneous as opposed to choreographed body movement. As such, the word dance suggests something like the physical exhilaration that NFL fans demonstrate when their favorite team wins a championship game.

SACRED DANCE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT: AN ABSENCE. Having observed the cultural disparity between ancient Hebrew and modern sacred dance, it must now be asked whether or not the New Testament encourages praise or worship of God through dance? With the coming of Christ, the expression of worship of God became distinct from that engaged in by the Hebrew people. The Old Testament cultus broke down, and church grew to embrace both Jews and Gentiles (Ephesians 2:14-16). A new age had dawned and along with it a new culture in which there would no longer be "neither Jew nor Greek", but rather, "all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). The Law descended from God through Moses, but "grace and truth" had come through the Lord Jesus Christ (John 1:14). The time had arrived in the ongoing drama of redemption when the temple and its services would no longer be needed in the worship of God, for according to Jesus, those that truly worshipped the invisible God would do so "in spirit and truth" (John 4:24).

With the obvious change of worship "style" between the testaments, it should come as no surprise that sacred or liturgical dance finds no reference in the life of the early church. If dance, as some moderns suggest, is such a vital expression of worship, why then does it find no mention or application in the worship of the apostolic church? Could it be because of the obsolescence of Jewish ceremonial law to the life of the church? (see Colossians 2:16-17). With the birth of the body of Christ Jewish feast days and celebrations were no longer relevant to the church's worship. In other words, the occasions for dance had ceased.

Dancing as a religious observance occupied an important place in the ceremonies of most ancient religions. If sacred dance was that conspicuous among the ancients, then its lack of mention in the New Testament is most telling. The apostolic church did not use dance because that form had no place in the simplicity of its worship. As one authority writes, "The universal importance of dance as part of the induction of new adherents into the mystery cults of the Greco-Roman period . . . made dancing highly suspect for Christian worship."[3]

In the worship of the church, dance should not be used because precedent for it in the New Testament is lacking. Even though people danced in the context of the Greek and Roman cultures, such practice never found entry into the worship of the early church, and for good reason. Dance was as irrelevant as it was irreverent to the simple form of worship that the apostolic church embraced as it continued steadfastly in, "the apostles' teaching . . . fellowship . . . the breaking of bread and . . . prayer" (Acts 2:42). The transition from Old to New Testament marked a cleavage of worship between the "spectacle" on the one hand, and the "spiritual" on the other (John 4:24).

Pastor Larry DeBruyn

(To be continued)

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[1] E.B. Johnston, "Dance; Dancer," The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1979) 856-58.

[2] David S. Dockery, "2565 hwl," New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology & Exegesis, Vol. 2 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1997) 46.

[3] Johnston, 858.