More About Music I Enjoyed In My Younger Days

1960s and 1970s (especially the first half of that decade) pop-rock was the music I grew up with. 1970s "Jesus Music" was much of the music I to which I listened in my years between high school and my first years of being married. There was a lot of good and fun in that music, and I still listen to music from that genre and time. But to be truthful, some of it was a bit simplistic and trite - annoyingly so. It wasn't the very best thing for feeding one's spirit (though there was much worse "out there" in secular music of the time). Even worse - in my opinion, of course - in light of the past 3 decades was the way eschatology was presented.

There was an near (or maybe actual) dishonesty to how end-times teaching was presented in the 1970s among Evangelicals (and maybe Fundamentalists). Some lip service was paid to, "No one knows the day or hour." It was always a qualifying caveat mentioned in books and presentations about end-times prophecy, but both the proportional use of time and the tone contrast between the caveat and the prophetic speculations communicated to the hearers that the caveat did not matter much. The grand, over-all, message a hearer would come away with was, "Any moment now, any second now," somewhere between urgent and hysteria. Personally, I think some teachers, churches and education institutions owed (and owe!) Evangelical Christian believers a very repentant apology for so carelessly wasting such believers' time, energy and money! And then there's the harm such unfulfilled urgency did to the Gospel's credibility among both weak believers and non-believers! Suggesting, to a point barely short of predicting, something that did not happen has consequences, sometimes eternal consequences! Ask Harold Camping about that, if he's still alive.

Getting back to 1970s "Jesus Music", it was, in part, a vehicle for communicating that eschatological urgency and enthusiasm. Larry Norman's "I Wish We'd All Been Ready" and 2nd Chapter of Acts' "Something Tells Me" are just two examples of this (but far from the only such). So even in the "Jesus Music" I enjoy - including artists I particularly like - there are aspects that taint my enjoyment. Humans are fallible, and need to be more conscious of this fact, Christians especially.