Scott Aniol

Scott Aniol is the founder and Executive Director of Religious Affections Ministries. He is Chair of the Worship Ministry Department at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he teaches courses in ministry, worship, hymnology, aesthetics, culture, and philosophy. He is the author of Worship in Song: A Biblical Approach to Music and Worship, Sound Worship: A Guide to Making Musical Choices in a Noisy World, and By the Waters of Babylon: Worship in a Post-Christian Culture, and speaks around the country in churches and conferences. He is an elder in his church in Fort Worth, TX where he resides with his wife and four children.

Author Archives: Scott Aniol

Worship That God Has Not Prescribed

April 6th, 2011 | 0 Comments

One of the key passages in Scripture that illustrates deviant worship is found in Exodus 32:1-10: When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, “Up, make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought… Continue Reading

Learning to Worship is Like Learning a Foreign Language

March 30th, 2011 | 0 Comments

My four-year-old son has been learning French recently. Well, sort of. We’ve checked out some children’s French DVDs from our local library, and each day he watches the DVD. It’s a silly little story that is spoken entirely in French. It comes with a little book that has screen shots of the different scenes and… Continue Reading

The Relationship between Cultural Conservatism and Theological Conservatism

March 23rd, 2011 | 0 Comments

This entry is part 8 of 8 in the series Preserving the Truth in our Worship You can read more posts from the series by using the Contents in the right sidebar.

What I have described in this series is nothing more than historic conservative Christianity—Christianity that aims at conserving God’s truth both doctrinally and aesthetically. It is popular today to speak deridingly about “cultural conservatism” vs. “theological conservatism.” Most evangelicals and increasing numbers of fundamentalists claim that cultural conservatism is at best unnecessary and at worst legalistic. For example, Mark… Continue Reading

Transmitting Imagination to our Children

March 17th, 2011 | 0 Comments

This entry is part 7 of 8 in the series Preserving the Truth in our Worship You can read more posts from the series by using the Contents in the right sidebar.

I have suggested in this series that in order to preserve the truth in our worship, we must be concerned about how we are shaping the imagination in the presentation of biblical truth. This is no more important than with our children. It is my fear that most Christians do not recognize that before a child… Continue Reading

The Judeo-Christian Worship Tradition

March 9th, 2011 | 0 Comments

This entry is part 6 of 8 in the series Preserving the Truth in our Worship You can read more posts from the series by using the Contents in the right sidebar.

I argued in the last essay that if we intend to preserve the truth handed down to us, we must never reject tradition outright. Instead, if we are intent upon preserving the truth handed down to us from Scripture, both its doctrinal content and the way the truth is imagined, we must continue to preserve and cultivate what… Continue Reading

Reforming Influences in 19th Century American Church Music

March 5th, 2011 | 0 Comments

This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series 19th Century American Church Music You can read more posts from the series by using the Contents in the right sidebar.

There were many composers, writers, and organizations during the nineteenth century that objected to the current condition of American church music and encouraged reform. Yet none had as lasting influence as the Boston Handel and Haydn Society, Thomas Hastings, and Lowell Mason. Boston Handel and Haydn Society The Handel and Haydn Society was formed in 1815 in Boston… Continue Reading

Culture and Tradition

March 2nd, 2011 | 0 Comments

This entry is part 5 of 8 in the series Preserving the Truth in our Worship You can read more posts from the series by using the Contents in the right sidebar.

I argued in the last post that all cultural forms are built upon something that came before, and we call this “tradition.” The implication of this is that all of the various cultural institutions, forms, artistic expressions, media, languages, and systems of thought are what they are today based on hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of… Continue Reading

Truth and Tradition

February 23rd, 2011 | 0 Comments

This entry is part 4 of 8 in the series Preserving the Truth in our Worship You can read more posts from the series by using the Contents in the right sidebar.

I have argued thus far that successful preservation of the truth necessitates that what is preserved is the doctrinal affirmations and the proper imagination of such affirmations, and I have suggested that the primary way in which this imaginative aspect is persevered is through conserving the Bible’s aesthetic forms in our worship. Culture and Imagination To speak of… Continue Reading

"Indigenous" vs "European" Music in 19th Century America

February 19th, 2011 | 0 Comments

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series 19th Century American Church Music You can read more posts from the series by using the Contents in the right sidebar.

I have suggested that the 19th century in America was a time in which three forms of culture began to emerge distinct from one another: cultivated, communal, and commercial culture. There exists some disagreement amongst scholars, however, over whether this division between folk, popular, and cultivated music was really a distinction between American music and European… Continue Reading

Truth and Worship Forms

February 16th, 2011 | 0 Comments

This entry is part 3 of 8 in the series Preserving the Truth in our Worship You can read more posts from the series by using the Contents in the right sidebar.

I have argued to this point that preserving the truth must include not only the preservation of right doctrine, but also the preservation of right imagination. As we have already seen, the imagination is shaped and cultivated through aesthetic forms. We have focused most specifically on literary forms since this is what we find in the Bible, but… Continue Reading

Cultivated, Commercial, and Communal Music

February 12th, 2011 | 0 Comments

This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series 19th Century American Church Music You can read more posts from the series by using the Contents in the right sidebar.

Church music in nineteenth century America can be summarized very simply with one word: reform. In many ways, the influential writers and composers of the nineteenth century were bent upon rejecting the new music of eighteenth century American composers and returning to more established classical traditions. In order to understand their motivation, however, one must consider both the changes… Continue Reading

The Sola Scriptura trump card

February 10th, 2011 | 0 Comments

Some recent internet discussions, some sprung from Ken Brown’s very fair review of my book, have once again led to all sorts of folks slapping their “Sola Scriptura” trump card down on the table, as if playing that card gives them the high ground and silences all argument. Don’t get me wrong; I firmly believe… Continue Reading

Review of Worship in Song in Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal

February 9th, 2011 | 0 Comments

I just noticed a helpful review of my book, Worship in Song, in the most recent edition of the Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary journal, written by Ken Brown. I’ve secured permission to reprint it here since it is not available online: Worship in Song: A Biblical Approach to Music and Worship, by Scott Aniol. Winona… Continue Reading

Truth and the Moral Imagination

February 9th, 2011 | 0 Comments

This entry is part 2 of 8 in the series Preserving the Truth in our Worship You can read more posts from the series by using the Contents in the right sidebar.

If, as I argued in the last post, truth is more than factual correspondence—if it has an aesthetic aspect to it—then both the apprehension and the presentation of truth involve more than just intellect; they involve the aesthetic part of man, in particular, his imagination. Today we use the term “imagination” to mean something more similar to… Continue Reading

Three Cultural Streams in 19th-Century American Church Music

February 5th, 2011 | 0 Comments

This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series 19th Century American Church Music You can read more posts from the series by using the Contents in the right sidebar.

The development of American church music during the nineteenth century has important implications for the philosophy and practice of church music in the twentieth century and beyond. Indeed, “it would be difficult to overstate the impact that antebellum sacred music reforms had on subsequent musical developments in America, and many scholars identify this period as… Continue Reading

Preserving the Truth in our Worship

February 2nd, 2011 | 0 Comments

This entry is part 1 of 8 in the series Preserving the Truth in our Worship You can read more posts from the series by using the Contents in the right sidebar.

My argument in this series will be that conservative worship is essential to the preservation of truth for this reason: we will have preserved truth successfully only if it is truth rightly imagined, and our imagining truth rightly depends heavily on the forms of worship that we employ. What is Truth? We must first clarify what it is… Continue Reading

The importance of distinguishing between folk and pop culture

January 29th, 2011 | 0 Comments

This entry is part of 6 in the series Vaughan Williams on Culture You can read more posts from the series by using the Contents in the right sidebar.

Recognition of a difference between folk and pop music may perhaps seem inconsequential, but for a composer like Ralph Vaughan Williams the distinction was at the heart of his life’s work. For Vaughan Williams and his mentor, Cecil Sharp, the commercial nature of music often rendered it banal and vulgar — it was music created… Continue Reading

A Distinctly Christian Culture

January 26th, 2011 | 0 Comments

This entry is part 13 of 14 in the series Missions and Music You can read more posts from the series by using the Contents in the right sidebar.

So is there a distinctly Christian culture? Is there a distinctly Christian music? Yes, there is—it is culture and music that expresses Christian values. In discussions of missions and music, understanding the idea of culture is critical. What is it? Shouldn’t the music of a church reflect the indigenous culture around it? The Standard Evangelical… Continue Reading

Does contextualization heighten the likelihood of a positive response to the gospel?

January 25th, 2011 | 0 Comments

This entry is part 12 of 14 in the series Missions and Music You can read more posts from the series by using the Contents in the right sidebar.

Conversations about missions and music often revolve around an insistence that in order to reach unbelievers in a target culture, we need to contextualize the message into their language, be it spoken, acted, or sung. Here are some helpful words from an excellent journal article by Mark Snoeberger that I think get to the heart of… Continue Reading

The superiority of folk culture to pop culture

January 22nd, 2011 | 0 Comments

This entry is part of 6 in the series Vaughan Williams on Culture You can read more posts from the series by using the Contents in the right sidebar.

The motivations behind Vaughan Williams’s use of folk idioms in his music also clearly demonstrates the distinction between folk and pop music in his thinking. Clearly Vaughan Williams’s interest in folk music was connected to his desire for a distinctly English national music. Indeed, as the title of his work on folk music (National Music)… Continue Reading