Does a song need to be ‘Christian’ for God to use it?

A song comes on while you’re driving. It is not a Christian song. There are no words about God in it; perhaps there are no words at all. And yet something shifts. Your chest tightens. Your eyes sting; for a moment you are somewhere you did not expect to be. 

Most of us have had a version of that moment. Fewer of us know what to do with it. The honest evangelical instinct is to be a little suspicious: that was only emotion, only nostalgia, only the production doing its work. Real encounter with God, we assume, needs the right words attached. 

I have just spent three days at the International Network for Music Theology conference at St Andrews University. The papers ran from pop star Billie Eilish to French composer Olivier Messiaen, to The Diary of Samuel Pepys. All of them kept circling one question: Where does the holy turn up in music, and does it wait to be invited?  

I presented a paper of my own, on how Eilish’s hushed, unresolved songs have become sacred space for a generation raised with no religion. Afterwards, as I reflected on my weekend, I was struck by something. Almost no one tells ordinary Christians what music theology actually is. There’s plenty for scholars, but next to nothing for the person who felt something real while listening to a song this week, and had nowhere to put it. 

So let me try.

What is music theology? 

Music theology asks what God has to do with music. But not just church music - all music. And the longer I work in this field, the surer I am that the wall we put up between the sacred and secular music is simply not present in the Bible. We have mistaken an inheritance for a doctrine. 

There are many different opinions on this. On one side is Jeremy Begbie, the most influential voice in music theology. He keeps music close to the Christian story, arguing that it can do extraordinary work when its meaning stays disciplined by scripture and tradition. Music serves theology. It does not get to freelance. 

The grace that holds all creation does not wait for our permission to be gracious 

On the other side is David Brown. He argues that God meets people through art that makes no religious claim at all. The encounter is real, sacramental even. It needs no Christian vocabulary to count. Music can carry you to God while saying nothing about Him at all. 

I sit closer to Brown. The moment in the car is more than a trick of feeling. A generation that will not come through the doors of a Church are meeting something true when music takes them somewhere they cannot name. But his openness can drift into a vague spiritual feeling, where the sacred is simply wherever we happen to be moved. That is too loose to stand on. So, we part ways, and I reach for older, firmer ground. 

A common grace 

Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch theologian, wrote this famous line about grace and the arts: “There is not a square inch of human life over which Christ does not say, ‘Mine.’” His wisdom gives me what Brown’s generosity lacks: a reason. The inspiration behind art never belonged to special grace, he said. It comes from common grace, by which God keeps everything true, beautiful and good alive across human culture, inside the Church and far beyond it.  

That one claim does the work. The beauty in a wordless track is not borrowed from religion and dressed up to look holy. It was always God’s. When Mogwai, a Glasgow post-rock band with no doctrine in mind, write an instrumental that stops you cold, they have not wandered outside grace. If it is genuinely beautiful, it is already inside it. The pandemic did not invent this. When the buildings closed, it simply made visible what was always true: the Church never held a monopoly on the holy. 

Tying music to explicit Christian words protects something worth protecting. But it leaves us nothing to say about the holy fear a teenager feels at a gig; that sense of being addressed by something far larger than themselves. Common grace lets me say the bold, faithful thing instead: “That was God. He got there first.” 

Music can carry you to God while saying nothing about Him at all

And it is not only gentle, wordless music that proves hospitable to God. One paper traced the rise of Christian metal: musicians taking the genre we file under ‘darkness’ and turning its roar toward worship. The same point, from the opposite end of the dial. If grace reaches the hush of post-rock and the scream of metal alike, the wall is not in the sound. It is in us. 

The payoff for ordinary church life is simple. You stop treating music as the warm-up act before the real content. You start asking what your church’s songs are forming in people. Whether they make room for sorrow as well as praise. Whether they develop honesty or only performance. And you stop being frightened of the song in the car. 

Take music seriously, as somewhere God might be met. Pay attention to what happens when it does. The grace that holds all creation does not wait for our permission to be gracious. It has been singing to people who never thought to look, and it has not once needed the right words.