A super-massive black hole and why I don’t like worship music

Last updated on: February 20, 2017 at 5:44 pm by Fred Clark

A super-massive black hole and why I don’t like worship music 2017-02-20T17:44:58-05:00 Fred Clark

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By the end of this year, scientists all over the world hope to have taken a picture of the super-massive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

Well, that’s how these scientists are explaining it to people like me, anyway, with the analogy of “taking a picture.” This project doesn’t involve a giant camera, or even an actual giant telescope — a telescope big enough to photograph something that far away would need to be the size of the entire planet. And so, as Jonathan Amos explains:

They have built an Earth-sized “virtual telescope” by linking a large array of radio receivers – from the South Pole, to Hawaii, to the Americas and Europe.

There is optimism that observations to be conducted during 5-14 April could finally deliver the long-sought prize.

In the sights of the so-called “Event Horizon Telescope” will be the monster black hole at the centre of our galaxy. …

The EHT’s trick is a technique called very long baseline array interferometry (VLBI).

This combines a network of widely spaced radio antennas to mimic a telescope aperture that can produce the resolution necessary to perceive a pinprick on the sky.

So what they’re calling a “telescope” is really a network of ginormous radio antennas all over the planet linked up with powerful computers that will, once they’ve crunched all the data, produce a “picture.” If all goes well — if the weather cooperates with clear skies at all the sites in April, and if the super-computers don’t crash — they may just have a picture to show us by the end of the year.

This is very cool, because whatever these folks find once they develop their “picture” is going to tell us a lot about how gravity does or doesn’t work. The project could wind up confirming or up-ending a great deal of what we think we know. Either way, that’s exciting.

It’s also very cool just because the super-massive black hole at the center of the galaxy is itself a mind-bogglingly awesome subject. It is incomprehensively vast and powerful — greater in size and power and majesty that we can begin to perceive.

DisneyBlackHole

And that brings us, abruptly, to why I don’t like a lot of what we call “worship music.” These songs and choruses purport to be about God (often, arrogantly and possessively, “our God”), but the language they use to describe God is indistinct from the language we might use to try to describe the super-massive black hole at the center of the galaxy. Many of these songs could be sung, without changing a word, by a Sagittarius A* death cult.

The problem, in other words, is that these songs seem to focus on our descriptions of the nature of God while paying far less attention to what we’ve been taught to understand about the character of God. We have ideas about God and those ideas are what we sing about in our worship: God is really, really big; God is mighty and powerful; God is just, like, really just terrifically awesomely huge; etc.

Those ideas may not be wrong, but they’re certainly not the important thing, and therefore they tend to be misleading. They’re not the stuff that God wants us to be thinking about — or singing about — when we think about God. The important stuff, we Christians were taught and told, is what we’ve been shown about the nature and character of God as revealed in Jesus Christ. That’s supposed to be how we know what God is like. That’s supposed to be the main thing.

And when we talk about the character of God as revealed in Jesus Christ, we wind up with something that doesn’t sound quite so much like we’re talking about Sagittarius A*. The super-massive black hole at the center of our galaxy is very impressive, but it’s not the embodiment of love. It’s not (as far as we know) preoccupied with liberation from sin and debt and oppression. It has not demonstrated its agenda by healing the sick or by preaching good news to the poor or by embracing the unclean and the outcast.

According to some cosmological theories, Sagittarius A* may have something to teach us about death and resurrection, but it’s power is mainly revealed through destruction and the swallowing of stars rather than through Calvary and Easter.

To be fair, this annoying, misleading tendency isn’t only a feature of “worship music.” The same wrong turn gets taken in much of our systematic theologies and our catechisms when they get sidetracked into lengthy ruminations on divine “omnipotence.” Those studies can have the same disastrous effect as those worship choruses — training us to worship power rather than love, and to admire power rather than love.

I think that effect is real and has tangible consequences. If our songs of worship and praise for God are otherwise indistinguishable from songs of worship and praise for Galactus, then we’re facing something more than just an abstract problem of abstract theology. We’re training ourselves to be less like Jesus — and convincing ourselves to become the kind of people who admire, and vote for, authoritarian leaders and would-be emperors.

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* This footnote shouldn’t be here because that’s not an asterisk intended to direct you to a footnote, it’s a “star” (but not that kind of star). The asterisk/star is part of the official notation and name of the black hole we believe to be at the center of our galaxy. It’s called Sagittarius A* because the star/asterisk there indicates that Sagittarius A* is exciting (although there, too, “exciting” doesn’t mean what one might expect it to mean).

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