Many hymns as we know them today would have been considered worldly and not acceptable for worship by many church fathers and influential Christians. Of course this is not because there is anything anti-Christian about singing. Jesus and his apostles sung hymns. But when it comes to modern worship, it’s not just the fog machines and amplification that saints of old would have objected to. Their objections cover aspects of worship widely accepted and even celebrated today.

To start with, church fathers like Chrysostom, Jerome, and Tertullian were against using any musical instruments in worship. Chrysostom wrote, “where pipe-players are, there Christ is not.” Maybe we can just make beautiful music with our voices then?

Well, you better think twice before singing any harmonies according to John Calvin. He likely would have viewed such musical ornamentation as distracting and potentially causing us to become “more warmed with the music than with the words”. Calvin wrote that “songs composed merely to tickle and delight the ear are unbecoming to the majesty of the church.”

Ok, so no instruments and no harmony. What else is there left to object to? Well, there’s the mere idea of singing something that’s not scripture. For most of church history, singing was done in unison, centered around the Psalms, and done without musical instruments for the first six hundred years or so. The idea of singing the kinds of songs we know as hymns today was still somewhat controversial even at the end of the 17th century. Even the idea of versifying Psalms and applying metrical structures to them was controversial beginning with the Reformation and persisting for a quite a while after.