Daniel Renstrom Interview

One time, when we were carol singing a few years back, a small spelling mistake crept through the editing process for the song sheets. It only came to light as we were singing through the carol, and it took a quick edit to ensure we were singing sound theology and not docetism or worse:

Word of the Father, not in flesh appearing

Of course, we sang the proper words celebrating the incarnation:

Word of the Father, Now in flesh appearing.
O Come let us adore Him, Christ the Lord.

Yesterday I reviewed the excellent new Christmas album which centres On The Incarnation from Daniel Renstrom. Having left a message on Daniel's website, he graciously got in touch to answer a few questions about the album:

Why do we need good Christmas music?

I am by no means an expert on Christmas music. So I don't want my
comments to come off as a guy who has seen the entire landscape of
Christmas music and has returned to give the right answer...haha.

I've noticed though that much of the Christmas music that I/we hear is
based heavily on sentimentalism and not Scripture. So in our
compiling of traditional Christmas songs and writing of new ones we
wanted to be very careful to tell the story of the incarnation as
Biblically accurate as possible.

How did you put the album together?

When we started thinking up the idea for the CD we put together all
the ideas that we thought should be highlighted in order to tell the
story of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. So from there we just
either found songs that fit into those themes or wrote new ones.

What is the essential Christmas message for you?

I think that the Christmas message is the same as the gospel
message...believe in Christ....worship Christ. The one line in the CD
that i love the most is the second verse of Rise & Fall, it says Those
who oppose stumble on this stone, the birth of this dangerous
King...But many will hear, believing will fear and hope in this
dangerous King. I love those lines because i think they convey the
gospel. Some people will look at the birth of Jesus and just say, he
was only a good man, born in the middle east. But others will believe
that he is GOD, and they will worship him.

A big thank you to Daniel for taking the time to respond. Daniel's new album On The Incarnation is available at iTunes, and even cheaper at Amazon downloads.