Theolog

Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs

by Mark Bonnington, 17 Apr 2007

Those new to Church often discover that believers enjoy the unfamiliar experience of engaging in corporate singing. This is hardly in tune with our culture, where only a big sports event or a drunken night out provides a context for corporate singing. By and large neither tends to be particularly edifying (I’m told…). When new people are getting used to Church, being expected to sing with others can be quite strange and it can take a while to adjust.

One influential theory of how the earliest Churches developed is that they modelled themselves on synagogue worship. As far as I know there is no evidence that early synagogue worship involved singing. Bible readings, sermons and prayers were all part of synagogue worship and had parallels in early house church worship. The importance of singing in early Christian worship had no parallel in the synagogues. Within Judaism you have to look to the Levitical worship of the Jerusalem Temple for a precedent for singing in Church.

There is clear evidence that the earliest Churches sang when they came together for worship. Paul says to the Corinthians that ‘When you come together each has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation’. Not a bad agenda for Christian worship. To the Colossians he says that they should teach and admonish one another ‘…singing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs…’.

It seems that wherever the Holy Spirit is at work people love to sing. Movements of the Holy Spirit are often accompanied by a new release of song in worship to God. Conversely songs often contribute to the renewal of God’s people, their spiritual life and their worship.

On holiday in the Scottish Highlands one year we drove into the local village at twenty past ten one Sunday morning looking for a Church. Seeing a young family with several kids go into a small chapel, we followed. Inside we sat behind the other visiting family we had just followed and realised that we had just stepped into a one hour cross-cultural experience. The women in our two families were the only ones without patterned dresses and hats and the men the only ones without black suits and ties.

We were welcomed warmly and graciously and treated to a forty-minute long exposition of a passage in Isaiah. We stood to pray (no evangelical hunch here) – but I was used to that and I found the hymnbook useful to help me resist the temptation to follow the biblical injunction (1 Tim 2.8) and raise my hands. But it was the singing that was the most strange. We sat to sing the metrical Psalms following a cantor with a tuning fork standing in a box below the elevated pulpit. As a celebration of the human voice in praise of God the singing was sublime. The range of tunes and words was - how should I put it? - very limited. Under my breath I prayed ‘Thank you Lord for Isaac Watts’.

Isaac Watts almost single-handedly delivered many evangelical Christians from singing only the metrical Psalms. Watts did two wonderful things – he provided Christian paraphrases of the Psalms that brought out their NT and Christian themes. He rightly saw a significant danger: that the mere repetition of psalms, without the interpretation of the Christian gospel preached and sung from them, leads in the direction of Jewish and not Christian faith. And later Watts introduced hymns that celebrated the glories of the Gospel, thus liberating us to worship not just with the psalms but with hymns and spiritual songs. On the way home in the car I hummed Watt’s Join All the Glorious Names and gave thanks for that brave young man who three hundred years ago in Southampton said to his father that it was about time they had some new songs in Church. From his courage has flowed the great evangelical tradition of singing hymns to worship God, build one another up and learn the faith.

Now some of the new songs that are around on the scene today are shallow and repetitive and amount to no more than what Mike Pilavachi memorably called ‘Jesus is my girlfriend’ songs. There are ditties of such crass theological, poetic and emotional shallowness that they amount to not much more than a love-struck teenager’s doggerel. Simplicity and repetition have their place (see Psalm 136, for example) but what the Church needs today is a healthy combination of psalms, hymns and spiritual songs – the biblical, the theological and the contemporary inspirational conveyed with a good tune and with the imagery of excellent poetry.

Isaac Watt’s own When I Survey the Wondrous Cross is so good that even Charles Wesley (who wrote more than a hymn a week for fifty years) said he would give up all his hymns to have written this one. The first line of this great hymn is a poetic and theological masterpiece in miniature – it suggests the majesty and power of what God has done in the cross of Jesus. This work of the cross has been painted on such a vast canvas that, like a landscape from a hilltop, just noticing it or seeing it is not enough - we have to survey it. Only when we stop for a while to drink it in for as far as the eye can see have we begun to appreciate the cross’ power and majesty. The new popular ‘O Waley Waley’ folk tune has given Watts’ theological and poetic masterpiece a new lease of life.

Of course, excellent songs for worship are not confined to old hymns. There are life-giving new tunes for old hymns (Before the Throne) and many excellent new songs (My Jesus, My Saviour). Traditionalists often look down their noses at the likes of Redman and Kendrick (‘Hugh’ Kendrick according to one not-so-in-touch clergyman). We need to remember just how many of Wesley’s 6000 hymns have been filtered out in 250 years to get us down to today’s collection of half a dozen masterpieces. Kendrick’s The Servant King has had wide circulation and bears the hallmark of longevity (‘Hands that flung stars into space, to cruel nails surrendered…’ – genius). Matt Redman’s Blessed be your name has had millions of Christians in the school of worship-despite-suffering with Job. In churches tempted by a gospel of health, wealth and success this is a welcome and biblical antidote that deserves plaudits for its life and worship-transforming potential.

The worship leader fit for the task brings out treasures old and new. Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs make for worship that glorifies God and builds up the Church.