As always, a good teacher recognizes that there are sometimes other teachers with more expertise on a given subject. I love hymnody, but I am a mere kindergartener in my hymnological studies. On the other hand, Pastor William Weedon, LCMS Director of Worship and Chaplain at the Synod's International Center, has spent much of his life in such studies. With that in mind, I share with you his paper from the Issues Etc. "Making the Case" Conference. This paper appears as it is posted at this link on Pastor Weedon's blog. (By the way, some of my parishioners may remember Pastor Weedon as the liturgist during my Installation back in May of 2010. I hope one day to have him as a guest preacher.)
Making the Case for Classical Christian Hymnody
“Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is
unsearchable.” Psalm 145:3. On this I suspect Christians of every
stripe could agree. The Lord is great and the Lord is greatly to be
praised. But we might see the cleft that has developed in the Church if
we venture to the next verses: “One generation shall commend your works
to another and shall declare your mighty acts. On the glorious splendor
of your majesty, and on your wondrous works, I will meditate. They shall
speak of the might of your awesome deeds, and I will declare your
greatness. They shall pour forth the fame of your abundant goodness and
sing aloud of your righteousness.”
What has happened in some sections of the Church is that THIS generation
has told all the other generations to shut up and keep silent. Instead
of listening to their proclamation of God’s majesty (who He is) and His
wondrous works (what He’s done) and being inspired by their witness to
join in their song with our own, some would silence their song and
replace it entirely with the song of the present generation. Instead of
the Church’s classical way of operating: supplementation, the rich
treasury of hymns that goes back so far, growing and being added to by
each generation, first listening to and learning to love the old praises
of prior Christians as they tell us of God’s wondrous works; we have
instead supplanting - replacing of this heritage of proclamation in song
that reaches century upon century back through the ages with the songs
of now.a
And we need to be honest about the nature of the songs of now. A friend
of mine sought to use some of the modern sounds in his church one
Sunday, but all the classic texts. It was very telling when a woman left
that worship service in tears and she told the musicians on the way
out: “You’ve taken away my music.” They were befuddled because they’d
striven so hard to use the musical idiom that that congregation had come
to expect. Why would it be welcomed? She gave them the answer: “It’s
not what I hear on Christian radio.” AH! The commercial interests
driving so called Christian radio is to get folks to download and listen
over and over again to the current song and then promptly to forget it
when they need you to download the newest, latest, greatest hit. Do you
see what has happened? The throw away generation, the disposable
everything generation, has come to treasure disposable, throw away songs
too.
The demand for the music of today exclusively to reign supreme in the
Church, whatever else it does, simply cuts off the prior generations in a
way that the Church has not known before. We become an orphan Church
that way, a church without our spiritual fathers and mothers. Anyone who
knows me know that I love reading the Church fathers. Great stuff. And
yet THE way that the prior generations have always spoken in the Church
to the current generation is not in the dusty study of Patristics but in
the living voice of the congregation. We take up THEIR song and it
becomes OUR song and so their theology, their witness to Christ,
continues to shape and mold us.
But there’s more. Dr. John Kleinig helpfully wrote about the theology
that runs with the praise music that came originally out of the
Pentecostal Church. The idea of this music is move a person. To move
them spiritually from entering into the courts of God with loud and
joyous songs of thanksgiving, to move them into the more mellow music of
the inner courts of the temple with lush and quiet songs of praise, and
finally for the congregation to peak, dare I say it, to spiritually
orgasm in the singing in the spirit, often done in tongues and musically
sustained by held chords and arpeggios and shimmering on the cymbals.
Music here at its base is employed to achieve the desired emotional
outcome. To bring a person to a feeling of the presence and closeness of
God.
This is in huge tension with the sturdy objectivity of the Church’s
historical musical deposit. For the Church classically simply did not
see music as first and foremost a vehicle to move emotions. She knew
that it does this. Luther confessed as much in any number of places. And
yet that was just an inevitable result of music, but not it’s task.
It’s task was rather to give voice to God’s Word. To proclaim to one
another the great things that God has done for us in Jesus Christ and to
summon one another to taste and see the goodness of the Lord and to
proclaim the person blessed who trusts in Him.
We might wonder how this shift toward exclusive use of compositions of
the present generation could possibly make its way into a Church like
ours which has traditionally been a bulwark of preserving the music of
previous generations. The answer, I believe, is that those who studied
Church Growth were trained to match in church the music liked and
listened to by their community. So that when new folks came in through
the narthex doors they immediately would feel at home with the same
sounds that filled their lives outside the doors. More than one writer
has pointed out the disingenuousness of this approach, for the Church
does not invite the old Adam to settle down and feel at home, but to his
own execution. Nor, even sociologically, has it proven to be the case
that unchurched folks expect the music at church to mirror the music
they listen to when washing their cars on Saturday. You can read more
about this in Daniel Zager’s stupendous monograph “The Gospel Preached
Through Music: The Purpose and Practice of Lutheran Church Music” (Good
Shepherd Institute 2013).
So it was with the best of motivations that our churches began to dump
the deposit of the church’s treasury of hymnody. But it wasn’t wise. And
it hasn’t worked if the purpose was simply to bring in the folks from
outside in droves. We’re a smaller Synod today than we were prior to the
time when classic church music reigned.
But I must issue this caveat. Dr. Nagel was always fond of asking what’s
the opposite of an error? Not the truth! Just the opposite error. So
the error of thinking that the Church’s hymnody is fixed. You have the
old songs and you should be content to sing them. Period. Full stop.
Nonsense. With the Spirit extolling our Lord Jesus through the Word, the
new song springs up in the Church continually. Not everything written
in a generation will be found worthy of adding to the deposit, but the
current generation tends not to be in the best position to evaluate the
final worthiness of its own contributions. The generation to come will
weigh and decide in which of our new songs they hear the words and
promises of God most clearly issued for their consolation and upbuilding
in the faith. But that the deposit grows with each generation is simply
a given. The Church’s song is richer now by far than it was at the time
of the early church or even the Reformation. It keeps being enriched
and for that all glory to God!
So when we speak of making the case for classical Christian hymnody we
mean defending the proposition that previous generations ought be given
an ongoing voice in the church’s praise, and this praise consists of
meditating upon God’s glorious majesty (that is, proclaiming WHO He is,
and above all who He has revealed Himself to be in the Crucified and
Risen One), and in meditating on His great works. We do both of these by
proclaiming them together to each other in song in the presence of God.
How far back does the treasury reach? Well, certainly biblical scholars
will tell you that it reaches right into the pages of the New Testament.
Philippians 2; Colossians 1; numerous portions of Revelation; 1 Timothy
3. You can find tantalizing bits of the song that the Christians sang
to each other there. Maybe it was something like Philippians 2 that St.
Paul and St. Silas sang together at midnight in the jail of Philippi.
Outside of the New Testament, though, we have these ancient hymns that
have come down to us and even made it into the liturgy. In the Divine
Service, we sing the Gloria in Excelsis or Agnus Dei or Sanctus. In the
Daily Prayer Services, we sing Te Deum Laudamus and Phos Hilaron. That
last is particularly of interest to those who study the history of the
hymns. You see, in literature, I think the first mention of Phos Hilaron
(our “Joyous Light of Glory” from Evening Prayer, but also in the
hymnal O Light Whose Splendor Thrills and Gladdens or O Gladsome Light
of Grace), the first mention is in a little book by St. Basil the Great
(and he died in 379). He writes: I will now adduce another piece of
evidence which might perhaps seem insignificant, but because of its
antiquity must in nowise be omitted by a defendant who is indicted on a
charge of innovation. It seemed fitting to our fathers not to receive
the gift of the light at eventide in silence, but, on its appearing,
immediately to give thanks. Who was the author of these words of
thanksgiving at the lighting of the lamps, we are not able to say. The
people, however, utter the ancient form, and no one has ever reckoned
guilty of impiety those who say “We praise Father, Son, and God's Holy
Spirit.” (Par. 73 On the Holy Spirit)
Just like we have no idea who wrote the Gloria in Excelsis or the Te
Deum (medieval legend notwithstanding), so with Phos Hilaron. It simply
was a song Christians sang and have continued to sing throughout
generations. Is it not amazing that we here in America today continue in
our Evening Prayer to offer praises in a hymn that St. Basil the Great
thought was positively antique back in the 370’s?
So the deposit goes very far back, especially if we think of those
ancient hymns of the church that were not rimed or set in stanzas. But
the riming and setting in stanzas goes back a long, long way also. The
man traditionally regarded as the father of western Christian hymnody is
St. Ambrose of Milan. Our LSB features three hymns attributed to this
great father of the Church. We even get to know a little bit about how
this form of hymnody took root and spread. Listen to St. Augustine in
his Confessions, paragraph:
Not long had the Church of Milan begun to employ this kind of
consolation and exhortation, the brethren singing together with great
earnestness of voice and heart. For it was about a year, or not much
more, since Justina, the mother of the boy-Emperor Valentinian,
persecuted Thy servant Ambrose in the interest of her heresy, to which
she had been seduced by the Arians. The pious people kept guard in the
church, prepared to die with their bishop, Thy servant. There my mother,
Thy handmaid, bearing a chief part of those cares and watchings, lived
in prayer. We, still unmelted by the heat of Thy Spirit, were yet moved
by the astonished and disturbed city. At this time it was instituted
that, after the manner of the Eastern Church, hymns and psalms should be
sung, lest the people should pine away in the tediousness of sorrow;
which custom, retained from then till now, is imitated by many, yea, by
almost all of Thy congregations throughout the rest of the world.
[Confessions IX:7:15]
So Ambrose is popularly considered the father of hymnody as we’ve come
to expect it: a poem consisting generally of number of consistent
stanzas that rime and often concluding with the doxology: an ascription
of praise to the Blessed Trinity.
If we listen to THAT generation proclaim to us the great deeds of God
and call us to meditate with them on who He is and what He has done, we
get something like this:
Savior of the nations, come,
Virgin’s Son, make here Your home!
Marvel now, O heav’n and earth,
That the Lord chose such a birth.
Not by human flesh and blood,
By the Spirit of our God,
Was the Word of God made flesh—
Woman’s offspring, pure and fresh.
Here a maid was found with child,
Yet remained a virgin mild.
In her womb this truth was shown:
God was there upon His throne.
Then stepped forth the Lord of all
From His pure and kingly hall;
God of God, yet fully man,
His heroic course began.
God the Father was His source,
Back to God He ran His course.
Into hell His road went down,
Back then to His throne and crown.
For You are the Father’s Son
Who in flesh the vict’ry won.
By Your mighty pow’r make whole
All our ills of flesh and soul.
From the manger newborn light
Shines in glory through the night.
Darkness there no more resides;
In this light faith now abides.
Glory to the Father sing,
Glory to the Son, our king,
Glory to the Spirit be
Now and through eternity.
Let’s note a number of things about this. It clearly proclaims Christ.
Proclaims Him as the Virgin’s Son, God of God, yet full man, whose
source was God the Father. It proclaims His deeds: His conception by the
Spirit, his birth of the Virgin, His coming from God and returning to
God even His descent into hell. It proclaims what He has won: the
victory and in our flesh to make whole all our ills of flesh and soul.
And it summons us one and all to join in praising the Trinity in and
through Him.
And consider that these words by Ambrose or from someone around that
time, have continued to proclaim Christ in each generation. Year after
year, when Advent arrives, this hymn is found on the lips of Christians
to bring comfort to each other and to join their voices with that of all
the previous generations, extolling the Lord’s incarnation for us. So
much did Luther value this Latin hymn that it was the first he rendered
into German. When we sing this hymn each Advent truly “one generation
commends your works to another and shall declare your mighty deeds!”
Ambrose’s hymns primarily are set to sanctify time and to celebrate the
events commemorated in the Church’s year: the great story of the life of
Christ. They had their home first and foremost in the Daily Office,
Matins and Vespers etc. But you couldn’t really keep the hymns away from
the Lord’s Supper. They migrated. And did so even before the
Reformation. Remember that “O Lord, We Praise Thee” was a folk hymn long
before Luther took it hand. Or remember the hymn of Huss for the
distribution.
With the Reformation, the ancient heritage was conserved, even in many
cases in Latin, but much was also put into the vernacular and of course
it was added to. New hymns couldn’t but continue to be birthed by the
joy of the Gospel’s clarity that took hold agin in those days. Luther’s
first great hymn was Nun Freut Euch. Listen: “Dear Christian, one and
all rejoice, with exultation springing, and with united heart and voice
and holy rapture singing: proclaim the wonders God has done, what His
right hand the victory won; what price our ransom cost Him!” There’s the
theology of praise right in a single hymn stanza. Luther never ceased
to marvel at music: “After all, the gift of language combined with the
gift of song was only given to man to let him know that he should praise
God with both word and music, namely by proclaiming [God’s Word]
through music and by providing sweet melodies with words.” (AE 53:323)
Or as Luther said in the preface to the Bapst hymnal: “For God has
cheered our hearts and minds through his dear Son, whom he gave for us
to redeem us from sin, death, and the devil. He who believes this
earnestly cannot be quiet about it. But he must gladly and willingly
sing and speak about it so that others also may come and hear it.” (AE
53:333).
So with the Reformation comes this explosion of new music, filled with
the joy of the Gospel, and aimed at the consolation of those terrified
in conscience or broken in heart. All designed to lift you up through
preaching the promises of God into your heart via putting them onto your
lips.
Of the many great hymns that arose in that time, who deserve particular
mention. They were by Philip Nicolai, Pastor in Unna, Westphalia. He saw
his congregation decimated by plague. Between July of 1597 and January
of 1598, Pr. Nicolai buried no less than 1,400 of his parishioners– 300
in the month of July alone. He could have fled the plague, but he
didn’t. He stayed put. He preached. He celebrated the Sacrament. He
prayed. He buried, and he prayed some more. And he did one more thing.
He wrote a book. A book he called The Mirror of Joy. It was all about
the joy that filled his heart as he thought of the heaven his Savior had
won for all upon His cross and to which He would one day bring His
people as they share His risen life in the New Heavens and the New
Earth. In the words of Luther, he “gladly and willingly sing and speak
about it.” At the tail end of his little book, he put three poems he
wrote, two of which he also set to music. One is called: Wie schön
leuchtet der Morgenstern (O Morning Star, How Fair and Bright) and the
other: Wachet Auf, Ruft uns die Stimme. Wake, Awake! For Night is
flying.
In the face of unspeakable tragedy, to families where mothers had lost
their sons, daughters their fathers, sisters their brothers, brothers
their sisters, husbands their wives - with no family left untouched by
the horror of death- faithful Pastor Nicolai sang the hope of heaven
into his people as they waited for the day of the Savior’s return and
learned to sing in hope along with him even with tears in their eyes. No
wonder these two pieces became known as the Queen and the King of the
Chorales. They are triumphant in the cross. Just listen in to sections
from either hymn:
Almighty Father, in Your Son
You loved me when not yet begun
Was this old earth’s foundation!
Your Son has ransomed us in love
To live in Him here and above.
This is Your great salvation.
Alleluia! Christ the living
To us giving Life forever,
Keeps us Yours and fails us never.
O let the harps break forth in sound!
Our joy be all with music crowned,
Our voices, gladly blending!
For Christ goes with us all the way—
Today, tomorrow, every day,
His love is never ending!
Sing out! Ring out!
Jubilation, exultation!
Tell the story!
Great is He, the King of glory!
Or this:
Now let all the heaven’s adore Thee;
Let saints and angels sing before Thee
With harp and cymbal’s clearest tone.
Of one pearl each shining portal,
Where dwelling with the choir immortal,
We gather round Thy radiant throne.
No eye has seen the light,
No ear has heard the might
Of Thy glory.
Therefore will we eternally,
sing hymns of praise and joy to thee.
I don’t know about you, but I think it’s nigh unto a high treason when a
Lutheran (well, when any Christian) is deprived of the comfort and
power of such great hymns! And they abound. Those are just two. Note
that they sing of Christ. They fling the comfort of Christ against the
darkness. They hold tight to the joy of what shall be when Christ renews
all things. They proclaim: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ
will come again, and they add the promise: “for you!”
You might notice if you’ve been around our Church for any length of
time, that SOME of our hymns are really, really long. Take Luther’s
delightful Christmas hymn: “From Heaven Above to Earth I Come.” It’s got
an eminently singable melody, but it goes on for 15 stanzas. Yikes!
What gives with that?
That’s a hint that the singing of hymns in the Lutheran Church, it’s use
of the classical Christian hymnody, from the start employed
“wechselsingen” as Dr. Walther termed it: “back and forth singing” would
be a good translation. So take “From Heaven Above…” and you might have
the choir sing all together stanza one, then just the women of the choir
on stanza two, then the men, stanza three, then all the choir on stanza
four, maybe just four voices, one on each part for stanza five, then
the whole congregation on stanzas six, seven and eight. Children’s
voices along on stanza 9. Women on 10. Men on 11. All on 12 and 13.
Choir on 14 and then all on 15. What does this back and forth singing
do? It enables us to preach to each other in the song. We literally sing
the comfort the Gospel into each other’s ears, hearing it and then in
our turn sounding it forth.
By the way, this way of singing is also key to getting the best way to sing, say, “Isaiah, Mighty Seer.” Picture it like this:
Choir 1: Isaiah, mighty seer in days of old,
Choir 2: The Lord of all in spirit did behold,
etc.
with the whole congregation joining in on: Holy is God the Lord of Sabaoth!
Luther’s Gloria hymn works the same way. This back and forth is the
royal priesthood at its work: proclaiming the excellencies of Him who
called us out of darkness into His marvelous light. It is the
fulfillment of the Apostles’ exhortation: Let the word of Christ dwell
among you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in PSALMS, and
HYMNS, and SPIRITUAL SONGS, singing with grace in your hearts to the
Lord.
And the centuries roll on and the witness keeps ringing out. The
nineteenth century was a time of rich meditation on the Church herself.
Everyone was thinking about it and singing about it. So we have “For All
the Saints” and “Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones” and so many others. The
focus wasn’t on Church for her own sake, but look at who the Spirit has
called us to be in Christ! And through them all ring comfort: “And when
the fight is fierce the battle long, steals on the ear the distant
triumph song, and hearts are brave again and arms are strong! Alleluia!
Alleluia!”
In the 20th and 21st century a new flowering of hymnody took place and
to the old songs were added numerous new proclamations of Christ. We
don’t have time to even begin to delve into the richness, but we must
note the hymns of Stephen Starke (“We praise You and acknowledge You, O
God, to be the Lord, the Father everlasting by all the earth adored…” -
great paraphrase of the Te Deum and set to the Jupiter tune, proclaiming
who the true King of the universe is!); Martin Franzmann (O thou who
when we loved thee not, didst love and save us all; thou great good
shepherd of mankind, O hear us when we call! Send us thy Spirit! Teach
us truth! Thou Son, O set us free, from fanciest wisdom, self-sought
ways to make us one in thee. Then shall our song united rise to Thine
eternal throne where with the Father evermore and Spirit thou art one);
Vajda (How could I not have known Isaiah would be there, his prophesies
fulfilled, with pounding heart I stare: A child, a king, the prince of
peace for me, a child, a king the prince of peace for me); so very, very
many others.
One last point I think needs to be made in favor of classical Christian
hymnody. It has, somehow, survived the fragmentation of the Church. So a
hymn written for a Roman Catholic eucharistic conference in 1976 ends
up being sung in Lutheran parishes around the world: “You satisfy the
hungry heart.” Or an EWTN broadcast of the Roman Mass for Ash Wednesday,
opens with the solemn singing of Luther’s “From Depths of Woe.” The
Baptists might have owned “Just as I am” at the start, but it is sung
universally by Christians. This united song of the Church gives me great
hope. And it witnesses a very Lutheran thing: if it sings truth, we
say, it is ours! We joyfully can take it to heart and praise God with
it. So our hymnal is not merely limited to the stream of music that
flowed directly from the medieval church to the Churches of the Augsburg
Confession. Rather, when Geneva sang truth, we sang it with them. When
Rome sang truth, we sang it with them. Did you know that Beautiful
Savior was originally composed to be a song of Eucharistic devotion? Tis
true! And yet its words are simple truth and so we take them gladly on
our lips.
Psalm 145 goes on to say: “All your works shall give thanks to you, O
Lord, and all your saints shall bless you. They shall speak of the glory
of your kingdom and tell of your power to make known to the children of
men your mighty deeds and the glorious splendor of your kingdom… The
Lord is faithful in all his works and kind in all his deeds.” One
generation declares His great works to another in the classic hymnody of
the Christian Church. And our calling in this generation is to hear
their song, to sing it with them in joy, and then to add to it as best
we may in our own day and age.
When Isaiah pictured the Church, he described her in chapter 35 in these
words: “And the redeemed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with
singing, everlasting joy upon their heads. They shall obtain gladness
and joy and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.” The Church is one long
procession of the people of Zion headed home, and the song we sing here
at the tail end of the procession at the moment is one we learned from
those who went before. Let us treasure the gift bequeathed to us and
learn to love it and to pass on such a tremendous heritage to our
children and children’s children until the glorious appearing of Lord
Jesus when we join the saints and angels in the song of the Lamb!
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