Confessing Evangelical

We spent last weekend in Cambridge, and on Sunday morning we visited Resurrection Lutheran Church for Divine Service. One of many highlights in a very enjoyable service (including an excellent sermon by one of the current students at Westfield House) was getting to sing the introit psalm from Lutheran Worship.

I love singing the psalms, whether that's the Scottish metrical psalter, the Genevan Psalter, or the simple tones used in LW - though none of those can begin to match Anglican chant. So I couldn't resist when I saw this page being recommended as a good read for "chant geeks".

It's a review of a book called Saint Dunstan's Plainchant Psalter, and as well as some observations about pointing that certainly are pretty hardcore chant-geekery - though while we're on the subject of pointing, let me just mention here that the pointing of the Te Deum in Lutheran Worship and the new Lutheran Service Book is the worst I have ever come across - the review also makes some useful comments on the singing of psalms generally. The review begins:

A said Psalm is an oxymoron. Imagine a congregation, at the Offertory, rising to say "Let all mortal flesh keep silence", and you have it in a nutshell. Early poetry, and especially epic poetry, was sung - and accompanied - the psalms being no exception. The caesurae in Beowulf, for example, are remarkably similar to those in the psalms; both surely were not silences, but were punctuated by an instrument of some sort.

So to really get the point of the psalms, we need to sing them:

Even those who say the Office alone should try singing the psalms: the deep meditative and spiritual value of this will soon become apparent. One who sticks to it for a month or so will never go back to saying psalms.

Another excellent article on the benefits of singing the psalms, from the opposite end of the ecclesiastical spectrum from the Anglo-Catholic reviewer of Saint Dunstan's Plainchant Psalter, is PCA pastor Terry Johnson's piece, "Why Sing Psalms?". Johnson writes:

[A] distinctive piety develops as a result of Psalm-singing, a strong, militant, and bold spirituality ... Nearly every Psalm refers to the conflict between the righteous and the wicked (148 of 150 by one count), a theme which is almost nonexistent in modern hymns. One author has said, "When iron was in men’s souls, and they needed it in their blood, they sang Psalms." The Psalms will stiffen a church accustomed to accommodation and compromise with the world.

In particular, the psalms are "the songs of the suffering church", the songs that Christians have turned to in "persecution, death, physical illness, depression, or spiritual 'desertions'". In short:

[T]he Psalms are unrivalled as a complete guide of spiritual life - precisely what they were meant to be. In them we find the whole range of human emotions and experiences. The Psalms are authentic. The joy of praise, the pain of persecution, the comfort of sonship, the sorrow of death, the hope of heaven, and the cry for justice all find full expression, often with vivid realism.

This is to say that the Psalms are human in a way that few hymns dare to be. The whole body of Christian doctrine and experience is to be found in the Psalms. They are virtually a "little Bible" as Luther called them.

The psalms are also gospel-centred and Christ-centred:

Showing the profound insight that we regularly expect from him, Luther says the Book of Psalms "should be precious and dear to us if only because it most clearly promises the death and resurrection of Christ, and describes His kingdom, and the nature and standing of all Christian people"

In the light of all this, it's a shame to see the singing of psalms so often being neglected in today's church. As Douglas Wilson points out, while the Reformed world is racked by debates over "exclusive psalmody":

...I am aware of no one who wants to maintain that Scripture bans the singing of psalms. And yet, despite this theoretical agreement, why, on a practical level, are the psalms virtually banned from the worship of the modern Church?

Though Wilson is wise enough to point out the "vast difference" between "those who would create a controversy about the psalms - as opposed to those who would create a love for the psalms themselves". "The need of the hour," he continues, "is for saints who will promote the psalms, not a certain position about the psalms".

And as was pointed out above, one of the most important features of the psalms is the breadth of human experience and divine truth that they cover. Wilson warns his readers to "be prepared":

[Y]ou may have been a Christian for thirty years, and if you start singing psalms you will find yourself singing things that have never occurred to you before.

Certainly you will find yourself singing things that you have never sung before.