Present Stress and Current Problems: Music and the Reformed Churches
HORACE T. ALLEN, JR.
The ecclesial scope or “space” with which this essay intends to speak in both a historical and an analytical way is often described as “mainline Protestantism.” More specifically, however, because of its subject matter, the definition may be narrowed to refer to the psalm- and hymn-singing traditions as they developed out of the Calvinist churches of northern Europe and Great Britain. This could be taken to embrace the Lutheran and Anglican traditions as well, if only because psalmody and hymnody have always functioned in an ecumenical way. The significant difference lies in the fact that these latter two traditions have always used psalms and hymns in the context of a relatively fixed, often printed, rite; but for most of the Calvinist churches, which have eschewed liturgical books, these sung texts have functioned very much as the rite itself. In keeping with my experience, therefore, I shall emphasize the psalmody and hymnody of Geneva, Scotland, and England, which formed much of the American Protestant experience of church music.
My basic argument proposes a kind of theological “road map” whereby these traditions weave together ethics and aesthetics with considerable complementarity, especially at the point of sacred song. This relationship has been succinctly explained by Paul Lehmann in a recent article in Reformed Liturgy and Music, “Praying and Doing Justly”: “What liturgy and its music are all about has to do with what it takes to be fully human.”1 And, he says, when he refers to the word liturgy:
As far as Christian faith and obedience are concerned, the focus and context of liturgy are etymologically and theologically political. This is the case whether liturgy is understood in the narrower sense of the musical elements of divine worship, or in the broader sense of the verbal elements of worship which include the Creed, the Prayers, the Proclamation of the Word. Praying and doing justly are intrinsically reciprocal to the integrity of faith and obedience in both senses of liturgical understanding and action.2
He then identifies the relationship of prayer and faith in its ecclesial and civic contexts by reference to Calvin:
How central politics are to the liturgical calling is instructively confirmed by Calvin’s account of the relation between faith and prayer and between prayer and “the external means or supports by which God in Christ invites us into fellowship (societatem) with them and preserves us in the same (in ea retinet).” Faith, according to Calvin, is the “principal work of the Spirit”; prayer is the principal exercise of faith”; and the external means or supports are “the true church” (vera ecclesia) and “civil government” (administrate politica). Accordingly, the doing of the Spirit, the doing of faith, and the doing of justice are the marks of the integrity of Christian faith and obedience. They identify the messianic reality and meaning of the presence of Jesus of Nazareth in and over human affairs.3
This perspective provides us with a touchstone for analyzing not only the strength, but also the most painful weaknesses, in contemporary Reformed experience as it seeks to relate ethics and aesthetics. That touchstone is the significance and congruence in the Reformed understanding of the church as ordered congregation, with the civic, political order. In Calvin’s Geneva, Knox’s Scotland, Puritan New England, and Wesleyan “meetings” and “societies,” the phenomenon of corporate song was symbolically central to the ordering of human life, personally and socially.
So let us look at that song in these historically interrelated traditions for further and more detailed clues to the current social stance of these communities. The place of liturgical song in these traditions is most clearly expressed by that eminent divine and theologian, the late Karl Barth of Basel. In volume 4 of his Church Dogmatics, wherein he undertakes to define and describe the various ministries of the Christian community, he identifies as first and foremost, “our office to praise God.”4 He describes praise this way:
The praise of God which constitutes the community and its assemblies seeks to bind and commit and therefore to be expressed, to well up and be sung in concert. The Christian community sings. It is not a choral society. Its singing is not a concert. But from inner, material necessity it sings. Singing is the highest form of human expression. It is to such supreme expression that the vox humana is devoted in the ministry of the Christian community. It is for this that it is liberated in this ministry….
What we can and must say quite confidently is that the community which does not sing is not the community. And where it cannot sing in living speech, or only archaically in repetition of the modes and texts of the past; where it does not really sing but sighs and mumbles spasmodically, shamefacedly and with an ill grace, it can be at best only a troubled community which is not sure of its cause and of whose ministry and witness there can be no great expectation. In these circumstances it has every reason to pray that this gift which is obviously lacking or enjoyed only in sparing measure will be granted afresh and more generously lest all the other members suffer. The praise of God which finds its concrete culmination in the singing of the community is one of the indispensable basic forms of the ministry of the community.5
Clearly then, if Lehmann, Barth, and Calvin can be relied on to represent the Reformed tradition, it can hardly be maintained (as has been done) that this community of faith is antiaesthetic. Its severity and conscientiousness at this point must be read as sincere attempts to preserve, not to reject, the personal and corporate power of communal song.
The only further point of detail that needs mention by way of explicating the aesthetic conservatism of this tradition is to note the source of the texts for that song: that ancient collection of prayer and praise which has been so central to both Jewish and Christian worship, the psalter (as well as certain New Testament canticles in Christian churches), which Eric Werner describes as “the greatest legacy of the Synagogue to Jewish Christianity and then to the Gentile Church.”6 So says Calvin, in his “Articles Concerning the Organization of the Church and of Worship at Geneva” (1537):
On the other hand there are the psalms which we desire to be sung in the Church, as we have it exemplified in the ancient Church and in the evidence of Paul himself, who says it is good to sing in the congregation with mouth and heart. We are unable to compute the profit and edification which will arise from this, except after having experimented. Certainly as things are, the prayers of the faithful are so cold, that we ought to be ashamed and dismayed. The psalms can incite us to lift our hearts to God and move us to an ardour in invoking and exalting with praises the glory of his Name. Moreover it will be thus appreciated of what benefit and consolation the pope and those that belong to him have deprived the Church; for he has reduced the psalms, which ought to be true spiritual songs, to a murmuring among themselves without any understanding.
This manner of proceeding seemed specially good to us, that children, who beforehand have practised some modest church song, sing in a loud distinct voice, the people listening with all attention and following heartily what is sung with the mouth, till all become accustomed to sing communally.7
James Hastings Nichols, Princeton’s able chronicler of Reformed worship, perceptively notes that
in classical Reformed worship the “liturgy” in the strict sense, the people’s part, was all sung. It is not the spoken prayers, taken by the minister, but the sung liturgy of the people which must be studied in the first instance to comprehend the meaning of early Reformed worship.8
Nichols suggests that the power and enduring shape of this metrical psalmody related to its simplicity as song, its comprehensiveness as psalter, and its particular hermeneutical assumptions about the Hebrew Scriptures by Calvinism:
The Old Testament and the psalms were to be read Christologically and as prophetic of the life of the church. Political and cultic references in the psalms that to a modern congregation seem archaic and irrelevant were at once understood by the 16th-century Reformed Church to be metaphorical prophetic allusion to her own life…. The Reformed sense of the church was particularly close of course, to the Hebraic view of an elect people…. As the staple of private and family worship as well as of the services of the church, the psalms became known to many by heart. No other book of the Old Testament, at least, could rival the psalms in the affections and knowledge of Reformed [laity]. Ministers frequently preached from the psalms also; the psalter was the only Old Testament book on which Calvin preached on Sundays.9
In conclusion, says Nichols, “to know and love the psalms was the mark of a [Reformed] Protestant.”10
It certainly was also the mark of that extraordinary Calvinist, Congregationalist exercise in political theology which was Puritan New England. A Unitarian pastor in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, in his 1980 Minns Lecture, “The New England Way and Vatican II,” reminded his audience at the First and Second Church, Boston, that
In New England we have one of the richest, if not the richest, heritages of psalmody in this land. Putting the tunes and translations of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay together, we have the very best of metrical psalmody. But the Psalms have been suppressed in our worship to an appalling degree…. That is the crying shame not only when you consider the way the Psalms were sung … but when you consider the revival of psalmody that the Liturgical Constitution of Vatican II sparked.11
Joseph Bassett concludes:
For these New Englanders the Biblical Word was the language the People of God spoke. Thus, when they faced an issue in their personal or religious life, they didn’t read the Bible as a law book. They read it for the wisdom which their forebears passed on to them out of their experience. The seventeenth-century New Englander’s ability to range over Biblical texts and tie into the earlier experiences of God’s People is based on their sensitivity to Scripture as first and foremost the language of their community. I would hope that we might learn to take up the melody of the Biblical Word from them.12
Now finally, as we assemble these bits and pieces of Reformed experience, let us welcome the Methodists aboard. For them, as for Calvinists and Puritans, the creation of a body of corporate song, biblically based, became the critical step in shaping piety and in energizing a serious measure of social change. The commitment of the Methodists in England to address the corruptions and injustices of the establishment and of the developing industrial revolution, was quickly matched by an equally impressive and extensive program of evangelizing and “humanizing” (to come back to Paul Lehmann’s word) the American frontier. For this latter purpose Wesley’s 1784 prayer book was seen to be useless, but he himself, perhaps unwittingly, provided a replacement for it: his own body of biblical song, which in intention and practice breathed the same air as the older psalmody, as did the Watts’ oeuvre, which became a matter of considerable controversy among the Calvinists.
With this much of a historical picture before us, and taking due notice of the obvious fact that the corporate song of these traditions became their “prayer book,” we may now turn to current Reformed experience to analyze the present configuration of ethics and aesthetics, that is, the congruence, if there be any, between “praying and doing justly.”
That congruence was perhaps most succinctly stated by John Calvin when, in book 4 of the Institutes he summarized the Reformed cult in terms of four stages: “the Word, prayer, the dispensation of the Supper and alms.”13 Not only is there a balance of word and sacrament, but also the balance of proclamation and response as in the pairings of word and prayer; sacrament and alms. This is the cultic secret that is essential to the larger balance of praying and doing justly, or, to use the wordplay much favored by George MacLeod of the Iona Community, the connection between cult and culture. However well or poorly the Puritans, Presbyterians, and Methodists endeavored to shape their respective societies by reference to their cultic song, they were committed to such an enterprise. Cultic song and cultural shape were meant to interpenetrate one another, even though the models might be as disparate as theocracy on the one hand or counterculture on the other. The question is: What has happened to this conviction on the way to the twentieth century? And, of course: What is next?
Returning to Calvin’s description of faith and prayer we may observe that in several ways, for these Reformed communities we have identified, crucial shifts have occurred in the content of that faith and prayer, and at the same time, certain aspects of the so-called external supports for that prayer have been overtaken by alien traditions of piety and praise that have robbed the traditions of their distinctive cultic patterns, thus opening them to cultural accommodation rather than to witness. What are those shifts and alien patterns of prayer? And what resources are available to Reformed churches today to equip them for a genuinely evangelical encounter with a culture that, if anything, is more violently post-Christian and secularist than ever before on the American continent?
The most important theological shift that happened in these Reformed communities was the loss of a commitment to the ordering of society’s life in favor of an increasing concern for individual salvation. The whole pattern of the Calvinist Great Awakening (mid-eighteenth century), the Methodist frontier evangelism (late eighteenth century into the nineteenth century) and the nineteenth-century revivals (beginning in New York state) all contributed to the kind of individualistic understanding of redemption that stripped much of Reformed Christianity of its social agenda except in narrowly defined areas such as temperance and Sabbath observance. Interestingly, some forceful figures on the scene saw what was happening. Such a person was the Presbyterian, Lyman Beecher, who, in the early nineteenth century found himself deeply suspicious of his evangelistic friends Finney and the Methodists, for this very reason. One of Beecher’s biographers, James Fraser, puts it this way:
The Methodists accused Beecher of meddling in politics. But Beecher and the northern evangelists like him could not keep out of politics. They were attempting to build the kingdom, and that was a political proposition.
And probably more than Beecher realized, the real problem was that he continued to the end to view the coming kingdom as the New England town purified and refined and spread across the continent.14
Whether or not our social vision requires the pure New England Commonwealth, we may be able to understand, especially from the standpoint of a Calvinist reading of the Hebrew Scriptures (as previously noted), that a messianic reading of history (whether eschatological or not) includes social and political history. Surely a measure of how far Calvinist churches have fallen from such a vision is the widespread astonishment among their members today that those churches should, from time to time, make ethical pronouncements on such national and international subjects as nuclear war, the economy, apartheid, abortion, sexuality, and other issues of public concern. The same might be said of the Methodist churches, while noting also that they are still trying to recover that unique symbol and source of social, political ecclesial reality, the local disciplinary, class meeting.
In short, “doing justly” came to be very narrowly defined so that the churches involved were increasingly subject to acculturation and cooptation by the prevailing preoccupations of society. An American “established religion” was being formed that only dimly recognized its social and political conscience.
Further, a chaplaincy-like relation to culture blunted the religion’s ability to critique national and political idolatries. Some Presbyterians will recall the astonishment with which their church greeted the prophetic challenge to McCarthyism in the early 1950s as expressed in their (then) Moderator’s “Letter to Presbyterians” (President John A. Mackay of Princeton Seminary).
And it is now clear in the 1990s that these churches’ constituencies by no means approved or supported the commitment of the leadership, bureaucratic or elected, to the various social challenges of the Civil Rights or anti-Vietnam War movements. Thus these churches are increasingly being encouraged by conservative elements within, and by their own declining numbers, to resort to that antipole of corporate ethical and aesthetic expression: evangelism (as having to do not with corporate worship or social witness but with the salvation of individual souls). This late twentieth-century development, however, may be seen to have significant liturgical roots in the nineteenth century when the churches lost their unique liturgy, that powerful corpus of psalter and biblical song, with its distinctive music. Unlike Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Orthodox, or Lutherans, this was their liturgy and their systematic and almost sacramental connection to the Bible. They had neither lectionary nor fixed liturgy to keep the biblical language, metaphors, and assumptions resonating among them. With the ascendancy of pietistic “hymns of human composure” and the adoption of ever more sentimental music, the reformist and messianic spirit evaporated. What was left was a religion of personal feelings and occasional attempts to modify public behavior. For that enterprise one needs ardor, to be sure, but not order. Furthermore, with the loss of the Reformed churches’ moorings in the Hebrew Scriptures and its psalmody, even Jews became estranged sinners, fit subjects for evangelization along with the rest of non-Christian humanity, in the eyes of these communities. Happily, Karl Barth has challenged that arrogance with his tart observation that
in relation to the Synagogue there can be no real question of “mission” or of bringing the Gospel. It is thus unfortunate to speak of Jewish mission. The Jew who is conscious of his Judaism and takes it seriously can only think that he is misunderstood and insulted when he hears this term. And the community has to see that he is materially right.15
This whole point is reinforced when we recall that however much Reformed churches have been enriched by their greatly expanded hymnody, it has unfortunately been at the expense of their commitment to psalmody. That loss is nowhere so clearly and pathetically illustrated than in the epidemic among us these days of greeting the people of God at the beginning of their Lord’s Day assembly, not with a sentence from the Scriptures or a full Psalm-introit, but with the sad, weak, and culturally bound expression, “Good morning.”
The argument here is not to renounce hymns and modern music but to recover the psalms and their appropriate music, of various styles. Happily, this is beginning to happen. The new hymnals of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Methodist Church, the Christian Reformed Church, and the Reformed Church of America all include definable sections of psalmody: metrical, responsorial, antiphonal, and responsive (spoken). Further, the renewed use, by the churches that have published these books, of a comprehensive Lord’s Day lectionary, usually the Common Lectionary,16 provides a systematic way of using the psalms, week by week.
This development, the widespread use by non-prayer book churches of a lectionary system, is perhaps the most important single result of at least three decades of ecumenical liturgical renewal, triggered largely by the impact of the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council as mandated in its document, Sacrosanctum Concilium.17 That the churches of the Reformations of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries should turn to a lectionary table that is based largely on the Roman church’s Ordo Lectionum Missae (1969),18 like Common Lectionary, is the most astonishing and hopeful ecumenical manifestation that could be imagined. Because of this revolution, how Scriptures are being used, liturgically and homiletically, Protestant preaching is becoming more exegetical, more ecumenical, and more integrally related to the Christian calendar than has been so for centuries. And in terms of the subject of this essay, with this shift in the use of the Scriptures in public worship it is now possible for parish minister and musician to work well ahead in planning instrumental music, choral music, and hymns. At last it is possible for Protestant worship to be truly and fully based in the scriptural material for the day according to an essentially christological calendar comprising a sequence of Sundays during whch the synoptic Gospels are read “in course” (ordinary time, being the Sundays after Epiphany and Pentecost), and two cycles of Sundays revolving around, respectively, Christmas and Easter. This, too, has become an important agendum for the new hymnals that have been appearing in the last decade. Perhaps these two movements of psalmody and calendar/lectionary-based hymnody represent an effective reversal of the process whereby the Reformed churches lost the peculiar body of song which was for them the liturgical-aesthetic opening to social ethics.
A broader liturgical question opens up at this point. Just as Paul Lehmann suggested that in Reformed churches, liturgy can be understood in a narrow sense as referring only to4 ‘the musical elements” or in a broader sense that includes creed, prayers, and proclamation, we might, in concluding this essay, propose an even wider definition that includes ritual gesture, ceremony, action, space, and atmosphere. This might, on the face of it, sound strange in a strictly Reformed context. Nevertheless, it is precisely the cultural context of North American Christianity that should give some pause for thought to the Calvinist churches with their inherited liturgical austerity. Whether or not the increasing popularity of so-called charismatic churches, with their simple but compelling liturgies of song, gesture, and participation, is to be regarded as an important cultural-ecclesial phenomenon, the increasingly powerful, violent, and virulent secularism of our day surely beckon “mainline Protestant” churches to forms of religious and pious expression that they had, for all sorts of historical reasons, rejected. I cannot possibly express this better than has a colleague, Bruce Rigdon, just a few years ago in a conference on worship at Lindenwood College, St. Charles, Missouri; his remarks were reported in the pages of the Presbyterian journal, Reformed Liturgy and Music:
Let’s talk about culture for a moment. Calvin lived and worked in a religious culture. He was surrounded by symbols, too many symbols he thought, that informed everything everybody did and thought. It was the enormous accomplishment of medieval culture, like the cathedral. And in this mass of religious influences and movements, Calvin discerned that it was necessary to purify. Hence, he pushed aside all kinds of things, took all sorts of things out of the church in order to focus the eyes of the people of God on what Calvin believed to be the central symbols, the powerful symbols of the Gospel.
My dear friends, you and I live not in a religious culture, but in the most secular culture the world has ever seen. Our problem is not that the atmosphere in our culture is loaded with powerful religious symbols that need to be cleansed. Our problem is that it is a desert out there. Thus, for the same reason that Calvin had to purify symbolic life in order to empower it, we must do the opposite in order to be as faithful as Calvin was. Ours is the task of allowing religious symbols to be born and to stir us and to become powerful among us and, in the long run, to recognize that the task given us is overwhelming. It is the conversion of a violent and pagan culture in which our children are called to grow up. We live in a culture which powerfully tells everybody moment by moment in all forms of media that God is absent from the world, that the world is not God’s but belongs to us, and we are entitled to do anything with it that we deem suitable. So secularization, if that is the right word for it, creates for us a very different context than the one in which Calvin had to work and his community had to live.19
If this be prophecy, then maybe even the Reformed churches, with their cautious approach to all matters musical, aesthetic, ceremonial, and ritual, may be on the way back to forms of praying that will better support the “doing justly” which is essential to serious social change in our secularized, consumerized, and competitive culture. Then, maybe, even the Reformed churches will find a way to celebrate, on a weekly basis, not only the word (and prayer) but also the sacrament (with alms) such that the eucharist, that bread and “cup of blessing,” might be experienced again as what Paul Lehmann has described as “a laboratory of maturity.”20
NOTES
1. Paul L. Lehmann, “Praying and Doing Justly,” Reformed Liturgy and Music 19/2 (1985):78.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 4, part 3/2: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh, 1961), p. 865.
6. Eric Werner, The Sacred Bridge (New York, 1970), p. 145.
7. John Calvin, Theological Treatises, trans. J. D. S. Reid, Library of Christian Classics 22 (Philadelphia, 1954), pp. 53–54.
8. James Hastings Nichols, Corporate Worship in the Reformed Tradition (Philadelphia, 1968), pp. 34–35.
9. Ibid., pp. 37–38.
10. Ibid., p. 40.
11. Joseph Bassett, “The New England Way and Vatican II,” The Unitarian Universalist Christian 36/3–4 (1981): 59.
12. Ibid., p. 60.
13. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 2, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1953), p. 601.
14. James Fraser, Pedagogue for God’s Kingdom: Lyman Beecher and the Second Great Awakening (Lanham, Md., 1985), p. 41.
15. Barth, Reconciliation, p. 877.
16. Consultation on Common Texts, Common Lectionary: The Lectionary Proposed by the Consultation on Common Texts (New York, 1983).
17. Vatican Council II, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium), 4 December 1963.
18. Congregation for Divine Worship, Ordo Lectionum Missae (Rome, 25 May 1969).
19. V. Bruce Rigdon, “Experiencing the Presence of God in the Desert,” Reformed Liturgy and Music 19/1 (1987): 54–55.
20. Paul L. Lehmann, Ethics in a Christian Context (New York, 1963), p. 101.