2
Initial Testing
As I admitted in chapter 1, establishing the claim that the Old Testament is dying, if not already dead, for large segments of Christianity in North America faces several problems. According to some polls, 75 percent of American citizens identify themselves as Christian, which, given the present population, would mean that there are approximately 242 million Christians in the United States alone. How might one even begin to get an accurate assessment of such a large population and how “it” views the Old Testament? And what of the diversified nature of such a large population, which is replete with so many groups and subgroups? These are real problems for any attempt to gauge “the health of the Old Testament in North American Christianity,” and I confess that I am no pollster. Then again, even pollsters must rely on representative samples, randomly selected, and so must reckon with margins of error. Apart from the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, the data I discuss below are not based on polls, and so the results are far more anecdotal than statistical, with the margin for error no doubt far larger than the acceptable +/-2 percent or +/-5 percent.
This important point granted, in what follows I present four pieces of “hard data” that both separately and together constitute empirical (or at least semiempirical) proof supporting my diagnosis that the Old Testament is dying. To continue with the medical metaphor, these four data sets comprise a battery of initial tests of our patient—analysis of the Old Testament’s symptoms, as it were—so as to identify the pathology, its causes, and its possible treatment. Chapters 4–6 discuss three additional and especially troubling signs of morbidity, but those are different from the tests found in the present chapter. For one thing, the material discussed in chapters 4–6 concerns larger, more public, and in at least one case, less Christian realms. It seems appropriate and instructive, then, to delay those topics and begin our testing with areas that are more focused on and concerned with the life of the Old Testament within the Christian church. Even so, I start with a wide-angle lens—the state of religious literacy among the general US populace—before moving to more specialized analyses of the Old Testament in sermons, hymnody, and the lectionary.
The U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey
In September 2010, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a study on religious literacy in the United States.1 The survey took its inspiration from Stephen Prothero’s 2007 book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t, especially his claim that, while Americans are deeply religious, they are equally and simultaneously profoundly ignorant about religion.2 Prothero cited findings from a number of opinion polls, but in the absence of any nationwide survey, he was forced to rely heavily on anecdotal evidence. As compelling as such anecdotes can be, they are less satisfying than a large-scale empirical analysis. Providing such an analysis was precisely what the Pew Forum set out to do.3
To quote from the survey, the Pew study was designed
to gauge what Americans know about their own faiths and about other religions. The resulting survey covered a wide range of topics, including the beliefs and practices of major religious traditions as well as the role of religion in American history and public life. Based on an analysis of answers from more than 3,400 people to 32 religious knowledge questions, this report attempts to provide a baseline measurement of how much Americans know about religion today.4
At best, the survey provides a baseline because no similar survey had ever been conducted. Without a preexisting study, it is impossible to determine if US religious knowledge has improved or declined. Regardless, the survey, conducted from May 19 through June 6, 2010, was a nationwide poll of 3,412 Americans, aged eighteen and older, executed in both English and Spanish. The following is from the executive summary:
Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.
On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey. . . . Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education.5
Table 1 presents these data, along with those pertaining to the two lowest-scoring groups—Black Protestants and Hispanic Catholics, both of whom scored below the category of people who had no particular religious affiliation.6
Table 1. Summary of Religious Knowledge Survey
| Atheists and Agnostics, Jews and Mormons Score Best on Religious Knowledge Survey | |
| Average number of questions answered correctly out of 32 | |
| Total | 16.0 |
| Atheist/Agnostic | 20.9 |
| Jewish | 20.5 |
| Mormon | 20.3 |
| White evangelical Protestant | 17.6 |
| White Catholic | 16.0 |
| White mainline Protestant | 15.8 |
| Nothing in particular | 15.2 |
| Black Protestant | 13.4 |
| Hispanic Catholic | 11.6 |
| Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, May 19–June 6, 2010 | |
More information can be gleaned the further one digs into the results. So, for example:
On questions about Christianity—including a battery of questions about the Bible—Mormons (7.9 out of 12 right on average) and white evangelical Protestants (7.3 correct on average) show the highest levels of knowledge. Jews and atheists/agnostics stand out for their knowledge of other world religions, including Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism; out of 11 such questions on the survey, Jews answer 7.9 correctly (nearly three better than the national average) and atheists/agnostics answer 7.5 correctly (2.5 better than the national average). Atheists/agnostics and Jews also do particularly well on questions about the role of religion in public life, including a question about what the U.S. Constitution says about religion.7
A few observations should be made about this survey. First, the questions do not strike one as particularly difficult; they are, in the main, rather basic.8 As a result, even high scores by various groups are not especially impressive. It is clear, nevertheless, that both evangelical and mainline Christians score rather poorly, especially vis-à-vis other groups. It is also noteworthy that atheists/agnostics and Mormons score comparatively highly. In the case of the former, one suspects that, at least in the heavily religious United States, being a “nonbeliever” involves a good bit of study or self-education so as to carve one’s position out amid a sea of belief, especially if one is convinced that such belief is largely delusional. In the case of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), the impressive and extensive built-in educational system of that church, especially via institutions of higher education and the training in faith that young Mormons receive when they go on their mandatory missions, probably deserves significant credit for the higher scores.9
Not to be missed is how the survey data correlate (or don’t, as the case may be) with previous work done by the Pew Research Center on levels of religiosity in America. According to the latter, nearly 60% of US Americans indicate that religion is “very important” in their lives, and approximately 40% say they attend worship services at least once a week.10 But there is surely a major disconnect at this point vis-à-vis the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey: despite widespread religious belief, or at least professed belief, the survey reveals significant deficiencies in that professed belief (if not the belief more broadly), at least with regard to basic content, at least some of which reflects important doctrine. So, for example:
More than four-in-ten Catholics in the United States (45%) do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ. About half of Protestants (53%) cannot correctly identify Martin Luther as the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation, which made their religion a separate branch of Christianity.11
A second observation about the survey is that it does not test for fine points of detail or highly nuanced formulations; it sticks resolutely with large topics that should be, presumably, widely known. To be sure, at only thirty-two questions, the survey doesn’t even begin to test for all of the most important things. Conversely, some knowledge that the survey did test for may not be all that important, at least not in terms of the practice of the faith—for example, identifying Luther as the founder of Protestantism.12 Transubstantiation for Catholic theology of the Eucharist would seem to be a very different matter, however! Regardless, the statistics pertaining to knowledge of the Bible and Christianity are shocking:
• Only 55% of the people surveyed know that the Golden Rule is not one of the Ten Commandments.
• Only 45% know that the four Gospels are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
• Only 16% know that “Only Protestants (not Catholics) traditionally teach that salvation comes through faith alone.”13
To put the last item in different terms: slightly more than eight out of ten people do not know why there is a Protestant movement in the first place as opposed to just the Roman Catholic Church alone. Several, if not most, of those eight people might not even know or understand the term “Protestant.” Most disturbing of all: the majority of Protestants themselves don’t know this (81%)!14
The data pertaining to detailed knowledge of the Bible are slightly more positive, but these, too, aren’t much to get excited about (see table 2). Some 71% of the people interviewed knew that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, but the number is lower (63%) with regard to knowing that Genesis is the first book of the Bible. Again, the statistics can be further filleted:
On the full battery of seven questions about the Bible (five Old Testament and two New Testament items), Mormons do best, followed by white evangelical Protestants. Atheists/agnostics, black Protestants, and Jews come next, all exhibiting greater knowledge of the Bible than white mainline Protestants and white Catholics, who in turn outscore those who describe their religion as nothing in particular.15
The authors of the study are thus spot-on when they write that, despite the claim of deep religiosity among US citizens, the poll reveals that “large numbers of Americans are uninformed about the tenets, practices, history, and leading figures of major faith traditions—including their own.”16 As proof of the point, consider two final details: First, while 85% of white evangelicals and Mormons know that Genesis is the first book of the Bible, followed closely by Black Protestants (83%) and atheists/agnostics (71%), less than half of Catholics know this fact (42%), with the specific breakdown comprising 47% of white Catholics and 29% of Hispanic Catholics.17 Second, while 81% of Mormons know that the Golden Rule is not one of the Ten Commandments, only 67% of white evangelicals know this, followed by 63% of Catholics and 62% of Jews and atheists/agnostics. Only 49% of white mainline Protestants and Black Protestants get this question right.
Table 2. Knowledge of the Bible according to the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey
Q39, Q40, Q41, Q46, Q47a–d
Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, May 19–June 6, 2010
Although there are other “hard data” to consider—data pertaining more directly to Christian practices—the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, which is far from anecdotal, is already sufficient to confirm the diagnosis offered in chapter 1. In brief, large swaths of religious people—including, let it be noted, Christians of various ethnic and denominational backgrounds—are quite uninformed if not ill-informed (perhaps mal-formed would be the better term) about even the most rudimentary details of their religion. In linguistic terms, the vast majority of the religious people surveyed are adherents who, presumably and by their own profession, “speak the language of faith,” but who are actually missing huge portions of the most basic vocabulary, syntax, and so forth of their (putative) religious tongue. That sounds like nothing so much as someone who cannot speak the language after all, who is (functionally) illiterate,18 or who at best speaks a severely reduced idiolect—a few words here and there, baby talk perhaps—or, in linguistic terms, someone who can speak only a pidgin language (see chap. 3). To go back to Marcus Borg’s remarks cited in chapter 1, we wouldn’t call someone “French” who wasn’t fluent in French. Why should it be otherwise if the “language” in question is somehow religious?
One final result from the Pew study should be mentioned. According to the report the “single best predictor of religious knowledge” is
educational attainment—how much schooling an individual has completed. . . . College graduates get nearly eight more questions right on average than do people with a high school education or less. Having taken a religion course in college is also strongly associated with higher religious knowledge.19
Lest we think (wrongly) that religious knowledge is solely something gained in a formal classroom, we should note that other factors are also crucial. The survey explicitly mentions
reading Scripture at least once a week and talking about religion with friends and family. People who say they frequently talk about religion with friends and family get an average of roughly two more questions right than those who say they rarely or never discuss religion. People with the highest levels of religious commitment—those who say that they attend worship services at least once a week and that religion is very important in their lives—generally demonstrate higher levels of religious knowledge than those with medium or low religious commitment. Having regularly attended religious education classes or participated in a youth group as a child adds more than two questions to the average number answered correctly, compared with those who seldom or never participated in such activities.20
Seen via the linguistic analogy, this suggests that people who actually speak the language, who spend time practicing it, and who began to learn it at a young age know it better than those who never use it, who never practice speaking it, and who never had instruction in it at formative periods or stages.21 This is completely commonsensical and not surprising in the least. If we are surprised by this result, it is proof not that we are religiously ignorant, but that we’re just plain ignorant.
The information from the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey is troubling, to be sure, but given the situation, especially when viewed via the lens of language learning, it is hard not to spread the blame widely—beyond, that is, the individual religious adherents themselves. If individual believers’ knowledge is suffering, if they can’t speak the language, then at least part of the blame must be laid at the door of the religious systems (and their leaders) to which they belong and to which they adhere (even if only loosely, which is, of course, part of the problem). To be more direct, the failures in religious knowledge reported in the survey appear to reflect massive failures in the religious system(s) in question, especially the educational arm(s) of said system(s), and the leaders responsible for those systems and that education. For Protestant Christianity, that means not only the failure of the “Sunday school” or “Bible study” phenomena (whether for children or adults), but also the failure of the sermon to be an effective tool in disseminating the language that is the Christian faith, not to mention other failures to provide adequate linguistic instruction in the Bible’s—and, more specifically still, the Old Testament’s—contribution to that faith.
Of course, even in low-church traditions of Protestantism, not to mention other Christian traditions, the burden doesn’t lie solely with (1) the sermon but with the worship and liturgy as a whole, which includes matters of (2) music/hymnody and (3) the public reading of Scripture, the latter sometimes (in “higher” churches at least) organized by the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL). In the balance of this chapter, I address each of these three areas in turn, noting a demonstrable lack of the Old Testament in each case. It thus is not improbable and indeed is highly likely that it is the dying (or death) of the Old Testament in sermon, song, and Scripture reading as much as the lack of a college religion class that has led to the dismal results reflected in the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, at least on those matters pertaining to scriptural knowledge.
Given their oral nature, analyzing sermons is a daunting task. By way of comparison, a great deal of Christian education curricula is in print. One could conceivably gather a large amount of that and assess it. For the purpose of the present study, the main question would not be simply whether such studies engage the Old Testament—a little, a lot, or not at all—but also, and equally as important, how they engage the Old Testament, if in fact they do.22
To be sure, a similar procedure is possible for sermons, though the vast majority of sermons aren’t formally published, and this complicates analysis.23 There is, of course, a massive amount of informal publication of sermons on the internet, in both text and multimedia formats. Indeed, there are far too many sermons available in this manner to properly assess, at least en masse. An entrée of some sort is needed.
Happily, there is, or rather there was, a series of books, each titled Best Sermons, that collected—no surprise here—the purported “best sermons” for a particular year. There were actually three such series of best sermons: one in the first half of the twentieth century (4 vols., in 1924–27),24 a second in the middle of the twentieth century (10 vols., in 1944–68),25 and the third toward the end of the twentieth century (7 vols., in 1988–94).26 With very little digging one is able to determine if the “best sermons” in these series are taken from the Old Testament or the New, both, or neither by simply looking to see what biblical text(s), if any, is given at the head of each sermon as the (primary) preached text.
Four comments are in order before presenting my findings from these series: First, the selection process(es) for these series is not always transparent. In the case of the volumes edited by Newton, for instance, there is no indication given as to why these particular sermons and not some others were deemed “the best.” The volumes edited by Butler and Cox are clearer on this point. Butler reports that over 11,000 sermons were submitted for possible inclusion in the first 2 volumes; he selected the winners with the help of an advisory committee, and only 3 of the 104 sermons included in the first 2 volumes were invited.27 In Butler’s tenth and final volume, he indicates that 8,975 clergy submitted sermons for possible inclusion among the 52 sermons published that year. Cox’s volumes operate very differently. For his first volume, 28 sermons were commissioned, and the remaining balance of 24 sermons were selected from a competition of over 2,000 sermons “from around the world.”28 Cox states that the most important criteria for selection were “originality, scriptural and/or Christian basis, relevance, clarity, and interest.”29
Despite the subjectivity involved in the selection process, the size of the submission pool for the Butler and Cox series is not insignificant. That said, even 9,000 submissions in one year is barely the tip of the iceberg, especially since many estimates put the total number of congregations in the United States at over 300,000. If that is accurate, it may be multiplied by 52 sermons a year, yielding a minimal total of 15,600,000 sermons per year (not counting multiple, nonreduplicated sermons whether on Sunday or midweek). So 9,000 submissions is just a drop in the bucket of 15.5+ million sermons per year—0.00058 percent if one does the math.
Second, I must admit that I did not read every one of the 879 sermons in these three series of sermon collections, and so I want to be careful not to misrepresent that fact or the sermons themselves. Several sermons give evidence of having been written for lectionary environments, which typically combine or at least include the public reading of texts from both Testaments. I catalogued these as “combination sermons,” though it may well be the case that just one of the texts from just one of the Testaments was actually the primary or only text focused on in the sermon. Similarly, there can be little doubt that Old Testament texts are occasionally used in some fashion (e.g., allusively or illustratively), even in some of the New Testament–only sermons; and vice versa.
Third, despite the crucial distinction between if present and how present mentioned above, and because I did not read every sermon, I cannot speak definitively as to how the Old Testament was used in (1) the sermons that are taken exclusively from the Old Testament, (2) the sermons that include an Old Testament text(s) with another (or several others) from the New Testament, or (3) the sermons that may have mentioned the Old Testament even if the preached text was taken exclusively from the New Testament (or no text was identified at all). An exploration of the how present question in these sermons would make for a very important and interesting study, but it is not something I do here.30 For my purposes, with the present data set, it is enough to focus on if present. The results, even when considering only this factor, are quite enlightening (though discouraging).
Fourth, the theological inclination of the series and the editors should be kept in mind. Though such inclinations aren’t always clear, the three series generally seem ecumenical, mostly mainline Protestant, with some Catholic participation, and occasionally also appear interfaith insofar as a few of the volumes include sermons by Jewish rabbis.
Table 3 presents a summary of the Best Sermons series data (see further apps. 1–3); note that the items mentioned above suggest a margin of error, though I cannot compute that with precision.
As was the case with the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, one can dig further into these statistics for more insight, and here, no less than there, the results are revealing. Of the total number of sermons (879), published in 21 volumes over a span of 71 years, no less than 432 (49%) are taken from the New Testament (alone), while only 186 (21%) are taken from the Old Testament (alone). This is a rather telling statistic and, from my perspective, quite disturbing. Equally disturbing, however, and proof of a comment made in chapter 1 that the death of the Old Testament is symptomatic of the death of Scripture as a whole, we might notice that no less than 202 of these sermons (23%) provide no biblical text whatsoever.31 Indeed, the no-text sermons outnumber the Old Testament–only sermons!
Table 3. Summary of Best Sermons Series
The news isn’t all bad. There are, after all, a number of sermons—approximately one in five—that are taken from the Old Testament, and a smattering of others (59 sermons, or 7%) at least list one or more Old Testament texts along with one or more New Testament ones. And again, as per my earlier comment, it is likely the case that even the New Testament–only sermons occasionally mention the Old Testament. Still the statistics are overwhelmingly skewed toward the New Testament—49% to 21%, or a ratio of 2.32 New Testament sermons to every Old Testament one; this ratio seems odd when one recalls that the Old Testament constitutes 78.1% of the Protestant Christian canon (in terms of number of chapters) and is even more substantial (81.4%) in Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox canons, since these latter include the apocryphal or deuterocanonical books (see app. 4 and chap. 7). If size were the only consideration, one should expect sermons from the Old Testament to be at least three times as frequent as those from the New Testament.
Of course things are rarely if ever so straightforward. Moreover, it is easy to imagine someone objecting that it is entirely normal if not altogether right (maybe even righteous) to expect Christian preaching to come mostly (if not exclusively) from the New Testament.32 This pernicious idea cannot be fully analyzed and refuted here, though much of what is said in chapters 4–6 and 8–9 bears directly on it. For now, I must content myself with saying that, if the New Testament alone were sufficient to the life of Christian faith, then surely the early church would have jettisoned the Old Testament when it had the chance (see chap. 5). The fact that the early church did not do so, even in the face of invitations to do exactly that, remains one of the most serious problems for any who would be too oriented toward the New Testament alone. At this point it pays to remember that it was no less a Christian and, let it be stressed, no less a Christocentric theologian than Dietrich Bonhoeffer who wrote: “In my opinion it is not Christian to want to take our thoughts and feelings too quickly and too directly from the New Testament.”33
Further insight from the Best Sermons series concerns the specific texts used. What texts from the Old Testament are considered worthy of preaching in the Best Sermons? Table 4 collates the data (see further apps. 1–3).
Once again, the data aren’t all bad, just mostly bad. The majority of the thirty-nine books of the Protestant Old Testament canon are represented at least once, though that isn’t much to celebrate considering the nature of these sermons series, the total number of sermons, the lectionary context of many of the sermons, and so on and so forth.
Table 4 also reveals the favorite go-to Old Testament texts for preachers. Most of this information comes as no surprise. The book of Psalms is by far the most popular (76 hits) with Genesis and Isaiah almost tied for second (29 and 28 hits, respectively), but trailing the Psalter by a considerable margin. The next most popular books are Exodus with 20 hits and Jeremiah with 12. More troubling is the significant number of books that are not represented at all and the books that are seriously underrepresented:
• Three hits: Nehemiah, Ecclesiastes, Daniel—3 books.
• Two hits: Leviticus, 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, Proverbs, Song of Songs, Lamentations, Joel, Habakkuk (and Sirach in the Apocrypha)—8 books; or 9, including the OTA.
• One hit: Judges, Ezra, 1 Chronicles (also Wisdom in the Apocrypha)—3 books; or 4, including the OTA.
• Not represented: Ruth, Esther, Obadiah, Micah, Nahum, Zephaniah, Haggai—7 books; or 24, including what is missing from the OTA.
The non- or underrepresented books total 21 of the 39 books (53.8%) of the Protestant Old Testament; still more for the Old Testament with Apocrypha (40 out of 58 books, or 69%). It bears repeating that only five books break into double digits: Genesis, Exodus, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Psalms.34
Furthermore, the texts preached from the Old Testament are rarely, if ever, off the beaten track. Not only do a disproportionate amount of sermons come from the “big three” books of Psalms, Genesis, and Isaiah, but even these sermons typically come from very well-known and, dare one say, overused texts. Little here is unusual or novel—the vast majority of the preached texts are classics. For example, 11 of the 29 sermons (38%) from Genesis come from the first three chapters; but these chapters together constitute only 6% of the entire book!
This preference for the familiar also holds true even for the few sermons that draw from less popular books: the two sermons from Leviticus, for instance, come from (1) Lev. 16:2–3, the famous chapter about the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur); and (2) Lev. 19:1–2, 15–18, which, in addition to being the only text from Leviticus in the RCL (Seventh Sunday after Epiphany, Year A: Lev. 19:1–2, 9–18), includes the well-known verses about being holy because God is holy (Lev. 19:2, cited in 1 Pet. 1:16 and alluded to in Matt. 5:48) and loving your neighbor as yourself (Lev. 19:18, cited in Matt. 5:43; 19:19; 22:39; Mark 12:31, 33; Luke 10:27; Rom. 12:19; 13:9; Gal. 5:14; and James 2:8).35 Or consider the three sermons from Ecclesiastes, all of which include part of chapter 3, the familiar poem on the times and seasons.36 Or, similarly, there is one sermon from Ps. 137, the infamous imprecatory psalm, which happily dispenses not only with the infamous cursing section itself (vv. 7–9) but even the slightly unpleasant sentiments in vv. 5–6 in order to focus instead on only vv. 1–4!
Table 4. Old Testament Texts Used in the Best Sermons Series
aFour of these texts (Pss. 46:1; 68:5; 9:9; 90:1) come from a single sermon.
One should note, too, that the selected Old Testament texts are often snippets at best, many taken from only one verse or from just a few. Apart from some small psalms (but even these are often selectively used), only a handful of sermons deal with any extended textual unit (note, e.g., the exceptions provided in the sermons on Judg. 17, 18; 1 Sam. 28–31; and the book of Jonah).
Finally, the Old Testament sermons—whether from the Old Testament by itself or in combination with a New Testament text(s), and whether from familiar texts or the few notable exceptions—are often preached by “experts” in the field: biblical scholars who specialize in the Old Testament, professors of homiletics, especially famous preachers, or, the coup de grâce, Jewish rabbis (see apps. 1–3).37 None of these are the average, run-of-the-mill preachers, which suggests that Old Testament preaching, especially of the off-the-beaten-path variety, is probably very rare indeed among “lesser lights.” In my opinion, these considerations effectively offset the unknown margin of error in the sermon analysis that I acknowledged above.
But here one might wish to protest. “Who in their right mind,” someone could ask, “would want to preach on every book of the Old Testament, let alone on all its obscure passages? And furthermore,” the objection could continue, “aren’t famous passages famous for good reason?” The answer to the first question is simple. To return to the linguistic analogy, those who are fluent in Scripture are both able and desirous to preach on every nook and cranny of the Old Testament (or New Testament, for that matter) precisely because they are fluent, and because of that fluency, every bit of the Old Testament (and New) is part of their language and broader linguistic system. It is neither hard nor especially onerous to preach these parts any more than it is hard or onerous to properly conjugate a particularly difficult irregular verb form. Conversely, leaving out any part of the “language” would neglect crucial bits of the grammar and lexicon. Both points are underscored by the fact that so many of the Old Testament sermons in the series are by “experts,” since these individuals are (presumably) the most adept in the full language of Scripture. This answer to the first possible objection can be further strengthened by appealing to the great writers and theologians in the history of Christianity, many of whom made it a practice to preach regularly and seriatim through the Old Testament books.38 Augustine’s and Calvin’s treatments of the Psalms come immediately to mind, but so does Luther’s extensive work on Old Testament texts (he was, after all, a Bible professor for much of his career). Perhaps the most famous example is Bernard of Clairvaux’s (1090–1153) series of eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs, in which he progressed only as far as the first verse of chapter 3!39 Nearer to our own time, one might consider the sermons of the prolific Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, which differ markedly from the Best Sermons series.40 Only 10.4% of Brueggemann’s sermon corpus is composed of New Testament–only sermons. Somewhat surprisingly, Old Testament–only sermons constitute still less, only 5.9%. The vast majority (83.5%) are sermons drawn from both Old and New Testament texts. That is largely because Brueggemann is a lectionary preacher.41 But once again, the how present question is important. Even in his combined sermons, Brueggemann often pays extensive, if not exclusive, attention to the Old Testament text(s). That said, he is well known for his penchant and ability to make connections between many texts, including texts that span the Testaments. Another important observation: Brueggemann, too, does not preach on every book of the Old Testament, but for every book he does preach from, his corpus outperforms the other three sermons series combined, despite the fact that his corpus is 6.5 times smaller than the total number of sermons collected in those other series.42
To put matters more theologically and less linguistically, the answer to the first objection regarding who would want to preach (the entirety of) the Old Testament is simply this: those for whom the whole of the material is canonical, which means those for whom the material functions as authoritative Scripture. If we desire yet more proof of the point, we might observe that no less than 11 of the 186 Old Testament–only sermons in the Best Sermons series are by rabbis, and that the only sermons on texts from the Apocrypha come from Catholic priests (for whom these books are not “apocryphal” at all!).43
Answering the second objection (Aren’t famous passages famous for good reason?) is simple too: Of course such texts are famous for good reason, or for several good reasons, though we do well to remember that the popularity of various texts tends to wax and wane throughout history, and so the reason(s) for a text’s popularity are hardly self-evident, essential, or eternal.44 More to the point, however, is the crucial observation that there is a downside to fame. That downside is simply that many people will end up knowing only these texts and not others—though some of those others may be (and truly are) just as important and significant as “the highlights.” So, for example, Gen. 1–3 is certainly an important section of Scripture, but what of Abraham, circumcision, Sarah and Hagar, Isaac and Ishmael? And this is only to mention the neglected parts of Genesis from the Best Sermons series that appear in Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians!
The point should be clear: the fame of a few passages comes at a high price. In terms of the linguistic analogy, when people know only a few phrases of a language, it is proof of significant language loss and lack of fluency. So, as will be demonstrated more fully in chapter 3, knowing only bits, even if these bits are “the hits,” suggests that the speaker’s language facility is on the wane and that the language itself is endangered.45 Here is yet more proof that a dark cloud surrounds the very thin silver lining of a few “Old Testament highlights.” And in this case, the dark cloud is definitely a “cloud of unknowing,” though of the worst kind (apologies to Pseudo-Dionysius and his medieval interpreter). What is unknown is the vast majority of the vast majority of the Christian Bible.
The Psalms in Mainline Hymnody
In moving from the sermons that are preached in worship to the hymns that are sung there, the work of W. Sibley Towner is instructive. In 2003, Towner wrote a quasi-empirical study of five mainline hymnals published since 1985 and how they treat the Psalms in approximately 211 “psalm-hymns” and paraphrases.46
Towner’s thesis is not particularly controversial: “The Psalter sung in paraphrase and hymn is both selective and interpretive.” Where things start to get interesting is when Towner claims, “In its overall scope as well as in its re-presentation of individual psalms it offers theological communications somewhat at variance with the biblical psalms themselves.”47 He demonstrates this variance by noting how the psalm-hymns sometimes
redirect or subvert their sources’ original intentions; sometimes they distort them altogether. This is true even of the paraphrases, though they attempt to reproduce the original more faithfully than the . . . freely-composed hymns. The truth is, we have in the hymnal a second canon of accepted teaching, less authoritative than the canon of Scripture to be sure . . . but widely accepted, meaningful, and useful in the theological enterprise of the church.48
While none of this is particularly surprising, the situation is nevertheless potentially problematic. “What shall we say,” Towner asks, “if the time-honored and vital theological medium of hymnody turns out to be conveying messages somewhat at variance with the very texts of Scripture that it purports to transmit?”49 Towner’s ultimate conclusion is that the variation is acceptable as long as no one claims (or thinks) that the two—the Scripture and the song—are identical.50 But that is precisely the rub, since the ability to differentiate the two is predicated on adequate knowledge (linguistic competence, as it were) of the original, scriptural Psalter. Lacking that, one could easily think that the song one just sang that depends on, say, Ps. 46, is in fact the same as Ps. 46.
As just noted, Towner’s analysis highlights two important aspects of contemporary hymnody’s use of the Psalms. The first concerns selectivity. Towner focuses on (1) which psalmic genres “resonate more vigorously with the contemporary singing church,” and (2) which individual psalms “emerge as most meaningful to the contemporary believing community, judged by the number of different settings for each one.”51 He answers the genre question statistically. Table 5 reveals “where the preponderance of hymnic interpretation lies, and thus the functional psalter of today’s worshiping Christian community.”52
What is perhaps most striking about this “functional psalter” is what is absent from it. A lot: “64 of the 150 psalms (43%) have no cognate hymns at all.”53 What is present in the functional psalter is thus akin to a canon within the canon. And what is the message of this smaller, highly selective canon? Towner puts it memorably in the words of the wicked witch Evillene from the 1974 Broadway musical The Wiz: “Don’t nobody bring me no bad news!” “Clearly,” Towner writes, “contemporary mainstream American Protestants want to praise God when they sing in worship, not to complain and lament.”54
It is hymnic selectivity, and no other factor, that has produced this functional psalter with its correlate “good news” message. The Hymns of Praise and Songs of Trust that are found in the book of Psalms are no more “lyrical, singable, and communal than . . . the much more numerous Individual Laments,” Towner asserts. These laments, too, were evidently “sung in Second Temple worship from the very beginning.”55 In point of fact, “their preponderance in the Psalter and their connection with intercessory prayer, sacrificial offerings, and healing suggest that worship and chant in biblical times may have been substantially devoted to lament and intercession.” Hence the contemporary liturgical move away from lament is not supported or recommended by the biblical material itself, as if “lament was meant only to be a prayer whispered in private.” No, the modern taste for psalms of praise and trust “surely . . . has something to do with the spirit of our times.”56
The second important aspect has to do with the interpretive nature of the lyrics in the hymns and how those relate to the canonical psalms. Towner finds the interpretation offered in the songs to be frequently moralizing, sacramentalizing, and Christianizing—such as transforming Ps. 23 into a text about humans not forsaking God’s ways or about the eucharistic table or about Christ the Good Shepherd.57 By means of very small changes, as minute as the introduction of a conditional clause or an adjectival qualifier, a biblical psalm can become something strikingly new and altogether different. But not all interpretations are dramatically different. Towner points out that Jane Parker Huber’s 1988 composition “The Lord’s My Shepherd” avoids the theme of eternal life (which many scholars believe to be absent from Ps. 23 itself)58 and also “neither moralizes, sacramentalizes, nor Christianizes the psalm.” Huber’s song demonstrates that “a hymnic re-presentation . . . can clarify and vivify without abandoning the canonical communication.”59
Table 5. Hymns according to Psalm Genre
| Psalm genre | No. of biblical psalms (total = 150) | No. of hymns (total = 211) | Average hymns/psalm | Psalms with highest number of hymns (total number) |
| Individual lament (including penitential psalms) | 45 | 33 | 0.73 | 130 (6), 51 (5) |
| Hymn (not including songs of Zion and enthronement hymns; see below) | 22 | 70 | 3.18 | 103 (12), 148 (10), 150 (10) |
| Communal lament | 16 | 10 | 0.63 | 90 (5), 89 (3) |
| Individual thanksgiving | 11 | 15 | 1.36 | 118 (5) |
| Royal psalm | 9 | 7 | 0.78 | 72 (6) |
| Instruction (wisdom) | 9 | 13 | 1.44 | 1, 91, 119, 139 (3 each) |
| Song of trust | 8 | 21 | 2.6 | 23 (12), 121 (4) |
| Prophetic oracle of judgment | 7 | 3 | 0.33 | 95 (3) |
| Song of Zion | 6 | 12 | 2.0 | 46 (5), 84 (4) |
| Enthronement hymn | 5 | 7 | 1.4 | 96 (3) |
| Blessing | 3 | 4 | 1.33 | 133 (2) |
| Communal thanksgiving | 3 | 4 | 1.33 | 67 (3) |
| Historical psalm | 3 | 2 | 0.67 | 105 (2) |
| Liturgy | 3 | 10 | 3.33 | 24 (7) |
And yet, while it is clearly possible to write a hymn that is “close(r)” to the original, what is wrong with a more (heavily) interpretive composition? On the one hand, the answer seems to be nothing per se; interpretation is simply a part of the deal. We are dealing with an English song, after all, not the original Hebrew psalm—and that means that translation, a major interpretive activity, is already part of the process.60 Moreover, it is virtually automatic, if not axiomatic, that secondary treatments tend to expand on their primary sources. Scripture itself does the same.61 But while everything may well be interpretation—hermeneutics all the way down, so to speak—we should also acknowledge that not everything is good interpretation. To cite the literary critic Wayne C. Booth, “There are an unlimited number of valid ways to interpret or evaluate any fiction, any historical event or historical account of events, any philosophy, any critical work. And there are even more ways to get it wrong.”62 This, then, is the “on the other hand”: yes, interpretation is to be expected and to some degree is “innocent” as an automatic exercise, but we also see that many songs have a way—indeed, songs are a way—of codifying and transmitting poor interpretations (not all of them “innocent”!) for centuries, perhaps because of their ability to ingrain their lyrical interpretations in our brains via their musicality (see further chaps. 8–9).
The title of Towner’s study drives this point home. It is taken from a line in William Kethe’s hymn “All People That on Earth Do Dwell” (1560), which is a re-presentation of Ps. 100.63 The pertinent stanza reads as follows:
Know that the Lord is God indeed;
Without our aid He did us make;
We are His folk, he doth us feed,
And for his sheep He doth us take.
The second line, “Without our aid He did us make,” reflects a particular understanding of a crux in the underlying Hebrew text of Ps. 100. The present text that is written (ketiv) has the negative particle לא/lōʾ (“not”), but at some point in the Masoretic tradition, scribes indicated that this was incorrect and the word should be read aloud (qere) as לו/lô (“his”). The qere seems to make better sense and is reflected in most contemporary translations (the crux is italicized):
he made us; we belong to him.
We are his people,
the sheep of his own pasture. (Ps. 100:3 CEB)
“Without our aid he did us make” appears rather nonsensical—in both Hebrew and English, despite the fact that it is reflected in the KJV (“It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves”) and in Kethe’s hymn (which predates the KJV by more than fifty years).64 Indeed, most scholars now believe that “without our aid/not we ourselves” is mistaken, a mistake that has been perpetuated for centuries by public singing in countless congregations.65 Kethe’s hymn has probably done as much to perpetuate the flawed understanding as the KJV itself has.
Towner deems it somewhat ironic that across the ages most singers “probably failed to notice that they were singing nonsense . . . or else . . . thought the psalm and its paraphrase were driving home the point that the Creator’s powers are infinitely superior to our own.”66 When the matter is put this way, the flaw in question (if it is one) seems rather minor. What’s wrong with singing about the Creator’s powers being superior to our own? Surely there is no doctrinal error here; the theology seems quite solid on several levels—even if it be a case of the right doctrine from the wrong text. But it is not just the wrong text; it is also the wrong text wrongly understood. So Towner: “Are we content that one of the most beloved of all church songs should perpetuate a textual error?”67 If we are not, even in so “benign” a case as Kethe’s re-presentation of Ps. 100, then what should we say of less benign cases such as Martin Luther’s hymn “Out of the Depths” (1524), which is based on Ps. 130? According to Towner, the second stanza of Luther’s hymn makes the psalm
a precursor of the Pauline, and quintessentially Lutheran, doctrine of justification by faith alone. Is this really the direction in which the psalm is going: “Our works, alas! are all in vain”? The psalm does not address itself to “our works,” nor does it develop the faith vs. works antithesis.68
But once again: What’s so bad here? Surely no Protestant would want to call Luther’s hymnic theology the opposite of “benign” and thus malicious. (Then again, in light of the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, the Protestant in question may not even know who Luther was or what he stood for!) Be that as it may, the issue at hand concerns differences between an original psalmic composition and its later hymnic version, especially if the differences are large and the stakes high. When does the hymn no longer reflect the underlying psalm at all but present a new composition altogether—one that is, despite the advertising (clearly false, in this case), no longer “based on” (or at least not solely based on) the original? Using linguistic terminology, when is the hymn no longer a dialect but something further removed than that? When is it something distinct—a different language altogether, perhaps made through language contact or the processes of pidginization or creolization (see chap. 3)? Answering these questions is difficult.69
Throughout this discussion, one shouldn’t forget the crucial role corporate singing plays in Christian (esp. Protestant) worship. Indeed, singing seems to be more important than ever, even and especially in low-church traditions, and this exacerbates the problems Towner has identified by, on the one hand, valuing sung texts far more than, and to the elimination of, other liturgical aspects (such as the public reading of Scripture); and by, on the other hand, the singing of songs that are lyrically stripped down and/or not much interested in the biblical material but only an inspiring line or thought therein—if such songs are not, in fact, completely disinterested in or uninspired by Scripture altogether. This last-mentioned concern applies to some, though certainly not all, contemporary Christian music, which is more popular than ever—not only in the marketplace, but also in free-church traditions, which tend to sing these sorts of songs instead of traditional hymns. Then, too, we must reckon not only with what is sung (in terms of underlying biblical genre/text and hymnic lyric) and how it is sung, but also with what is not sung, which is as important for the question of hymnody as it was earlier with reference to the Best Sermons. Which texts are overrepresented and which underrepresented or absent altogether—and to what effect?
At this point the problem of selectivity, favoring certain psalm types over others, could be rephrased as the problem of neglect: the massive overlooking of a particular psalm type—namely, the laments. Bad news, as Towner has shown, doesn’t make the cut for the canon within the canon of the functional, sung psalter. Lest someone object here that everyone has a canon within the canon, whether they admit it or not, I only echo the earlier point from Booth: even if that is so, not every “minicanon” is equally good, and countless ones are really bad and even worse. Towner concurs and puts his finger on the very real problems created when selectivity becomes neglect:
Our sung psalters do not offer us a range of concept and emotion as wide as that of the biblical Psalter. Except for denominations committed to singing every psalm in chant, paraphrase, or hymn, contemporary hymnists and hymnals prefer to celebrate God as creator and thank God as liberator rather than to lament to the God who listens. To this end, they more often take as their texts the canonical Hymns and Psalms of Trust. Yet, perhaps this is to be expected—singing about sin and suffering sounds like an oxymoron, especially in the communal context of a congregation. [But] perhaps this selection also says something about the theological climate in the mainstream churches in recent decades. Put in commercial terms, in the competitive denominational marketplace of the twenty-first century, somber doesn’t sell. We prefer to sin and repent, lament and die in silent privacy.70
There can be little doubt that individuals have preferences and tastes. The same is true for corporate “persons”—communal bodies like institutions, denominations, congregations. But at what price does the preference to “sin and repent, lament and die in silent privacy” come? At the very least it seems that we must agree with Towner: “A persistent preference for praise in psalm-singing impoverishes the emotional range of worship, depriving worshipers of access to a source of hope that grows out of suffering.”71 The “praise-preference” impoverishes at this point, allowing no hope, because, in the Psalms, a (if not the) primary way to get to hope is precisely through (never around) lament. One only knows hope, that is—especially the hope that grows out of suffering—if one knows the full Psalter, which is to say if one can “speak Psalms,” and do so fluently, not haltingly or with a heavy lisp of praise. But that full knowledge of and full fluency in the Psalms is precisely what the preference for praise opts out of.
The linguistic reduction at work in hymnic selectivity-turned-neglect is thus of dread importance. The problem of the Psalms’ presence (or absence) in contemporary hymnody is not, therefore, simply a matter of well-meaning but mostly harmless Christianization of ancient Hebrew texts that predate Christ as well as our smartphones and praise bands. Transformation and updating are surely inevitable, even laudable in some instances, if it “stays within recognizable parameters.”72 According to Towner, such recognition depends on maintaining “the distinction between what is canonical, quasi-canonical, and ephemeral.”73 He reserves Scripture for the canonical category, believing preaching to be ephemeral and deeming liturgy and hymnody quasi-canonical, though that could be inaccurate for low-church traditions where preaching, too, is quasi-canonical (if not more than that) and where liturgy is often, at best, implicit.
Regardless, Towner is spot on that
people learn their hymns by heart in church and then draw on them in prison camps and hospitals, while driving in the car and lying in bed, for guidance and consolation in daily lives. Well and good, and may the tradition continue and grow, as new outbursts of hymnody enrich the life of the church! The only question is: How do we know when the float has gone too far?74
Once again, answering this last question is not easy: it is akin to the question of determining when a dialect has become a new language. To anticipate some of what will be said in chapters 3–6, however, it seems that things have gone too far if we no longer know the original (psalm or language) in all its complexity, nuance, and, yes, difficulty. If it’s all good news, all the time, then it’s probably not real news, nor biblical news—not, at least, from the Psalms. The float (drift) at this point has indeed gone too far. It is now a new language, a different “psalm”—no longer “the LORD’s song” (cf. Ps. 137:4)—and thus no longer a dialect belonging to the language of faith.75
Viewing Towner’s study through the linguistic analogy that the Old Testament is (like) a language means that a great deal is at stake in the use of the Psalms in contemporary hymnody. It is not solely a matter of exegetical niceties, truth in advertising, and so forth, but a matter of linguistic capacity, competence, and dexterity: the ability to speak the (full) language or not. In the case of the Psalms, it is one thing to ask “How can we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land?” (Ps. 137:4 NASB). It is quite another thing to ask “How can we sing the LORD’s song at all, especially if (or in light of the fact that) we no longer even know that the LORD has a song, let alone more than one type?”
Ominous evidence of this very possibility may be found in several contemporary Christian music recordings. As one example, consider “Who Am I?” by the singing group Point of Grace, which contains the following lines:
Who am I
To give you anything but praise?76
The song is not a psalmic re-presentation like Kethe’s hymn, but I deem the lyric altogether analogous to “Without our aid He did us make.” Yes, it is powerful and evocative theology; it also gives rise to an intriguing and not altogether erroneous by-product (or by-interpretation)—namely, a grand vision of God that cannot help but eventuate in human praise. And yet, in and by itself, the line is profoundly ignorant of the biblical witness, especially and specifically the Psalms, because it is precisely there, perhaps more than anywhere else, that the human being offers God far more than praise, a good bit of which is about as far from praise as possible,77 all of which, however, is somehow sanctioned and allowed for and heard by the God who listens. Let it be underscored that this sanction and authorization is realized
• canonically, by the inclusion of the book of Psalms in the canon of Holy Scripture;
• pedagogically, given the psalms’ connection to Torah, especially as instruction in prayer, which is to say that we should pray like the psalmists pray, not just that we are permitted to do so;78
• and finally vis-à-vis the dynamics of the psalms themselves, which often include the psalmist’s testimony that God has heard the prayers—a testimony supported by other texts as well (e.g., 1 Sam. 1).
But all that is lost in a single, catchy line on the radio or stereo or music player: “Who am I / To give you anything but praise?” The loss is profound and carries serious consequences—personally, publicly, even politically79—especially if the song becomes as theologically authoritative (or more theologically authoritative) to a listener as the Psalms themselves. Kethe’s version of Ps. 100 shows that such a scenario is entirely possible, to which I’ll add a personal testimony: I am not the first to find myself battling uphill in some teaching context, trying to convince people that grief and disappointment with God are legitimate emotions and part of the life of faith. These people, too, seem to be convinced that they are “nobodies” who cannot and must not offer God anything but praise, even if they didn’t learn that on the radio from a contemporary Christian music song.80
To sum up, the (non)use of the Psalms in contemporary hymnody represents a death of sorts. The death of the “little Bible” (Martin Luther’s term for the Psalter) is a microcosm of the dying of the whole Old Testament. When the full language of the Psalms is no longer spoken, or in this case sung, large and rich parts of the wider linguistic system die too.81 In this, the second test of our patient, the use of the Psalms in contemporary hymnody not only showcases the morbidity of the Old Testament; it also highlights in a powerful way how much is riding on its survival.82
The Revised Common Lectionary (and the Psalms)
The picture painted so far is not pretty. Then again, perhaps one shouldn’t expect too much from the general populace in terms of knowledge of the Bible generally or the Old Testament specifically (as per the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey). Preachers, one would hope, should know better on both scores, with their sermons reflecting as much, but the data from the Best Sermons were equivocal at best. Moreover, even if Towner is right about the ephemeral nature of preaching, the treatment of the psalms in quasi-canonical hymnody evinces the same problem besetting the other data sets: loss of basic linguistic competence, not to mention full fluency, in the language that is the Old Testament. When viewed through the linguistic analogy, the loss of lexical items, accompanied by large-scale reductions in nuance and massive simplification of grammar and syntax, sounds like nothing so much as (re)pidginization, which is something that happens to languages that are about to die (see chap. 3). As if all that wasn’t bad enough, and as yet further proof that my diagnosis regarding the Old Testament’s death is accurate, there is one last preliminary test to run on the patient: the public reading of the Bible via the lectionary, which, as part of the liturgy, is another “quasi-canonical” source, to continue with Towner’s categories.
By now it should come as no surprise that the trends identified above are also to be found in the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL). The RCL is a useful tool that, in a generous, best-case scenario assessment, is designed to expose a congregation to an extensive and representative sample of the entire Bible across a three-year cycle. The RCL depends on previous lectionaries, including daily lectionaries that, if followed, have a user read the entirety of the Bible (or nearly so) in the course of three years, sometimes less. There are also more specialized lectionaries that lead readers through the entire Psalter in a month, the whole Torah in a year, and so on and so forth, but for present purposes a focus on the RCL is in order since it is the primary lectionary used by many Christian groups, including the Episcopal Church in the United States of America, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Reformed Church in America, the United Church of Christ, and the United Methodist Church, to name a few.83 The RCL is also widely used elsewhere in the world, including in Canada, Great Britain, South Africa, Korea, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand.84 This explains the “Common” part of the RCL title, and indeed, use of the RCL (or something quite like it) has been a notable point of ecumenical cooperation in the past few decades.85 The RCL also enjoys a large support apparatus, which includes everything from studies of its structure, meaning, and significance to a host of exegetical collections focused on the various lections themselves.86
The RCL includes four biblical texts for each Sunday—an Old Testament lesson, a psalm or hymnic responsorial, a Gospel lesson, and an epistle lesson. There is a certain balance to these four—two Old Testament lessons and two New Testament lessons—and that is a good thing, but things aren’t quite as balanced as they might seem on first blush. For one thing, the second lesson, frequently sung liturgically as a response to the first lesson, is often omitted, such that the first New Testament reading (the third in the RCL) becomes the second reading, with the RCL’s second New Testament reading (technically the fourth lection) becoming the third.87 In this process the previous 2-to-2 balance between Old and New Testaments is skewed to become 1-to-2. The reasons for the omission of the psalmic/hymnic lesson are several, but it is usually due to a lack of liturgical support—no choir to sing the response, for example. According to some, the hymnic responsorials are more a matter of prayer than of preaching anyway.88 Such a judgment may be correct, and the prayerful use of the psalms is certainly traditional and justifiable, but at the same time such a determination leaves the didactic aspects of the psalmic material at best implicit or inductive (via modeling and practice) rather than explicit and expositional,89 especially if Bartlett is right that, in the construction of the RCL, “no particular attention [was] paid to the way in which their content may relate to the content of the Gospel texts.”90
A second way things aren’t as balanced as they seem is that, beginning with Easter Sunday and running through Pentecost, the (first) Old Testament lesson gets dropped altogether, being replaced by a lesson from Acts. The Old Testament lesson only returns eight weeks later, on the first Sunday after Pentecost (Trinity Sunday). A third way things are imbalanced is that, even in churches that use the RCL, typically not all the lessons will be read; neither will all serve as the preached text(s). We saw earlier that the Best Sermons series of the twentieth century were inordinately weighted toward the New Testament, and so it seems safe to assume that the Old Testament is getting short shrift, even in RCL-based churches.91
Since this last point is just a supposition—though a fairly reasonable one in light of the other data considered in this chapter—perhaps we should give the RCL the benefit of the doubt and instead assume the best about its intentions regarding the Old Testament in Christian liturgical practice. The problem is that even when we assume the best, it is still readily apparent that the RCL is far from foolproof and manifests some significant problems vis-à-vis the full language that is the Old Testament (and thus the full language that is Christian Scripture). One way to analyze these problems is to see them as further symptoms of the death of the Old Testament. Yet another way to think about the matter is to wonder if it is not precisely the flaws in liturgical instruments like the RCL (as well as the flaws in sermons and hymnody) that are contributing directly to the demise of our patient.
A thorough analysis of the Old Testament throughout the RCL would no doubt yield significant findings.92 It must suffice here to provide an entrée into that larger issue by looking at the use of the Psalms in the RCL; this has the advantage of a more manageable focus but also can serve as a kind of check on Towner’s study of the Psalms in hymnody. I have done this work elsewhere and simply cite my conclusions here:
As helpful as the lectionary is in the task of preaching the Psalms, it is not foolproof. Simply put, the lectionary omits much that the Psalter deems precious. Fifty-one psalms—more than a third of the Psalter—do not appear in the lectionary.93 While Holladay is correct that “[t]he range of psalms in this [the Common] lectionary is impressive: much of the riches of the Psalter becomes available to the alert listener,” it is nevertheless a real concern that so much of the Psalter is missing. The problem of missing psalms is exacerbated in two ways: first, even the ninety-nine psalms that do appear in the lectionary are not all intact; some forty-three of these are excerpted.94 While this excerption is sometimes for reasons of space and (liturgical) time, it must be admitted that at other points it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this excerption reflects theological censorship, which is the second worsening of the situation.
Holladay’s careful study of the Roman Catholic Liturgy of the Hours and the Common Lectionary has demonstrated that the omitted psalms and/or omitted parts of psalms are either laments or imprecations (curses) contained within psalms (esp. laments). Certainly lectionaries are constantly being revised, and Holladay notes a distinct improvement in the Common Lectionary over the Liturgy of the Hours when it comes to the Psalms. That progressive trend is also found in the Revised Common Lectionary. One notes, for example, that Ps. 137:7–9 is omitted in the Liturgy of the Hours but is given in full in the Revised Common Lectionary (though, admittedly, as an optional text). It is clear, regardless, that lament is typically underrepresented in the lectionaries and that lectionaries have a tendency to omit “some, if not all, of the harsh language regarding enemies.” As Holladay has ominously put it, there is a “constant tendency” in the church “to bypass materials with a negative import.” Now it must certainly be admitted that the psalms of divine wrath that often include vicious cursing of the enemies of God (and of the psalmist) are among the Bible’s most difficult texts. But even these texts are not without merit, nor are they bereft of spiritual help. . . . The point . . . is that censorship of lament (or imprecation) simply won’t do: the stakes are too high and the results truly deleterious. Such censorship neglects a significant portion of the real life and real faith of the psalmists. And it neglects a significant portion of the real life of those who pray (or should be praying) the Psalms now and their real struggle to correlate their lives with something approaching reality and the real faith of the Psalms. In brief, if the Psalms are censored, one will not get the full anatomy of the soul, but something far less, partial, and grotesque—perhaps even hideous, like a skeleton: strangely attractive in its whitewashed articulations but utterly devoid of the parts that make a human being alive.95
The main problem facing the Psalms in the RCL is the same as one of the main problems facing the Psalms in hymnody—namely, selectivity. In the case of the RCL, this selectivity is not accompanied by overt interpretation—no paraphrases or re-presentation as with contemporary hymnody—but the RCL’s selectivity nevertheless contains within itself a correlate “interpretivity,” an implicit curriculum, as it were, which explains and justifies the selection process (even if these explanations and justifications have to be “reverse engineered” since they are not explicit).96 It seems both natural and reasonable that readers would deduce that what is lacking from the RCL is simply less important—and that holds true not only for the psalms omitted from the Psalter but also for the entire books (!) of the Old Testament that are omitted from the RCL altogether (7 out of 39 books, or 18%),97 as well as for those Old Testament books that are severely underrepresented (13 books, or 33%, are found only once in the three-year Sunday cycle).98 Moreover, it seems quite likely that, for many Christians, what is lacking from Sunday’s readings (and from sermons and hymns) will go unknown, precisely because it is unheard and unread. Here too someone might argue that such a situation isn’t all bad. Maybe it’s even better than that: maybe it’s “quite good” or at least “good enough.” Some Old Testament is better than none, after all. Furthermore, there were presumably good reasons for the selectivity of the RCL in the first place. Maybe, then, what is not represented in the RCL isn’t known because it ought not be known. Perhaps it is dangerous in some way, or off-putting and offensive, maybe even non-Christian. That could well be the message, intended or otherwise, of the RCL’s selectivity; that could be the effect of its “censorship,” unintended or otherwise.
I’ve clearly moved from giving the RCL the benefit of the doubt to treating it in the worst-case scenario. Surely that isn’t entirely fair—at least not with regard to the original purpose of the RCL and its crafters. But this skeptical assessment may not be too far off target when it comes to the reception of the RCL; and from where we stand in the twenty-first century, long after the New Criticism, Poststructuralism, and Reader Response approaches, we should be prepared to reckon as seriously with a work’s reception and interpretation as we reckon with its presumed “original intent.” Part of that reception/interpretation is the effect produced by the (original) design. So, whatever the original (best) intent of the RCL, its selectivity or censorship is more than obvious. And that selectivity comes with significant interpretive baggage, which is to say, it comes at a high price.
Not all the news on the lectionary front is bad, however, and even the points that are problematic are not without some balance. So, for example, many agree that the RCL selects Old Testament lections on the basis of “a kind of typological relationship to the NT text; that is, for Christians the OT text can be read in conversation with the Gospel text, either as a kind of foreshadowing or as a promise whose fulfillment is found in the Gospels.”99 That is good as far as it goes, though in my judgment that isn’t nearly far enough (see chap. 9), and those responsible for the RCL concur. According to Bartlett,
Those who designed the Revised Common Lectionary were concerned that the typological constraint limited both the range and meaning of OT texts that could be read. Therefore in the season from Pentecost to Advent (so-called “Ordinary Time”) the Revised Common Lectionary is more apt to go through one OT book at a time, in a kind of continuous reading.100
But, since not everyone likes lectio continua—or attends church during Ordinary Time101—one should observe that alternative Old Testament readings between Pentecost and Advent are given for “those churches that want to maintain the close thematic connection between OT and Gospel texts.”102 Happily, the opposite is also true. The Feasting on the Word series originally neglected the Old Testament readings from Ordinary Time that are more sequentially based, but due to popular demand, the publisher decided to add treatments of these lections as well.103
To summarize: the RCL is more balanced than what we saw in the Best Sermons series and in contemporary hymnody, but the results are still rather mixed. On the one hand,
the use of the lectionary can broaden the range of texts that the preacher preaches and the congregation hears. The lectionary provides a protection against the tendency of preachers to recycle favorite texts and favorite themes week after week and helps to ensure that, for instance, justice and mercy will be balanced not only among the attributes of God but [also] among the sermons preached to honor God.104
In this way, by using the RCL, Christians gather around a common table and a common set of texts.
Yet, on the other hand, the problem remains that this common table of texts offers a greatly reduced menu. As Bartlett notes, “The decision about which verses to include and which to omit from a particular pericope sometimes seems arbitrary and oddly anti-canonical.”105 So, while the RCL protects against some problems—the penchant to produce an even more reduced selection of pet texts, an imbalanced understanding of divine attributes, and so forth—it nevertheless introduces others. Perhaps the most important point to make here is that the introduction of (new) problems directly and adversely affects the avoidance of other problems. The prophylactic that is afforded by the “fuller” (or more truthfully, “less reduced”) complement of texts from the RCL would presumably be even more effective if the selection of texts was yet fuller still—which is to say, if it comprised the whole language of Scripture. Thus the RCL would be better if it contained no excerption or selectivity at all.106 Of course, at that point the RCL would no longer be the RCL—at least not in its present form. It would simply be the entire Bible.
In his excellent book on the lectionary, Fritz West has argued that the three-year lectionary cycle uses the memory of the church to interpret the Bible and uses the Bible to structure the memory of the church.107 West’s argument is another “best-case scenario” and a generous reading of the lectionary. The proof, however, is always in the pudding, and it is quite telling to correlate this fourth and final test involving the RCL with the first test about the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey. Historically, it has been the Roman Catholic Church, more than Bible-centered Protestant congregations, that has employed lectionaries for worship, liturgy, and preaching. In the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, however, Catholic groups often scored very poorly in terms of Bible knowledge (see above, esp. tables 1–2). Somewhere along the way, it seems, the Bible is failing to structure the memory of the church—perhaps because the lectionary simply isn’t cut out for the job.108 The memory of the church, in turn, is failing, which means that it has precious little to go on in terms of interpreting the Bible (to complete West’s feedback loop). And it isn’t just the church’s memory. It is also the church’s language, if only because so much memory is encoded in language and correlate linguistic systems.109
The preliminary tests of our patient are now complete, and the results are not encouraging for the following areas of concern:
1. how well the Old Testament (or parts of it) is known and how broadly;
2. how often and how much of it is present in the very “best” of sermons;
3. how much and what parts of it (including what is often touted as its “dearest part,” the Psalms) are reflected in musical worship; and
4. how much and what parts of it are present in the liturgical instrument that is the RCL.
Thus our patient shows serious signs of morbidity. The Old Testament is very, very sick. Indeed, as I said from the outset, my own diagnosis puts matters much more strongly: the Old Testament is dying. The four “tests” presented above are proof of the point. Even more troubling, the last three tests not only showcase symptoms of the disease; they may actually reveal contributing factors to the patient’s demise. The first test clearly demonstrated that a language must be practiced in order to thrive; the last three tests, which in principle revealed distinct opportunities for such linguistic practice, fail definitively at exactly this point.
To spell this out further: the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey reveals that the most knowledgeable individuals spent time “speaking the language,” as it were, practicing that language in various ways, listening to it, learning it, and so on and so forth—and they typically did this from a young age, as children, or at a formative period in life, as college students taking a religion course. Sermons, hymns, and the lectionary—which together form a significant percentage of regular Christian worship, even in low-church traditions—are, analogically, primary opportunities where Christians speak (or don’t speak), practice (or don’t practice), hear (or don’t hear), and learn (or don’t learn) the language of Scripture. These are also where Christians do these things (or don’t do them), or at least can do them, from young ages (if they were exposed to such as children) or at formative periods (via worship at its best).110 Sermons, hymns, and lectionary thus constitute a major part of the Christian “educational curricula,” even without the formal instruction that the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey suggests is so crucial. (If such education is crucial for the very small and minimal base of knowledge tested by that survey, how much more for full linguistic fluency!) But running the last three tests after the first one reveals serious problems with this language training. The educational system is failing, not in terms of available material—the Old Testament is there, after all, at least for now (but see chaps. 4–7)—but in terms of practice. Indeed, the cold hard fact is that, thanks to large swaths of sermons, hymns, and liturgy, Christians are learning precisely how not to speak the language, practice the language, hear the language, or learn the language that is the Old Testament, whatever their age—from smallest tyke to octogenarian and everything between and beyond. The Old Testament is dying, and it seems that the Christian practices of sermon, song, and lectionary are at least partly to blame.
Additional testing is in order, especially if we are to gain some access on how best to treat the patient, if it isn’t already too late. But before proceeding on these points, we need greater clarity on two fronts: First, we need to know more about the specific pathology (or pathologies) that our patient is suffering from. This is the concern of chapter 3, which focuses on linguistics so as to discuss the problem of language demise and death in greater detail.
Second, we need to know what is at stake. In the preceding discussion I noted several possible objections to my argument, but these can be focused more bluntly as follows: What difference does it make if parts of the Old Testament disappear (e.g., the psalms not represented in hymnody), or large parts (e.g., the books not reflected in the RCL) wither away, or even the whole thing dies off? Answering that question would take many tomes; the testimonia used as epigraphs to the present volume and what has already been said so far should, I hope, make it clear that one pays a high price indeed if one loses the Old Testament, or even just some of its constituent parts. Chapters 4–6 cast still more light on this matter, but to anticipate that material, we will see there (1) that the early church deemed the Old Testament absolutely essential to Christian faith; (2) that devastating results happen when Christians sever their connections to the Old Testament and, correlatively, the Judaism with which they share this material; (3) how Christians are incapacitated to answer severe and significant criticisms of the Old Testament (and the Bible as a whole) if they lack full fluency; and (4) how Christians are bamboozled into thinking life is mostly a zero-sum game about prosperity if they do not know what should be, but no longer is, their mother tongue.
