What happens when the congregation of worshipers sings a hymn? Are they paying tribute to the custom of many generations? Are they enjoying a variation of community singing? Are some mutely enduring something that they do not like to do or do not understand, until a more acceptable unit of the service appears? Are they mentally agreeing with the taste of the individual who chose the hymn or else belaboring him for his lack of taste? Are they singing with a will, dragging, mumbling, or dozing?

A hymn in a service of Christian worship is a means of adoring the most high God. It is a rehearsal of God’s mighty acts. It is a confession of faith in that God. More than that, a hymn in a service of Christian worship is a means by which each worshiper speaks the living Word of God to each other one. The fact bears close scrutiny.

I

The New Testament refers to the hymns of the worshiping congregation in several passages which are potent for Christian worship today. In the Goodspeed version they read:

Do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. Do not get drunk on wine, for that is profligacy, but be filled with the Spirit, and speak to one another in psalms, hymns, and sacred songs. Sing praise to the Lord with all your hearts; always give thanks for everything to God our Father, as followers of our Lord Jesus Christ, and subordinate yourselves to one another out of reverence to Christ. (Eph. 5:17–21)
Let the ruling principle in your hearts be Christ’s peace, for in becoming members of one body you have been called under its sway. And you must be thankful. Let the message of Christ live in your hearts in all its wealth of wisdom. Teach it to one another and train one another in it with thankfulness, with psalms, hymns, and sacred songs, and sing to God with all your hearts. And whatever you have to say or do, do it all as followers of the Lord Jesus, and offer your thanksgiving to God the Father through Him. (Col. 3:15–17)
What is the right course, brothers? When you meet together, suppose every one of you has a song, a teaching, a revelation, an ecstatic utterance, or an explanation of one; it must be for the good of all. (1 Cor. 14:26)

These passages presuppose a function of the Christian congregation which Colossians speaks of in the term “body of Christ.” That is that each member of the Christian church is a member, literally, a nourishing helper for his spiritual life. Held together in the mutual fellowship of the Christian church, each Christian is a minister and servant to each other one, St. Paul tells the Ephesians (4:11–16), building up his fellow Christian in faith against the perversion of falsehood by means of the “truth,” that is, the message that the promises of God to redeem His people have come true in Christ Jesus.

Christian worship in general, and the use of “hymns and psalms and spiritual songs” in particular, then are to serve this purpose of the mutual upbuilding of the Christian company. Let us abstract from these passages several considerations for present-day worship.

1. Worship is to be adoration and thanksgiving toward God. That Christians share in each other’s worship is a reinforcement, not just psychologically in that they imitate each other, but theologically in that they rehearse what they are thankful for and why they can speak to God at all—a reinforcement of thankfulness and adoration in one another.

2. The rehearsal of what they are thankful for, and the statement of why they can address God as their Father, focus upon the Word and message of Christ, that is, the coming of Christ into the world to redeem mankind to the Father through His own sacrificial living and dying, attested by His rising again. This is the significance of Colossians, “Let the message of Christ live in your hearts in all its wealth of wisdom.” 1 Cor. 14 takes up the problem of unedifying, disorderly worship. St. Paul urges that every contribution of any worshiper to the total must “be for the good of all” and then goes on to describe how he himself did it:

Now I want to remind you, brothers, of the form in which I presented to you the good news I brought, which you accepted and have stood by, and through which you are to be saved, if you hold on, unless your faith has been all for nothing. For I passed on to you, as of first importance, the account I had received, that Christ died for our sins, as the Scriptures foretold, that He was buried, that on the third day He was raised from the dead, as the Scriptures foretold. . . . Thank God! He gives us victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. So my dear brothers, be firm and unmoved, and always devote yourselves to the Lord’s work, for you know that through the Lord your labor is not thrown away. (1 Cor. 15:1–4, 57, 58)

St. Peter describes the function of Christians together as being a priesthood in which they present themselves and one another to God as spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ, by “declaring the virtues of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:5, 9), and speaks of the Gospel of Christ as at once the seed by which men are born anew to God and the milk by which they are nourished. (V. 2; cf. 1 Peter 1:23, 25)

3. What renders worship a dynamic, edifying thing for all concerned is this, that it is this Word of the Gospel, this account of the redeeming work of Christ which is God’s own tool for the spiritual salvage and nurture of men, that is spoken back and forth by the worshiping company. Each worshiper becomes simultaneously a target and a rifle for this projectile of the powerful Word of God. St. Paul describes this process when he discusses the Sacrament. It had become, with the Corinthians, a vehicle for gluttony and class distinction. But what should be is this (KJV): “As oft as ye eat of this bread and drink this cup of the Lord, ye do show forth the Lord’s death till he come” (1 Cor. 11:26); it is a mutual proclamation. The sermon in the Christian service grew out of the practice of Christians breaking out into a hubbub of repartee and conversation after the reading of the lessons from Old or New Testament, and thus came to represent the mutual speaking of the Word of the Gospel through the lips of the preacher (Justin Martyr, First Apology 67; quoted by M. Reu, Homiletics, Columbus: Lutheran Book Concern, 5th ed., 1944). The writer to the Hebrews describes the whole act of worship together as the communicating of this Word to one another and thus the empowering to the Christian life (Heb.10:19–25). All of this mutual speaking of the Gospel, then, is to be uniquely the function of the “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” of the worshiping church. The great texts from Ephesians and Colossians focus upon the hymn of the congregation as the central edifying act, the means by which each Christian builds each other one, helps the Word of Christ to dwell in him.

4. A final accent emerges directly from the passages under consideration: in the act of worship and in the singing of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs worshipers are to subordinate themselves to one another. This subordination has a simple communicative element to it: people must listen as well as sing, they must yield to each other’s preferences. When Christians sing a hymn together, they are all pooling their likes and dislikes, they are each playing their part for the sake of every other one. There they cease to belong to liturgical or nonliturgical parties, to pride themselves as traditional or creative, for there they all settle upon a common form of mutual expression. This mutual submission is not merely a yielding and communicating, but it stresses a mutual service. The mind of Christ is that men serve one another (Phil. 2:1 ff.), and St. Paul describes as a variation of the submission which Christians have for one another in worship the submission of husband to wife and wife to husband in the mutual self-sacrifice of Christ and the church. (Eph. 5:22 ff.)

II

If we can grant the premises for congregational song which we have attempted to glean from the New Testament, we are ready to summarize the essentials of the hymn in our own time that is to satisfy the requirements of Christian worship.

A. The people must understand what they sing. This is a hard saying. Evidently some powerful poetry goes by the board. No two people in any group of worshipers have the same capacity for understanding or know just the same words. St. Paul tried to clean out the incomprehensible utterances of ecstasy that disfigured the church at Corinth, but as he writes he says much that pertains to hymnody also:

The man who can speak ecstatically should pray for the power to explain what he says. For if I pray ecstatically, it is my spirit that prays, but my mind is helping nobody. Then what am I to do? I will pray ecstatically, but I will pray intelligently too. I will sing ecstatically, but I will sing intelligently too. For if you utter blessings in ecstatic speech, how is an ordinary man to say Amen to your thanksgiving? For he does not know what you are saying. You are giving thanks well enough, but it is doing him no good. Thank God, I speak in ecstasy more than any of you. But in public worship I would rather say five words with my understanding so as to instruct others also than ten thousand words in an ecstasy. (1 Cor. 14:13–19)

This does not imply that hymnody must shrink to a tiny deposit of worn and childish stanzas. Often the essential meaning can come through when some lines simply symbolize mood but others speak directly. The administration of parish worship, within and outside the services of worship, can seek to enlarge the worshiper’s understanding of the hymns that he sings and the basic appreciation of their meaning and message.

B. The hymn must stir people to moods appropriate to what they are saying. Current psychological theory stresses the integration and total response of the individual to the point that it is no longer fashionable to single out and analyze individual moods, their relation to special thoughts and concepts, and the manner in which the human organism harbors and produces them. Yet even a superficial reflection will indicate contrasts and parallels. A basic function of worship and the hymn is thankfulness to God and adoration with reverence. Here come moods of joy, the quickening pulse of gratitude, the sense of the holy and grand towering over the littleness of man. Reflection upon the way of life in Christ, the act of the atonement, the forgiveness of sins, the freedom from the wrathful judgment of God, will be accompanied by moods appropriate to earnest self-searching. The outreach to the worshiping brother will be accompanied by the mood which makes singing natural to begin with, the desire for expression of affection and concern. The word “mood” attempts to describe the indescribable and hence gives rise to no standard language. Bach’s time tried it with its Affekttheorie. Perhaps, as we try to teach our people why they sing hymns, we shall have to devise such a language. To this quality of a hymn its poetic form, with its evocations of rhythms, its symbolism of restraint and symmetry, its use of metaphor and euphony, makes great contributions. That whole area of expression, at once related to the organic nervous system and to the capacity for thought and language, obviously draws heavily upon the tune to which the hymn is sung and the music of its accompaniment. To that domain my colleague, Dr. Buszin, will give special attention in this conference. In attempting to point out the multiplicity of moods which the hymn should induce in the worshiper, we must not fail to mention the very first: the challenge upon interest, both of the singer and of the listener. This mood is an outgrowth of the comprehensibility of the hymn. It is, in effect, comprehensibility plus an applied and pertinent quality, through which the concepts of the hymn are expressed as experience of the singer to be communicated to his fellow worshiper.

C. Finally, if the hymn is to fulfill its task, it must actually sing the Gospel. Obviously this does not happen in every line or phrase. It is conceivable that in a total service of worship a hymn could possibly omit the saving message in favor of a simple affirmation of reverence or thanks or adoration, but it is not very likely. Very early in the history of the Christian church the Gloria Patri was affixed to psalms or the New Testament canticles, as an affirmation and signal of the redemptive work of Christ, under the Father, communicated by the Spirit. 1 Tim. 3:16 is doubtless a very early hymn which St. Paul quoted as an apt and familiar statement of how God is “the Pillar and Ground of the truth”:

God was manifest in the flesh,
Justified in the Spirit,
Seen of angels,
Preached unto the Gentiles,
Believed on in the world,
Received up into glory.

When people sing to each other in worship, if their hymn is truly what it should be, they will think what they are singing. Our hymn must then either directly express their thought of Christ Jesus which they wish to communicate to their brother, or it must speak such thoughts which are unmistakably given by the fact of that Gospel. Otherwise they are not fulfilling their ministry as members of the body of Christ worshiping together. But when their hymns give the worshipers an opportunity to hold the Cross and open tomb of Christ before one another’s eyes and engrave that meaning upon one another’s hearts, then they are truly teaching and admonishing one another, building one another up in the faith, nurturing the body of Christ, speaking the living Gospel.

III

Now let us make the attempt to apply these principles to hymns actually in the employ of the church. This application obviously varies from person to person. Where hymns have been in the employ of worshipers for generations, these will react differently from those who are hearing and using a hymn for the first time. Hymns may become so familiar by much use that they are sung for the sake of pleasant association merely, for the sake of semiconscious and nostalgic associations with certain scenes and events, for the sake of appreciation of the tune grounded sometimes on reasons quite apart from the purpose and the theology of the text. Or a hymn may wear out through overuse or because of habits of listlessness of the congregation as it sings them or because of distasteful tunes or harmonies. Each worshiper develops a series of reactions and associations peculiar to himself. Hence it is especially important that every worshiping congregation train itself periodically to learn and appreciate new hymns, to refresh its understanding of the old ones, and to cultivate the mutual submission of each worshiper to the common goal of edifying the brother through the congregational song.

Hymns in this section are drawn from The Lutheran Hymnal (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1941) unless designated The Hymnal (Protestant Episcopal Church, 1940).

A. Many hymns satisfy the criterion of intelligibility, for editors shape their language to suit the congregational average. Sometimes the result, to some tastes, is destructive of poetic feeling. Thus Crown Him with Many Crowns, 341, has the closing stanza:

Crown Him the Lord of heaven,
Enthroned in worlds above,
Crown Him the King to whom is given
The wondrous name of Love.
Crown Him with many crowns
As thrones before Him fall;
Crown Him, ye kings, with many crowns,
For He is King of all.

An earlier edition (Ev. Luth. Hymn-Book, Concordia Publishing House, 1924) reads:

Crown Him the Lord of years,
The Potentate of time,
Creator of the rolling spheres,
Ineffably sublime.
All hail, Redeemer, hail!
For Thou hast died for me;
Thy praise shall never, never fail
Throughout eternity. (104, st. 5)

The chorale Es ist das Heil uns kommen her, 377, has a language, also in the translation, which is sufficiently lucid for the understanding of any catechetically trained worshiper. Its deficiency is chiefly in the realm of interest, in that some of its turns of phrase are hardly more than metrical and rhymed restatements of theological briefs. Thus:

What God did in His Law demand
And none to Him could render
Caused wrath and woe on every hand
For man, the vile offender.
Our flesh has not those pure desires
The spirit of the Law requires,
And lost is our condition. (st. 2)

More vivid is stanza 7:

Let me not doubt, but trust in Thee,
Thy Word cannot be broken;
Thy call rings out, “Come unto Me!”
No falsehood hast Thou spoken.
Baptized into Thy precious name
My faith cannot be put to shame,
And I shall never perish.

To this reviewer the chorale 231, even in translation, has a suitable blend of clear language with unique and interesting form and expression.

We now implore God the Holy Ghost
For the true faith, which we need the most,
That in our last moments He may befriend us
And, as homeward we journey, attend us.
Lord, have mercy!

Shine in our hearts, O most precious Light,
That we Jesus Christ may know aright
Clinging to our Savior, whose blood hath bought us,
Who again to our homeland hath brought us.
Lord, have mercy!

Thou sacred Love, grace on us bestow,
Set our hearts with heavenly fire aglow
That with hearts united we love each other,
Of one mind, in peace with every brother.
Lord, have mercy!

Thou highest Comfort in every need,
Grant that neither shame nor death we heed,
That e’en then our courage may never fail us
When the Foe shall accuse and assail us.
Lord, have mercy!

Fresh and genuinely poetical in form and language, and clear in meaning, is Oh, Worship the King, No. 17:

Oh, worship the King
All glorious above;
Oh, gratefully sing
His power and his love,
Our Shield and Defender,
The Ancient of Days,
Pavilioned in splendor
And girded with praise!

Oh, tell of His might,
Oh, sing of His grace,
Whose robe is the light,
Whose canopy space!
His chariots of wrath
The deep thunderclouds form,
And dark is His path
On the wings of the storm.

This earth, with its store
Of wonders untold,
Almighty, Thy power
Hath founded of old,
Hath stablished it fast
By a changeless decree,
And round it hath cast,
Like a mantle, the sea.

Thy bountiful care
What tongues can recite?
It breathes in the air,
It shines in the light,
It streams from the hills,
It descends to the plain,
And sweetly distils
In the dew and the rain.

Frail children of dust
And feeble as frail,
In Thee do we trust
Nor find Thee to fail.
Thy mercies, how tender,
How firm to the end,
Our Maker, Defender,
Redeemer, and Friend!

O measureless Might,
Ineffable Love,
While angels delight
To hymn Thee above,
Thy humbler creation,
Though feeble their lays,
With true adoration
Shall sing to Thy praise.

Somewhat wearing in language, partly because of repetition and partly because of hyperbolic language, is 430, What Is the World to Me. The noble tune may salvage it for many a worshiper. Poor in basic interest values is 288:

Lord, help us ever to retain
The Catechism’s doctrine plain
As Luther taught the Word of Truth
In simple style to tender youth. (st. 1)

B. Judgments begin to be quite subjective when we explore the value of a hymn in reflecting mood of the worshiper. The interest factors considered above are largely in this area. It may serve the purpose of exploration to single out a few basic moods: those pertinent to the mutual communication of the church, to the adoration of God, and to the mutual submission of Christians. This complex of mood is, admittedly, central in a communication of the living Gospel.

Again 231 (see above) reveals its worth. When taken in combination with its tune, which is an evocation of meditativeness and of affirmation simultaneously, we have a splendid demonstration of the Christian hymn. To this reviewer a similar quality of high mood, possibly tinged by associations with the tune, is given in The God of Abraham Praise, 40. Note stanza 3:

He by Himself hath sworn—
I on His oath depend—
I shall, on eagle’s wings upborne,
To heaven ascend;
I shall behold His face,
I shall His power adore,
And sing the wonders of His grace
Forevermore.

Interesting in this connection is the method of material in the first person singular. The question does not seem to be so much the quality of the subjective as contrasted with the objective. Nothing could be more subjective, in the sense of demonstration of personal feeling, than A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, 262, which is in the plural. The question is rather whether the first singular is a useful device for speaking to the brother. As Christians join in a hymn in the first person singular the effect can easily become simply the pooling of personal devotion. No. 40 seems to be rescued from this by the grandeur of its utterance and the congregational pace of its tune. No. 430 suffers from the lack of mutual submission in its text.

An older generation found 246, Holy, Holy, Holy, one of the outstanding parish hymns. It does breathe a mood of high reverence and adoration. Perhaps it is the tune, together with the lack of an explicit Christological reference, that has caused it to wear poorly.

Despite the high prestige of the queen of chorales, How Lovely Shines the Morning Star, 546, it seems to be hampered in its congregational and mutual quality, though high in its mood of reverence. It has splendid sentiments of prayer at the beginning of the day but seems not altogether appropriate to the Common Service. Even less so is Beautiful Savior, 657, with sentiments of a folk and individual quality, though reverent and charged with adoration.

The mood of dependence in faith, a thoroughly appropriate goal for a congregational act of worship, is a useful aim in the Christian hymn. Here 350, despite its rather exaggerated language, sounds the note of confession of weakness and of mutual strengthening in faith:

Jesus, the very thought of Thee
With sweetness fills the breast;
But sweeter far Thy face to see
And in Thy presence rest.

Nor voice can sing, nor heart can frame,
Nor can the memory find
A sweeter sound than Thy blest name,
O Savior of mankind!

O Hope of every contrite heart,
O Joy of all the meek!
To those who fall, how kind Thou art,
How good to those who seek!

But what to those who find? Ah! this
Nor tongue nor pen can show;
The love of Jesus, what it is,
None but His loved ones know.

Jesus, our only Joy be Thou
As Thou our Prize wilt be!
Jesus, be Thou our Glory now
And through eternity.

No. 430, What Is the World to Me, which we analyzed before as wearing in interest, is very useful in this quality of summoning the fellow worshiper to dependence in faith; the singular number seems to be less effective, however, than the plural of 350. No. 347, Jesus, Priceless Treasure,is one of the great chorales in the domain of dependence. Again the somewhat baroque utterance may temper the sincerity and appreciation of the hymn in the Common Service, and it may seem to apply rather to the individual devotional exercises of the Christian.

The Hymnal, 529, brings John Oxenham’s prayer of a nation at war. This is an interesting attempt to combine the sentiments of war-ridden people with the prayer of faith. The complex of ideas may be somewhat difficult for the individual worshiper to manage.

Lord God of hosts, whose mighty hand
Dominion holds on sea and land,
In peace and war Thy will we see
Shaping the larger liberty;
Nations may rise and nations fall,
Thy changeless purpose rules them all,

For those who weak and broken lie
In weariness and agony,
Great Healer, to their bed of pain
Come, touch and make them whole again.
O hear a people’s prayers, and bless
Thy servants in their hour of stress!

For those to whom the call shall come,
We pray thy tender welcome home;
The toil, the bitterness, all past,
We trust them to thy love at last.
O hear a people’s prayers for all
Who, nobly striving, nobly fall!

For those who minister and heal,
And spend themselves, their skill, their zeal;
Renew their hearts with Christlike faith,
And guard them from disease and death;
And in thine own good time, Lord, send
Thy peace on earth till time shall end.

C. And now what of our central quest today, the hymn that helps the Christian speak to his brother the good news of the redeeming work of Christ?

Again we can cite 231 as effective, concise, and winsome in its method. The Deutsche Messeof Martin Luther suggested that it be sung in every service, and it deserves that use. How well it would wear under repetition is a question.

Dogmatic as 377 is in expression, it does do a complete job of stating the Christian Gospel, with at least a minimum of applied quality. No. 546 is rich in affirmation of the redemptive and ongoing power of Jesus the Lord. No. 350, previously considered at length, here gives explicit signals for rehearsing the redemptive work of Christ. Also sung to the tune of Wie schoen leuchtet der Morgenstern, O Holy Spirit, Enter In,No. 235, is a noble rehearsal of the work of the Spirit, giving explicit Christological reference in only one stanza:

O mighty Rock, O Source of Life,
Let Thy dear Word, mid doubt and strife,
Be strong within us burning
That we be faithful unto death,
In Thy pure love and holy faith,
From Thee true wisdom learning.
And grace And peace
On us shower; By Thy power
Christ confessing,
Let us win our Savior’s blessing. (st. 6)

Yet this link, in a total service of worship, perhaps as the Hauptlied to a sermon on the work of the Spirit in holding the Word of Christ with us, would be sufficient to make the total hymn mutually edifying.

Less potent Christologically is Holy. Holy, Holy, 246, setting up the one slender thread of “God in Three Persons, blessed Trinity.” Similar in this respect is the otherwise great The God of Abraham Praise, 40. The Hymnal offers a stanza not found in The Lutheran Hymnal:

There dwells the Lord, our King,
The Lord, our Righteousness,
Triumphant o’er the world and sin,
The Prince of Peace;
On Sion’s sacred height
His kingdom he maintains,
And, glorious with his saints in light,
Forever reigns. (st. 3)

The Messianic language might well serve to make the link with the redemptive work explicit. The lovely Oh, Worship the King, 17, is devoid of redemptive reference, and the carefully planned service would have to compensate for its omission by means of other hymns. Yet with all of its reference to Christ, What Is the Worldto Me, 430, also speaks no specifically redemptive word, and simply reflects the faith that is the outgrowth of Gospel mutually considered and conveyed in other sections of the service.

To this reviewer some hymns would be deficient, not simply because of omitting the evangelical note but because they set up thoughts and moods that subsist without the Gospel altogether. Here Jan Struther’s general and mystic hymn of the kingdom seems to be placed: (The Hymnal 473)

High o’er the lonely hills
Black turns to gray,
Bird-song the valley fills,
Mists fold away;
Gray wakes to green again;
Beauty is seen again,
Gold and serene again
Dawneth the day.

So, o’er the hills of life,
Stormy, forlorn,
Out of the cloud and strife
Sunrise is born;
Swift grows the light for us;
Ended is night for us;
Soundless and bright for us
Breaketh God’s morn.

Hear we no beat of drums,
Fanfare nor cry,
When Christ the herald comes
Quietly nigh;
Splendor he makes on earth;
Color awakes on earth;
Suddenly breaks on earth
Light from the sky.

Bid then farewell to sleep:
Rise up and run!
What though the hill be steep?
Strength’s in the sun.
Now shall you find at last
Night’s left behind at last,
And for mankind at last
Day has begun!

Similarly John Oxenham’s hymn on the Christian vocation attaches it to the created rather than the redemptive order: (The Hymnal 510)

All labor gained new dignity
Since He who all creation made
Toiled with His hands for daily bread
Right manfully.

No work is commonplace, if all
Be done as unto Him alone;
Life’s simplest toil to Him is known
Who knoweth all.

Each smallest common thing He makes
Serves Him with its minutest part;
Man only with his wandering heart
His way forsakes.

His service is life’s highest joy,
It yields fair fruit a hundredfold:
Be this our prayer—“Not fame, nor gold,
But—Thine employ!”

These essays in the analyzing of hymns are not given as final in their judgment of the hymn. But they are presented as illustrative of the concern that the leader of worship has for constructing a service in which his people “teach and admonish one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs,” always to the end that the Word of Christ might dwell among them richly.

Concordia Seminary
St. Louis, Mo.

From The Musical Heritage of the Church, Volume V (St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia Publishing House, 1959). Copyright Concordia Publishing House. Printed by permission. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Concordia Publishing House.