Far from being an artifact of the past, hymnals are vital resources that ensure we remain grounded in modes of piety above and beyond our cultural contexts and fixed in orthodox doctrine. When we consider that worship songs are one of the primary ways that Christians are catechized in the Christian life, it is hard to understate how important this is.
The hymnal is, for the most part, a dying artifact. Fewer and fewer churches have hymnals in stock, and even fewer actually make use of them during Lord’s Day worship. On the one hand, this makes a great deal of sense. It is expensive, after all, to buy a considerable number of physical books that eventually must be replaced—potentially soon, even, if children with Crayons get their hands on one or somebody spills their coffee on one. Why not just project the lyrics to whatever “Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” are being sung, up on the big screen? Some people will claim, too, that worship with screens has the added benefit of creating a more somatically natural worship experience. Instead of looking down at a book, one can look forward, project his voice outward, and see the rest of the congregation worshiping alongside him. And instead of holding an object in his hands, his hands are now free to be elevated or held open in a posture of worship. I recently had a lengthy argument with another Presbyterian friend who made all these points.
As compelling as these arguments may be, the demise of the hymnal comes with an unintended, but horrible, consequence: evangelical worship that is marked by “chronological snobbery.” This reveals something about our current moment and has significant theological implications. Abetted by the strong influences of liberalism and consumer capitalism, our culture is one that suffers greatly from historical amnesia and is obsessed with the here and now.
For example, if you quiz a typical American about pre-World War II history, most likely, they have scant knowledge. What little they do know might well be that whatever happened was certainly racist, sexist, homophobic, backward, anti-intellectual, unsophisticated, and outdated. C.S. Lewis, in his book, The Screwtape Letters, labeled this attitude “chronological snobbery,” and rightly characterized it as antithetical to Christianity. Indeed, our religion is not one that has to do with what is hot and fashionable in the current moment but is one that is predicated upon fixed eternal truths and, as J. Gresham Machen insists in Christianity and Liberalism, upon events—especially a set of particular events: the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ—that occurred in the past. We assert, with the church catholic through the ages: “As it was in the beginning, [it] is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.” In fact, this creed, itself—known as the Gloria Patri —is one of the oldest hymns in the Christian tradition, dating back to the first few centuries of the church. It is an heritage of the early church that has been shared by all major branches of Christianity, including evangelical Protestantism. Indeed, it was included in most of the Protestant hymnals published over the last few centuries—even the low-church Baptist Hymnals! But it is a safe bet that most evangelical Christians today have never heard of it. This illustrates the problem we face.
Hymns and spiritual songs from different periods in history reflect different emphases, based on the cultural milieus in which those texts were written. If one looks at the Trinity Hymnal—one of the best modern hymnals out there—one will find a constellation of hymns from different time periods that have different theological emphases or use different sorts of language and style. For example, there are a few of those hymns that have no clear author but have been universal standards in the church catholic since the few centuries immediately following the Council of Nicaea, such as, again, the Gloria Patri, the Te Deum, which appears in the Trinity Hymnal as, “Holy God, We Praise Your Name,” and the Gloria in Excelsis, which appears in the same collection as “All Glory Be to Thee, Most High.” These texts have a characteristic emphasis on the Trinity properly understood, and the centrality of this doctrine in redemption and the Christian life. And far from being relics of Popery, these texts remained centerpieces of worship following the English Reformation. Thomas Cranmer included English translations of all three of these texts in the Book of Common Prayer. Even today, for Prayer Book Anglicans (and Presbyterians), these texts remain important. Other hymn texts in the Trinity Hymnal that were composed by Church Fathers or other early church poets generally emphasize these same themes—dwelling heavily on the Trinity, or walking, over their several verses, through the themes of the Nicaean or Apostles’ Creeds. Examples include the fourth-century text, “Of the Father’s Love Begotten;” “O Light That Knew No Dawn,” written by the Cappadocian Father, Gregory of Nazianus; and Ambrose of Milan’s poem, “O Splendor of God’s Glory Bright.” These texts, unlike the previous three, were less known to early Protestants. They were re-sourced and translated by English clergymen during the nineteenth-century Oxford Movement, which, despite its multiple theological issues that can be fairly summarized as “crypto-Romanism,” nevertheless wrought a laudable emphasis on resourcing hymn texts from the early church.
However, apart from “Of the Father’s Love Begotten,” which has become somewhat of a Christmas standard, and a very small part of the Latin text of Gloria in Excelsis—which, again, appears in the chorus of the nineteenth-century English Christmas carol, “Angels We Have Heard on High,” few evangelicals today know any of these early church hymn texts. Yet the doctrine of the Trinity is one of the doctrines that has most plagued the contemporary evangelical church. I could point to the heterodox doctrine of “social trinitarianism” that has so insidiously pervaded so much evangelical scholarship in the last half century, or simply call to mind all of the poor analogies for the Trinity that venture into modalism, Sabellianism, Arianism, and a whole host of other classic heresies that are prevalent enough among laypeople for Hans Fiene’s Lutheran Satire to have, years ago, created a funny video entitled “St. Patrick’s Bad Analogies” that remains evergreen and salient to all its watchers. Even in the Reformed evangelical world, the most popular systematic theology written the last few decades, Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology, despite its general ease-to-read and helpfulness, is unfortunately marred by the crypto-Arian error known as “Eternal Functional Subordination of the Son—a doctrine that ignited a firestorm of controversy in the evangelical world about ten years ago. I must wonder, if the evangelical church had been more diligent in catechizing its members by preserving, in regular worship, these ancient hymn texts that dwell so richly on Nicaean Trinitarianism, would we be dealing with so many trinitarian errors today?