A thousand years ago, the psalms were the best-loved of all the books of the Old Testament. They were the glory of services, the mainspring of personal devotion, the backbone of monastic life.
Now they are virtually forgotten; a handful of bowdlerised fragments occasionally working their way into services to give a little variety, but usually omitted and never missed.
What have we lost? And isn t it time to reclaim our loss?
First, what have we lost?
The use of the Psalms in worship is older than Christianity, of course, but the details of the transition from Jewish use to mediaeval use are not completely clear not least because it is rarely clear whether someone is writing about the psalms in the book of the Old Testament, or psalms found elsewhere in the Old (and New) Testament, or psalms written since. (I shall use psalm only for one of the 150(ish) psalms from the Book Of Psalms.) What is clear is the massive boost given to the psalms by the monasteries. Both in Western and in African monasticism the psalms were deeply valued not only as worship materials, offering praise to God, but also offering spiritual food to the singer, speaker or listener.
The Rule of St Benedict, for example, has its regulars go through all the psalms every week; allocating three to six psalms to each of the eight daily Offices each day. (This comes to more than 150, partly because some psalms were the same each day, and partly because the longer psalms were divided into sections.) Furthermore, it comments on the tepidity of such a practice compared with our Fathers who recited the whole of the psalms daily!
Much of the mediaeval liturgy derives ultimately from monastic sources, so it is no surprise to find psalms as an integral part of both the Mass and the Offices. While hymns were barely tolerated (except at Milan of course), psalms flourished throughout the period in all areas, to the point where psalmody almost becomes a general word for religious plainchant. We also regularly find psalters copies of the psalms in the lists of property of pious laymen and laywomen, at least those rich enough to be able to afford books.
And this love of the psalms continues through the Reformation. Metrical versions of the psalms are among the earliest and most-loved books of the Reformation. Sterndale and Hopkins were not the first to print a metrical psalter in English, but their version became part of the national consciousness. In the Established Church, Cranmer and his advisors went to much trouble to produce singable versions of the psalms in English, inventing a new musical form Anglican chant in the process. Then, when the 1662 Book Of Common Prayer was put together, all the Bible passages were reproduced from the Authorised (King James) Version except the psalms: the English of the Great Bible had sunk too deep to risk change. Finally, the very first book printed and published in America was a psalter: the Bay Psalm Book in 1640.
But this was the swan-song of the psalms.
Already the metrical psalters were being criticised for lame, flat versification bordering on doggerel sometimes from the wrong side. Not that it mattered; the singing of the psalms in nonconformist chapels at least was often rendered almost meaningless by the method of singing: for example it was common practice for a cantor to sing a line in an extremely ornamented form, and then the congregation sing the same line to a less ornamental form of the same music, rendering already dubious verse almost meaningless.
Then as the seventeenth century became the eighteenth, influential voices were raised claiming that the sentiments expressed in the psalms made many or most of them unfit for public worship: Isaac Watts and John Wesley among them.
It is all downhill after this. There is still the theoretical commitment to the psalms among Presbyterian groups, but the only reason given is that the Bible tells us to , and even among them the range of psalms actually sung steadily contracts. In the nineteenth century Tractarianism gives a brief resistance, but again the only reason is that Rome tells us to.
Finally as the twentieth century draws to a close, the psalms are almost ignored. The Methodist practice is typical: relegated to a mere fifty-five texts, mostly heavily censored, pointed for Anglican chant but rarely chanted, and used occasionally to add variety to a service. Almost invariably they are said, not sung; almost invariably they are responsorial that is, a leader will read the verses in black type and the congregation respond with the verses in light type; almost invariably they are ignored for the rest of the service. No wonder that the creators of a proposed new hymnbook were surprised at the demand for the psalms to remain in the book.
How could something so dear to twenty generations of Christians fall so low?
The psalms are part of the Bible, and the attitude to the Bible has changed sharply in the same pattern. Once we come out of the Roman Empire and into the Middle Ages, there is a consistent view of the Bible which lasts until the Reformation: to the mediaeval mind, the fundamental point was that the Bible is true.
The concept of truth was a rugged one. There is the well-known tale of Saint Jerome who, when challenged about the consistency of the New Testament stories, replies, The truth of Scripture does not depend on counting lepers. Its authenticity may be doubted, but the attitude is accurate. Furthermore, when Western Christianity rediscovered the Greek philosophers in the thirteenth century, and especially the writings attributed to Aristotle, there was admittedly some discussion; but in the end the Church was able both to accept (rightly) the truth of evolution, while simultaneously accepting (rightly) the truth of Genesis 1 and 2, and (rightly again) acknowledging them as consistent.
Nor was this robust view of the truth of the Bible confined to scholars. Chaucer a most perceptive observer of the ordinary puts these words into his conversation with an ordinary innkeeper: ye woot that every Evaungelist that telleth us the peyne of Jhesu Crist ne seith nat alle thyng as his felawe dooth, But, nathelees, hir sentence is al sooth, And alle acorden as in hir sentence. (you know that every Evangelist that tells us of the punishment of Jesus Christ doesn t say everything in the same way as the others; but nevertheless, their meaning is completely true. And all of them agree in the meaning.)
But surely truth isn t enough to build a Church? No, of course it isn t. To be of any use, truth needs judging; it needs applying to the current world; it needs developing into a coherent moral understanding; it needs to be made something to live by. In the mediaeval world, these were not the province of the Bible: these were the province of the stories of the saints, and of the discoveries of science; but above all of the writings of the Church Fathers. When you read sermons or books from mediaeval times, you find over and over again that the facts are established by appeal to Scripture, but the interpretation and application of those facts by appeal to Tertullian or Origen or, above all, St Augustine. It gets to the point where you sometimes wonder if Seynt Austin is a book of the Bible you ve somehow overlooked.
So throughout the Middle ages there is a simple, coherent structure: The truth of Scripture, used by the Church Fathers to convey God s will to the individual.
But at the Reformation this changes. Now the cry is Sola Scriptura and saints, science and Fathers have no place in a Reformed Church. Now nothing must come between the Bible and the believer; the Bible must be both truth and interpreter.
And it can t be both. The Church found out very quickly inside a couple of generations that it is simply impossible to be both the truth and the interpretation of the truth. One of them had to go.
The one that goes is the Bible as truth. From now on, the Bible is authority, not truth; interpreter, not truth; moral teacher, not truth.
This was almost complete even by the middle of the seventeenth century. The Westminster Confession, that great summa of Reformed theology, places its doctrine of the Bible as its very first chapter, before even the doctrine of God. The chapter contains ten paragraphs. The first paragraph, the basis for the entire edifice, says that the Scriptures are given by God to reveal Himself, and to declare that His will unto His Church . It does not say they are true. Other paragraphs assert that the Scriptures are given by inspiration of God to be the rule of faith and life and another dozen phrases of the same sort. Throughout the emphasis is on the authority of the Scriptures. The only reference to the Bible being true is buried in the fifth paragraph in a subordinate clause under a weakening adjective, and immediately qualified and balanced by yet another assertion of its authority yet notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts. And even then, it is not the truth itself that is in vision, but our belief in that truth.
Of course, lip service continued to be paid to the truth of Scripture, but it is no more than lip service; the emphasis is now on the Bible as the conveyor of God s will. And even the lip service is intermittent. More and more we find that Scripture is described, not as true, but as infallible or authoritative. That the Bible was true was still acknowledged in words, but it had no real impact on the understanding of the Bible. The Bible s suggestions of how to work out one s faith became coded commands. The Bible s accounts of events became moral examples. The Bible s judgements on past events were applied, forcibly if necessary, to current events without regard for truth.
To sum up:
We can particularise this to the Psalms.
So we can conclude:
What does this mean?
Let us take some real psalms. Let us take an apparently easy one: Psalm 23: The Lord is my shepherd and so on. Surely this is teaching us how to see ourselves? Teaching us of Jesus as our Shepherd, of us as His flock? Is not this how we ought to feel about our Saviour? Is this not a proof that you, Alan Jackson, are completely wrong?
Well, let us take a difficult one: Psalm 137: By the waters of Babylon . It starts so well, doesn t it! Is it not teaching us to weep for our sins, for our separation from God? Are we not exiles? Of course we are. Until verse 8 and 9: O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks. What are we to learn from this? What is this barbaric gesture teaching us?
But these are questions that treat the Bible as authoritative. We are asking what the Bible is telling us to do or to be that is, we are saying it has authority over us. This is post-reformation Psalms.
So what do we ask pre-reformation? We say this psalm is true: and the questions are therefore: Who is it true of? What events or occasions is it describing?
Now I know the psalm is poetry, and I know that people speak of poetic truth as something different from er prose truth. To me, this makes no sense: is poetic truth truth or not? I believe that truth is truth; the confusion is that poetry can express truth in more complex ways that prose can; but the truths are still true or false. The questions to ask, though, are the same: who, what, where, when was this true?
For a poem, the question who is this true of? is usually easy to answer. A poem is true of its writer. The statements in it are true of its writer. It was true that the writer hung his harp on the poplar trees figuratively, perhaps, but still truly. It was true that the writer wept in their heart, perhaps, but weeping it was. It is true that the writer has been driven to such anger that they want to kill their captors children. Is this surprising? Can we not see this pain, this sorrow, this anger today in Palestine, among Hutu refugees in the Congo, in the refugee camps of Darfur, in the suicide bomber?
Can we not feel the truth of that pain, that sorrow, that anger echoing in our own hearts?
And if we censor this psalm, stopping at verse 7, are we not lying?
This is what happens when we abandon the idea of the psalms as authoritative, telling us what to be, and instead embrace them as true. They become mirrors for our own hearts to look in. A mirror does not judge; nor do the psalms. That is for you to do. A mirror does not moralise; nor do the psalms. That is for you to do. A mirror does not command; nor do the psalms. That is for you to do.
Now we have gone so far, let us return to Psalm 23. Who is it true of? The writer. The feelings it expresses are those that the writer found to be true in their own experience, at the time of writing. It was true that the writer felt God to be their shepherd; it is true that even in the Valley of the Shadow the writer had felt God s presence.
Can we not understand how the writer feels? Can we not feel the truth of that contentment, that sense of God s presence can we not understand how it would feel for us?
This is different from what I suggested earlier. Psalm 23 is not teaching us that Jesus is our Shepherd; it is telling us that one writer felt the truth of that in their own life. It is not telling us that if we believe in Jesus as our Shepherd, we will be led through green pastures; it is telling us that this was what one writer experienced. It is not asking us to obey; it is asking us to understand.
And what we understand is ourselves. We are human: we feel contentment, safety, fear, abandonment, anger, hatred, confidence, doubt, joy, love, vengeance, despair, acceptance, respect, and so many other things. The psalms confront us with these feelings, and enable us to see the truth of our own hearts, without judgement, without moralising, without commanding. The psalms trust us to judge ourselves.
It is this power that the psalms had, all through the Middle Ages, that led them to the honour and love of almost the whole of Christendom. It is this power which we should be reclaiming which we can reclaim, if only we face up to the Bible as true, not as authoritative, not conveying God s will, not as containing God s revelation; just true.
Isn't it time to reclaim the Psalms?