Monthly column on hymns and songs

It is often healthy to have one's assumptions challenged. I have been slow to feel the force of two contemporary responses to new hymns.

The first is the most radical. To quote one critic: 'The Lord may already have given to the church the major portion of hymns to be used to the end of the age.' Think for a moment, and you can hardly disagree - unless there are two more millennia before the Lord returns. We are unlikely to rival the wealth of our inheritance in less time than it took to accumulate.

But the well-known author of my quotation draws a tough conclusion: don't bother to try! Some of our 19th and 20th-century offerings lend weight to his argument; compared with Watts and Wesley, they sound trivial. But I cannot deduce that virtually nothing new is any good. This is the opposite of the grand illusion that everything has to be new.

You and I, of course, know the right balance; what a shame we are the only two who can see it! My quoted source is woefully unhistorical as well as unbiblical. In the late 1700s, when Charles Wesley's work was done, you could be forgiven for thinking that no more hymns would ever be needed. Most Methodists thought so; it took another 200 years for their next significant hymn-writer to appear. At any other time, a hymn-writing moratorium would have been tragic. Not even Watts or Wesley poses the explicit challenge of cross-cultural global evangelism.

This doctrine of the end of hymn-writing is a novel kind of cessationism. Suppose we said that all the best books have already been written and all the best sermons already preached; why bother to labour at new ones? What was wrong with Bunyan, Latimer, Whitefield, Spurgeon, Lloyd-Jones and co.? But how did the Doctor know he ought to carry on preaching, rather than simply declaiming from the printed riches of the past?

Clear and plain

A different challenge to hymns comes from similar quarters: hymns must be so doctrinally explicit that only Reformed evangelicals would want to sing them. Popularity across the board signals failure! 'A worthy hymn must be clear enough to offend people if they do not believe the sentiment or the doctrine . . . If a hymn is so innocuous that universal acceptance is inevitable, then it clearly misses the mark.'

Give my source his due; we all know hymns like that. I will not risk execution by quoting your favourite; but some I have written fall into this category, and I am driven to ask if editors have missed the point. If they understood it, or if I had sharpened its cutting edge, they would never have chosen the hymn. Many American books prefer: 'Eternal brightness, help me see', where I wrote: 'Eternal brightness, make me see'. I think I know why!

But when it comes to dropping hymns beloved by non-evangelicals, even non-Christians, surely our friend proves too much. Out go 'Abide with me', 'The Lord's my shepherd', 'Rock of ages', 'How great thou art', and hundreds more, including a sledgeful of Christmas carols. Can we not be glad that good news reaches unexpected places and unwilling hearts in undesigned ways? If congregations don't yet catch on, what an opportunity for the preacher or Christian friend!

If we abandoned all the verses that appealed to the world, the verbal music of Mary and Simeon, of David and Paul, would surely have to go too. But isn't this why it is there, to win people to faith in the living God? In smaller ways, the best hymns (not just the worst!) have their evangelistic possibilities, and their place at the frontiers of Christ's kingdom.

A healthy challenge?

Clear and plain

Christopher Idle

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