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A thousand tonguesThe Wesley hymns as a guide to scriptural teachingMusical Bible studyA THOUSAND TONGUES Evangelical Methodists will most appreciate this book, reprinted and lightly revised from its 1987 edition. Its core is the text of some 140 hymns, most by Charles Wesley, with a Scripture reference attached to almost every line and some lines meriting two or more. ‘Some Wesley hymns…’ would be a better subtitle. It is the arrangement which marks out this labour of love as a distinctive Wesleyan document, since the 53 themes under which the hymns are arranged, from ‘God the Sovereign Creator’ to ‘The Second Advent’, are expounded in a broadly biblical but distinctively Methodist way. The length of these doctrinal prefaces varies from two or three lines (on ‘The Unseen World’, ‘The Old Testament’ and ‘The Creative Word’) to more than two pages on ‘Holiness’ and four on ‘The Lord’s Supper’. In these longer sections the author appears to struggle, as indeed anyone does who tries to present the rather fluid Wesleyan theology as a consistent and scriptural whole. Is ‘join’ the right word to connect Christ’s sacrifice with our response (twice on p.58)? It may be in Daniel Brevint (Charles Wesley’s main source) but is not so used in Scripture or The Book of Common Prayer. And, if we’re going to have 48 lines of ‘Soldiers of Christ, arise’ in a book like this, let’s have all 96 — not a dud among them! After all, we do have 84 lines of ‘Come, O thou Traveller unknown’. Most of the favourites are here; not, however, ‘Forth in thy name, O Lord, I go’, ‘Jesus, the name high over all’, or ‘O thou who camest from above’. To expect a Scripture index would no doubt be asking too much; this remains, however, a distinctive and useful resource. Who will be bold enough to use it as the basis for some stimulating group Bible study? Christopher Idle,
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