Rewriting the theology in hymns
Gretta Vosper has been in Canadian news quite a bit lately, as she is promoting her new book, “With or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important than What We Believe”. Over Easter weekend, the Globe and Mail did a story about how her church would be singing “Glorious Hope is Risen Today”, rather than “Christ the Lord is Risen Today.” At Gretta’s site for the “Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity” there are several modified hymns listed. For example, instead of singing “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty”, they offer the following modified hymn:
Sing Praise to All
Sing praise to all that has offered us life and sustains us—
All that has opened our hearts to the love borne within us:
Family and friends,
Beauty we see without end—
Gifts that our lives lay before us.Sing praise to all that has opened our minds to new vistas—
All that has called us to seek out new truths through the ages:
Vision and word,
Music that sought to be heard
These are the gifts that will mould us.Sing praise to minds that will fashion our bold new tomorrows—
Yesterday’s wisdom released from its dogma and credos.
Evermore free
To live out what we believe
Walking the path that Life hallows
(They also offer an alternative to “How Great Thou Art”)
Now I realize that most of the hymns in our hymnals are now under public domain, and so we are able to modify them freely. Some of them have been slightly modified depending on what hymn book it is in. Take for example, “Come Thou Fount, Come Thou King” a modernization of “Come, Thou Fount.” We played this in church a couple of weeks ago, and changed the last verse to match what was in our hymn book. Those who grew up with the Nazarene hymn book recognized the third verse, but those who grew up in different traditions, or those who had only recently come to know the song through the new modern adaptation, were a little thrown off. You can see the verses in the link above, and here is the third verse from the Nazarene hymnal:
O to Grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let that grace, now like a fetter
Bind my yielded heart to Thee
Let me know Thee in Thy fullness
Guide me by Thy mighty hand
Till, transformed, in Thine own image
In Thy presence I shall stand.
So here’s the question. Is changing a few words to fit with our tradition the same as what Vosper is doing? How important is it that the songs we sing in Church be theologically sound? Are there examples of songs that we sing in church that we shouldn’t?
These are the questions that will be part of the discussion at our “Unbound” group next Sunday night. I will be posing these questions to the young people to help them start to wrestle out a theology of worship. As well, this Sunday is “Build your own ice cream sundaes!” Yum, yum!
-Amanda MacInnis
Tags: Hymns, Theology, Unbound, Worship
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April 15, 2008 at 1:32 am
I tried to give hymns a fair shake, but I keep coming to the same conclusion. They have too many words. Sooner or later they screw it up. For me it is the last stanza where they shift categories to an otherworldly focus. That bugs me. So I end up modifying the hymn or sticking only to a couple verses.
But I think this is an occupational hazard of studying theology. It has made me picky. It is like when I learned how to play guitar, it made me picky about the music, it changed my experience of the songs in the service. As a theologian I can’t just sing in oblivion, I think about what I sing because I know that as a community what we sing speaks about who we are and also about who we are becoming. I want worship that doesn’t work against the teaching ministry of my church.
April 15, 2008 at 1:46 pm
I agree. There are several songs that now that I have studied theology, make me cringe. But I find it’s not just the hymns, it can also be some of the praise choruses.
The church I’m serving in weathered the “music wars” pretty well. But there are some on the praise team who struggle with us playing hymns (they think they should be played on the organ and not with an electric guitar). On the other hand, we have some who think because a hymn has been sung in the church for over 50 years that it is “A-Ok”. I’m glad that our young people are starting to wrestle through all of this.
April 16, 2008 at 12:40 am
Thanks for taking the time to pick up on one of the issues I look at in my book. Basically, the way I see it is, if you can’t say it from the pulpit, you can’t sing it in the pews. My experience has been that once individuals who don’t understand why traditional hymns are not being sung are challenged to read the words out loud, they get the picture very quickly. My partner, Scott Kearns, has written a number of new songs but they are in a contemporary Christian style and a stretch for more traditional congregations. However, while recovering from major surgery, he reworked many traditional hymns to lift up the values we seek to live by and I hope they’ll be available soon. In the meantime, check out Singing the Living Tradition from the Unitarian Universalists. They have already reworked many old hymns or written words to old tunes but you do need to read them carefully. Bring, O Morn, Thy Music, to the tune Nicaea (Holy, Holy, Holy) has a dreadful line about “…bird and beast and tree//Lo, they rise and vanish, vanish at thy bidding…” We had it selected for the week after Katrina and realized it just wouldn’t work so, since it’s in the public domain, we changed it.
Best of luck with all this. It is dreadfully difficult at times so if there’s anything I can do to help, don’t hesitate to connect.