---

With Watts and Wesley and Lyte and How and Keble and Ellerton, on the contrary, you think:
what powerful and beautiful thought, and, what do you know, it rhymes! It is frankly hard for
me to believe, the state of literary endeavor being what it is in our day, that the situation can be
turned round very easily. And that poses a problem: a real challenge for those who believe in
biblical worship and think that we are likely to find that more biblical pattern in the classic
paradigms of Christian worship than in more contemporary developments. We want to adorn
that classical worship, singing praises worthy of God and of the Christian church. But, to do so,
we cannot simply sing the old. We must sing the best of the old, of course. Hymns from various
periods of the church have a special elan that cannot be replaced. They wore born in the
mighty works of God experienced by his people in a particular time and set of circumstances.
Like certain Christian books and theological confusions, they gain a special authority from the
circumstances of their birth. But we cannot simply sing the old. We must add to that deposit
what we have to offer the church of the future. But when a culture is in steep decline, when its
arts are corrupt and juvenile, the church will be hard-pressed to find the materials with which,
in her worship, to add the contemporary to the ancient with the contemporary rising to the
standard set first by Holy Scripture and then met time and time again in the history of
Christian praise. We cannot bemoan the lack of new Christian hymns of high quality without
bemoaning first the lack of poets.

My own feeling is that if we had the poets, we would find that we had the composers. The text
is the larger problem and the more difficult to address.

But, do you see now, how this large issue of the content and character of sung praise in
Christian worship reduces to this question: Do we have a Psalter in the OT only and not in the
NT because Christians, following Pentecost, no longer need a Psalter, they have been cut loose
to worship God in song as the Holy Spirit leads them? Or, do we have only one Psalter in the
Bible because one was enough for ever and all times?

And the question is the same on the musical side. There is, perhaps to the surprise of some,
considerable material on the musical side of sung worship in the Old Testament. We know
from I Chronicles 25 that David made it a point, when he organized the musical aspect of the
temple worship, to place that responsibility in the hands of men who were trained and skilled,
those are the Bible's own words, in music, in the playing of instruments, in singing, and in the
directing of choirs. It was unthinkable to David that the sung worship of God's house would
not be managed by skilled musicians.

And we know that they were skilled, in just the way in which we understand musical skill
today. They combined instruments in the accompaniment of praise. They chose certain
instruments for certain songs. (Psalms 61, 67, 76: With stringed instruments.) They wrote
music, associated certain melodies with certain texts (Many psalms have in their title the
direction to be sung to the tune...) and they annotated the music they wrote with technical
terms, the very kind of terms that so frustrate the novice today. This is what all advanced arts
and sciences develop: a terminology meaningful to those with a professional grasp of the

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