Case Studies in Culture and Hymnody

Drawing on the Nairobi Statement, we can say that congregational singing is a transcultural activity in worship. Virtually all Christian traditions have and do participate in some form of congregational singing.⁶ Hymns are also contextual artifacts. Analyzers of Western hymnody usually include literary, theological, and historical perspectives, but are less likely to look at hymns through a cultural lens. It may be that cultural knowledge is assumed. However, when songs beyond the Euro-North American context are sung, the cultural aspects of the experience come to the fore.

In an attempt to explore the benefits of a cultural analysis of hymns and hymn singing, we will examine more closely three well-known congregational songs that represent stanzas of what Bishop Martínez called "the great hymn of the church." Isaac Watts's "Jesus Shall Reign" serves as an object of contextual analysis. Prudentius's "Corde natus ex Parentis" illustrates a cross-cultural dimension of hymnody from a historical perspective. The South African freedom song "Siyahamba" is an example of a song, forged recently in a specific cultural and political context, that has spread around the world, and is used extensively across cultures. As the choice and popularity of "Siyahamba" indicates, many of the songs that make up the "stanza" of our generation come from the Southern hemisphere. Noting this reality, I will suggest an approach for understanding and incorporating in our worship the different structures that come to us through the use of songs from beyond the Euro-North American context.

"Jesus Shall Reign"—a contextual case study. As one of the best known hymns in the English language, "Jesus Shall Reign" (1719) has served as an expression of missionary vision for virtually all Protestant denominations for at least two hundred years. By the nineteenth century Watts's free paraphrase of selected verses from Psalm 72 had come to epitomize the emerging expansion of the missionary movement.⁷ His words have shaped the thought and theology by which the Western church defined its understanding of missions during the period of its most dramatic growth.⁸ The identity of Christian missions was nurtured in the milieu of European political monarchies, and developed during a time when Christians assumed not only a relationship between the kingdom of Christ and major European kingdoms, but also the divine right of kings. "Jesus Shall Reign" gives voice to an emerging movement devoted to spreading the Good News of salvation "throughout the world which was ignorant of this knowledge of God in Jesus Christ."⁹

This, and many of Watts's other hymns and psalm paraphrases, deserves to be sung in churches everywhere. Like all of our congregational song, "Jesus Shall Reign" reflects its culture, and may be seen as an artifact of liturgical inculturation. Watts understood the context of those who would sing his psalm-paraphrases and hymns; part of the process of hymnic inculturation was to compose texts in a manner that allowed them to be understood by the singers of his time, "working-class worshipers of England's Nonconformist congregations."¹⁰ Furthermore, he adapted to the practice of lining out metrical psalms by following the principle of one line, one thought, so that precentors expressed a complete thought when speaking a line before the congregation was to sing it. This avoided the dreadful practice of singing only a partial idea and having to wait for the next phrase from the precentor to complete the thought.¹¹

While I value this psalm paraphrase as representative of one stanza in the unfolding hymn of the church throughout the ages, our present context forces us to examine Watts's understanding of "kingdom" in light of increasingly cross-cultural societies. The image of kingdom in Watts's day was one of a consummate hierarchy in which the rulers of the nations represented, to varying degrees, the authority of God. Such an image crumbles under the weight of the current international reality. This old-world view of "kingdom" inherited from the eighteenth century provides at best an ambiguous model for Christ's realm on earth. In a world where the influence of multi-national corporations often supersedes that of national governmental structures, the concept of kingdom may come across as both archaic and irrelevant unless it is grounded theologically in an understanding of the eschatological realm of God.

As we shall see "Jesus Shall Reign" shows Watts as a patriot of the monarchy. Yet he and Dissenters in England were often in tension with this monarchy. The Schism Act of 1714 forbade independent congregations like Watts's to run schools, and foreshadowed the possibility of further persecution for those outside the Church of England. Queen Anne died providentially on the day the Act was to take force, and it was repealed by 1719, the year that Watts's Psalms of David Imitated was published.¹² Perhaps Watt's paraphrase of Psalm 90, "Man Frail and God Eternal" (better known as "Our God, Our Help in Ages Past"), written following the enactment of the Schism Act, reflects a tempering of his patriotic pride. In stanzas four and eight of the original text Watts notes the ephemeral nature of all nations:

Thy word commands our flesh to dust,
Return, ye sons of men:
All nations rose from earth at first,
And turn to earth again.
 
Like flow'ry fields the nations stand
Pleas'd with the morning light;
The flowers beneath the Mower's hand
Lie withering e'er 'tis night.¹³

Watts's habit of Christianizing the psalter, a hallmark of his psalm paraphrases,¹⁴ was a major change from earlier metrical versions that attempted to stay as close as possible to the Hebrew. So, rather than follow the lead of Sternhold and Hopkins's Whole Booke of Psalmes in the mid-sixteenth century, or Tate and Brady's New Version, first published at the end of the seventeenth century, Watts set out on a new course, "[taking] the Hebrew and recast[ing] it, as if the psalmist were writing in the Christian era."¹⁵ One result was "Jesus shall reign," the astonishing incipit for Psalm 72.¹⁶ As Watts states in his "Preface; or An Inquiry into the right way of Fitting the Book of Psalms for Christian Worship," Christians sing the psalms from a different perspective from the Hebrews, for we express nothing but the character, the concerns, and the religion of the Jewish king; while our own circumstances, and our own religion (which are so widely different from his) have little to do in the sacred song; and our affections want something of property or interest in the words, to awaken them at first, and to keep them lively.¹⁷

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