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As Robin Leaver has noted, "In the older metrical versions there was a concern for a re-representation of the psalm, but in Watts the concern was for re-interpretation."18 Re-interpretation of the psalter for worship is liturgical inculturation through congregational song. While Watts's approach to the psalter demonstrates a particular Christocentric inclination, there is both internal textual and external social evidence that the hymn "Jesus Shall Reign," though reflecting its culture well, suffers from an ethnocentric propensity by today's standards. One of the dangers of liturgical inculturation is that the regional appeal of a hymn may limit its universal application. As Watts Christianized the psalter to fit his own religion, he also particularized the psalter to fit his own region of the world. Hymnal editors have usually excised stanzas two and three of Watts's original hymn partly for their regional disposition:
Psalm 72 specifically mentions Tarshish, Arabia, and Saba; Watts substituted locations where England was developing mission activity along with colonial and economic interests. The "barbarous nations" in the second stanza quoted above actually appear in a revised form in a twentieth-century American hymnal as "savage tribes."20 This substitution of contemporary locations for biblical or mythological ones represented a codified literary device of the time known as "imitation." Following the example of great eighteenth-century poets such as John Milton, Alexander Pope, and John Dryden, Watts was not only a master of this device, but also was in the vanguard of its use.21 While freeing psalm-singing from a strict metrical approach that was often poetically stilted, he offered Dissenting congregations freer adaptations or paraphrases of the psalms. Indeed, the complete title of his primary psalm collection, The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, and Apply'd to the Christian State and Worship, is a direct reference to the device of imitation.22 Many followed Watts's lead by "imitating" the psalms in their own cultural context. The effective use of imitation depended on a thorough knowledge of the original psalm, usually in the 1611 translation commonly known as the King James Version. Although Watts could identify with the "stranger in distress, the widow and the fatherless," as he did in his paraphrase of Psalm 146, "I'll Praise my Maker While I've Breath,"23 issues of justice receive short shrift in "Jesus Shall Reign." Psalm 72 states that "He shall keep the simple folk by their right, defend the children of the poor, and punish the wrong doer....For he shall deliver the poor when he crieth; the needy also, and him that hath no helper. He shall be favorable to the simple and needy, and shall preserve the souls of the poor" (verses 4, 12-13). The mandate of this prophetic passage is considerably obscured in Watts's paraphrase found in the original stanza six:
Watts freely adapted the psalms and omitted those ideas that he thought unworthy of a New Testament ethic.24 How can we know what the hymn meant in its time? Evidence comes from the colonial caste system in eighteenth-century India under British rule. The East India Company was chartered by Queen Elizabeth I in 1600, and by 1689 the directors of the Company resolved to "make us a nation in India."25 By 1711, just a few years before the writing of Watts's hymn, Alexander Dalrymple noted that the "great endeavour of all commercial states, is to draw the production of other countries to its own center."26 Because Western music of this era was philosophically based on certain "universal" laws that were as constant as "the circulation of the blood and the law of gravity,"27 music not corresponding to these natural laws was by implication inferior. Music was one of the cultural props that allowed eighteenth-century British expatriates to maintain their role at the assumed pinnacle of society, separate from the local population. The arts "mask[ed] the image of realpolitik by erasing all evidence of that which had been subdued and of how the defeat was accomplished by trade and labor exploitation, racial separation, bureaucratization, and the brutality of military enforcement."28 In his discussion of the great missionary expansion of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jaroslav Pelikan refers to "Jesus Shall Reign" as a symbol of Christian growth. He notes that "the sun never sets on the empire of Jesus the King, the Man Who Belongs to the World."29 God's purpose and Great Britain's ecclesiastical, political, and economic destiny seem to merge in "Jesus Shall Reign." Was the Dissenting British parishioner singing subconsciously:
Given that Watts was known to substitute "Britain" for "Israel" in some of the psalms, probably not.30 "Corde natus ex parentis"—a cross-cultural case study. The text of "Jesus Shall Reign" clearly reflects the culture of its time not only in its Christian updating of the psalter, but in the rhyming of its poetic couplets and its long meter structure. "Of the Father's Love Begotten" demonstrates a historical cross-cultural excursion of nearly sixteen centuries. This Latin hymn is the work of the Spanish poet Marcus Aurelius Clemens Prudentius in the early fifth century of the Christian era. Prudentius was educated in law before turning to an ascetic spiritual life at age fifty-seven.31 His devotional poetry was widely read, and was influential during the Middle Ages. Many hymns were derived from his long Latin poems, as was the case with "Corde natus ex parentis." Needless to say, early fifth century Spanish piety is far removed from a twenty-first century Christian. Prudentius' poetic reflections on the nature of Christ within the Trinity, however, growing out of the theological controversies of the fourth century, provide a transcultural content—that is, content that has relevance across cultures in time and in space—for the broader Christian community. |
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