There are two uncomfortable truths we conservatives need to remember about the psalmsinging/hymnsinging debate.
Let me be clear: this is not an attack on psalms. I am a strong advocate of psalmsinging, spend lots of time promoting psalmsinging to Baptists and charismatics as a way to re-center the church on a biblical view of God, and His majesty and authority and hatred for sin. I'm writing this as a person who has used only three "hymns" in the last year and a half, one of them the Magnificat from the Genevan Psalter and the other two being hymns from the early 1800s of unquestioned Reformed character which I selected because they directly referenced the biblical text I was using, and in a Southern Bible Belt context, would help me show that Calvinism isn't something "new and strange," but is taught in some of the "great hymns of the faith" sung by traditional fundamental Baptists. I send online Youtube videos of the Genevan Psalter each week to a list of local pastors and lay leaders who are interested in what we are doing, and have received an almost uniformly positive response from people who, in many cases, had absolutely no idea that anyone sings the psalms today and are amazed to see what they are like when sung. Credit here to Ninehouse Productions and Psalternative -- they're a group of Canadian Reformed people who are doing wonderful work by putting the Genevan Psalter online via Youtube. We need lots more people like them.
(For those who will ask, we almost exclusively use the Genevan Psalter at Hazelgreen, singing in English and Korean, and I send the Spanish texts of the Genevan Psalter to a list of people who are native speakers of Spanish who watch online. If we had Spanish-speaking people in regular attendance, we'd be singing in three languages, not just two, which I point out is a huge benefit of using the Genevan Psalter because it is available in nearly every major modern language that has a strong Reformed church.)
So what are those uncomfortable truths?
First, some who most of us on the Puritan Board would consider heroes of experiential Calvinism were on what many of us would consider the "wrong" side of the debate over introduction of hymns into worship. To cite just one example, Jonathan Edwards used Isaac Watts' "Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs." I was very surprised when I learned that since I had always associated an emphasis on psalmsinging with the most conservative elements of Calvinism. That has not uniformly been the case in Reformed church history. Whatever the demerits of Isaac Watts may be (and there are many), I don't think many of us want to condemn Jonathan Edwards to the outer darkness for using his hymns.
Second, while it's true that Edwards' example may be partly excused by the fact that much of the debate in England and New England over introduction of hymns was prompted by really bad psalters (the Ainsworth Psalter, for example) that were attempts to be as literal as possible in translating the psalms but had wooden versifications artificially forced into meters that didn't fit the words well, and the reduction of the total number of tunes in common use to a few dozen, that's not the whole story. The Reveil in Europe (basically the European version of the First Great Awakening) introduced man-made hymns as a supplement to the various national translations of the Genevan Psalter.
Our conservative Dutch Reformed history books will tell us that the conservatives in the Afscheiding of 1834 rejected the introduction of hymns because they were introduced contrary to the 1619 Church Order of Dordt, and that is true. It's also true that the Dutch church leaders, during a government-imposed reorganization of the church, introduced hymns of human composition that were theologically problematic and were what we would today call "liberal" (the negative term of that era would be "rationalistic"). Part of why the Dutch Reformed conservatives, to their credit, preserved the Genevan Psalter for so long is that hymnody in the Netherlands was associated with Lutheranism at best, and liberalism at worst, while psalmsinging was the conservative Reformed position and was SUPPOSED to be the practice required by the church order.
The problem with that narrative is that outside the Netherlands, most of the conservative efforts to return Reformed churches to their roots in the late 1700s and early 1800s were associated with the Reveil. That movement didn't oppose psalmody, and continued to use the Genevan Psalter in various national translations, but introduced what they viewed as "Christocentric" hymns that emphasized the need for personal conversion.
JP Wallace is correct when he writes this:
I go home angry at the wickedness of the Church of Scotland in the late 19th and 20th century. It was they who in great measure created the modern godless Scotland with their Christless formalism. There are empty or closing churches everywhere in every city town and village and they are empty because the preaching was and is empty. The Free Church has been vindicated by history and liberalism equally condemned. Nothing short of miracle of grace and revival can possibly turn it around.
I don't think there is any need to abandon or downplay psalmsinging to return the church to an emphasis on personal conversion and break it from the Christless formalism and rationalism of the 1800s which Wallace correctly condemns.
To the contrary, we now have two centuries of the problems of American evangelicalism to show us what happens when we sever worship from the biblical emphasis on the severe wrath of a sovereign God which is taught in the psalms. Much of what the psalms teach seems very odd and very much of an "Old Testament God" to many modern evangelicals.
My response is that they're right -- except that the "Old Testament God" is also the God of the New Testament, and maybe the problem is that a lot of evangelical churches worship a "Jesus meek and mild" of their own making who is not the God of the Bible but more akin to the false god of the Marcionite heretics. A church that finds psalmsinging uncomfortable is perhaps a church that doesn't understand how seriously God takes sin and refusal to bow the knee to His ultimate authority.
However, we have to come to terms with the fact that the leaders of the Reveil in Europe thought that introduction of man-made hymns was important to emphasize the need for personal conversion. These men were not liberals, they weren't really pietists (though there were some ties with that movement), and they advocated doctrines very much like that of the conservatives in both Northern and Southern Presbyterianism. Yes, it's true that in America, Girardeau was still an advocate of psalmody in the 1800s, but he was the exception, not the norm. I don't think most of us want to condemn the leaders of Old School Presbyterianism, in both the North and the South, for singing hymns along with their conservative brothers in Europe outside the Netherlands and Scotland. How many of us want to say Machen was a bad boy because he didn't mandate exclusive psalmody for his new denomination? Maybe he understood there were more important problems to deal with in the 1920s and 1930s.
Let's place the blame where it belongs, not on hymns, but rather on people who emphasize rationalism and who are satisfied with a "historical faith" in assent to the doctrines of the church, which is well and good, but don't place the necessary emphasis on a "saving faith," i.e., personal knowledge of our total depravity, our utter inability to save ourselves, and our desperate need for an alien righteousness that comes from Christ's sacrifice, not from our works or our "head knowledge."
That's what Puritanism means. Without that, doctrinal orthodoxy leads to Christless deadness.
The early Scottish rationalists were not yet heretical in their doctrine, though they became such in later generations.
Where they erred was failing to understand the Puritan emphasis on personal conversion. Their dislike of an emphasis on personal conversion is what led to the expulsion of the Erskine Brothers in the 1700s and the Secession movement that eventually became the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. It was a major factor, though not the only factor, in the formation of the Free Church of Scotland.
We need to keep the eye on the ball of personal conversion. Psalmsinging, while important, is secondary to conversion.
It is entirely possible for an unconverted heart to sing the psalms. If we have any doubt on that point, let's remember that the tormenters of Jesus, the Son of David, were singing the Psalms of David and failing to recognize the Messiah right in front of their faces Who had been foretold by the very psalms they took on their lips in the temple and the synagogue.
Conversion is the key.
A converted heart will love God's Word, and that includes the Psalms.
We cannot reverse that order.
