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Comparing American antebellum Evangelical Worship Song and Contemporary Evangelical Worship Song: Reflections on the Trinity and Divine Activity Within the Economy of Salvation
Lester Ruth
Christian Congregational Music Conference, Ripon College, Cuddesdon, England, Aug. 2, 2013
Hymns aren’t choruses and praise choruses aren’t hymns. This sentiment was one of the major truisms of the battles which erupted in the United States in the 1990s over various styles of worship. That the two were not the same was self-evident. Indeed earlier forms of contemporary worship, even before that term was coined, was premised on some kind of essential distinction between bodies of congregational song. The piety of John Wimber’s congregation in southern California—first a Calvary Chapel and then a Vineyard Fellowship—was predicated upon those worshipers wanting to sing songs to God, not about God.
But is the dichotomy true? Are the true bodies of song all that different? I suggest that from a different angle, especially one that doesn’t become enamored of the form itself but asks more theological questions about how they speak of God and how they speak of divine and human activity, hymns and choruses are often very similar. They both are windows into evangelical piety that shows a certain constancy for over 200 years in some critical aspects.
Before I get to the details of my conclusions, let me explain a bit of my method to try to get to as a fair representative body of song for comparison that I could.
With respect to contemporary worship song, I have used the twice-a-year top 25 lists made public by Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI), the copyright clearinghouse with over 150,000 churches in the United States holding licenses. These top 25 lists are compiled from the reporting of usage done by churches in 6 month periods. Since the first list came out in 1989 to the last recent list, there have been 100 songs that have made their way on these lists. This is my corpus of contemporary worship songs.[1]
In order to establish a reliable historical canon of hymns reflecting likely actual use, I rely upon the work of musicologist Stephen Marini who has computed the first-line content of every hymn from 200 historically significant American evangelical hymnals from the first in 1737 to 1969. From that list, Marini has created a variety of small lists, including a list of the most-republished hymns in the 86 evangelical hymnals from 1737 to 1860. Culling through the 33,000 hymns found in these 86 hymnals, identifying those that were published in at least 1/3 of the hymnals, Marini has identified 70 hymns (hereafter EV) that appeared in at least 1/3 of the hymnals.
The handout will list those songs included in my review. Notice that my findings are limited to the United States since the primary material in both instances have that parameter.
To the lyrics in both bodies of song I have asked similar questions to get at theological content and liturgical piety. In the first line of inquiry I was asking about nouns: how do the two bodies of lyrics name the divine? This is the first critical step in assessing their Trinitarian quality. Everything builds upon how—and whether—the first, second, and third Persons of the Triune God are named. In the second line of inquiry, I asked about verbs: how do the two bodies of song speak about divine activity, especially in salvation and in worship. While I was at it, I also looked into what verbs were attributed to humans.
I acknowledge limitations in isolating song lyrics and treating them as theological texts. Others like Bert Pohlman and Matthew Sigler, doing comparable studies, have acknowledged the same.[2] I am sure we will discuss these in more details later.
Having raised the issue of the Trinitarian quality of these songs, let me get to my key finding: the explicit Trinitarian dimensions of both bodies of song are relatively weak. Generally, the bodies of song are not Trinitarian in any full or robust way. If a congregation relied just upon the most-used songs, either 200 years ago or today, the result would be a repertoire out of sync with apostolic naming practices for God in the New Testament and with much classic liturgical materials.
Specifically, here are the shared similarities between the two bodies of song upon which I base this larger conclusion: 1) there is relatively little referencing of God as being Triune, 2) virtually no worshiping of God for being Triune, 3) the songs have infrequent mentioning of more than one divine Person at a time , 4) there are many examples of generic naming of God (God, Lord, King) in which the content of the song does not explicitly bring to mind one of the Persons (unless one would attribute sovereignty, power, majesty primarily to God the Father, but, to anticipate my next point), 5) explicit naming of a divine Person is much, much more likely to be of Jesus Christ. General divine notions of power and activity are attributed to him and there is a tendency to collapse more generic names (not only Lord, but also God and King) to him. Both bodies of song are obsessed with Jesus Christ.
Your handout can provide you some of the specific numbers, which are now on the screen.
How can these tendencies be explained, whether it is in the generic naming practices or the strong attachment to Jesus Christ, especially in his divine nature? I’d like to suggest a confluence of two factors, at least.
The first is the influence of the Psalms on evangelical songwriting. Except for a few Psalms with obvious, overt Christological possibilities or the few Psalms that make specific reference to the Spirit of God, most engage in the sort of naming practices that I’m calling generic, i.e., speaking of God, the Lord, or the divine being as King. I think the influence of the Psalms is both direct and indirect. It is direct in the sense that many of the evangelical worship songs are intended to be direct adaptations of a Psalm or indirect in that individual and corporate reading, praying, and meditating on the Psalms influence the shaping of Christian piety and provide a main well for the language for Christian worship.
The second factor is the natural affective attachment toward Jesus Christ coming from evangelicalism’s classic emphasis upon salvation. Although liturgical attachment to Jesus Christ reaches back to the apostolic period and received a resurgence in the doctrinal disputes of the late patristic period, I’d venture to suggest that it is evangelicalism’s—at least those strains influenced by Pietism—fusion of affect-based piety with the centrality of soteriology that provides the tipping point that takes the it into a hyper-attachment to Jesus Christ. Worshipers intensely focused on salvation will likely be focused on the one they call Savior. In grass-roots evangelicalism formulation, that is likely to be Jesus Christ. He is the one who has acted decisively on our behalf and thus gratitude, dependence, love, and a host of other affect-related dispositions of the soul are likely to attach to him. It seems easier for evangelicals—past and present—to dream of a positive, essential role for Jesus Christ in salvation than for either the Father or the Spirit. These songs bear that out for the most part.
Simply put, we sing about the One who saved us because contemplation of that salvation is what creates worshipful dispositions of the soul. And so, if a worshiper formulates her or his salvation by saying “Christ died to save me and then he rose from the grave,” that worship will be attractive to songs arising from that sensibility. But what if a worshiper formulated her or his experience by saying, “God presented Christ as an atoning sacrifice and then by the power of the Spirit raised him from the dead”? I think a more Trinitarian song would be desired. The singing mouth conforms to the shape of the singing heart.
The Incarnation almost gives Jesus Christ an “advantage” over the Father and the Spirit, if I can be a little bit cheeky. In an affect-based liturgical piety, the concreteness of Jesus Christ being embodied allows the evangelical worshiper is very attractive. The worshiper can visualize him whether generally or with respect to particular episodes in the Gospels. The worshiper can personalize Jesus Christ and think of him concretely in a waythat is more difficult for God the Father and the Holy Spirit.
What about the sense of divine and human activity within the two bodies of song? Looking at all the verbs used in both bodies of song for both divine and human action, there are similarities, some of which are related to my earlier comments about the Trinitarian dimensions of the songs, as well as some critical dissimilarities. I would suggest that it in the verbs, reflecting some critical shifts in piety associated with some other distinctive features of each body of song, that the most significant differences exist between classic evangelical hymnody and contemporary worship song.
But first the three similarities which relate to the portrayal of divine and human activity. First is the similarity between the two bodies of song with respect to the greater number and broader range of verbs attributed to humans. Simply put, humans get more verbs and a greater range of verbs than does God or any of the three Persons of the Godhead. In the 70 evangelical hymns, there’s almost 2 verbs for people to every verb for God; in the CWS, it’s 1.5 human verbs to every divine verb. With respect to the number of different verbs within a corpus, i.e., the range of actions attributed to people and God, God in EV has 40% of the number of different verbs and people have 60% On the same issue, CWS has people holding just over 50% of the range of verbs and divinity just under 50%. You can reference the handout or the screen for the specific numbers.
Given the strong naming practices which respect to the Son as discussed above, it is not surprising that there is a related similarity with respect to attribution of divine activity. This is the second similarity. When one of the three Persons is named as acting within the songs, the primary actor is most usually Jesus Christ. The second most active divine actor is a more generic designation of God, Lord, or King, not the Father nor the Spirit. The situation is particularly acute in the CWS, in which the Spirit gets one verb in 99 songs: blazing.
A third similarity is closely related to the second: even when the Divine Persons are named or inferred in a song, regardless of which corpus, there is little cooperative activity. The Persons do not act upon each other or through each other toward humanity. The Persons do not act in concert. The portrayal of Divine activity generally, even when there is more explicit naming, is a sense of compartmentalized activity.
A fourth similarity is in the portrayal of the death of Jesus Christ. There is a similar balance in how it is that the death of Jesus Christ saves. No single theory of the atonement predominates.
Finally, there is a similarity in the diminished sense of the historical breadth of divine activity. To put it simply, apart from recognizing God’s creative activity, there is little sense of God’s historical activity with Israel prior to the coming of Jesus Christ or during the life and ministry of Jesus. One could know little of the Old Testament scriptures or of the Gospels and not be lost in either body of song. The most significant exception to that claim is the typological and allegorical use of a certain cluster of types, especially from the narrative of Exodus and arrival in the Promised Land, to have a way of talking about Christian hope and experience in EH.
Having pointed out the family resemblances between the two bodies of song—in several key respects the two bodies of evangelical song share much DNA—I would in no ways want to assert or imply that the two are identical twins. There are some significant differences between the two repertoires, but I think the differences are not always where people have placed them.
The first significant difference between the two bodies of song deals with the frequency and the manner in which a Divine Person is addressed directly in a song. Not only is there a clear tendency toward prayer directly addressed in contemporary worship songs but there is an overwhelmingly strong use of direct worship of divinity, whether in sheer numbers of CWS or in relative percentage as compared to EH. Simply put, CWS like to use phrases like “I worship you, I honor you, I praise you” in a direct approach to worship. CWS comes through the front door of worship, boldly, aggressively, repeatedly without knocking, whereas EH tends to slip in through the back door by praising in indirect ways.
The distinction in amount of direct address to the divine corresponds with a distinctive element in EH. If CWS tended toward direct address to divinity, i.e., prayer, then EH has a greater likelihood of including direct address to people in the form of exhortation for a variety of purposes. There is a corporate consciousness not found in CWS.
If the difference between direct and indirect worship is evidenced in the amount and manner in which the divine recipient is directly addressed, then there is also a corresponding shift with respect to key cluster of verbs. Simply put, CWS clearly tends to emphasize the activity of human worship more often. Verbs like “worship” and “praise” are much less frequent in EH than CWS. By these two key verbs, along with corresponding verbs found in contemporary evangelical piety (lift, long, glorify, magnify, bow, adore, and the like), CWS tends to spend quite a bit more time directly adoring the Divine You.