The Biblical Psalms in Christian Worship

A Brief Introduction and Guide to Resources

John D. Witvliet

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781467420556
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

In this concise yet comprehensive guide to using and praying the psalms in worship services, John Witvliet first offers summary of key biblical-theological themes related to the practice of worship, and he continues with reflections on every step in the process of preparing to use the psalms in worship, drawing on insights from writings in the history, theology, and pastoral practice of worship, liturgy, and preaching. Including patristic testimonies as "prelude" and both Reformation-era and modern testimonies as two "interludes, " the volume also offers a comprehensive list of currently available liturgical and musical resources. Witvliet offers a first -- a book designed to speak at once to both "traditional " and "contemporary " worship practices. The Biblical Psalms in Christian Worship will appeal to a wide range of readers, including college and seminary students, scholars and teachers, church educators, worship leaders, musicians, and librarians.

PART I

The Psalms and the Basic Grammar of Christian Worship

Learning to talk is one of life’s greatest miracles. But even for toddlers, healthy speech habits don’t come naturally. Young children need to learn to say “thank you,” “I’m sorry,” and “please.” Parents need to prompt and reinforce these basic conversational moves. Eventually they become part of the way toddlers see the world and navigate relationships. Indeed, there are few moments quite as sweet as hearing a sudden, unprompted “Thanks, Mommy and Daddy.”

I love you…I’m sorry… Thank you…Help… Words like these are the building blocks of healthy relationships. Every close relationship depends on them. When they are left unpracticed, marriages fail and friendships disintegrate.

Faithful speech is also central to the Christian life. One of the most provocative and inspiring word pictures in all of Scripture is that God is related to the church like a marriage partner. The God of the Bible is not just interested in being contemplated or appeased. This God is interested in the give and take of faithful life together, with good communication right at the center of it. Ample evidence for this claim is the Bible’s songbook, the 150 Psalms, each of which expresses at least one essential communicational habit for a people in a covenant relationship with God.

One of the ways we learn good communication habits with God is by participating in public worship. When we gather for worship, the church invites us to join together to say to God, “We love you. We’re sorry. Come again—we’re listening. Help. Thank you. I will serve you.” In fact, some orders of worship pretty much follow this pattern, ensuring a healthy balanced diet of faithful speech. To use a phrase from Thomas G. Long’s recent book Testimony, worship is “God’s language school.” As Long explains:

The way we talk in worship affects the way we talk in the rest of our lives, and vice versa…. The words of worship are like stones thrown into the pond; they ripple outward in countless concentric circles, finding ever fresh expression in new places in our lives….Worship is a key element in the church’s “language school” for life…. It’s a provocative idea—worship as a soundtrack for the rest of life, the words and music and actions of worship inside the sanctuary playing the background as we live our lives outside, in the world.¹

As with toddlers, these speech habits take practice. But the discipline is worth it, forming us over time to express our deepest fears, hopes, and joys in profound ways.

The challenge is that on any given Sunday, each of us comes to church with something different to say. Some of us come to church ready to tell God “thank you!” Others of us want to cry “why?” Others are ready to say “I’m sorry”—though we all need to. To say it another way, some of us come ready to sing Psalm 100, others Psalm 13, and all us, if we’re honest, need to speak Psalm 51. Good worship services make room for these essential words. They help each of us express our particular experience, but they also help us practice forms of speech we’re still growing into. This is one reason public worship is so important—it challenges us to practice forms of faithful speech to God that we are not likely to try on our own. Authentic worship, like toddler talk, expresses who we are and forms what we are becoming.

The biblical Psalms are the foundational mentor and guide in this vocabulary and grammar for worship. In a provocative and inspiring book, Eugene Peterson speaks of the Psalms as the tools God has given us to form in us a vibrant and well-grounded faith: “The Psalms are necessary because they are the prayer masters…. We apprentice ourselves to these masters, acquiring facility in using the tools, by which we become more and more ourselves. If we are willfully ignorant of the Psalms, we are not thereby excluded from praying, but we will have to hack our way through formidable country by trial and error and with inferior tools.”²

Indeed, the Psalter is the foundational and paradigmatic prayer book of the Christian church. Time and time again, worshiping communities have returned to the Psalter for inspiration and instruction in the life of both personal and public prayer. Some of the most auspicious liturgical reform movements in church history—including those of sixth-century monastic communities, sixteenth-century Lutherans and Calvinists, and the twentieth-century Liturgical Movement—have called for a renewed appreciation for the liturgical possibilities of the Psalter.³ Early African-American expressions of Christian worship were known for “a kind of extatic Delight in Psalmody,”⁴ and the Psalms are also both a point of comparison for understanding black spirituals and a source of inspiration for recent black gospel music.⁵ If we want to better understand the DNA of the Christian faith and to deepen our worship, there are few better places to begin than with careful and prayerful engagement with the Psalms.

At root, this conviction arises from the place of the Psalms within the canon of Scripture. The Psalms, like all Scripture, are “inspired by God and useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16-17). The words of the Psalter are reliable and trustworthy, though to be sure, they can also be challenging, perplexing, and even disturbing. For several commentators throughout the history of the church, this conviction suggested that praying the Psalms was one of the best ways to pray “in the Spirit” (Eph. 6:18; Jude 1:20). Indeed, when we pray these texts we are, in a profound if elusive sense, praying the words the Spirit has given us. In the words of Thomas Merton, “Nowhere can we be more certain that we are praying with the Holy Spirit than when we pray the Psalms.”⁶ In John Calvin’s words, when the psalms were sung, “we are certain that God has put the words in our mouths as if they themselves sang in us to exalt his glory.”⁷

Other Biblical Canticles

The broad themes of this volume can also be easily applied to our study and use of other biblical canticles, including—to name only a few of the more famous examples—the song of Miriam (Exod. 15:1-18); the song of Deborah (Judges 5); the song of Hannah (1 Sam. 2:1-10); the songs of David (2 Sam. 22:2-51, 1 Chron. 16:8-36); various canticles of Isaiah (see Isaiah 12; 25); the book of Lamentations; the song of Mary, the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55); the song of Zechariah, the Benedictus (Luke 1:68-79); and the song of Simeon, the Nunc Dimittis (Luke 2:29-32).

Yet the Church has not always been a good steward of the Psalms as liturgical prayer. For one, we are often guilty of speaking the strange words of a lament or enthronement Psalm without serious attempts to help worshipers understand what they are saying. Here we might be helped by John Cassian’s ancient advice that it might be “better to sing ten verses with a modicum of comprehension than to pour out the whole psalm with a distracted mind.”⁸ For another, we often render the Psalms in remarkably unimaginative ways. Over three generations ago, Earle Bennet Cross contended: “It is deplorable to waste the art and beauty of the Psalms on the desert air of systems of responsive readings which bore so many congregations to somnolence.”⁹ This critique is as relevant today as it was then.

Thoughtful, prayerful use of the Psalms in both public worship and personal devotion requires theological poise, pastoral perception, and artistic imagination—all grounded in the texts themselves. So before we study practical options for reading, singing, and praying the Psalms in worship, it is valuable to pause and consider the way in which the Psalms form us for prayer. The Psalms teach us what faith-filled prayer looks like. They provide what might be called the deep grammar or the paradigmatic structure for Christian prayer.¹⁰

Consider the following seven lessons the Psalms teach us about prayer. In each case, I briefly describe the lesson and then point to examples of how that lesson is reflected in Christian worship practices. Indeed, the Psalms reflect an ancient, biblical way of praying that continues to shape Christian worship, even when the Psalms themselves are not used. Understanding the nature of that formation will help us both deepen our practice of worship generally and be better stewards of the Psalms themselves.

1. PERSONAL ADDRESS AND DIALOGIC STRUCTURE

The biblical Psalms teach us that prayer and worship are not monologues. Rather, in the memorable words of Augustine, Benedict, Cassian, and Calvin, prayer is a “conversation with God.”¹¹ The Psalms themselves are often scripts of conversations. Often they express prayer, words to God. At other times, they depict proclamation, words from God. Petitions alternate with oracles. Psalm 12, for example, begins with the plea: “Help, O LORD, for there is no longer anyone who is godly.” This plea is soon interrupted by an oracle: “‘Because the poor are despoiled…I will rise up,’ says the LORD.” This alternation of speakers depicts what Raymond Jacques Tournay has called the “prophetic liturgy of the temple.”¹² The Psalms teach us, to use Walter Brueggemann’s phrase, that “biblical faith is uncompromisingly and unembarrassedly dialogical.”¹³ This, in turn, reflects the larger pattern of covenant reciprocity that undergirds large portions of both Old and New Testaments. There is nothing impersonal about biblical faith, and nothing impersonal about biblical worship. Worship is more than mere contemplation of timeless truth; it is a personal encounter between God and the gathered congregation. We can think of it as the exchange of messages between God and the community of faith.

This understanding of worship as interpersonal encounter is a frequently used metaphor for Christian liturgy across traditions. Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant liturgical theologians have all been known to speak of liturgy as dialogue, as the mutual exchange between God and the community of believers, mediated through the forms of human speech, visual arts, and music. In worship , we speak to God through prayers, including sung prayers, and in our offerings. In worship, God also speaks to us through the reading and preaching of Scripture, including the readings of Scripture that function as calls to worship, words of assurance, and benedictions. God also works to assure and challenge us through songs and artworks, testimonies and greetings. In worship God speaks to us; and we speak to God.

2. IDENTIFYING GOD’S CHARACTER THROUGH METAPHOR AND HISTORICAL RECITATION

Hebrew prayer is addressed to a specific and known God rather than an amorphous divine being. As Brueggemann points out, “Israel’s prayer consists in the utterance of ‘you,’ addressed to a named, known, addressable, reachable You.”¹⁴ This is a particular God, YHWH, whom Christians identify further as the God of...