Comment: Frankensteined hymns

First of all, I don't normally do Christianity Today. And I certainly don't like to take any part in giving John Piper any more publicity, even the miniscule amount of publicity I can offer. But this requires comment.

The article linked here posits that Piper has, among whatever virtues he may have, some inclination for hymn writing. For an event for women sponsored by The Gospel Coalition (another thing I'm not keen to publicize), Piper was apparently saddled with the hymn "Great is thy faithfulness" to follow his sermon. Apparently the hymn was too Wesleyan for the über-reformed Calvinist Piper, so he decided to add a couple of verses of his own to the hymn. After all, nobody tells John Piper what to do. (You can see the added verses in the article link.)

(Personal note: that hymn was sung at my mother's funeral, primarily because as the one who had just started a church music degree at the time I was naturally asked what her favorite hymn was, and that was the one that came into my head. So now that hymn always catches my attention.)

Not surprisingly, I guess, there was a certain amount of kerfuffle over Piper seeking to bend the old hymn's theology towards his own, or something like that. You can, if you choose, finish that article for a batch of comments from varied experts of one sort or another: to me the most useful are those of Constance Cherry, of Indiana Wesleyan University. Piper's emendations don't really pass muster with Cherry's list, particularly #4 -- no one would ever think that Thomas O. Chisolm would have ever written such a thing on a poetic basis alone. For one thing, where Chisolm's text is more God-directed, Piper's is individualistic -- the pronoun "I" suddenly leaps to greater prominence than in any of Chisolm's verses (although it does appear in the refrain). The disconnect is jarring stylistically, before any theological questions even come up.

There are a lot of questions to be asked here; why would any speaker be handled a hymn to follow their sermon without any input? Why could not Piper just ask for another hymn or even write something fully new, if he's that good?

What doesn't need to be fussed over too much is the supposed unprecedented quality of such a move. It's not new. Hymns have been worked over by poetic Dr. Frankensteins before for theological and other reasons. It should be noted, though, that it's impossible for any such alteration, emendation, or augmentation of a hymn not to have theological results, and even seemingly non-theological changes to hymns are usually theological if you dig deep enough. For example, editing of hymn texts to cut gender-exclusive language for God or for humanity absolutely derive from a theological conviction: namely, that women and men are created equal in God's image, called equally by a God who  we cannot confine to maleness without courting heresy. Piper himself would utterly reject such a change, but clearly isn't above such manipulation of hymn texts for theological purity.

But my main reaction, though, is that this has happened before, apparently without complaint, and to hymns far more widely popular than "Great is thy faithfulness." Indeed, possibly the most popular hymn out there for us western Christian types is a Frankenstein's hymn.

Here is the text as written by the original author:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.

'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.
How precious did that grace appear the hour I first believed!

Through many dangers, toils, and snares, I have already come.
'Tis grace has brought me save thus far, and grace will lead me home. 

The Lord has promised good to me; his word my hope secures. 
He will my shield and portion be as long as life endures. 

Yea, when this flesh and heart shall fail, and mortal life shall cease;
I shall possess, within the vail, a life of joy and peace.

The earth shall soon dissolve like snow, the sun forbear to shine;
But God, who call'd me here below, will be forever mine.


(Hat tip to Carl Daw for including those last two stanzas in the entry for the hymn in Glory to God: A Companion.)

Mostly familiar, yes? John Newton does a pretty neat trick in this text, speaking for three verses of God's past action towards us, then pivoting at the end of the third verse and looking forward to God's future provision for us for the three final stanzas (with a quick look back in the last half of the final stanza. It's pretty effective hymn writing, and remains consistently focused on God's grace to us in providing for us both in the past and in the future.

We don't get that, of course, with the emendation visited upon the hymn in our modern hymnals. I'm guessing modern hymn singers would get a bit uneasy at that final stanza's thoughts on the earth disssolving and the sun going out, not to mention the mortality of stanza five. Still, our discomfort deprives us of Newton's full message, and leaves stanza four seeming a bit abrupt and out of place for some. There is a loss here. It probably isn't enough to restore those final two stanzas, but there is a loss.

Oh, and there's that other stanza.

When we've been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun,
we've no less days to sing God's praise than when we'd first begun.

John Newton had nothing to do with that stanza. It first appeared in a collection called A Collection of Sacred Ballads, published in Richmond in 1790 (Newton's was first published in London eleven years before). In that collection it was the last of nine stanzas of the hymn "Jerusalem, my happy home" (or at least one version thereof). When you work your way through the nine stanzas, it actually makes sense there. It fits thematically, it fits stylistically, it just fits.

Somehow, across the nineteenth century, that stanza got detached from its original hymnic home and "floated" across texts, eventually attaching itself to "Amazing grace." It was not actually published with that hymn until 1910, but it had apparently become a common alteration to the hymn well before. It is now, of course, inseparable from the hymn, no matter how wildly different in poetic thrust or theological focus it is. I mean, who is "we"? Newton's verses have all been "me." Where is "there" based on the context of Newton's hymn as it is presented (without his last two original verses, remember)? How did we suddenly spend ten thousand years "there"?  It's a stanza about the beauties of the Holy City, not about God's provision for us at all. And yet there it is stuck. It's as if Newton's original hymn was really rejected, a la Piper's disdain for "Great is thy faithfulness," and wrenched into a thing that promises us pie in the sky bye and bye instead of quietly rejoicing in God's, well, grace to us?

So, yes, "Amazing grace" is a Frankenstein's hymn, just without any one individual to whom the alteration can be attributed. Imagine if you will the mob, rather than seeking to destroy Frankenstein's monster, actually adding an arm to him. As long as "Amazing grace" remains in the general repertory of the church, complaints against modern "frankensteining" of traditional hymns, no matter how ethically sound, are going to come off as a little weak, to say the least.

Obviously even Newton's fourth stanza didn't always survive...

Dear Pastor: Why won't they sing?

Time tonight for a few brief thoughts, dear pastor, on one thing that will ultimately vex you to some degree should you start taking this whole congregational singing business seriously. No matter how much encouraging you do, no matter how much support you provide with choir and instruments and helpful guidance, no matter what kind of congregational song you practice, there will be people in your congregation who will not sing.

Why is this?

When singing is about as natural an activity as there is, something that starts happening virtually in infancy, why do so many people stop themselves singing?

A few off-the-cuff thoughts:

1) Some jerk told them at some point in their lives they couldn't sing. To be clear, there will be people who will, frankly, do more harm than good if they try to join the church choir (and I think I'm in the minority about church choirs not necessarily being an all-come affair), but that's not the same thing. Or if folks have somehow decided that if they don't sing like Placido Domingo (or people don't encourage them with such praise) then they won't sing at all, the sin is in their heart. I'll go ahead and say the harsh thing: to refuse to sing with the congregation is to refuse Christian community. Come at me, bro.
But some have been actively hurt by small bitter people and will need a particular kind of encouragement.

2) They aren't used to singing. Let's face it: how many places in society (aside from church) is singing regularly practiced? There are people for whom their only regular experience at group singing is the seventh-inning stretch at a baseball game. (They probably aren't singing the national anthem if it's being "led" by some soloist, but that's another point.) Or if they're a soccer partisan maybe they join in on their club's preferred chants. And that's about it.

3) Singing, or perhaps singing with others, isn't "cool." This would the the wannabe-rockstar position, not wanting to share the stage with others. Not super common, but out there.

4) "I don't sound like the person leading the song, so I shouldn't sing." A greater risk in more contemporary settings, where a single lead voice is more likely featured. Also a greater risk if the leader can't resist particular "soloistic" touches in leading the folk. I doubt it's intentional, in most cases, but it still can intimidate folks in the pews out of their comfort with singing.

5) MEN DON'T SING. Easily the most toxic position out there, and goes with all sorts of other toxic things going on with men in the church.

6) Staying above the fray. Some folks are more inclined to be observers at church than participants. Singing, in that mindset, is too much involvement. Best to remain detached and not do anything that might make me start enjoying this, or - even worse - getting something out of it, or - horrors! - being moved. Worst of all, somebody might invite them to join the choir...

No one of these will explain all the non-singers in your congregation. Some of them may not be present, but I'm willing to bet more than one or a few of them will.

I wouldn't expect this to be a comprehensive list. What reasons for not singing the hymns, or barriers to singing with the congregation, have you experienced? I'd like to hear from you.

...to which some say, "no thanks, I'll pass"...

Dear Pastor: Musical borrowing, cultural appropriation, and "borrowed" song

Earlier this year in one of the "wedding day" series of posts on what the church should sing, I put forth this post on singing "something borrowed." You may recall that post advocating for singing at least some of the song of the global church, broadening the repertoire of our congregations beyond the comfortable "western" stuff we know and taking in music from the continents of South America, Africa, and Asia in particular. (I am far from a significant voice advocating for this: far more notable figures in the church such as C. Michael Hawn, Nathan Corbitt, and even John L. Bell can be counted among those who in one way or another speak to the power and importance of global song in the Western church.)

Such "borrowing," it should be noted, is not without its potential pitfalls. If your principal church musician has a fairly significant academic background (and likes to scare you), or if you have a few professors among your congregation, you might get introduced to the phrase "cultural appropriation," if you didn't run across it yourself during your own education. It's not nothing, and a church can be as guilty as any other institution or group of it, but the simple congregational singing of songs from non-US cultures should not fall into the category of cultural appropriation. Let's talk about why, dear pastor.

A full treatment of cultural appropriation would overwhelm this blog, so we shall try to be brief about it. In short, cultural appropriation involves the lifting of images, creative or artistic works or forms in which such works are produced, religious imagery, folklore, or other creations of a culture without permission or at least acknowledgment. The appropriation factor also often involves a situation in which the culture being appropriated is a minority culture and quite likely one which has experienced dominaiton, exploitation, or abuse in history at the hands of the culture doing the appropriating. (This article offers a fuller exploration of the topic.)

One thing that has to be acknowledged is the degree to which such appropriation does happen in the realm of music. In the United States, such appropriation has long histories in popular music, particularly as early rock'n'roll artists and/or their producers engaged in wholesale grabbing of blues and R&B songs already recorded by black artists, repackaged them with white artists singing, and reaped the profits with no acknowledgment or recompense to the original artists. When Elvis Presley scored a hit with "Hound Dog," there probably weren't a whole lot of listeners who were aware of Big Mama Thornton's earlier, earthier version of the song, and Presley's people didn't much concern themselves with that. 

Not all popular music encounters quite fell into such appropriation. Eric Clapton's wanderings into the blues were generally careful (after a time) to acknowledge masters such as Robert Johnson, the Rolling Stones did generally seek to deflect some attention onto Muddy Waters, and Paul Simon did a reasonable job of putting his South African collaborators in the spotlight to some degree on the Graceland album (not necessarily in the video to the biggest hit from that album, unless Chevy Chase has some South African background I don't know about). In other cases (some recent Miley Cyrus videos come to mind, as well as a recent Coldplay/Beyoncé video heavily borrowing dance and imagery of India), the spectre of appropriation is less successfully dispelled.

The more slang term "cultural tourism" might be useful here. If the music "dabbles" in the culture without any particular involvement or deeper acknowledgment, without the voice of that culture being heard and recognized, there's a decent chance appropriation is happening. In that last video, India (and a fairly stereotyped India at that) is basically little more than a backdrop for a fairly generic (albeit catchy) Coldplay song and a costume department for Beyoncé; the music itself offers no acknowledgment whatsoever.

In the case of the church and its song, if we do it right, these issues don't quite come into play the same way. This does, however, require the church to be diligent about the how and why of singing the song of the whole church. 

Maybe the most significant part is acknowledging these Christians as exactly that: Christians. Not merely objects of mission or "exotic" elements for our fascination, but Christians no less (or no more, although sometimes it's hard not to wonder) than us. It involves regarding Tokuo Yamaguchi, the author of the always-intriguing hymn "Here, O Lord, your servants gather" (Glory to God #311), as a contributor to the church's song in the same way as, say, John Wesley (whose journals Yamaguchi translated into Japanese), if not necessarily as prolific a contributor as John's brother Charles. It means submitting Yamaguchi's hymns to the same theological scrutiny as any other hymn (stands up fine in my opinion, your mileage may vary), and taking the accompanying tune (an appealing use of Japanese gagaku mode by Isao Koizumi made for this text) as seriously and as joyfully as any other we sing. (I do recommend it, for what that's worth.) (Of course, gagaku mode actually originated in China, so there's that.)

That hymn and its tune also lead to another point about global song: very little of it has not already been affected by interaction with the West. While that tune does seem to be reasonably close to gagaku mode (as far as I can tell, and I'm far from any kind of expert), its accompaniment is quite Westernized. Most tunes that come from these traditions are going to have even more Westernish tint to them. This should be no shock in light of history; the West (and the church) was involved in South America for centuries, and parts of Asia and Africa as well. Whether through benign carelessness or more insidious intent, as noted in the earlier blog entry, the "primitive" musics of those peoples weren't going to be heard by those missionaries as anything other than something needing to be suppressed. Western hymns were imported wholesale (translated, possibly, if the missionaries were feeling generous) and given privileged status. The development of a somewhat more indigenous music for singing in church was too often a late twentieth-century phenomenon, by which time much of the musical life (not just missionary music) of those peoples had been highly altered by contact with Western music and musical styles. We're very seldom, if ever, getting any "pure" Japanese or Brazilian or Congolese tunes in our hymnals. So, in a sense, our fingerprints are already all over the music as it arrives into our hymnals and collections.

Furthermore, if you're working with a hymnal of some sort, copyright law provides at least some protection for those creating the songs that come to those hymnals. You will see somewhere on the page an acknowledgment of the source of the tune and text when those are known. Hymnal compilers have had to work out some form of compensation and permission for the use of these texts and tunes (if they're under copyright, of course). This isn't like Elvis lifting "Hound Dog" from Big Mama. (I assume the same is true for non-hymnal sources that might import music, but don't quote me on that.)

Finally, the very point of singing global song in the church is to hear the voices of those peoples, often with histories of oppression, who are our sisters and brothers in Christ; to hear - and more, to experience as much as possible - how images that might seem odd or different (or "foreign") to us nonetheless point us to the one true God, the one Savior, the one Spirit. If that's not part of your reasoning you're doing it wrong. 

Probably more to come on this subject, since it doesn't submit to easy explanation. 

John Bell does do a bit of borrowing in his work...