Confession: I just Frankensteined a hymn

You might recall a comment from some weeks ago about an overly well-known evangelical figure penning two verses to the hymn "Great is thy faithfulness" to bend it more toward his own theology (supposedly), and making a poetic hash of it. You might recall also that "Amazing grace" was also identified as a "Frankensteined hymn" because of the historical amputation of two of its original stanzas and addition of the current fifth stanza, making (unpopular opinion alert!) a bit of a theological hash of that hymn.

Allow me to introduce myself: I'm Dr. Frankenstein.

With a special event coming up in two weeks, I had an urge to use the old G.K. Chesterton hymn text "O God of earth and altar." I was mildly surprised to find it had not made it into Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal, and had to go looking in the 1990 Presbyterian Hymnal to find its most recent appearance in my experience. I had not realized that its appearance there was in a "Frankensteined" form, with an edit made in the second stanza and a new third stanza by Jane Parker Huber.

Two problems here. First, the Huber portions are under copyright, and getting that permission in time was probably not feasible. (The Chesterton text is public domain.) Second, those edits didn't really work thematically, in my humble opinion. Regarding part of the discussion in the previous blog entry, the Huber stanza is rather dramatically different from the original Chesterton stanzas in language -- Huber has, again in my humble opinion, always been a bit self-conscious about sounding "modern" in language and a bit susceptible to what might be called "hymn buzzwords," and that tendency grated against Chesterton's older poetic impulse.

To be honest, the copyright problem was enough to throttle that idea, but the second problem sent me off searching for Chesterton's original, or as close as I could find, which meant a visit to hymnary.org, which is usually a fairly trustworthy source for such things. It did not disappoint.

That hymn can therefore be examined here.

You can probably guess where the issues are. Chesterton's verse about "all the easy speeches that comfort cruel men" made sense enough in 1906, as women generally weren't voting at that time, but it simply doesn't work today - perversely, because women do not need to be let off the hook for cruelty. Everybody can be cruel. And that third stanza made sense at the time, I guess, but having to explain just the first line, "Tie in a living tether the prince and priest and thrall" would largely undermine the whole point of using the hymn. Finally, considering that the service in question is on the theme of peace, that line about "lift up a living nation, a single sword to thee" is probably a non-starter as well, unless I wanted to use it as an example of the mindset that got Britain into the bloody and destructive morass of the Great War just eight years after Chesterton penned these lyrics. And indeed, that idea might make it into the service somehow.

But instead, I did something foolish. I performed my own surgery on the hymn.

For the "cruel men," the line will read "from all the easy speeches that lead us wrong again." Not very Chestertonian, I'm sure, but I will say it does get at the point Chesterton was rightly making.

The new third stanza is as follows:

God, be our only Ruler, our Guardian and our Guide;No more let earthly rivals distract us from your side.Bind all our lives together, rebuke and save us all;O God of earth and altar, now hear our desperate call.

I will confess that I was self-conscious about trying to get a little closer to Chesterton's style here, though I won't claim to have succeeded. There is, you can see, some direct borrowing from Chesterton (such as "bind all our lives together" and the echo of the opening phrase) in hope of making the connection more viable.

So there's my confession: I'm bending ol' Gilbert Keith a little bit for my own purposes. My hope is that the adjustment is not too violent or ruinous to the hymn, and that it will work for the one occasion on which it is likely to be sung. But I am now guilty of (along with Jane Parker Huber, I guess) making a bit of a Frankenstein's monster out of this august hymn. Guilty as charged.

But we're still gonna sing it.

Sorry, Gilbert Keith.

Dear Pastor: Bad spaces and bad leadership

Having worked through most of John L. Bell's The Singing Thing it seems only fair to see it through, right? There's not too much left, and the points left to cover are worth thinking about.

Of his four reasons people don't sing, we have addressed the questions of vocal disenfranchisement (people having been told long ago they can't sing) and the effect of performance culture on the church (people believing they shouldn't sing because they don't sound like the person up front). The last two can be covered, I think, in one post here, not because they don't matter so much but because there may be less to unpack about these and, in one case, there may only be a limited amount one can do about it.

3) Acoustics, or the qualities of the space in which singing happens that enhance or dampen the sound the singers make. In many cases little can be done; the space was built decaces or centuries before and the necessary changes are financially or practically prohibitive. On the other hand, if the building is old enough, it may actually be of superior acoustic quality - those old European cathedrals are often acoustic marvels for having been built so long ago. (The things you learn when amplification doesn't exist...)

There are other factors that may more adjustable, depending on your circumstance. Does your congregation sit somehow facing one another, in an arc or some other shape that brings the folk into eyesight of one another at least a little bit? This could help. Do they sit in long fixed pews facing the front, towards the pulpit and possibly choir? Probably not good, plus it has the subliminal effect of suggesting that the choir provides the "real" music for the service. Is the space heavily carpeted? Ick.

How much can you do to improve your space's friendliness towards singing? I certainly can't tell you.

4) Bad leadership. Yeouch. The uncommitted band members who barely show up, the unprepared organist, the slovenly choir...it's the horror-show chapter. And this is the place where, if your church is infested with such a problem, you are inevitably going to be required to intervene. Sorry.

The book's final section addresses the ambiguities of congregational singing, things that are quite often not under your control or that of anyone else in leadership. People who have unnatural or irrational aversions to guitars or organs or pianos or drums, due to associations you cannot possibly know; the accrual of familiarity to a particular song or sound around which congregants put up walls to protect themselves from anything different or challenging; attractions and aversions to particular musical styles, harmonies, tunes, instrumental timbres; the ambiguity or unfamiliarity of certain hymnic language - words like "Zion" or "Ebenezer," or even more familiar words like "peace" - what does that really mean? Absence of war? A treaty or armistice? Shalom?; language archaic or new that puts off one faction in the congregation and attracts another; language for God or for humanity that is not exclusive; the list could truly go on for quite a ways. And some of them will simply call for someone (likely you) to lead your congregation to discern the way to go, and some of them will simply be vexations that you will face, and just have to find a way through them.

The book is worth having, although occasional parts of it may be a little outside the grasp of the non-musician. Bell generally does a decent job of explaining those parts, though, so that should not be a reason not to get it.

Turns out this is just part one. We'll get to part two at some point in the future.

Dear Pastor: More on performance culture and congregational singing

Last week's entry considered the impact of what John L. Bell called "performance culture" and its impact on the folks in your pews and their willingness to sing, particularly considering the impact of that performance culture and its infiltration into the church itself. That was not, however, the impact Bell was necessarily thinking of in The Singing Thing, and the impact of performance culture itself on the willingness of the folk to sing does need to be considered as well.

Bell states that "we are almost unconsciously entering an era very different from any Western civilization has previously known" (113) concerning emphasis on select performers over mass singing. Perhaps things were/are different in Bell's Britain. In the US performance culture has never been far from the center of any cultural life, and such communal singing as did exist did not always do so in a way that was as widespread as it might seem. Take, for example, the singing schools of colonial and early Federal New England.

These robust gatherings, social events as well as musical lessons, addressed a particular concern that we might share: the poor state of singing in the church. Itinerant singing masters established these singing schools as far as they could travel, offering instruction in enough of the rudiments of music to help congregation members have a fighting shot at singing the hymns in the service without evoking nightmares. Inevitably the singing schools themselves became the attraction, but the effect of people learning how to sing (at least a little) was a boon to the church.

The church in New England, that is, and maybe a little bit of the mid-Atlantic. This wasn't a nationwide phenomenon, and thus its impact was necessarily limited. (It did leave behind some fantastic music, however. Go listen to some William Billings, like here or here - or here, though the latter was not so much a church song. These were part-time musicians, by the way -- Billings was a tanner and other things, and Justin Morgan, heard here, was a horse breeder. Yes, the Morgan horse was his doing.)

Serious question: what would it take to make singing schools a thing again? That would be fascinating.

Likewise the shape-note or fasola singing phenomenon was thoroughly grassroots, but not geographically unanimous. Borrowing some elements from those New England singing schools (including some of the music - here's how one of those Billings tunes translates into shape-note style) but fleeing the increasingly urban East for the rural frontier, and using an ingenious system of assigning shapes to notes in order to make basic intervals easily singable, the shape-note tradition took root in the then-frontier Midwest and South. It was a rural phenomenon, not at all respected in urban climes. (The tradition survives today, and has in some cases taken on a more urban audience than its early practitioners would have ever thought.

Even as these popular traditions found their homes and adherents, performance culture also found its footing, particularly in the mid-nineteenth century in a two-pronged approach. As virtuoso performers (frequently European) figured out there was money to be made performing in the US, they started making their way to the States accompanied by Barnum-esque hype (literally so in the case of the soprano Jenny Lind, whose first US appearances were engineered by no less than the circus huckster P.T. Barnum himself - that much of The Greatest Showman was true.) At the same time advancing technology in the form of sheet music brought a form of "performance" culture to the good ol' American home, where your daughters could be primed to be prize catches by learning to play the piano and sing appealingly. In different ways both of these pulled against the practice of singing together, one by emphasizing the performer and the other by emphasizing the individual. 

One could push against other factors in American cultural life - the elite emphasis on good music of the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth century, the middling and uncertain emphasis on teaching music in schools, and yes, the advancement of broadcast culture (from radio to television to streaming tech) and its hyper-glorification of the "star" as other factors that have pulled against much of a sense of communal singing as a valued quality, perhaps amplified by the sheer size of the US and the greater challenge of anything becoming culturally dominant in such a large country.

So where does public communal singing happen? You could point to community choruses, to the degree that a town can support such a thing. Oddly enough, one of the few places where true communal singing sometimes happens is at sporting events. Baseball still offers up "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" when the seventh-inning stretch comes along, except when national television broadcasts ruin that by inserting a useless soloist (and having survived, at least in some quarters, the militaristic usurpations of "God Bless America" that infested the sport after 9/11). Perhaps the most song-friendly sport is, of all things, soccer. Supporters groups have their songs and chants at the ready, which is wonderful ... unless you're for the other team. (Here's an example from the club down the turnpike in Orlando. It ain't Bach, but hey, they're singing.)

And then there's the church, where the singing is a little about being community, but so much more. More than community, its about being "body" - the body of Christ, to be precise. To a great degree the world is not going to be a lot of help facilitating and encouraging our singing, dear pastor. So how do we do it?

Dear Pastor: Performance-culture fallout (also after John L. Bell)

Continuing to follow some of John L. Bell's points on why people don't sing (in church or much of anywhere), we come to his second reason, in a chapter titled "The fallout from a performance culture." While my earlier blog on similar issues didn't make that explicit claim, a couple of points I did include are related from or perhaps derivable from such a claim:

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.

And:

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.

As noted in the earlier blog, the first of these positions isn't necessarily all that common, but it does happen. If the singer in question is not "in the spotlight," so to speak, it's hard for that person to care enough to sing. This suggests a whole lot of other issues going on in that person's heart, mind, and soul, perhaps beyond the scope of this blog.

That other position, however, is pretty directly related to Bell's point. More precisely, it is a consequence of the importation of that performance culture into the church.

Protestantism in its various forms in the United States has run the gamut of attitudes about the song of the people, from almost a reverse-snobbery of glorifying the rough voice in certain frontier traditions to the near elimination of the song of the people in some more elite Protestant quarters. Different models of providing leadership and guidance to the singing congregation have come and gone, none perfect but some cerainly more effective than others. It isn't as if the focus on individual leaders is new; from "song leaders" to "ministers of music" to cantors borrowed from Jewish tradition, using an individual as leader of the congregation's song (or an ensemble in some cases, such as the paid quartets that sang almost everything in some emerging mainline traditions in the late nineteenth century) has a long history in this country.

In these cases there was and is always the risk of the soloist, often of professional status, intimidating the people in the pews by sheer force of voice, no matter how unintentionally. Being a leader of others in singing makes a peculiar set of demands that is not shared by more straightforward professional singing roles, and not all singers catch on to that. But to understand the particular dangers of which Bell seems to be speaking, it might be more useful to refine the word that Bell uses; perhaps instead of simply speaking of performance culture, it might be more precise to speak of "soloistic" performance culture.

Performance culture can be collaborative. Soloistic performance culture focuses on the "star," for lack of a better word. A "star" doesn't need to worry about whether others can keep up; what he or she does is the focus.

Good leaders, perhaps with some training, are sensitive to the need to lead in such a way that the people are not only able to follow, but are in fact encouraged to do so. This doesn't consist only in the call that "everybody sing!"; it also includes the leader providing a model for singing the song in question that makes it easier and more feasible for the congregation to learn and to sing (particularly in those style traditions where new songs are constantly feeding into the pipeline from Australia or wherever).

And when you're out in front with guitar in hand or behind the keyboard, and you've got a voice that can be soloistic, it can be awfully hard to remember that. And in the end, dear pastor, it may yet fall upon you to provide the corrective and to remind your leaders in whatever style or format that their job is to lead and not to star.

Hear me out here; is it possible that, just maybe, this (while killer for an arena show) doesn't necessarily help a large group of people sing together when they all know they can't sound like this?

Dear Pastor: Vocal disenfranchisement (after John L. Bell)

A few weeks ago, this blog put out a few reasons why folks in our congregations won't sing. They were strictly out of my own head, so to speak, derived from what level of experience I have (which does include a master's in church music as well as one in divinity) as both church musician and pastor; the "research" involved was strictly the "research" of experience.

Well, somebody agrees with me on at least one of those reasons, and the somebody is kind of a big deal.

John L. Bell, he of the Iona Community and Wild Goose Worship Group and lots of gatherings on singing in the church, offered up back in 2000 a book titled The Singing Thing: A case for congregational song. The book has been sitting on my shelf waiting to read for a really long time now, and with getting into this project a little more seriously it has finally forced itself into my reading activity. It's worth the read, though it is directed a little more generally, inclusive of musicians and congregational singers more so than pastors. The understanding still has value for you, dear pastor.

This volume, the first of two, is offered in two parts: "Why do we sing?" and "Why do some people not sing?" Number one of those reasons why some people don't sing: vocal disenfranchisement. The short version of that term is "somebody long ago told me I can't sing, so I believed them."

My way of putting it was a little less polished:

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.

But yeah, vocal disenfranchisement.

Bell offers the distressing statistic that in a random sampling, one in four people will say - nay, will insist - that they can't sing. There is, on some level, such a thing as being "tone deaf" - not able to discern a melody or to "match pitch" as it might be called in music. There are some people who hear a pitch, in other words, and cannot replicate that pitch with their own voices. There are some people, yes, but not one-fourth of the population.

For the most part these disenfranchsiements happen at an early age; some unthinking teacher or other authority figure instructs the child not to sing, or to be quieter, or something that imprints on the child the unshakable belief I cannot sing. Such imprints become cataclysmic memories, resonating through that person's life and frankly inhibiting any effort or opportunity to sing that might come along, as Bell describes it.

Bell also, from his perspective, describes this as a particularly British phenomenon. He's from Britain, of course, but hopefully his trips to the States since 2000 have revealed to him that this is an American phenomenon as well.

It isn't my place here to replicate Bell's chapter; go get the book and read it yourself. I do want to make the point that Bell summarizes the remedy for this as "renaming and decision-making"; the non-singer, the supposedly tone-deaf member in the congregation needs to be renamed as a person with a voice desperately waiting to be used in songs of praise to God, and that singer (with the combination of encouragement and expectation from the church) has to make the decision not to be limited by that nasty voice from the past. Who's right, that nasty teacher or the God who instructs to sing?

Obviously it's not as easy as Bell makes it sound (and the chapter does make clear that there's a lot of work involved), but it is doable. I am going to differ with Bell, though, in one particular.

For Bell, this is the work of the church musician. On the most basic level this is true. The church musicians are the ones who have the technical capacity to bring some level of musical example and encouragement and instruction to make it possible for the self-claimed non-singer to cast off that old curse.

However, I'm going to say that the one who sets the tone for this to work, dear pastor, is you.

First of all, you're singing yourself, right? This is the most basic way to set the tone in your congregation: no matter how creaky, no matter how unsteady, when the congregation sings, you're singing.

Secondly, you're the one who impresses upon your church musicians the imperative that part of their work is to encourage the song of all the congregation, and directs that even the non-singers are to be included in that. It's important that you don't get caught in the "I'm not a musician so I can't really instruct the musicians" trap that is too easy for pastors to fall into, as inviting and comforting a trap as that might be. No. It's a call for all the people to sing, and being a pastor to all the people includes opening up the opportunity for all the people to follow God's imperative to sing. (Imperative? What else do you call the statement "Sing to God"? It's right there in the grammar and syntax.)

So, yeah, you have a role to play in liberating the non-singers from their shackles. Don't shy away from it.

Credit: http://www.instagram.com/noelitoflow

Even this attitude would be an improvement. 

Is this you? Come on down to Grace Presbyterian Church and sing with our congregation!

Dear Pastor: Sing with understanding? Do people really want to?

So a few weeks ago now, before a variety of vacations and professional development things and whatnot, this blog put forth an entry that was both tribute to a long-ago professor and a challenge to you, dear pastor, to put forth the effort to give serious theological consideration to the hymns your congregation sings - at least as serious, say, as you give to your sermon or the service prayers or other parts of the service you choose.

Here is where I admit that all of this thought and advising I am presuming myself qualified to give isn't necessarily a slam dunk. What are the chances that, if you go through this effort and invest the time and energy into some basic grasp of hymns for use in worship, choosing with care and seeking to have those hymns working in concert (ha) with prayers and scripture and such, ... what are the chances that anybody will care, or even notice?

Let's be honest, friend pastor: there are going to be people in your congregation whose sole interest in the music in a service - not just the hymns, but anything the choir or soloist does or organist or pianist or band plays - is whether or not it is "pretty." Now I'm not using that word for its literal meaning, although in many cases that will apply - "that was so pretty (or beautiful)..." becomes the end-all and be-all of that member's reaction to or reflection of the music. The choir's anthem might be "beautiful" or "inspiring" or (depending on the style) "fun" or "catchy" or whatever; the soloist's effort becomes "inspiring" or "thrilling" or "powerful"; the organ prelude is "majestic" or "awe-inspiring" or what have you; the band "totally rocked, dude" - you get the idea. Whatever medium or style is being used, there is some aesthetic pinnacle that might be acknowledged for the musical effort that ends up blotting out any kind of more theologically informed reflection or result of that musical contribution.

Blame it on music, or more precisely blame it on the way humans are taught to respond to music. Note I'm not making a distinction between musician and non-musician here. Popular music fans are encouraged to respond emotionally to the music they hear, for sure; classical music patrons are fed all sorts of mumbo-jumbo about The Great Masters and the Power of Music; jazz followers have their heroes and titans. Those who are trained in performance or theory or education add their professional expertise to the mix - technical proficiency or harmonic complexity or what have you - but whatever the case may be, deliberate theological consideration can't be assumed, and the professionals may in fact be more difficult to encourage than the untrained folks in the pews. If you're hiring a band, they may have decided the songs to play Sunday and, well, it's your job to work around them; the hired choir soloists from the local university are likely trying to slip their lesson repertoire in without actually having to think about whether it "fits." (I may be exaggerating a little, but I have seen - from a distance, thankfully - examples of both.)

I cannot offer you a "magic bullet" to make your congregation or choir or singers or band care about the songs they sing in more than aesthetic way. It is admittedly not a concern everybody shares. Writing from the Presbyterian Church (USA) perspective in which I am situated, having embraced the challenge of trying to develop a distinctly "mainline" approach to the question that takes the mind and its engagement in worship seriously, I have to acknowledge that not everybody will care. And some will never care.

But some will.

Someone will notice. It might take a while, but somebody will express surprise at the realization that "everything really went together this morning," or maybe something like "I don't think I ever really got what that hymn was saying, but hearing it after that sermon/prayer/communion it suddenly made sense," or some other reaction.

You've probably seen the meme below, about how we don't really know which sermons are going to "work" and which ones are not; the same really does apply to pretty much everything we put into the service, including the hymns we choose to support the sermon and scripture. We don't know, but we do it anyway, and sometimes it lands with one person, or maybe two or four or ten, and once they've had that experience once maybe (just maybe) they become more open or sensitive to the other things going on in the service in the future.

You teach people how to sing with understanding by presenting the service in such a way that understanding happens. You sweat it out and pray over it and listen for that ever-elusive guidance of the Spirit and, when Sunday comes, you put it out there and it's in the Spirit's hands, so to speak. But it does matter, and it does change how people experience worship. It helps the congregation and it helps you. And maybe you both grow a little.

Sing with understanding, and give your people the chance to do so. If nothing else, it's basic good stewardship of the hour of worship.

Credit as noted. It applies to choosing hymns too.

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...