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ENDNOTES 1. Stephen B. G. Mbunga, Church Law and Bantu Music: Ecclesiastical Documents and Law in Sacred Music as Applied to Bantu Music (Schieneck-Beckenried, Switzerland: Nouvelle Revue de Science Missionaire, Supplement 13, 1963). 2. The Milwaukee Symposium for Church Composers (Washington, D.C.: The Pastoral Press, 1992). See paragraphs 56-80. 3. "Nairobi Statement on Worship and Culture: Contemporary Challenges and Opportunities," in Christian Worship: Unity in Cultural Diversity, ed. S. Anita Stauffer (Geneva: Lutheran World Federation, 1996), 25-28. 4. Toward a Theology of Inculturation (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1988), 11. 5. Liturgical Inculturation: Sacramentals, Religiosity, and Catechesis (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1992), 29. The term "inculturation" is derived from the Latin inculturatio and is currently used almost exclusively when referring to the relationship between liturgy and culture. "Enculturation" is a term reserved by anthropologists for the socialization of individuals. John E. Kaemmer, Music in Human Life: Anthropological Perspectives on Music (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), states that "a universal feature of human life is the replication in every generation of the techniques, values, and symbols that characterize a particular mode of human life. The instilling of these qualities in the young is called socialization or enculturation" (75). 6. By exception the reformer Ulrich Zwingli restricted congregational singing of any kind, though he was a music lover and performer himself. Even The Society of Friends, noted for gathering in silence, have a hymnbook in the United States: see Worship in Song: A Friends Hymnal (Philadelphia: A Publication of Friends General Conference, 1996). 7. See Robert A. Schneider, "Jesus Shall Reign: Hymns and Foreign Missions," in Wonderful Words of Life: Hymns in American Protestant History and Theology, ed. Richard J. Mouw and Mark A. Noll (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 83-84. Schneider notes that "Jesus Shall Reign" is the second most widely published mission hymn in the nineteenth century, after Reginald Heber's "From Greenland's Icy Mountains." 8. Kenneth Scott Latourette devotes three volumes out of seven of his A History of the Expansion of Christianity (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1939-1945) to the nineteenth century. 9. Robin A. Leaver, "Theological Dimensions of Mission Hymnody: The Counterpoint of Cult and Culture," in The Hymnology Annual: An International Forum on the Hymn and Worship, ed. Vernon Wicker (Berrien Springs, Mich.: Vande Vere Publishing, 1991), 1:38. See also Lionel Adey, Class and Idol in the English Hymn (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1988), 15, who refers to "Jesus Shall Reign" as an "idol" of the British nation, and describes how patriotism and the church have often functioned inseparably in hymns. 10. Esther Rothenbusch Crookshank, "'We're Marching to Zion,' Isaac Watts in Early America," in Wonderful Words of Life (note 7), 21. 11. Rothenbusch Crookshank, 23. 12. See Rochelle A. Stackhouse, "Hymnody and Politics," in Wonderful Words of Life, 47. 13. Ibid., 47-52. I am indebted to Rochelle Stackhouse for her insightful analysis of "Our God, Our Help in Ages Past" reflected in this portion of my essay. 14. Watts's free paraphrases of the psalter, including the addition of overtly New Testament references, caused a firestorm of controversy among Reformed groups and others who followed John Calvin's mandate of 1542: "No one can sing anything worthy of God, unless he has received it from God himself...we can find no better songs for this purpose than the Psalms of David, which the Holy Spirit himself has uttered and made" (quoted by Louis F. Benson, The Hymnody of the Christian Church [1927; Richmond: John Knox Press, 1956], 82-83, 86-87). For a detailed account of the clash between psalm singing and Watts's paraphrases in Reformed congregations in America, see William B. Bynum, "'The Genuine Presbyterian Whine': Presbyterian Worship in the Eighteenth Century," American Presbyterian: Journal of Presbyterian History 74:3 (1996): 160-65. 15. J. R. Watson, The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 153. 16. For further examples see Watson, The English Hymn, 153-56. 17. George Burder, ed., The Works of the Reverend and Learned Isaac Watts, D.D. (London, 1810), 4:113, as cited in Watson, The English Hymn, 153. 18. Robin A. Leaver, "Isaac Watts's Hermeneutical Principles and the Decline of English Metrical Psalmody," Churchman 92 (1978), 58. 19. See Erik Routley, A Panorama of Christian Hymnody (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1979), 20-21, for the complete text. Italics in original. 20. While most hymnals eliminate these two stanzas altogether, at least four hymnals published by Southern Baptists in the twentieth century combine parts of the two stanzas with some alterations. The Baptist Hymnal (1975, p. 282) provides the following conflation of Watts's original stanzas two and three: "From north to south the princes meet/To pay their homage at his feet;/While western empires own their Lord,/And savage tribes attend his word." I experienced the irony of this particular version of Watts's hymn when the students I was teaching in a Nigerian seminary sang it during a morning chapel service. In a hymnology class after chapel, the ensuing discussion allowed these capable Nigerian pastors to express their feelings not only about the issue of colonialism in hymnody, but the difficulties of singing many Western hymns in their worship. 21. Watson, The English Hymn, 104-05, cites a historical and literary precedent for substituting images of Great Britain for those in the Hebrew Bible in William Barton's Old Testament readings of seventeenth-century British history. Barton, a Puritan minister, gave the reader bracketed English alternatives to Israel in one case, or from Parliament to Deborah and Barak in another. His version of the psalter was preferred by the House of Lords during the Civil War. 22. I am grateful to my colleague, Kenneth Shields, a professor in the English Department of Southern Methodist University and a founding member of the Charles Wesley Society, for pointing out this particular literary trait of imitation in Watts's hymns and for placing it in the context of literary devices used at this time. Shields discusses imitation in his article, "Charles Wesley as Poet," in Charles Wesley: Poet and Theologian, ed. S T Kimbrough, Jr. (Nashville: Kingswood Books, 1992), 49-52. As Shields noted in a conversation with me on June 6, 1997, "In eighteenth-century poetic tradition of Milton, Pope and Dryden, imitation pays homage to the authenticity of the western literary tradition of Greece and Rome, appropriates those texts and gives authority to the imitation, and provides pleasure to the sophisticated reader who knows what is going on." A similar process was employed in the case of biblical imitation. It is a hermeneutical device that is most effective if those who read it are thoroughly familiar with the original text. Since the singers of Watts's hymns were steeped in the tradition of the metrical psalms, it was most likely that they were able to appreciate his poetic commentary regardless of whether or not they approved of it. As Watts stated in a letter to Cotton Mather in 1717 concerning The Psalms of David Imitated, "Tis not a translation of David that I pretend, but an imitation of him, so nearly in Christian hymns that the Jewish Psalmist may plainly appear, and yet leave Judaism behind" (quoted in Albert E. Bailey, The Gospel in Hymns [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950], 52). 23. Isaac Watts, Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, 1719, alt. by John Wesley, 1737. |
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