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| Unfortunately, I was forced by the download rules on the computer on which I wrote this post to reuse an image from a previous one. Not totally unrelated, though, right? |
There is a
formula for writing great hymns.
That’s not
to say that every great hymn ever sticks to said formula like glue, nor that
any hymn which does stick to said formula like glue must automatically
be great, but it certainly seems to me that an awful lot of very good ones
follow a clearly identifiable pattern that goes something like this.
Verse One focusses
on God’s transcendent qualities, perhaps including his eternal
existence, some key features of his unchanging character, and his work in
creation.
Verse Two
focusses on the incarnation (that is, when the Son of God became a human
being, Jesus).1
Verse Three
focusses on the cross, where Jesus sacrificed himself to pay the penalty
for our wrongdoing so that we might be reconciled to God.
At some
point in Verse Three or Four, there’s a bit about the resurrection, when
Jesus was raised to everlasting life as the firstfruits of a new creation.
And Verse Four,
predictably, focusses on that new creation to come when God’s kingdom
will be fully established in total perfection.
It’s not
hard to see why it’s a reliable recipe; all the key aspects of the gospel are
covered in a nice logical order. All the hymn needs now is a theme to
distinguish it, a common lens through which all its components may be viewed,
and it’s ready to be enthusiastically belted out on a Sunday morning (or whenever
else one might want to enthusiastically belt out an epic hymn). The formula isn’t
totally rigid, of course: extra verses may be included here and there to
introduce other themes or elaborate on present ones; equally, verses might be
squashed together; and we haven’t yet considered the possibility of such a
thing as a refrain. Still, many really great hymns conform to the formula at
least to a certain extent.
And I would
like to make it very clear here that I’m not complaining. The gospel
never changes, so it’s perfectly predictable that our hymns should be rather,
well, predictable. Much as hymns can of course deviate from the formula without
deviating from sound doctrine, the formula is, at its heart, a good and secure outline
of the gospel, and so it’s surely commendable for a hymn to follow it. We
should not be bored of these truths. Christians have a horrible tendency to
want to move beyond the gospel, to reach Level 2, to attain to some higher
level of divine knowledge – but there is no moving beyond the gospel that doesn’t
amount to moving outside it. The following is from the first chapter of Paul’s
letter to the church at Colossae:
And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil
deeds, [Jesus] has now reconciled in his
body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above
reproach before him, if indeed you continue in
the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that
you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and
of which I, Paul, became a minister.2
The gospel
from which we must not shift if we are to be presented holy and blameless
before God is the same one that has been proclaimed in all creation. It’s the
same old story, every single time, and we are to continue steadfastly in it,
not rewriting the ending or getting distracted by subplots. The gospel,
unchanging, is nevertheless the only thing that stands any chance of changing
us.
In which
light, I’m a huge fan of the Epic Hymn Formula and its stubbornness in churning
out the same old truths. And it’s not as if every hymn that follows the formula
is exactly the same; each has its own unique perspective on the gospel it
proclaims. Those common lenses I mentioned earlier give us new eyes to see the
same reality and be blown away by it all over again.
I’m writing
this rather pushed for time, so I can’t provide as extensive a list of examples
as I would ideally have liked, but here are a few favourite formula-followers
of mine just off the top of my head:
At the
name of Jesus
Crown him
with many crowns
Christ
triumphant
From the
squalor of a borrowed stable (Immanuel)
How great
thou art
I cannot
tell
In Christ
alone
A very meagre
list, certainly, so I’d be delighted to be informed of any of my lovely readers’
favourites. Hymnary.com is a good place to search for old hymns (on which the copyright
has expired!) by the odd bits of lyrics you can remember.3
Footnotes
1
The word ‘incarnation’ is from the Latin for ‘in flesh’, if you didn’t know.
3
It also has details of tunes, author biographies, and multiple scores for lots
of them and generally seems like a pretty great resource: http://www.hymnary.org/.
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