Beautiful Old Hymns

“When that whole week beat you up and stress you,

But you hear that organ playing, it remind you of your blessings.

And on another note, she just hit another note –

Chills down my spine, got me crying, make me over, Lord.

You don’t know about it, though, old-school church hymns.”

KB, ‘Church Clap’, Weight and Glory (2012)

 

Remember these snazzy wooden boards they used to slot the hymn numbers into? Good times.

But we all know the old hymns are the really good ones, right?

I mean, when you’re in the main meeting at Soul Survivor¹ and the band has been busy working its way through the very hippest bits of worship music that the twenty-first century has produced, and you reach that awkward moment where the big screens are emptied of written lyrics and someone on the stage suggests that all present should sing their own song to the Lord (and, if you’re anything like me, you produce no more sound than perhaps a bit of indistinct humming and yearn for the chaos to end), the song that ends up taking over the whole tent is never one of the trendy modern collection whose being featured in services is so often touted as a necessity for persuading anyone under the age of fifty to commit to membership of a local church; it’s ‘Amazing Grace’. It’s always ‘Amazing Grace’. ‘Amazing Grace’, might I remind you, was published in 1779.

The thing is, if a song has managed to endure like that, still being considered worthy of inclusion in hymnals and services decades and centuries after it was initially written, that implies that it probably possesses at least one of the following qualities.

First, sound doctrine. In order for a hymn chock full of heresy to have gained much popularity in the first place, it would most likely have to have been consistent with a particular theological fashion or fad that was a big deal in the society that birthed it – but fashions and fads, by their very nature, don’t stick around for very long, and so the hymns attached to them likewise plunge into obscurity. Think, for instance, of the religious patriotism of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, which I think it’s fair to say strikes us as rather embarassing these days – and then try to think of any modern worship song that says anything even vaguely patriotic. That fad has died, and though the odd favourite will always slip through the net (my school song was ‘Jerusalem’²), most of its hymns have died with it. Theological fashions change, but the gospel endures, and so a hymn that’s faithful to the gospel is more likely to endure for a decent chunk of time as well.

And second, artistic excellence. If the reason people continue to be fond of a song isn’t because it stirs their regenerate hearts to contemplate and grasp the glory of God more fully, then it might be because it’s just good poetry set to a cracking tune. People don’t remember boring songs, and if they can’t remember it, they’re not going to keep including it in the hymn books. What they will keep including is those uplifting favourites that everybody knows and loves. (Like ‘Jerusalem’. Which unfortunately does infinitely better in this category than the previous one.)

In other words, it’s not that all the hymns people wrote in Ye Olden Days were brilliant, and God has allowed the Church’s skill in songwriting simply to trail off miserably into only fractional brilliance in more recent years; rather, it’s that the passage of time tends to confine faddish or dull hymns to the scrapheap, leaving behind only those that actually have enough lyrical or musical merit to remain appealing to subsequent generations. It isn’t that old hymns are automatically good, but that good hymns tend to be enduring. It’ll be interesting to see which of the favourites of our current era stand the test of time.

One of the many notebook-filling projects that I keep is a collection of what I call ‘beautiful old hymns, and some beautiful new hymns that sound like old ones’.³ It would seem fitting to finish this post with a few highlights from it. If you know the hymns from which the below selections were taken, then consider this a reminder of how excellent they are; and if you don’t, consider it a recommendation of them on my part.⁴

From the seventeenth century:

In life, no house, no home

My Lord on Earth might have,

In death, no friendly tomb,

But what a stranger gave.

What may I say?

Heav’n was his home,

But mine the tomb

Wherein he lay.

- ‘My song is love unknown’, Samuel Crossman, 1664

Praise to the Lord, who doth nourish thy life and restore thee,

Fitting thee well for the tasks that are ever before thee.

Then to thy need

He like a mother doth speed,

Spreading the wings of grace o’er thee.

- ‘Praise to the Lord, the Almighty’, Joachim Neander, 1680

My knowledge of that life is small;

The eye of faith is dim,

But ’tis enough that Christ knows all,

And I shall be with him.

- ‘Lord, it belongs not to my care’, Richard Baxter, 1681

From the eighteenth:

Whence to me this waste of love?

Ask my Advocate above!

See the cause in Jesus’ face,

Now before the throne of grace.

- ‘Depth of mercy’, Charles Wesley, 1740

Not the labours of my hands

Can fulfil thy law’s demands.

Could my zeal no respite know,

Could my tears forever flow,

All for sin could not atone:

Thou must save and thou alone.

- ‘Rock of ages, cleft for me’, Augustus Montague Toplady, 1776

The soul that on Jesus hath leaned for repose

I will not, I will not desert to its foes.

That soul, though all hell should endeavour to shake,

I’ll never, no, never, no, never forsake.

- ‘How firm a foundation’, Robert Keen, 1787

From the nineteenth:

Crown him the Son of God

Before the worlds began,

And, ye who tread where he hath trod,

Crown him the Son of Man,

Who every grief hath known

That wrings the human breast,

And takes and bears them for his own,

That all in him may rest.

- ‘Crown him with many crowns’, Matthew Bridges and Godfrey Thring, 1851

Brothers, this Lord Jesus shall return again

With his Father’s glory, with his angel train,

For all wreaths of empire meet upon his brow,

And our hearts confess him king of glory now.

- ‘At the name of Jesus’, Caroline M. Noel, 1870

O perfect redemption, the purchase of blood,

To every believer the promise of God;

The vilest offender who truly believes,

That moment from Jesus a pardon receives.

- ‘To God be the glory’, Fanny J. Crosby, 1875

From the twentieth:

Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth,

Thine own dear presence to cheer and to guide,

Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow:

Blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside!

- ‘Great is thy faithfulness’, Thomas O. Chisholm, 1923

I cannot tell why he whom angels worship

Should set his love upon the sons of men,

Or why, as shepherd, he should seek the wanderers

To bring them back; they know not how or when.

- ‘I cannot tell’, William Young Fullerton, 1929

Priestly King, enthroned forever

High in heav’n above,

Sin and death and hell shall never

Stifle hymns of love.

- ‘Christ triumphant’, Michael Saward, 1964

And so they never shall. Keep singing old hymns – not because their antiquity automatically makes them worth singing, but because, i.e. if, you find in them the same gospel-focussed lyrical brilliance that earned them the enduring place they occupy in the hymnals. (And because everyone loves a cracking tune.)

Footnotes

¹ It’s a massive Christian youth festival thing: https://soulsurvivor.com/. If you haven’t been, I bet you know someone who has. Ask around.

² Which is also, of course, a key feature of the Last Night of the Proms – and prom season is almost upon us and I am determined to make it to at least one of them this year: https://www.bbc.co.uk/proms.

³ I have many such projects. If for some bizarre reason you’re anxious to know further details, then by all means check out my post ‘Thing to Do with an Empty Notebook’ under ‘2016’ then ‘April’ in the box on the right.

⁴ Hymnary is an excellent website for looking up the details of beautiful old hymns: http://hymnary.org/.

White Guilt

“Oh my G*d, Karen, you can’t just ask people why they’re white.”

Mean Girls (2003)

 

The fruit is a metaphor for guilt, because, you know, Tree of Knowledge and all that. (Look, I know it’s not brilliant, but I’m tired and it was the best I could come up with...)

Around this time four years ago, I was busily embroiled in revision for my A2-level summer exams. I had three: a module 4 Chemistry paper; a two-and-a-half-hour French assessment including listening, reading, and writing components; and an essay exam for History concerning the progress of civil rights in the USA from 1865 to 1992.¹

Why my secondary school settled on US civil rights as the exam-assessed History topic for the Upper Sixth is entirely a mystery to me; I personally found the whole affair rather dull, especially trade union rights, and especially compared to our parallel coursework topic of the 1917 revolutions in Russia. Aside from my lack of enthusiasm for the course’s subject-matter, however, what was perhaps even less fun was the way I would find, in almost every lesson, what seemed to me a compelling reason to feel guilty for being white.

The bulk of what I learned about American civil rights history, I reckoned, could happily have been summed up as ‘White People Oppress Everyone Else’. Black Americans and Native Americans were the two minority groups we focussed on most heavily, and in each case the story was a grimly depressing one. Legalised segregation. Forced resettlement. Lynchings. Disenfranchisement. And when other racial and ethnic minorities got a peep into the curriculum,² things were just as bad: internment camps for Japanese Americans during the Second World War, for instance.

And my history class, a small group populated entirely by white kids, just sat there feeling horribly guilty about all of it.

It’s strange, isn’t it? All that stuff wasn’t, after all, us. It wasn’t even our ancestors, unless there was more hopping across the Pond in my classmates’ family trees than I formerly realised – not that that’s necessarily relevant either. These were atrocities committed decades ago by people we never knew nor had any connection with: to feel sad and angry would have been reasonable enough, commendable even, but guilty? Where did that come from?

Well, perhaps four years should have been long enough for me to come up with a decent answer to that question, but I’m still not sure I’ve got one, and I don’t doubt that people who actually study such things could do an immeasurably superior job of coming up with one than little old me. Still, I do have some small yield of the past few years’ ponderings to contribute towards the construction of an answer, as you’ve probably already gathered from the fact that this post has a few paragraphs left of it yet. Here’s what I think.

See, we know we’re not able to be plausibly implicated in those specific crimes against people of minority racial and ethnic backgrounds that I learned about in A-level History. Those are things we can look at from a safe distance shaking our heads, lamenting them and condemning them and generally making it clear we find them entirely regrettable and altogether repulsive. To express guilt over something makes it clear we deem said something unacceptable – and to express guilt over atrocities in which we played no part makes it abundantly clear that we’d never dream of actually playing a part in anything resembling such atrocities. In other words, by feeling guilty about other people’s crimes, we automatically avoid the question as to whether we’re guilty of any similar crimes ourselves.

Fellow white people, I’m certainly not suggesting that any of you ever helped lynch anybody or anything like that, but if you accept that discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities is still a problem in this day and age, then, well, the fact is that somebody’s got to be responsible for it. And much as it shames me to say it, I’m pretty blooming sure that I at least am part of the problem. I do take for granted that my own census category of White British is the norm in my society. I do prefer to avoid discourse in which the matter of racial and ethnic background features heavily. I do make snap judgements about people based on physical appearance. It’s not overt or explicit, and it certainly doesn’t prevent me from having the utmost love and respect for people from a whole variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds; it’s more subtle than that, more silent, more situation-specific – but I catch myself often enough to be sure that it’s there.

I read an article some time ago in which the author argued that white people are often happy to talk about the problem of racism in general terms, but never prepared to acknowledge the problem of ‘I, racist’.³ We blame the nameless, faceless System, or we blame those Other white people – and, I suggest, we feel vaguely guilty about our ‘privilege’ even as we are blind to the ways in which we personally abuse it. We can’t be blamed for having been born white any more than we can be blamed for the segregation and disenfranchisement and so on that was rampant in the US in previous decades – but if we feel guilty about something for which we’re not responsible, that gives us space to look the other way when it comes to something for which we are. If we determine to feel guilty about something for which we know we can’t reasonably be blamed, we assure ourselves that deep down, we are really innocent after all. Such guilt is, in a way, overdoing it; it’s a kind of ostentatious socio-cultural piety, if you will, a way of demonstrating what nice people we actually are. Vague, collective White Guilt both shifts the focus from our own sins as individuals and asserts that we are Not The Kind Of People who would commit such sins.

But if I know anything about sin, I know that assuring oneself of one’s innocence is a very dangerous place to be: if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.⁴ Admitting to being ‘I, racist’ is such a massive taboo in our society that it’s really no surprise that I should prefer to veil myself in the comfortable detachedness of White Guilt. But none of my wrongdoing and corruption can be veiled from the eyes of God who made all humankind in his image, and calls individuals from all peoples and nations to belong to the great assembly of those forgiven and made righteous by the blood of Jesus shed for them. And indeed, if I confess even the kinds of sins my culture (or subculture) deems most shameful (and not without reason), that reveals the depths of God’s mercy on me even more dramatically as he proves himself faithful and just to forgive me. Forgiveness, and the help of the Holy Spirit to fight against such sins as racism and grow into the righteousness I have already been freely gifted – that’s got to be better than manufacturing an illusory righteousness of my own by wallowing around in White Guilt, right?

Footnotes

¹ Would you like a Horrible Histories song about the Montgomery Bus Boycott? Of course you would: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHttUInZHTY. Audio and lyrics only, I’m afraid, but it’s still worth three minutes of your day.

² I wasn’t totally sure about the precise difference between race and ethnicity, so I asked the Internet for help – but I’m not convinced that what differencebetween.net says on the matter corresponds exactly to the way we use the terms in modern Britain, http://www.differencebetween.net/science/nature/difference-between-ethnicity-and-race/, so I’ve plumped for covering all bases by using both terms together on every occasion.

³ I even managed to find said article in my browser history: http://www.differencebetween.net/science/nature/difference-between-ethnicity-and-race/. (This is why you should never delete that jazz.) The argument’s got much more to it than the one point I remembered, and it’s far better informed than my argument here, so maybe just go and read that instead.

⁴ That’s from the first letter of John, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20John+1&version=ESVUK, and seems to have become a bit of a favourite of mine.