Hymns and Hymnwriting     •     Echoes of Creation

Text

This song is based on Isaiah 35, one of many magnificent poetic passages from the most poetic of all the prophets. It is not an ambitious effort: the subject appealed to me, and the text shaped itself into a multilateral symmetry:

1: RESPONSE TO GOD: in nature

2: GOD'S POWER TO SALVATION: human imagery

3: GOD'S POWER TO SALVATION: geographic imagery

4: RESPONSE TO GOD: in humanity

 

1: NATURAL revival

2: MORAL vacuum

3: NATURAL desert

4: MORAL revival

For several years I was privileged to live in the Sonoran Desert: where the scenery and seasons often reminded me of the geographic context of the Bible. And, when (once every few years) the spring rains came at just the ideal season, the mountainsides became veritable "hanging gardens" for a few days. I have never seen any garden or greenhouse so beautiful. So this prophetic song resonated with my experience.

As a hymn, this illustrates another large gap in our hymnals: we have hardly any hymns¹ with significant logical basis in the prophetic books (although there are brief reference to the prophets throughout the hymnal.)

I suspect that part of the problem is our discomfort with a hyperliteralistic reading of the biblical text. If that is true, we have is a problem with biblical understanding far more serious than the lacuna in our choice of hymns.

I've tried to point the way away from literalism towards poetic metaphor, by juxtaposing different figurative expressions for the same phenomenon -- including some expressions that are often misunderstood as theological technical language.^1a

Thus, even in the "nature" stanzas, the last couplet imposes a metaphorical interpretation of the images. And the connections between stanzas pull together parallel phrases from all of the stanzas into one pattern. In such a context, the "glories falling from heaven", "the messiah", "the spirit's call", "god's judgment", "salvation", the "road" and the "city" -- must all be taken as different ways of describing the same thing, or as describing different aspects of the same thing. Our duty as interpreters is not to separate these images, but to integrate them, with our own experience, into a coherent picture.

Use

Perhaps we do not know how to use these hymns: there is no natural place in the traditional order of worship for them. But surely we schedule enough pop or gospel songs, without particular consideration of whether or how they might fit into the theme of the service (if there is one). So why can we find no place in worship for praise from the Old Testament prophets?

Does the triumphalism seem out of place? Then what of songs like "Christ Arose" or "Crown Him King of Kings"? As the facade of national Christianity fades from our culture, we may better recognize how much like ours was the ancient world. Was it in Free and Independent Christian Republics that Isaiah and John proclaimed God's rule, God's triumph over his enemies, and God's judgment on the oppressors? No, it was in lands oppressed by brutal foreign pagan overlords. We may yet need songs expressing defiant faith in a just culmination of human history. It will be well for us then, if we have learned them from the prophets!

Perhaps if we concluded the celebration of the Lord's Supper with a hymn², we might find a natural place for the Messianic prophecies, in proclaiming the Messiah's reign "until he comes."

Possibly a prophetic hymn might serve as an opening song, as a variation from the common praises or invokations, or as the beginning of a sequence leading up to a thoughtful celebration of the Messiah's suffering and death.

Music

This meter is not unusual in German hymns; there are several familiar chorale tunes for it. Joachim Neander's "Unser Herrscher", with its complex ascending leaps in the first four lines, and its more contemplative final couplet, seems to fit as well as any. It is not only a well-known part of the "core repertoire" of most hymnals, but is a "common tune" for hymns in this meter. In yet another instance of a frustrating and depressing pattern, it is neglected in our hymnals³.

Notes

¹Prophetic canticles are least badly represented in Great Songs of the Church #2: with Watts' Psalm 72, Jesus shall reign, and 98, Joy to the World and Revelation 21, Lo, what a glorious sight appears; Wesley's Come, Thou long-expected Jesus (a catena); Isaiah 9, To us a Child of Hope is born, and 21, Watchman, tell us of the night. Our other hymnals present an even more anti-prophetic prejudice: Joy to the World seems accepted or rejected only as a Christmas carol; Hymns for Worship included one modern song written by a friend of the editor: a creditable action, if only he had actually recognized its source in Isaiah 12.
  A sharp contrast to this bare handful of traditional or sectarian choices in our books: Rejoice in the Lord, a smaller non-premillenial, denominational hymnal, contains a core section of 18 hymns based on the prophets and prophetic psalms -- and perhaps a dozen other hymns scattered elsewhere. Instead, we have fifty-seven varieties (if I may be permitted an understatement) of the "no tears in Revelation 21" theme. This is not balanced spiritual food.

^1aI believe that nearly all of what the older theologians interpreted as "theological technical language" was not intended to be understood that way; rather, it was intended to make metaphorical connections between daily human life and an understanding of God. In reality, "The Lord is my Shepherd" is no more metaphorical than "The kingdom of God is within you"; "I will remove your heart of stone" is no more metaphorical than "Be filled with the spirit."

²Is there not a precedent: Mark 14:26?

³Perhaps the most common English text is Neander's Open now thy gates of beauty; Great Songs of the Church #2 includes Come ye faithful, raise the anthem. Apart from the editions of Great Songs of the Church, our hymnals omit it.

This text, © Stephen Hutcheson, 2005, and offered freely for use under a Creative Commons License. These studies are created by members of the West Allen Church of Christ in Allen, Texas