Hymns and Hymnwriting     •     Echoes of Creation

Creation is the context of God's redemptive actions; nature was "good" when created, and its initial state is the ideal to which fallen nature (and fallen humanity) call for restoration.

Again, the focus here is a reaction against a class of popular songs which exhibit two failures; (1) describing "salvation" as an event having only sentimental importance ("I was lost and sad, and now I'm saved and happy! And, by the way, you should get happy too!") (2) stripping the biblical vocabulary of all meaning by turning vivid analogies into theological technical terms.

My approach to both problems is to put the words back into their historical context, showing how they should express the universal themes in humans experience of the consistent pattern of divine activity. From the sunrise comes salvation, the title song, "alludes in detail" to multiple events, emphasizing that the same language applies to each of them: and thus, finding the real meaning of those words in the common features of those events.

Once a garden empty stood explores the meaning and method of "restoration", and explicitly introduces the primeval Garden as a biblical way of talking about a future hope.

Jesus reigns in power emphasizes that the divine kingdom is not a "technical term" for the church, but an expression of a particular kind of God's actions throughout history. Jesus is King not because he sits on a special chair but because kings act as deliverers and judges: and that is how God always acts.

And Now shattered are the iron bars challenges the crypto-calvinist sentimentality of so many of our "salvation songs" with a genuinely biblical contrast: God has done everything to save me, yes, and yet, and yet, my salvation is not complete. It also challenges the isolationism of theological technical language by drawing together "salvation" images from throughout the biblical timeline, in an almost Wesleyan density of allusions to biblical events to present a coherent story of a recognizably universal experience.

And, in four distinctly different ways, each of these songs points forward to eternity.

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