Psalms in Our Time

Psalms 137, 87: I love thy kingdom, Lord

The earliest American hymn still in use, this combines two psalms to express love for the church, both divine and human.

Text: Timothy Dwight, 1800

Meter: 6,6,8,6 (Short meter)

Rhyme scheme: abcb

This is in many ways one of the most difficult of the psalms. Its historical background is crystal-clear: the abominable desolation that was the aftermath of the fall of Jerusalem, with its unspeakable images of violence specifically aimed at the most innocent of the people; the soul-shocked refugees huddled in a strange land, tormented by self-doubt, surrounded by contemptuous idolators: trying to recover a sense of relationship to a God who had (for good cause) deserted them, but who cannot at the same time have deserted his own just nature.

Their response is, in that context, restrained. Their vow is not one of vengeance, but of loyalty: and not ultimately to a city, but to the God whose rule that city symbolized. The city might never recover, but it would remain as a symbol of unrequited horrific crimes until the inevitable retribution came.

It is easy to dismiss the grisly curse on Babylon's innocents as sub-Christian.¹ It is not so easy to turn this into an edifying hymn, and Isaac Watts didn't try: he omitted this and and about a dozen other psalms².

In newly independent America, Watts' Psalms and Hymns were widely used,³ but were considered to need revision. Watts had too thoroughly accommodated the psalms to eighteenth-century Englishmen; references in the psalms to Britain and to her king were just as out of place in newly independent and republican America as references to Jewish kings had been in Watts' England.⁴

Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), president of Yale University, was asked to undertake a revision. He included 33 original hymns of his own, including versions of the psalms Watts had omitted. The casual reader may not notice the connection with Psalm 137, especially if stanzas 3 and 4 are omitted (compare with verses 5-6). But with that connection in mind, the ideas of praying,⁵ singing, rejoicing, and mourning for Zion also come from the song.

Some modern hymnals describe this as a version of Psalm 87, which describes God's establishment of Zion, love for it, rescue of it, bringing people from all the world as citizens into it (naturally understood as a Messianic mission), and (again) the joyful fellowship and singing to be found there. And certainly Dwight seemed to pull in some ideas from there, comparing human and divine love for the Church.

The result might be called a composite psalm, or even a hymn. It is worth noticing, as an example of the process by which psalm-writers and singers became hymn-writers and singers, or as an example of the way that the psalms may profitably guide hymnwriters today; though we feel no compulsion to end with the psalms, we cannot do better than to begin from them.

"St. Thomas": Aaron Williams, Universal Psalmodist, 1763; abridged

Incipit: sddmrdr|mfsfmfmr; 51132 123454 34325

Melodic scheme: Through-composed

Aaron Williams (1731-1776) was a music teacher and publisher in London; his books of psalm tunes were widely distributed in England and America. He published a 16-line tune "Holborn" of which this is the first four lines.⁶ It is a fine and useful tune, often used as a common tune, but poorly represented⁷ in our books for no apparent reason.

Our hymnals use the western American tune "Bealoth", published in 1840 in the Sacred Harp, a simple but distinctive double-length⁸ tune, and a reasonable choice.

Use:

It is sometimes easy to claim love for God, and yet feel indifference or even dislike for members of the church. We've been warned about this before; and yet we may need reminding. This psalm brings together the real, active love God show for his covenanted people with the genuine love we should demonstrate. It is a good song, well worth the use we make of it.

Verses 3, 4, and sometimes 7 are generally omitted.

Excursus: The Temple Figure in Hymns

I have heard Christians express concern that this song represented a material view of the "church" as the physical "house" with material walls -- that is, a congregational meeting place. This, I think, exhibits two fundamental misapprehensions that we should outgrow.

We sometimes convey the impression that the denominational world thinks of "building" as "church."⁹ That may be true for some half-converted, superstitious, inactive self-proclaimed heritary members, but it is not something that would ever be taught by any accredited teacher in any denominational tradition. The hymns written by theologians and approved by editorial committees may sometimes express what we might regard as superstitious ideas about church property, but this will not be one of them!

On the other hand, we are sometimes incredibly naive¹⁰ about recognizing metaphorical language. In all language, the juxtaposition of words from different semantic domains, or "collocutional clash", is a reliable indicator that an act of metaphor is about to be committed. Here, the clash comes in the first clause, where three different metaphors (church, house, and kingdom) are unapologetically placed in apposition. From the first it is clear that the author will be using metaphorical expansion. But not until the second stanza does he introduce the primary metaphor (city), and that at first by implication (walls, citizenship) rising to a climax with use of the city name, Zion".

But I once heard a Christian, crouched on that first superstition, seeing the two words "house" and "wall" and blithely passing over all the other metaphors, confidently jump to the conclusion that a church building was being described. This is absolute nonsense, as can be seen from even a casual glance at the underlying psalms and the unabridged text. But it is a kind of nonsense that we do far too much to encourage. And it impedes both our "singing with understanding" and our proclamation of the Gospel.

Notes