“ Sing and make melody in your heart” Singing Scripture through hymns Mark A. Noll
“o for a thousand tongues”
Wherever the Christian faith has taken root, the history of the Bible and the history of hymnody have grown up together. This synergy existed from the beginning in America. A printing press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the North American colonies’ first such enterprise, published the Bay Psalm Book as its very first work. This metrical paraphrase of the Psalms appeared in 1640 and was then reprinted over 30 times during the next century and a half. The Bay Psalm Book’s popularity meant that when New England Puritans ventured beyond their primary focus on the Bible itself, their public singing—and often personal reading—was still Scripture in another form. The Bay Psalm Book’s paraphrased translation, made directly from the Hebrew, was the work of three university-educated ministers, including John Eliot, who would later labor to translate the Bible into Algonquian (see pp. 32, 36). The Bay Psalm Book has often been criticized for its clunky style, as in its rendering of Psalm 23: The Lord to mee a shepheard is, want therefore shall not I.
24
Hee in the folds of tender-grasse, doth cause mee downe to lie. But no one should doubt how much it kept Scripture central as Puritans sang in church or used the book for family worship and private reading. This clunky hymn book would soon have competition. American hymnody evolved significantly in the eighteenth century primarily because of the popularity of English hymn writer Isaac Watts (1674–1748). Before Watts, English, Scottish, and colonial Protestants restricted their singing to biblical paraphrases, such as the Bay Psalm Book, for fear that substituting unreliable human invention for the pure Word of God would contaminate their public worship. Watts, an English Congregationalist, dared to loosen up. The title of his most widely reprinted collection explained what he hoped to accomplish: the Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, and apply’d to the Christian State and Worship. Early American editions of Watts’s Psalms of David included a text from Luke 24:44 to justify a kind of paraphrasing combined with original writing that many at the time regarded as dangerously radical: “All things must be fulfilled which were written in . . . the Psalms concerning me.”
Our eternal home
Watts deferred to tradition in the first paraphrase he prepared for Psalm 90. Its rendering was freer than what the Bay Psalm Book authors attempted, but not by much: Through every Age, Eternal God, Thou art our Rest, our safe Abode; High was thy Throne e’er Heaven was made, Or Earth thy humble Foot-stool laid.
Christian History
Singing procession to church during the New England religious revival 1740 . Hand-colored woodcut—North Wind Picture Archives / Alamy Stock Photo
Churchgoers process into worship while singing (left) in 1740, during the First Great Awakening.
