![Sankey, Sacred Songs and Solos (opened to \"I Know That My Redeemer Lives\")](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/168\/2017\/11\/SankeysSacredSongsandSolos.jpg\")
<\/a>First,\u00a0holding and reading a hymnal\u00a0reminds me that Christians are a people of the book, whose\u00a0religious beliefs, imagination, and behavior have been and will be shaped by texts. Of course, I can see exactly the same words on a screen, but they feel less ephemeral and more serious when I see them\u00a0rendered as black ink on white paper.<\/p>\n
When bound in a book, those texts seem to have more heft. Literally, and figuratively. For reading lyrics out of a hymnal also reminds me that those words are part of an ancient tradition.\u00a0I love seeing the dates of composition for texts and tunes, all the more so when the hymn we\u2019re singing is side-by-side with a much older or much younger counterpart\u00a0on a similar theme.<\/p>\n
I suppose that you could put the same information on a screen\u2026 but it seldom happens. Nor, for that matter, do\u00a0such slides tend to include the names of the people who authored the tune and text (and, often, translation), or the biblical verses that inspired them. Projected on a screen, hymns seem much like the stock images that illustrate sermons: anonymous and mass-produced. Hymnals remind me that God\u00a0has spoken in many and various ways through\u00a0women and men who were faithful to their vocations, dedicated to their crafts, and inspired to write words by\u00a0their encounters with the Word.<\/p>\n
Again, it\u2019s conceivable that all that information could be included on a projected slide. But\u00a0that would still leave the chief reason that I use hymnals:<\/p>\n
I love to sing in harmony.<\/h2>\n
Just yesterday I was reminded that one of my favorite members of the great cloud of witnesses scorned multi-part singing:<\/p>\n
Because it is bound wholly to the Word, the singing of the congregation, especially of the family congregation, is essentially singing in unison. Here words and music combine in a unique way. The soaring tone of unison singing finds its sole and essential support in the words that are sung and therefore does not need the musical support of other voices.<\/p>\n
\u2026The purity of unison singing, unaffected by alien motives of musical techniques, the clarity, unspoiled by the attempt to give musical art an autonomy of its own apart from the words, the simplicity and frugality, the humaneness and warmth of this way of singing is the essence of all congregational singing\u2026. This is singing from the heart, singing to the Lord, singing the Word: this is singing in unity\u2026. (Life Together<\/em>, pp. 59-60)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
But even someone so sainted as Dietrich Bonhoeffer was wrong about some things.<\/p>\n
First, as venerable as his preferred mode\u00a0is in the musical history of the Church, harmony singing has its own rich tradition. John Calvin may have forbidden it (and instrumental accompaniment) in his quest for \u201csimple and pure singing of the divine praises,\u201d but Luther\u2019s first hymnbook (Neue geistliche Ges\u00e4nge<\/em>, 1523) had four parts. Andrew Wilson-Dickson notes that, unlikely as it may sound to us, \u201cin Luther\u2019s time students would gather round a table to sing in harmony from part-books just for amusement\u201d (The Story of Chris<\/a>t<\/a>ian Music<\/a><\/em>, p. 62 \u2014 the preceding Calvin quotation comes from p. 65). And while few 18th century Anglicans were initially skilled enough to sing the works of Isaac Watts in harmony, things changed under the\u00a0influence of Charles and John Wesley. Their renewal movement not only insisted on making hymnody more accessible to laypeople, but Methodists invested time in teaching each other to sing. As a result, it became more and more common to hear antiphonal and harmony singing in Methodist chapels,\u00a0whether or not\u00a0there was instrumental accompaniment.<\/p>\n
The story continues into the 19th and 20th centuries. Even without much training, the \u201cshape note\u201d singers of the Sacred Harp tradition threw themselves into a gloriously loud,\u00a0rough-hewn\u00a0harmony. And it beggars belief that Bonhoeffer \u2014 so famously taken with the gospel music\u00a0he encountered at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem \u2014 would have believed that so polyphonous a musical tradition as that of African American Christianity did not\u00a0count as\u00a0\u201csinging from the heart, singing to the Lord, singing the Word.\u201d<\/p>\n