David Koyzis teaches political science at Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ontario, Canada, and is the author of the award-winning Political Visions and Illusions (InterVarsity Press, 2003). He is an amateur poet and musician and has a special interest in sung metrical psalmody, especially the 16th-century Genevan Psalter. Born near Chicago and living now in Canada, he sometimes calls himself a Franco-Greek-Cypriot-Finno-Anglo-American-Canadian, one of the smallest ethnic minorities in North America.
Nearly 25 years ago I made a discovery that would change my life profoundly, especially as it relates to the worship of God. While visiting Prague in 1976 I had purchased a copy of a Czech hymnal published in 1900 that contains the 150 Psalms in metre and some 350 hymns. But it was not until the mid-1980s that I discovered the true significance of this little volume. At that time I discovered the tunes of the Genevan Psalter, the metrical psalter completed in 1562 and used in Calvin’s Geneva. From thence its use spread to the Netherlands, Hungary, South Africa and elsewhere, having a huge influence in the Reformed churches in those countries. Imagine my surprise to discover that I had long possessed evidence that these were sung by Czech Christians as well, and in the very church of pre-reformer Jan Hus!
Apart from a fewtunes, however, the Genevan melodies did not catch on to the same extent in the English-speaking world. This is largely because of some of the distinctive characteristics of the English language, including the relative paucity of feminine endings, or unstressed final syllables. Hence English-language metrical psalters, such as the Scottish Psalter of 1650, tended to render all the psalms in a very few uniform metres, such as common metre (86 86 iambic), long metre (88 88 iambic) and short metre (66 86 iambic).
The Genevan tunes, by contrast, conformed to a variety of metrical patterns, some of which would strike us as rather eccentric. This made them more like the German chorales that were being composed in the Lutheran territories at the same time. The syncopated rhythms were such that Queen Elizabeth I is said to have referred to them derogatorily as “Genevan jigs.” Following centuries-old practice, they were written in the traditional ecclesiastical modes of the western church.
Following my discovery of this rich liturgical resource, I was hooked and began to write my own versifications of the Psalms to be sung to these tunes. Somewhat later I began to compose arrangements for the tunes. Ten years ago I posted a website devoted to the Genevan Psalter and to the recovery of psalm-singing in evangelical churches. Since then I have been adding to this website, including an introductory essay, a blog, a sample liturgy, numerous links to other psalm-related material and, of course, the texts themselves.
This is a labour of love that has been a part of my life for nearly a quarter century, and I expect that it will occupy my retirement years when the time comes. My prayer is that it may spark in Christians around the world a renewed love for singing the psalms. I will have more to say in future on the place of the psalms in the church’s liturgy.
“Let everything that breathes praise the Lord!” (Psalm 150:6)
I have recently noticed the uncanny physical (though by no means ideological) resemblance between these two Baptist preachers, John Piper, of Desiring God Ministries, and the late Tommy Douglas, the father of Canadian medicare and the first leader of Canada’s socialist New Democratic Party. Coincidence? Judge for yourself.
My recent reading of the Progressive Revival blog provides a good opportunity to explain my own identity as a progressive Christian. Of course I must immediately point out that what the larger society deems progress may not necessarily be genuinely progressive, which raises the central issue of what makes for progress. How do we know it when we see it? How do we know what to work for?
The followers of the various ideologies have their own definitions. Marx famously believed in the inevitability of a global movement towards the classless society. History moves in a single direction through the mechanism of the class struggle.
Nationalism believes that the liberation of the nation from foreign control (however the words nation and foreign be defined) is a progressive development.
Liberalism has moved through more than one stage beginning with Thomas Hobbes and culminating in its most recent manifestation in North America. The eschatological vision of liberalism may be less obvious than in Marxism, but it can be said to consist of a society in which everyone acquires equally a maximum degree of personal autonomy, by means of either a small government getting out of the way or, more recently, an expansive government actively intervening to increase the range of personal options available to all.
In my personal library are two privately-printed, soft-bound volumes (booklets, really) devoted to Hancock, Michigan, Remembered, written by Clarence J. Monette. Hancock is located in the beautiful Keweenaw Peninsula that juts out into Lake Superior as the northern-most contiguous point of the sparsely-populated and heavily forested Upper Peninsula. My maternal grandfather was born there.
I was particularly interested in volume II, Churches of Hancock, including the history of what is now called Gloria Dei Lutheran Church. One of its predecessor congregations was the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church, established in 1880, just two years prior to the arrival of my great-great-grandparents from Finland. After recounting the beginnings of the congregation, the author turns to the membership.
Membership rose to impressive figures. In 1914, there were two thousand-four hundred baptized members in the congregation, over half of them children. Not only was there the Hancock church building, but numerous preaching stations in chapels and private homes from Boston to Pilgrim; Sunday School programs were conducted for some one thousand-two hundred and fifty children.
Among these 1,250 children was my grandfather, who turned 9 in December of that year. I have in my possession both his baptismal certificate and his confirmation certificate, dated 1923, when he was not quite 18 years old.
By the time I came along my grandfather was no longer a believer and seemed to consider himself an agnostic, if not an outright atheist. With the Great Depression, two failed marriages, and a brother lost to war behind him, he somehow found himself unable to believe, despite his upbringing in a christian home and what appeared to be a vibrant church community. As the final decades of his working life were spent at a General Motors assembly plant near Detroit, his real commitment was to the labour union movement and to what can only be described as socialist politics.
Despite his agnosticism, no self-respecting society of agnostics would ever have taken him as member, because the need to believe in something transcending our earthly existence was too strong in him. This came out in eccentric ways, as he gravitated towards a variety of paranormal phenomena, including UFOs, extrasensory perception, telekinesis, communication with the dead, past lives, &c.
My grandfather has been gone for over three decades. I now wish I had had the presence of mind to ask him why he found it so easy to believe in such a hodgepodge of peculiar notions yet so difficult to believe in the shed blood of Jesus Christ for his sins.
I treasure these church documents, printed and handwritten in the Finnish language. A large part of me hopes that, on the Last Day, I can simply bring these out, show them to God, and say, “See? My beloved Grandpa was baptized and confirmed in your church. He is one of your own!”
Of course, such matters are out of my hands. All I can do is to trust him to God’s mercy and leave it at that.
In 1932 a 26-year-old Philip E. Wentworth published an article in the Atlantic Monthly titled: “What College Did to My Religion,” which the magazine has seen fit to post in its web archives. The author tells the tragic tale of how, as a young man, he was moved by an undergraduate Harvard education, not only to give up his previous plans to become a Presbyterian minister, but to renounce his Christian faith altogether. To be sure, his argument is not a particularly sophisticated one. Surprisingly, it amounts to little more than his professors persuading him that his childhood view of “a universe which revolved about the central figure of an omnipotent Deity” could not stand up to a scientific view in which “[a]ll events in history were manifestations of cause and effect operating upon the natural level.” In short, a fairly naïve conception of science all too easily vanquished a similarly naïve faith.
One comes away from reading Wentworth’s personal apologia with sadness and with the sense that he might have come through Harvard with faith intact if only someone had bothered to open him up to, among other things, the reality of multiple levels of causality. Surely it is not that difficult to grasp that a biological or chemical explanation for a given phenomenon does not rule out social or psychological motives. The fact that feelings of romantic love can be analyzed in terms of electrical impulses in the brain can hardly diminish the reality of romantic love. To recognize the role medical assistance plays in curing an illness is hardly to deny the hand of God and the efficacy of his people’s prayers in the patient’s recovery.
What I find especially curious about such stories is precisely this: The narrowing of vision and the discovery of a supposedly single, naturalistic form of causality (e.g., economic productive forces, psychosexual motives, natural selection) comes disguised as an opening of one’s vistas to the real world. By contrast, those who retain a worldview recognizing the inescapable complexity of the cosmos and who refuse to see it as self-contained are almost always portrayed as cramped and closed-minded.
Yet would it not make more sense to assume that those who, with the psalmist (e.g., in Psalm 104), take joy in the sheer variety of God’s creation and live their lives accordingly are the open-minded ones? Would it not be more accurate to judge that those buying into reductionist explanations of reality have the narrower minds? Yet the peculiarly modern prejudice to the contrary dies hard, and there are still many people willing to take it at face value, particularly in the academy and the popular media.
I find myself wondering what happened to Wentworth. Did he retain his naïve, but unsatisfying faith in a closed universe into middle and old age? Might he have returned to faith in Christ later in life, as has happened to many erstwhile covenant-children-turned-agnostics? Did he perhaps grow disenchanted with the faith he embraced at Harvard? I would love to know.
Bebop, n. 1. a sophisticated type of jazz developed after the Second World War, employing experimental tonal and rhythmic forms; 2. the name of one of the juvenile dinosaurs in Barney and Friends.
Parallel fifths, pl. n. (music), for definition click here.
Relativism, n. a variant of ancestor worship.
faux pas, n. surrogate dads.
Broadmindedness, n. the mental state predisposing one to accept the truth claims of a plethora of mutually incompatible reductionisms.
Narrowmindedness, n. the stubborn refusal to admit that the sheer variety in the cosmos might be reduced to a single key element.
The autumn of 1989 was an exciting time to be teaching political science, due to the extraordinary events occurring in the former east European Soviet bloc. The culmination was, of course, the dramatic opening of the Berlin Wall on 9 November. A political illusion that had seemed so immovable for four decades collapsed with unprecedented swiftness over the course of a very few weeks. By Christmas it was all over, and a new era had begun. To my current students, of course, this is all ancient history, of which they have no memory.
While in graduate school many years ago I subscribed briefly to the journal of the Mercersburg Society, which claims to carry on the legacy of the 19th-century Mercersburg movement. This movement was named for the city in Pennsylvania where the German Reformed Church in the United States had its seminary. Two of its faculty, John Williamson Nevin and church historian Philip Schaff, spearheaded an effort within that denomination to recover something of the catholic roots of the Reformed churches, emphasizing, among other things, the place of the institutional church and its means of grace in the lives of believers, the “mystical presence” of Christ in the Lord’s Supper, and the need for a prescribed liturgy rooted in the ancient patterns of worship.
The German-born Schaff is, of course, known for his multivolume History of the Christian Church and his three-volume Creeds of Christendom, a handy source book for even a nontheologian like me. Virtually all of his works can be read online at Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
Nevin was born and raised a Presbyterian, studied at Princeton Seminary and later affiliated with the German Reformed Church. He was early confronted by the revivalistic “New Measures” that had swept through American protestantism at the turn of the 19th century. He wrote his Anxious Bench as a critique of these measures and as an affirmation of the institutional church and its ordinary means of grace.
Contemporary evangelicals would do well to familiarize themselves with Mercersburg, a school that stands in contrast to the revivalist strain that has dominated the evangelical movement (at least in the US) for some 200 years. In so doing they might stand a chance of immunizing themselves against the various forms of evangelical Christianity revolving around strong personalities and the techniques of communication at the expense of the institutional church with its divinely-mandated task of preaching the Word and administering the sacraments.
The differences between the United States and Canada are not always easy to discern on the surface, but they’re there. One of these concerns post-secondary education. Here in Ontario this field is dominated by a very few provincial universities, some of which may have had Christian origins but are by now rather thoroughly secularized. These tend to be concentrated in the major urban centres. The universities may or may not include affiliated colleges, some of which are church-related. For example, as one drives past the University of Waterloo, one sees a rather patronizing sign calling attention to the “church colleges.” These include Renison College, St. Paul’s College, Conrad Grebel College and St. Jerome’s University, affiliated with the Anglican, United, Mennonite and Catholic churches respectively. All are related in some fashion to the University of Waterloo itself. Nearby Waterloo Lutheran University retained its independence but changed its name to Wilfrid Laurier University nearly four decades ago, thereby abandoning what remained of its Lutheran heritage.
Then there are the community colleges, such as Mohawk College here in Hamilton. Elsewhere this would be called a polytechnical school and, accordingly, it offers the Bachelor of Applied Technology. The very word college in Canada — and indeed throughout the Commonwealth — has multiple meanings. It could be a polytechnical school, a private secondary school (e.g., Toronto’s élite Upper Canada College), a graduate theological school (e.g., the Presbyterian Church’s Knox College, also in Toronto), a school affiliated with a university, or even a professional association (e.g., Ontario College of Teachers).
By contrast, in the US, where I grew up, post-secondary education is far more decentralized and encompasses a variety of types spread throughout the country, including metropolitan areas, middle-sized cities and small towns. There are the publicly-controlled state universities (counterpart to Ontario’s provincial universities), independent universities and colleges, church-related and confessionally-based colleges, ivy league schools, and so forth. These are scattered far and wide, popping up in the unlikeliest places but firmly rooted in the hearts of their supporters.
Driving through Michigan on Interstate 94 one frequently encounters signs alerting travellers to Eastern Michigan University, the University of Michigan, Spring Arbor University, Albion College, Kalamazoo College and — somewhat off the beaten path — Hillsdale College and (in the Upper Peninsula) Finlandia University. There education is not simply a matter of state governments undertaking to educate their citizens. It is a matter of particular communities — some overtly confessional and some not — becoming aware of the need to educate their young people, refusing to wait for someone else to take the initiative, and deciding to do something themselves.
Despite its Canadian location, my own employer, Redeemer University College, conforms to this grassroots pattern. It was established nearly three decades ago by Reformed Christians of Dutch heritage, who sought to establish a university rooted in an overtly Christian worldview. One of its models was Abraham Kuyper’s Free University of Amsterdam, but also several institutions south of the border, including Calvin, Dordt and Trinity Christian Colleges, established along similar lines. Yet Redeemer is definitely a Canadian institution.
I must confess to preferring the decentralized, bottom-up approach to post-secondary education, of which Redeemer is a part. I rather like driving into a small American town and seeing an equally small college (read: undergraduate university) there. Its very existence speaks well of the people who sacrificed so much initially to make it possible and in the ensuing decades to keep it going. That many of these supporters are Christians with a vision of education in the service of God’s kingdom makes their efforts all the more praiseworthy. I could wish for more such efforts in here in Canada.
Christians have been engaging sporadically in eschatological speculation for most of the last two millennia, but a lot of people these days seem to be focussing on 21 May 2011 as the predicted Day of Judgement. Could this be part of an effort to preempt the Mayan calendar?
Easily the jewel of the 16th-century Reformed confessions is the Heidelberg Catechism, which begins in so memorable and moving a fashion as to work its way into the hearts of believers everywhere:
Q & A 1 Q. What is your only comfort
in life and in death?
A. That I am not my own,
but belong—
body and soul,
in life and in death—
to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.
He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood,
and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.
He also watches over me in such a way
that not a hair can fall from my head
without the will of my Father in heaven:
in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.
Because I belong to him,
Christ, by his Holy Spirit,
assures me of eternal life
and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready
from now on to live for him.
Q & A 2 Q. What must you know
to live and die in the joy of this comfort?
A. Three things:
first, how great my sin and misery are;
second, how I am set free from all my sins and misery;
third, how I am to thank God for such deliverance.
The life in Christ is, above all, a life of gratitude for the gift of life itself and for the restoration of that life from the bondage of sin and death through his perfect sacrifice on the cross and subsequent resurrection. Any human effort to find such comfort in something or someone else is bound, as St. Augustine understood, to leave our hearts restless.
English-speaking Calvinists are generally familiar with the acronym TULIP, which is a handy way of remembering the principal doctrines of Reformed Christianity:
Total depravity Unconditional election Limited atonement Irresistible grace Perseverance of the saints
However, given that some might see TULIP as old hat — and in the interest of encouraging bio-diversity — today’s challenge is to come up with another floral acronym that expresses the truths of Reformed Christianity. I posed this to some friends and colleagues some time ago, and now it’s your turn. For example:
Perseverance of the saints Authority of scripture Noetic effects of the fall Salvation in Jesus Christ Yes to God’s grace
As tomorrow marks the 492nd anniversary of the event that traditionally marks the beginning of the Reformation, I thought it appropriate to post the following choral rendition of Luther’s Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott, sung in its original syncopated rhythm.
This hymn is, of course, a free paraphrase of Psalm 46 with a christocentric focus. The nonlutheran Reformers generally versified the psalms while sticking more closely to the original texts. Here is an example from the Genevan Psalter: Psalm 46, sung by the 270-year-old Debrecen College Cantus of Debrecen, Hungary, a choral group that deserves more recognition on this side of the pond.
One of my esteemed colleagues, whenever he is responsible for leading faculty in prayer, almost invariably goes to the Book of Common Prayer as his primary resource. This is not at all a bad thing to do, as the BCP is filled with the vast liturgical riches of western Christendom, as well as with a few gems from the east.
But of course the BCP is 450 years old and its language is that of Elizabethan England, much of which is largely incomprehensible today. We are no longer accustomed to addressing each other as thou and thee. We speak of the living rather than the quick. References to the “Holy Ghost” have been supplanted by “Holy Spirit,” the word ghost having long come to be associated with Halloween and the occult.
However, it must be admitted that liturgical language tends almost everywhere to lag behind ordinary usage. In short, my colleague’s affection for the BCP is by no means unusual or extraordinary within the larger Christian tradition. (Judaism and Islam have their own versions of this phenomenon.) Up until the 1960s the vast majority of Roman Catholic churches worshipped in Latin. The reforms of Vatican II brought in vernacular liturgies, but there are many Catholics who continue to regret this and seek out churches where the Latin mass is celebrated, the numbers of which have undoubtedly grown now that Pope Benedict has loosened restrictions on the use of that ancient tongue in the mass.
It’s true. I am not a social conservative, but that does not mean I am unsympathetic with the concerns of those who describe themselves as such. I am certainly much closer to them than I am to the economic libertarians in the conservative movement or to the lifestyle libertarianism that has come to dominate élite opinion in the arts, the media and the courts. At the same time, I cannot add my own name to the number of professed social conservatives. Why?
Take abortion as just one example. I am unequivocally pro-life. I believe that we are obligated to care for the lives that have been put in our care and to protect the vulnerable. I agree with the late Senator Edward Kennedy (yes, you read right!) that “human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized — the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old.”
Moreover, try as I might, I cannot follow the logic of those advocating a so-called consistent life ethic, in which abortion is lumped together with a host of other issues, including poverty, health care and the like, which generally involve differing prudential judgements as to how best to provide undoubted, albeit scarce, goods in the most equitable manner. The fact that many proponents of the seamless garment approach turn out to be pro-choice on abortion does little to recommend their position to those who believe abortion to be a genuine justice issue.
Some Christians accept without reservation the teachings of their church, including the status of Scripture as the Word of God, but they nevertheless seldom read it and consequently do not know it very well. This is definitely not true of most evangelicals, who from an early age are taught to read and love the Bible. And even to collect bibles! As an adolescent I once went through our family home and counted all the bibles I could manage to locate, including those in Greek. (My parents had had a bible school education and my father had grown up speaking modern Greek.) When I had finished counting, I was astonished to discover that among the eight of us we owned more than 80 copies of the Bible! Our own experience was obviously quite different from those households that may own but a single copy gathering dust on one of the upper shelves of the home library.
I am part of the last generation to grow up with the King James version, although other translations were beginning to be published at the time. I recall with special fondness my mother reading to us from J. B. Phillips’ paraphrase of the New Testament, whose fresh and colloquial renderings made God’s Word come alive for us children. Nevertheless, when we undertook to memorize passages from the Bible, as we were taught to do in sunday school, the KJV still held sway.
It was in sunday school and church that we learned that the Bible is not merely a collection of legal codes, genealogies, moral advice and wise observations about life. Nor is it a series of episodic vignettes from the national experience of a people distant from us in both time and place. Rather, the Bible is a grand story covering the entirety of history from beginning to end, from creation through the fall into sin, to redemption in Jesus Christ, up to the final consummation of his everlasting kingdom, as recounted in the Revelation. This was our own story, and we identified with the foibles and struggles of persons who lived long ago, but whose lives and actions vividly manifested God’s mighty acts in history, culminating in the sending of Jesus into the world.
The late Bishop Lesslie Newbigin writes that Christians are those who indwell the biblical narrative, who make it their own and find their place within it. This indwelling conditions everything they do, in the full array of their life’s responsibilities. Furthermore, it is incompatible with finding one’s place in another pseudo-redemptive narrative, whether it be the liberal expectation of a progressive expansion of freedom or the Marxian expectation of a classless society. No one can serve two masters (Matthew 6:24).
Those of us who grew up steeped in Scripture early came to love it. Its world is intimately familiar to us and its worldview is not the least foreign to our apparently modern sensibilities. For myself this love has worked itself out in my praying a simple form of the Daily Office throughout the past 30 years and in singing the Psalms, about which I will have more to say in the near future.
There is a once sizeable but now declining protestant denomination here in Canada that is said to be so well-heeled financially that it could keep going for decades after the last member has died. Presumably this would provide a golden opportunity for market diversification at the corporate level: “We used to do church; now we own the Toronto Maple Leafs.”
I was born and raised in Wheaton, Illinois. For some people that might be thought to say everything. Wheaton is the home of Wheaton College, that 156-year-old bastion of evangelical higher education. The city itself hosts the head offices of numerous missionary and parachurch organizations, though, tellingly, precious few denominational headquarters. The population is heavily churched, with vibrant congregations of every and no denomination. Although I attended a public elementary school, many of my teachers were evangelicals and at least two were Wheaton graduates. Our family were members of an Orthodox Presbyterian Church congregation, which my parents helped to establish just over half a century ago. We spent my first eleven years there.
I do not recall hearing the word evangelical used to describe us. At that time fundamentalist had not yet become the term of near universal opprobrium that it is today, and I often heard my mother speak favourably of “fundamental” churches, that is, those which confessed the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, including the incarnation, the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth and so forth. Our church was obviously one of these. On a weekly basis I grew accustomed to hearing the Ten Commandments read either before or after the confession of sin (I can no longer recall the precise order), reciting the Apostles’ (but, as I recall, not the Nicene) Creed. The church was strongly sabbatarian, with certain activities mandated or proscribed on the Lord’s Day. (We could listen to Mantovani’s rendition of classic hymns, but not Lawrence Welk, on the phonograph.) I was taught the Westminster Shorter Catechism beginning in the early elementary grades.
Yet our family’s experience was somewhat at the periphery of the larger evangelical movement. Such typical proscriptions as avoidance of alcohol, the cinema and tobacco were largely foreign to that congregation, though their use was an obstacle to membership in some neighbouring churches. However, what distinguished us from other Presbyterians was that we had no room for the liberal protestantism that we believed to have sidetracked Princeton Seminary in the 1920s and had further decimated some of the major American church bodies during that troubled decade.
One of the things that makes the word evangelical so difficult to pin down is that, whichever defining characteristics one comes up with, there will always be exceptions. An evangelical is someone who has had a born-again conversion experience – except, that is, for those who have not. Some, like myself, have never known a time when we were not aware of belonging to Christ and would be hard pressed to fasten onto a single moment of personal conversion.
Similarly, I am tempted to say that an evangelical is someone who rejects liberalism, though it’s no longer clear that the average evangelical even knows what liberalism is. Nevertheless, the evangelical believes strongly that the Bible is the very Word of God. She believes that Jesus really did rise from the dead and that he performed genuine miracles during his earthly ministry. He believes that Jesus really predicted the destruction of the temple in AD 70 and that his eschatological discourses were not artificially inserted into the gospel record after the fact. Evangelicals may differ in their interpretations of the apocalyptic books, but they firmly believe that Jesus will indeed return to earth to establish his eternal kingdom. This would seem to indicate that there is a certain confessional core to which virtually all evangelicals, whatever their other differences, would adhere.
Yet there is also a strong pragmatic streak among evangelicals, as can be seen in the proliferation of seeker-friendly worship services, the ready embrace of marketing techniques in spreading the gospel and the apparent subordination of truth to measurable results, usually calculated by the numbers of warm bodies (or souls!) present in the pews. The danger here, of course, is that certain non-negotiables will be inadvertently discarded in the interest of attracting new converts. In which case evangelicals may end up looking very much like the liberals from whom their forebears struggled to distance themselves.
Could it be, then, that evangelicalism is best understood in terms of the tension between this confessional core and the pragmatism that so often comes with well-intended activism? If so, my subjective judgement is that the confessional core still has priority of place within the movement, though the lure of pragmatism could one day dilute that core.
