From the College of Medical Studies, we are
very grateful that you all are here, and we're
especially grateful that Mark is here.
And it's my job to introduce him, and then
ironically, go on in.
Ironically, then I have to run away and go sing
one of the songs from the first volume that
he's going to be talking to you about.
So I know that at several of the presentations,
some of the new hymns that have been written
are going to be sung, so it's really exciting
to see how this is already impacting not just
some of the churches.
He was just telling me that this first volume
is now sold out of its second printing, and
they're getting ready to do a third printing.
So it's clearly meeting a need, and he'll tell
you more about that.
Mark Shipp has had experience on the mission
field in Brazil. He's taught in Africa, and
Europe, and Asia, and is currently at...
Come on in.
What do you guys call yourselves now? Who?
Austin Graduate School of Theology.
Austin Graduate School of Theology has
undergone a few name changes, and I never can
remember the correct one.
His specialization is Old Testament, but he
clearly is multi-talented.
If you look at the types of things that he's
done in addition to scholarly things, for
example, he's co-author of an Akkadian handbook.
It's not a Cajun handbook. It's an ancient
Semitic language, Akkadian.
He's also co-director of the Tel Tamar dig in
Israel, so you have a number of scholarly
things in that area.
But he's also a co-composer of Oratorio, a
hindsight on high places.
He's also editor of Kindless, this work on the
Psalms that's ongoing.
He's certainly done many things, but clearly
not only a scholar, but somebody who has a
pastoral heart for ministry and mission.
So I think it's all of those things combined
that have brought him to be involved.
Well, actually not be involved in this, but to
drive this forward.
So you will certainly enjoy this. I'm sorry I
have to miss it.
I'll go advertise it somewhere else.
Go sing some of the songs somewhere.
Thanks, Kurt.
Yeah, I'm Mark Shipp, and this presentation and
the one tomorrow are on this volume here,
Timeless, Saints and Psalms for the Church Today.
It is almost none are available, as I just now
found out.
They're almost sold out. They've got a few.
We had grand designs of having a whole bunch
here to sell to everybody, but they've got just
a few left.
This is a unique thing I keep hearing from
people who know a lot more than I do about a
metrical psalter,
which is a psalm hymn book.
We don't have Psalm hymn books in Churches of Christ.
It's not been a part of our tradition, but this
is not just a psalm hymn book, all 150 psalms eventually.
This is volume one. There will be two more
volumes, but also a full commentary with translation,
new translations, new commentaries on every
psalm, new application notes, responsive readings,
and of course several songs, new songs
composed, both traditional style and
contemporary style,
attached to each psalm. So it's kind of a
gargantuan project, many years in the making.
Why are we doing this is a good question.
Years ago I thought, you know what, we do a
fair job within Churches of Christ and other
church traditions
similar to ours of singing hymns and spiritual songs,
but we've not been very good at obeying the
command to sing psalms, have we?
As you look back through hymnals over the last
50 years, there are a decreasing number of
psalms that are sung,
as opposed to 500 years ago when, let's say in
Calvin's Geneva, they sang only psalms in worship,
to the point that by the mid to late 20th
century, almost none were sung in most hymnals,
with some few exceptions, Orthodox churches and
a couple of small Presbyterian churches that
continue to sing psalms.
But we certainly didn't sing many, and those of
you who grew up in Churches of Christ know the
ones that we sang.
There are half a dozen that we would sing with
any regularity. What are the Psalm 23?
The Lord's my shepherd, I'll not want, is the
setting we use with that, mainly. 148, 100, all
people that on earth do dwell,
that one I grew up singing, the 148. There's a
couple of others, Psalm 1, some settings of
Psalm 1 occasionally.
Psalm 119, yeah, there's a few that have been
sung, but I just, I think, exhausted what we
do, mainly.
Now, we have no tradition of metrical psalms. A
metrical psalm is a psalm from the book of
Psalms set in modern style,
because the Bible doesn't print poetry the way
we write poetry, right?
It's got a completely different way of looking
at poetry 3,000 years ago than what we do now.
So, it's a way of taking the ancient psalm and
transferring it into modern, sort of, poetry
and meter.
Well, that's a difficult thing to do, to try to
do that and keep the psalm intact, because it's
very, very different styles of poetry.
And so, I got to thinking years ago, we're not
doing a good job of obeying the command to sing psalms.
And so, we need to recover psalms. Why recover
psalms? Isn't that Old Testament?
It's because the book of Psalms was a hymn
book, not only of the second temple period, but
also the hymnal of Jesus.
And they sang psalms in the early church, and
in fact, not only psalms, but largely, often,
many psalms,
throughout the 1st Christian centuries and into
the Middle Ages.
It's only been a recent phenomenon that
churches have failed to sing psalms.
I think that is too bad, because the book of
Psalms provide us with the vocabulary and the
theology of worship,
from lament to thanksgiving to praise. It
teaches us how to lament, give thanks and
praise responsibly and faithfully.
It gives us those movements in worship, and it
gives us the impetus, it's the font from which
worship springs.
If you cut yourself off from the spring, so to
speak, then you're not long-term serving the
needs, I think,
spiritually or in terms of worship of the
growing of the church. I think it's a bad trade-off.
And so, for those reasons and others, we
decided to dive into this.
What I want to do right now is show some slides
about how Timeless is both in the same genre,
the same tradition of what I'll call metrical psalters.
And that is a psalm hymnal that's metered in
modern meter.
That has a history of roughly 500 years, and
not prior to that.
Psalms were sung prior to that, but not hymn
style, not metrical psalters.
And so I want to sort of look at a history of
metrical psalters and how Timeless fits into that.
I have enlisted the aid of my right-hand man,
Randy Dawe.
Raise your hand, Randy. Randy's going to be
leading a lot of these songs.
And I hope you all have put on your eyeglasses,
and you can see what's up here.
I did not make copies for everybody for you to
have in front of you.
You're going to be singing both an ancient
metrical version and a newer one.
And some of them are a little bit unusual, and
some of them are actually funny for our sensibilities.
And show how we're both similar, we're both in
that same tradition, and also different, that
we also diverge.
Tomorrow, we're going to be talking about
Timeless just in general, about what our
procedures are,
how we differ from metrical psalms of the past.
And then we're going to spend half the time
just in worship.
We're just going to be singing and doing
responsive readings and the like, just to show
what's possible.
So that's what we'll do today and tomorrow.
Let's see, I've got control of this, don't I?
Okay, beginning with Calvin's Reformation in
around 1551,
Calvin believed that only psalms should be sung
in his churches.
So in Geneva, he enlisted the aid of mainly
French composers,
and they came up with a new hymnal, which was
all psalms.
And some of them are still sung to this day
from the hymn book of Calvin's Geneva.
Psalm singing, and in fact hymn singing, was
not really done in the high Middle Ages.
In Catholic churches, you had professional choruses,
and one of the things that Protestantism did
was return worship to the pew.
So that communion was taken in the pew by the
laity, songs were sung from the pew.
And so how do you get people to sing?
Well, you do folk music.
But in fact, they took folk styles of the day,
and they elevated those folk styles and
invented the new genre of the hymn for
congregational singing,
so that people who weren't used to that could
sing publicly.
With Protestantism in the 1500s, psalm singing
is everywhere, especially among Reformed churches.
Luther also encouraged the singing of psalms,
but not exclusively, like Calvin did.
A mighty fortress is sort of loosely based on
Psalm 46.
Calvin was not a musician, but he sponsored the
creation of metrical psalters.
Luther was a musician, and that comes through
with his compositions.
But Calvin sponsored the creation of metrical psalters,
advocated that only psalms from the Bible ought
to be sung in Christian worship.
So the Geneva psalter was the result of
Calvin's patronage,
and he utilized some of the best musical talent
of the day.
Insistence on singing only metrical versions of
psalms seems a bit extreme to us,
and I think probably it is.
There are still some churches, by the way, that
only or largely sing psalms.
The Christian Reformed church sings, I think,
mainly psalms, if not only psalms,
and the Reformed Presbyterian church sings
mainly psalms.
There are still some that only or largely do that.
That has some historical basis in the
preference of the early church for psalms,
not uniquely that too.
And with many of these, hymnals did not have
any music at all.
They were just the words, and you'll see some
of that as the presentation goes on.
But the notes came later, and especially the
harmony came later.
What they would do, there was no marriage of
text and tune back then.
A text might be utilized, you might utilize a
number of tunes with it,
and that's why we have some poetry that we have
in any hymnal
with more than one musical setting to this day,
but these days we tend to relate one psalm or
one set of lyrics to one particular musical setting.
I don't have time to do an exhaustive survey.
There were lots of hymnals, and I'll give you a
real brief overview of this,
but I want to focus on a couple of them.
Metrical psalters produced in English between
1549 and 1750.
Some of the more important were Robert
Crowley's Psalter, 1549,
the Ainsworth Psalter, 1612, in Holland by an
English separatist clergyman,
Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins' Psalter,
which we'll talk about in a minute,
and the Bay psalm book.
You all have heard of the Bay psalm book, right?
It has the reputation of being the first book
published in America.
It was a metrical psalm book.
Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalter first appeared
as a compilation by Thomas Sternhold between
1547 and 1549
and then published posthumously.
Additions to Sternhold's Psalter were made by
John Hopkins,
and the publisher John Day brought together
these psalms and other compositions
into what he called the whole book of psalms,
not quite spelled like we do it,
collected into English meter in 1562.
It was an attempt to be extremely literal to
the text of the psalms.
What happens when you try to take the literal
psalm and cram it into English verses?
Well, weird things happen when you do that.
In effect, singing the exact psalm text with
forced English rhyme and meter,
and you may see some of that here.
This is from Sternhold Hopkins' Psalter.
Okay, so an attempt to render it literally into English,
and not always is the poetry all that elegant.
And this has some inelegance to it.
Here is what we have done with our Psalm 24.
We have, I think, three settings for Psalm 24
in Book 1 of Timeless.
This is one done by one of the members of our
committee, Mel Whitcher,
The Lord Our God Created Earth.
And if you feel like doing the harmony, chime in.
Okay, so that's one of our three attempts at
trying to take the words of the Psalter
and retain the meaning but transfer them into
styles that are a little friendlier to us,
and a system of singing that we're more
familiar with.
One of the most elegant psalters, many of the
psalters, by the way, that were done,
were this kind of forced rhyme.
Forcing all the words that they could, crammed
them into minimal space in terms of English poetry
and European poetry.
But one of the best was the Scottish Psalter,
produced in 1564,
revised and expanded in various editions until
the classical edition of 1650.
One of the things to remember, too, is they all
borrowed from each other.
They borrowed from the Geneva Psalter.
They borrowed from Sternhold and Hopkins.
They borrowed from the Scottish Psalter.
That's still the case today with metrical
psalters that are produced.
That is really strange to try to read that.
Randy tells me he can do it.
It looks like all a bunch of half notes to me.
But we're not going to try to sing that, I
don't think.
You want to try? No.
Let's do this.
This is Psalm 1 from the Anglo-Genevan Psalter.
The Genevan Psalter in English, but stolen by
the Scottish Psalter in 1650
with the tune, Dundee, which you all know is
God Moves in a Mysterious Way,
which also comes from the Scottish Psalter.
It's one of the ones that has retained its life
throughout the last 500 years.
And that's one of the more elegant examples of it,
and actually one of the more elegant examples
of Thomas Sternhold's poetry.
Several great hymns come out of the Scottish Psalter,
All People That on Earth Do Dwell, Psalm 100,
though it was written for the Anglo-Genevan
Psalter in 1561
and the tune that we just sang come out of the
Scottish Psalter.
Let's give a shot at one we have done on Psalm 1.
I'm going to have to operate this, and I'm
technologically challenged.
So unless you want to...
I'll try to do this and actually keep up with it.
The men do this, you can do bass, I'll do tenor.
Why don't you sing when the women come in, sing
with them?
You want me to do that?
You don't have to do it on pitch, you can do it.
Alright, I'll try.
Let's see, this is done by the music by
Konstantin Zhigulin of the singing group Salome.
He's a prolific Russian composer,
and this won the hymn award two years ago at
Sending Voice 2, this particular hymn.
Okay, well that's... I like it.
I think it was a fair outing for us.
And it begins Psalm 1, Volume 1 of Timeless.
I think it's the second or third setting.
Not all reviews of metrical psalters were good.
In fact, not all metrical psalters were good.
In fact, most of them were awkward and forced.
These are some of the reviews.
You never did get me the glass review, by the way.
Randy found one that's hilarious.
Literary opinion after the 16th century was negative.
In his 1781 History of English Poetry,
British poet laureate Thomas Wharton called the
Sternhold and Hopkins psalter
obsolete and contemptible.
Well, you know, you decide.
An absolute travesty and entirely destitute of
elegance, spirit, and propriety.
In 1819, Thomas Campbell of the Alexander and
Thomas Campbell Restoration Movement
condemned metrical psalters' worst taste and
flat and homely phrasing.
Okay, well, from the 1800s on, there's a
movement away from metrical psalters.
And for obvious reasons, not all of it was good.
I'm going to have to find my...
Oh, they're over here.
Excuse me while I fiddle.
The first book published in the U.S. supposedly
was the Bay Psalm book,
whose name is actually not Bay Psalm book,
but the whole book of psalms faithfully
translated into English meter,
Whereunto is prefixed a difficult or a
discourse declaring not only the lawfulness
but also the necessity of the heavenly
ordinance of singing, looks like flinging,
doesn't it,
scripture psalms in the churches of God.
That's the title of the Bay Psalm book of 1640.
Produced in Cambridge, though they had the
Ainsworth, Sternhold and Hopkins,
and another psalter called the Ravenscroft psalter,
they apparently found the rendering into
English of these psalters less than ideal.
So clergymen, including, and you should
remember these from your American history,
Richard Mather and John Eliot from the Plymouth Colony,
were commissioned to do new translations from
the Hebrew,
from which the metrical versions were then composed.
That is much like what we have done with Timeless.
The composer writes poetry based on the psalm,
gives it to a composer who then does the
musical setting for the poetry.
These translations were not particularly
elegant, and none have survived,
though many of the tunes taken from older
psalters continue to be in use.
Now this is what page one of the Bay Psalm book
looks like, Psalm 1.
And so rather elegantly done, the poetry is
really bad
because they thought it's holy Scripture,
the sung version needs to be exactly the same
insofar as it's possible.
Cram those words into a modern scene.
Go ahead, Randy.
O Lord, our God, King of the earth, how Thine
aim wondrous great! Who has Thy glorious
Majesty above the Heavens set?
And all that passes as of seas, Jehovah our
Lord, how wondrously magnificent is Thy name
throughout the world.
Is Thy name throughout the world.
Well, you can see that not all the scantion,
not all the syllables are exactly the same,
and it is a little tricky.
Some of it, the stressed syllable is not what
we would do in English,
and so it's a little tricky.
Some of it's rather nice, but not all of it
equally so.
This is one that we have done on Psalm 8, and
it's one that I've done actually.
O Lord Majestic is Your name.
You need to hang on to those.
I'll keep these separate. Yeah.
I still have some of yours here.
That's alright, I don't need it.
Maybe we ought to sing on this one all the
melody one time through.
Okay, melody on first verse, and then we'll do...
Do the last verse.
There begins to be a movement away from
metrical Psalmody,
beginning in the 1700s with Isaac Watts.
There are inherent strengths and weaknesses to
metrical psalmody.
Its strength is its history of singing the
biblical book of Psalms,
and that's in compliance with the command to
sing psalms.
Its weakness was the attempt to render into
Western poetic meter and rhyme
ancient Asiatic poetry, which has neither rhyme
nor meter,
nor that we can perceive rhythm.
We don't know what it was if there was one.
The result was generally, but not always,
forced and inelegant rhyme.
Isaac Watts died in 1748, is known mainly for
his hymns,
where he broke with tradition and wrote poetry
with more subjective content,
only loosely connected with biblical text.
So let me point this out.
You all are familiar with, many of you, with
one of his songs that we've sung
in Churches of Christ as long as I've been alive.
How shall the young secure their hearts and
guard their lives from sin,
by word that choicest rules and parts to keep
the conscience clean.
His verses are scattered references to Psalm 119.
It's not in any way connected, a metrical
version of Psalm 119.
Let's try this.
We really don't have time to do the next one.
This is one of our three, I think, Psalm 24s,
written by Cathy Thompson at Oklahoma Christian.
I wish we had time, but we don't, to do this.
Well, I said we don't have a history of psalm singing.
That was sort of attempted to be remedied,
actually five years before Timeless came out,
by a fellow named Clarence Johnson,
who produced this little book called Psalms to Sing,
which is all 150 psalms, the first metrical
psalter done in Churches of Christ,
from around the early 2000s, I believe, is when
it came out.
He is since, I think, deceased.
It has 16 new songs only.
The rest are actually songs from Sternhold and Hopkins,
Genevan Psalter, the base Psalm book, and
everything else.
He has 16 that he did lyrics for.
He didn't do any music.
He suggested tunes from later hymnals.
So he beat us to the punch by five years.
The book is still in print.
I recommend it.
It's only the lyrics.
Some are very good, and some are what you get
with the older psalter.
And that brings us to this, which is a three-volume.
We're halfway through volume two, volume one.
I showed you.
They're about out.
I recommend getting it.
One of the things, and I'll stop with this,
one of the things that we have noticed,
is that it was intended to be used to combine
the song worship
with the worship of reading Scripture and the
homily, the preaching.
Somehow combine those, because too often the
musical part of our worship
is completely separate and distinct from
everything else that goes on.
And psalms, in fact, have not been generally
sung or read in worship.
This is an attempt to remedy that.
And one of the unintended consequences is it's
being used all over for devotional purposes.
People have told me, oh, I thought it was for devotional,
so I read a psalm every morning.
I read the psalm, I read the commentary, and
then I sing the songs.
And a lot of people have done that.
So it's a multi-use volume.
That's the hardback, and I hope you come back tomorrow.
We'll talk about the actual volume and why we
did what we did and do some worship.