Singing Church History
Introducing the Christian Story Through Hymn Texts
By Paul Rorem
Fortress Press, 228 pages, $34
The extraordinary diversity of Christian hymnody is often underappreciated. Neighboring hymnal pages gather texts penned by ancient bishops, black-robed reformers, and earnest social reformers; with tunes that first premiered in vaulted choirs, clapboard meeting houses, and somewhere along the sawdust trail. The hymnal is among our most ecumenical tools for the spiritual life, lifting high those truths that bind us together, and anticipating heaven’s great choir.
Medieval historian and Lutheran pastor Paul Rorem has captured hymnody’s breadth and richness in Singing Church History, a fast-paced, accessible survey that tracks congregational singing from the Jerusalem temple and the earliest Christian communities to South African freedom songs and Taizé.
During a quarter-century of teaching seminarians at Princeton, Rorem studded his church history lectures with fitting interludes of praise. This book harvests the best fruit from that project, noting the influence of major theological controversies, liturgical developments, and mission imperatives on our hymns. He has a lecturer’s eye for the telling anecdote, and mostly chooses hymns that average worshipers will know and that represent major themes of the eras from which they come. This is a book focused mainly on hymn texts, but major musical developments and striking text-music pairings are treated with care.
Unsurprisingly, Rorem’s treatment of the medieval and Lutheran chorale tradition is especially strong. He carefully explains the catechetical aims behind Luther’s virtual invention of congregational hymn-singing, and unpacks the rich imagery of Philipp Nicolai’s “Wake, Awake, for Night is Flying” and “O Morning Star, How Fair and Bright” with flair, pointing out the dangers of modern hymnal editors’ injudicious pruning.
He is a fan of historical curiosities, like the fact that “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” was inspired by a line in an opera about King Arthur by John Dryden, and Social Gospel pioneer Walter Rauschenbusch had a sideline in translating Moody and Sankey’s revivalist tub-thumpers into German for mission congregations in Hell’s Kitchen. He also draws interesting connections between hymnwriters of different eras, noting that Wesleyan hymnwriting began with translating the songs of German pietists, and that Fanny Crosby built some of her finest lines around cherished passages from Charles Wesley.
Rorem is a Lutheran and his publisher is the ELCA’s house press, so it’s only fair that his work continually references the ELCA’s current hymnal, Evangelical Lutheran Worship, and assumes Lutheran hymn traditions that aren’t well-known among Episcopalians (only one of the beloved songs of Lina Sandell, “Sweden’s Fanny Crosby,” appears in any of our hymnals).
Less forgivable is Rorem’s sidelining of the crucial role played by high-church Victorian Anglicans in creating a churchly hymnody for the English-speaking world. John Mason Neale’s translations of medieval sequences are mentioned, but the larger project in which he figured, which bequeathed us the lion’s share of our English hymns for Church festivals, is ignored. The middle 20th-century liturgical art-song tradition, a handmaid to the Liturgical Movement’s work in ritual and ceremonial revision, was arguably just as influential within American Lutheranism as in the Episcopal Church, and its omission seems odd.
It would have been very challenging to craft a short chapter on as diffuse a movement as contemporary evangelical praise music, but it seems irresponsible to try to narrate recent church history without it, especially given its close ties to the global expansion of Pentecostalism. Andraé Crouch, Keith Green, and Hillsong are far more representative of the singing church today than the mainline-friendly global voices Rorem lifts up in his closing chapter. He could have found plenty of intriguing throughlines with earlier pietist and revivalist hymn traditions, had he been curious enough to search for them.
Still, this book could be a helpful springboard for adult education for any congregation (an opportunity for collaboration between priest and organist?). Rorem even includes texts and notation for singing a hymn or two in each chapter, and his discussion questions are superb.
The Rev. Mark Michael is editor-in-chief of The Living Church. An Episcopal priest, he has reported widely on global Anglicanism, and also writes about church history, liturgy, and pastoral ministry.
