Durable Hymns
Donald T. Williams on Five Marks of Excellence That Could End the Worship Wars
The “worship wars” that rage in the church today are nothing new. St. Ambrose was considered an innovator for writing hymns and teaching his people to sing them. The controversy over melismatic textual elaboration in the Middle Ages was (according to legend) settled by Palestrina’s Pope Marcellus Mass. The Reformation started debates over exclusive psalmody and the use of instruments, debates that continue among Protestants to this day, although they are now overshadowed by heated arguments over contemporary praise and worship music versus traditional hymnody.
Part of the answer to these debates was inscribed over the door to the old Ayres Memorial Library at Taylor University: “What is past is prologue; study the past.” We study the past not because the present is unworthy of our attention but because only by studying the past can we learn the criteria by which to discern what is worthy in the present. No one has explained this principle better than Dr. Johnson:
To works, however, of which the excellence is not absolute and definite, but gradual and comparative; to works not raised on principles demonstrative and scientifick, but appealing wholly to observation and experience, no other test can be applied than length of duration and continuance of esteem. What mankind have long possessed they have often examined and compared, and if they persist to value the possession, it is because frequent comparisons have confirmed opinion in its favour. As among the works of nature no man can properly call a river deep or a mountain high without the knowledge of many mountains and many rivers; so in the productions of genius, nothing can be styled excellent till it has been compared with other works of the same kind. (Samuel Johnson, Preface to the Plays of William Shakespeare, 1765)
How do we apply these principles to the Worship Wars, as pastors, as ministers of music, or as those who train them? We do it partly by recognizing that a great deal of today’s music is very poor. Well, that shouldn’t be too surprising; some of the music of the past was, too. The difference is that, with the past, the weeding-out process described by Dr. Johnson has already taken place. Therefore, we cannot find, encourage, and preserve the best contemporary music without knowing those marks of excellence that made the best of the past stand out and survive so long.
What are those marks? There are at least five: (1) biblical truth; (2) theological profundity; (3) poetic richness; (4) musical beauty; and (5) the fitting of music to text in ways that enhance, rather than obscure or distort, its meaning.
These are the marks of excellence in any age. They are not arbitrary but are derived from biblical teaching about the nature of worship (it is to be in spirit and in truth, and involves loving God with our whole person, including the mind) and from an understanding of the nature of music and how it can support those biblical goals.
Biblical Truth
The faithful Church has always insisted on biblical truth, and Protestant hymnody started out with a special emphasis on it. The earliest congregational songs for the churches of the Reformation were paraphrased Scripture texts, especially the Psalms. John Hopkins’s collection of the metrical Psalms of Thomas Sternhold (1549) was one of the most popular books in Elizabethan England. What these renditions lacked in literary elegance they made up for in biblical faithfulness:
The man is blest that hath not gone
By wicked rede astray,
Ne sat in chair of pestilence,
Nor walked in sinner’s way;Donald T. Williams is Professor Emeritus of Toccoa Falls College. He stays permanently camped out on the borders between serious scholarship and pastoral ministry, between theology and literature, and between Narnia and Middle-Earth. He is the author of fourteen books, including Answers from Aslan: The Enduring Apologetics of C. S. Lewis (DeWard, 2023). He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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