A Brief History of the American Hymn - Dr. Mark Noll
By Dr. Mark Noll
Arise, my soul, arise; shake off thy guilty fears;
The bleeding sacrifice in my behalf appears:
Before the throne my surety stands, My name is written on His hands.
He ever lives above, for me to intercede;
His all redeeming love, His precious blood, to plead:
His blood atoned for all our race, And sprinkles now the throne of grace.
Five bleeding wounds He bears; received on Calvary;
They pour effectual prayers; they strongly plead for me:
"Forgive him, O forgive," they cry, "Nor let that ransomed sinner die!"
The Father hears Him pray, His dear anointed One;
He cannot turn away, the presence of His Son;
His Spirit answers to the blood, And tells me I am born of God.
My God is reconciled; His pardoning voice I hear;
He owns me for His child; I can no longer fear:
With confidence I now draw nigh, And "Father, Abba, Father," cry.
In a single song, we have the early history of the modern evangelical movement. Charles Wesley's great hymn, which was first published in 1742, contains in itself a capsule précis of the themes that drove the generation of John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, and the Countess of Huntingdon in their search for what they called "true religion." The hymn features an immediate address to the individual, it concentrates on themes of salvation, its focus is the gracious work of God in Christ, and it is saturated with Scripture-at least 25 of the hymn's phrases quote or allude to biblical passages, with the provocative claim that "my name is written on His hands" a particularly effective Christian application of Isaiah 49:16.
The singing that took place in the evangelical revivals from the mid-1730s onwards was, thus, not exactly a completely new thing. Yet the pervasive exuberance with which revived believers took to song represented a dramatic leap forward in the history of religious music, as well as in the history of Protestant Christianity. The musical significance of the early evangelical revivals lay in the extraordinary reach of the revivals' new hymnody, new singers, and new devotion to song.
Human Vs. Divine In New England, the progress of evangelical revival, especially as recorded in the defining accounts of Jonathan Edwards, was also a progress in song.
[i] Edwards was an early, if moderate, supporter of the reforms that from the early 1720s were replacing New England's "Rsual" singing (psalms lined out and sung haphazardly with great local variation) with "Regular" singing (psalms and even hymns sung in harmony, sometimes with musical accompaniment). In his earliest account from May 1735 of the awakening that had begun in his Northampton, Massachusetts, parish late the previous year, Edwards reported that "no part of public worship has commonly [had] such an effect on [the people] as singing God's praises."
[ii] In just a few more years, Edwards' congregation moved from the newer way of singing to the newer hymns as well. In 1744 he reported that two years earlier he had authorized the substitution of a hymn by Isaac Watts for one of the three psalms normally sung in a Northampton service. The blended worship that resulted was, in Edwards' report, "to universal satisfaction."
[iii] That same year, 1744, Edwards offered an extended public defense of the new hymnody. Against an objection finding fault "with the singing that is now practiced . . . making use of hymns of human composure," Edwards argued that he could find no command in the Bible that prohibited hymns of ordinary human creation any more than it prohibited prayers of ordinary human creation. Positively considered, it was, Edwards felt, "really needful that we should have some other songs besides the Psalms of David," especially to express directly "the greatest and most glorious things of the gospel, that are infinitely the great subjects of her [the Church's] praise." Rather than singing always "under a veil" where "the name of our glorious Redeemer" was never mentioned directly, he favored adding the hymns of Watts to the psalms.
[iv] Throughout the rest of the British Empire, other evangelicals by 1744 were moving even farther and faster than Edwards in exploiting the possibilities of song.
The Cutting Edge of Worship In early English Methodism, hymn-singing promoted by leaders like John Wesley, Charles Wesley, and John Cennick was even more definitive of the new evangelicalism. In the words of one American Congregationalist who wanted his colleagues to move more quickly in imitating the Methodists: "We sacrifice too much to taste. The secret of the Methodists lies in the admirable adaptation of their music and hymns to produce effect; they strike at once at the heart, and the moment we hear their animated, thrilling choruses, we are electrified."
[v] Calvinist evangelicals were only a few steps behind the Arminian Wesleys. After George Whitefield had preached to huge crowds in Philadelphia in 1739, Benjamin Franklin noted how "one could not walk through Philadelphia in the evening without hearing psalms sung in different families of every street." When in 1740, Whitefield's itinerations took him to Dutch Reformed churches in New Jersey, he took special delight in services where his congregation sang in Dutch while he preached in English. And when Whitefield organized the daily routine for his orphans in Georgia, he included provision for singing psalms or hymns four separate times every day (including Thomas Ken's "Morning Hymn" with its last stanza, "Praise God, from whom all blessings flow").
[vi] The new evangelical hymnody also provided a lifeline during the forced migrations of African American evangelicals.
[vii] The remarkable place of hymnody among African Americans is illustrated by the life of David George, who was converted as a slave in South Carolina sometime around 1770, was manumitted by the British liberators during the War for American independence, then moved to Nova Scotia when American patriots regained control of South Carolina, and eventually led a band of black Baptists to settle in Sierra Leone. At an early point in this arduous pilgrimage, the black Baptists began to use for special encouragement
A Select Collection of Hymns, To Be Universally Sung in All the Countess of Huntingdon's Chapels. Those hymns accompanied George and his associates as they pioneered Christian communities in three widely spaced regions of the Atlantic world.
Old Forms for New Song The hymns of the evangelical revival were innovative, not so much because they were new
in toto, but because they breathed new energy into inherited forms and made new adjustments as they sang. In particular, they used the Bible expressively and they depicted redemption dramatically. These two elements can be illustrated succinctly, though each would also be worthy of the most extensive development.
The hymnody of the first evangelical revivals was thoroughly permeated by Scripture, but it was a use of Scripture that worked by indirect allusion rather than direct paraphrase. The power that could be communicated by Scripture allusion was extraordinary. So it was with the well-known "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing" by the Cambridge Baptist Robert Robinson, who exploited the story of God's protection of Israel against the Philistines, as recorded in I Samuel 7, to make a forceful evangelical statement about the Christian journey:
Here I raise my Ebenezer; Hither by thy help I'm come;
And I hope, by thy good pleasure, Safely to arrive at home:
Jesus sought me when a stranger, Wandering from the fold of God;
He to save my soul from danger, Interposed his precious blood.[viii] The Personal Story A second innovation of evangelical hymnody was to make the drama of personal salvation palpable in every imaginable way. Here the great early masters were Charles Wesley and William Williams Pantycelyn. Although they were far from alone, Wesley and Pantycelyn both left a huge corpus of the most affecting and effective accounts of what it meant to be a Christian. Of course, both were distinctive in how they presented their accounts. Wesley, for example, was never above a little theological by-play aimed at Calvinistic doctrines, like the definite atonement, that he disliked, as in the opening stanza of the hymn that John Wesley placed second in his 1780 definitive collection:
Come, sinners, to the gospel feast; Let every soul be Jesus' guest;
Ye need not one be left behind, For God hath bidden all mankind.[ix] But mostly Wesley's were hymns of unalloyed unction, reassurance, rescue, and praise.
The hymnody of the evangelical revivals did, in fact, innovate in other matters also. Not surprisingly, innovation in metaphor, meter, and psychological fire encountered stiff opposition, some for scriptural reasons, some out of class resentment, and some because of what was perceived to be unacceptable style. For example, William Parker, a nervous English rector, worried in 1753 about the sacred musician's susceptibility to corruption by musical passion: "Let him carefully decline the introduction of all such addresses to the passions in his notes, all such complications of sounds, as, having once been connected with words of levity, may naturally recall into light minds the remembrance of words or their ideas again."
[x] Parker was expressing a legitimate concern, but the tide of evangelical innovation would not be reversed so easily.
A Deep Bond But why, we should ask, why was the new hymnody so expressive, so definitive, of the new evangelical movements? Why were hymns, and why have hymns been, so important for all evangelical movements from the eighteenth century through the present? Historically considered, it is possible to interpret the role of hymnody for evangelicals as just one more particular episode illustrating humanity's deep bond to and with music. Movie goers who are conscious of connections between the scores they hear and what they are watching on the screen know that Martin Luther once caught it exactly: "For whether you wish to comfort the sad, to terrify the happy, to encourage the despairing, to humble the proud, to calm the passionate or to appease those full of hate ... what more effective means than music could you find?" We are what we sing, the music we listen to regularly, the music we instinctively like, the music that brings tears to our eyes or a charge of energy to our spirits, the music that expresses our deepest longings and strongest loyalties.
Mark Noll is a historian specializing in the history of Christianity in the United States. He holds the position of Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. Noll himself is a Reformed evangelical Christian, and in 2005 was named by Time
magazine as one of the twenty-five most influential evangelicals in America. This article has been abridged and adapted from a lecture by Dr. Mark Noll titled Hymns and the Origins of Evangelicalism, 1707-1780.
[i] On the importance of music for Edwards, as both pastoral practice and theological ideal, see George M. Marsden,
Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
[ii] Edwards to Benjamin Colman, May 30, 1735,
The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 16: Letters and Personal Writings, ed. George S. Claghorn New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 54.
[iii] Edwards to Benjamin Colman, May 22, 1744, in
Works: Letters, 144.
[iv] Edwards,
Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New-England (1744), in
Works: Great Awakening, 406-07.
[v] Quoted in Leland Howard Scott, "Methodist Theology in America in the Nineteenth Century" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1954), 132n81.
[vi] Luke Tyerman,
The Life of the Rev. George Whitefield, 2 vols. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1876), 1:338, 279, 444-45.
[vii] This paragraph follows John Saillant, "Hymnody and the Persistence of an African-American Faith in Sierra Leone,"
The Hymn 48 (Jan. 1997): 8-17.
[viii] Baptist Hymnal, 92 (# 177).
[ix] Wesley,
Collection of Hymns, 81 (# 2).
[x] Parker quoted in Nicholas Temperley,
The Music of the English Parish Church, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 1:210.
