Wheat and Chaff

I post this here for my own future reference.  This is a comment that I left in repsonse to a question asked about Exclusive Psalmody (EP), which is the position that the New Testament church in its worship should sing only the inspired psalms of the book of Psalms in the Bible.  They argue that we must do in worship only what Scripture explicitly tells us to do, a view known as the "regulative principle", and that we are commanded to sing psalms, we have a book of inspired psalms to sing, and therefore we should only sing psalms.  There are other aspects to the argument as well, but this is the heart of it.

My view is that Paul clearly provides warrant for the singing of uninspired hymns in Colossians 3:16. I know the EP proponent will howl with outrage at this assertion. I have no problem with the idea that psalms, hymns and odes all refer to different names or kinds of songs in the book of Psalms, and yet even granting that, nowhere does Paul say to sing _only_ those songs in the book of Psalms. Even if he had said "sing psalms", that would not have limited us to the book of Psalms, since a "psalm" is just a song meant to be sung to musical accompaniment, like to a psaltery.

Further, Paul says to "teach" one another in this manner. In no other avenue does the church accept the bare reading of the words of Scripture as teaching. The word is to be exposited, explained. This is even more the case with the Psalms, which come to us in the Old Testament, before the revelation of Christ, and are full of references that must be contextualized for a NT audience. They speak of bloody sacrifices, of killing all God's enemies, and the use of musical instruments. Now these things must all be explained. But if you have to explain what the Psalms actually mean, then you have to recognize that if you merely use the bare words of the Psalms, you have not taught the people.

In particular, I think the Psalms present to us an incomplete theology of suffering, something that is a major problem I believe among western Christians. When suffering happens to David, it is always as a punishment for sin, or else something to simply be endured and not comprehended. "How long, O Lord?" the psalmist always cries. On the other side of the cross, suffering takes on an entirely different role, as the Christian enters into the suffering of Christ. Our suffering is not necessarily punishment for our sin and neither is it something just to be stoically endured. The New Testament calls on us to rejoice in suffering. Peter and John rejoiced that they were found worthy to suffer for the sake of Christ. Paul says he "fills up what is lacking" in the suffering of Christ through his own suffering- Col. 1:24. It is very difficult to imagine anything similar coming from the mouth of David.

I believe that the EP argument fails to recognize the degree of change that came with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Jesus said that the least in the kingdom of heaven would be greater than John the Baptist, who was the greatest prophet that ever lived. Joel said that the Spirit of God would be poured out on all flesh, so that their sons and daughters, their old men and maidens, would prophesy. I think that points us in the direction of a far higher level of understanding and expression of the truth of the gospel in the New Testament. Paul says, "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly", the word of Christ. Yet to the EP, I cannot sing the name of Christ and I cannot explicitly sing about anything that was revealed only in the NT. And it is not clearly revealed in the OT. This is taught clearly in many passages including Hebrews 1 and others- that many things were concealed or understood only in shadows in the OT period. The theology of suffering is just one example.

We also have, I believe, examples of such use in the NT. 2 Timothy 2:11ff. I know the EP proponent doesn't accept that example, but I find the argument persuasive, that it is an example of poetry that Paul quotes, and that if it is poetry, quoted with the expectation that the people would know what he was quoting, then the most logical supposition is that it was a hymn that the people sang. 1 Timothy 3:16 is another example. Given that there is no clear prohibition of such hymns in the NT, then it is most logical to accept that what they appear to be is what they are.

So we have warrant by example, by direct command and by implication. The Psalms are not adequate for NT worship. They were given in a time of the childhood of the church, do not fully express the theology that would be revealed later, and must themselves be explained constantly to a NT audience. Therefore they do not "teach" by themselves, as Paul commands us to do. With the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the NT, the command of Paul that the "word of Christ" would dwell in us richly by congregational singing, and the example of such extrabiblical hymns actually receiving the sanction of the Apostle, our way is clear.

And what is gained by singing only the inspired words of Scripture? What possible purpose could it have? God never gives us commands for no reason. There must be a purpose. And yet what purpose could it have? We have uninspired words in the prayers and in the sermon. So it's not like we are successfully excluding the untrustworthy words of man. A song does not differ intrinsically at all from a prayer; only the form is different. Indeed, many of the Psalms are called prayers- 17, 86, for example. So in principle there is no difference at all between a prayer or a song- only the accidents are different. If there were something intrinsically problematic about singing uninspired songs, if that were inherently offensive to God, then you would have to say the same about prayers, and only pray the prayers we find in Scripture.

So it accomplishes nothing theologically or liturgically, it denies the church the opportunity to sing about Christ explicitly and clearly for no good reason at all, it presents the church with an incomplete theology as if it were sufficient, it ignores the actual contrary examples we see in the New Testament, fails to accomplish what Paul told us to do in Colossians 3:16, and unacceptably flattens out God's redemptive history, failing to see the real distinctions between Old and New Testament and the import of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. And it has the added effect of cutting its proponents off from unity and fellowship with the great majority of the rest of the world, including the Reformed world.