Matthew Nathanael Lundquist

“ But what is the most serious thing that our American Lutheran congregational hymn singing lacks? One thing—LIFE. That is our great problem—life in our church song—new life—LIFE. With this go all the difficulties of the problem of life. ”

“ The communion of the congregation with God through Jesus Christ, which seeks concrete expression in the church hymn, is in itself the highest, the most noble, and the most harmonious of all the realities of human life. When this divine communion seeks expression in the church hymn, then the poetical art to be employed must be such as will adequately express and convey the emotions and experiences peculiar to this communion. The inner harmony of the matter should reveal itself in the poetical form of presentation as outer harmony, as beauty. ”

“ The Reformation brought into play all serviceable forces and means to promote and make possible the realization of this principle in the cultus. The reformers sought to make the liturgy intelligible and accessible to the common people—for the Latin they substituted the language of the people, and the congregation was given an opportunity to take an active part in public worship. It was perfectly natural that church song could not remain in its mediaeval form, an exclusive privilege of the clergy, but be transferred to the people. ”

“ He wrote one of the greatest hymns of the Western Church, namely, Vexilla Regis—The royal banners forward go, the Cross shines forth in mystic glow. We quote the first stanza of another great hymn by Fortunatus, a grand Easter hymn.
Welcome, happy morning! age to age shall say;
Hell today is vanquished; heaven is won today.
Lo! the Dead is living, God for evermore!
Him their true Creator, all His works adore.
Welcome, happy morning! age to age shall say.
Simplicity, depth, fervor, divine sentiment, full-hearted confession, are some of the outstanding characteristics of the early Latin hymns. ”

“ If the cultus is a meeting between God and the Church, in which God imparts his gifts to the congregation and the latter faithfully receives, enjoys, and acknowledges the divine gifts of grace; a meeting, in other words, in which the divine objects join the worshipping subject, in which the latter is permeated by the former, then it seems only very natural that religious lyrical poetry should here find its proper use; when the worshipping 10 congregation gives expression to its life of faith and love through sacred song, through the hymns of the Church, these hymns are lyrical poetry. ”

“ The faithful express through the church hymn their ardent desire for these things; they meditate upon these things, they rejoice in their possession, they describe them and they extol them; they adore, thank, and laud their Saviour, and they give themselves up to God. Since the content of positive Christian faith, or God’s revelation of salvation through Jesus Christ, is the principal subject of the church hymn, it is clear that the church hymn must be in perfect harmony with the Word of God, the Bible, the very source of the revelation of salvation. ”

“ But this self-edification is brought about in the Church only through the Holy Spirit who dwells and lives within the Church and in and through the Church and her institutions of grace produces in the hearts of the redeemed personal conversion, sanctification, and salvation. Thus the Church grows both outwardly and inwardly and proceeds towards her eternal perfection. But the Church has to do not only with purely spiritual conditions, things divine and eternal. By her life she seeks to permeate, sanctify, and glorify all conditions, even the temporal. ”

“ If the requirement of community in the church hymnody permits dealing with special situations and experiences in the realm of spiritual life, then it ought to follow that this character of community will not be violated if the content of the church hymn bears upon certain external conditions and circumstances in which the entire congregation never can find itself at any one time. Since there are liturgical acts which directly affect only certain individuals in the congregation, not the congregation as a whole, there may be church hymns for certain individuals and special occasions. ”

“ Ambrose has been called the father of Latin church song, because of his great work in hymnody and church music. The first stanza of one of his beautiful hymns is here quoted.
O Jesus, Lord of heavenly grace,
Thou Brightness of Thy Father’s face,
Thou Fountain of eternal light,
Whose beams disperse the shades of night.
Prudentius (Aurelius Prudentius Clemens) is a prominent Latin hymn writer of this period. He was born in Spain, 348 A. D. Prudentius has been called “the first great Christian poet.” With him the Latin, the language of a stern and hard people, is, as it were, tempered by faith. ”

“ Therefore our attention turns towards the Church, her nature, her establishment, and her extension in this world through missionary activity; further, toward her inner growth, by which she gives expression to her religious and harmonious life as a communion in solemn divine worship, and through her sacred acts and order consecrates human life unto a vessel for divine life. ”

“ A number of poor hymn books appeared. Public taste for the right kind of church song was spoiled. This paved the way for a hymnological revolution, brought about mainly by Rationalism, during the last half of the eighteenth century.
The fourth period, the era of decline, includes the last half of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth. This is the time of the destructive influences of Neologism or Rationalism in Germany. German hymnody suffered. Rationalism is a denial of positive Christian life, and lacks sympathy for the primitive, the simple, and the popular. ”

“ This means that the religious experience, expressed in the church hymn, is not merely a product of human imagination, more or less foreign to those who gather their spiritual life and their soul experiences from the fountain of Holy Writ under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, but it is far more an experience gained from the reality of true spiritual life, and thoroughly accordant therewith, something to which, therefore, every true Christian can easily agree. ”

“ The Reformation endowed congregational hymn singing with a sonorousness and power, as never before in the history of the Church. One of the main principles of the Reformation was that all Christians, as a spiritual priesthood (Rev. 1:6 and 1 Pet. 2:5) , are privileged and obliged to approach God and bring Him their offering, without human mediators and deputies, only because of the merits of Christ, the one true mediator; and this not only individually in private life but also in public worship. ”

“ Luther’s hymns alone would form a valuable little hymn book. But it would be still more valuable, if we included in it the best Lutheran church hymns of the entire century. A hymn book containing all the great Lutheran church hymns of the sixteenth century—a remarkable Lutheran hymn book.
The Reformation hymnody possesses a preponderatingly objective character. Definite and true evangelical faith is its keynote. Christ’s redemption and the sinner’s justification by faith are the outstanding expressions in this hymnody. The human and the individual, the subjective, receives a secondary place. ”

“ While epic and dramatic poetry have little or no place in the Evangelical Lutheran cultus, and so can not very well be employed in the hymnody of the Church, the third kind of poetry, the lyric, is very extensively used. A noteworthy characteristic of lyrical poetry is that the object of the song is most closely united with the singing subject; they are as one; the object lives within the subject and is the real content of the subject. ”

“ The great festival hymn of the Reformation is sung. We have before us altar, pulpit, pipe organ; we have before us minister, organist, choir, congregation. The ideal of the problem is a harmonious co-operation between all if we are to have VITAL worship and VITAL song.
The good pastor of a large Lutheran church in Connecticut thanked his organist and choirmaster in a 66 very hearty way after a fine Sunday morning service. The good organist and choirmaster answered: “Well, who cannot play and sing when the pastor preaches such soul-stirring sermons and conducts the liturgy so beautifully?” ”

“ Hymn book committees are at work on the compilation of better and more serviceable English Lutheran hymnals.
The history of hymnody in the American Lutheran Church is in many respects discouraging. A prominent American Lutheran theologian recently made the following statement: “Few of our ministers have ever had an appreciation of the treasures of Lutheran church 60 song” The training of the clergy in hymnology and church music is not what it ought to be. The education of the church organist and choir director is woefully deficient. ”

“ But it should also be true, that if the poet is a sincere student and lover of the Bible and delights in singing its praises, then his hymns ought to possess Biblical tone and content, since there is a very close union between content and form in every human religious product. A church hymn possessing Biblical tone and language ought to be understood and appreciated by the present age. Biblical language is antique but it will never be antiquated; it is old but eternally new and youthful. ”

“ But it must be required of every church hymn that it express only such religious experiences as are in the main common to the whole communion of the faithful, only such soul states and spiritual stages of development as are essentially experienced by every true Christian. ”

“ Ericus Olai is the only known Swedish hymn writer of mediaeval times. One of his hymns, “The Rich Man,” a metrical paraphrase of the Gospel lesson which deals with the rich man and Lazarus, Olaus Petri, the great Swedish reformer, included in the first Swedish Lutheran hymn book. It was also included in the Swedish Lutheran hymn book of 1695. An interesting and valuable testimony concerning the fact that also in the Swedish mediaeval Church the people were allowed to sing in public worship, is found in the answer that King Gustavus I gave to the complaint of the Dalecarlians, in 1527. ”

“ It is the songs of the Church that Ambrose, Prudentius and others sing with the Church and the Church with them; when they are dead and gone, the Church remains, and continues to sing their songs.” Personal poetic gifts and temporal conditions and circumstances influence the church hymns. The true church hymn does not lack individuality; but it is free from individualism. The experiences which the church hymn expresses, the soul states which it describes, should not be of an extreme, a singular or an abnormal character, but they should be normal and common to the Church. ”

“ The objective-subjective hymnody of the seventeenth century, in its purest and noblest form, is to be found in the hymns of Paul Gerhardt, writer of more than one hundred hymns, in which the ardor and fervor of Christian subjectivity attained a most happy union with the firm evangelical faith and the noble 47 popular elements of the Reformation period. He is one of the greatest German hymn writers, if not the greatest. ”

“ Bernard of Cluny and Bernard of Clairvaux are two Latin hymn writers who hold a very important place in Christian hymnody. From Bernard of Cluny (twelfth century) comes the well known hymn, “Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest.” This hymn comes from his famous and only poem Laus Patriae Celestis which consists of some three thousand lines of dactylic hexameter. We quote the first stanza of another well known hymn that comes from the same poem.
Brief life is here our portion;
Brief sorrow, short-lived care;
The life that knows no ending,
The tearless life, is there. ”

“ Very much like American culture—sorry to say. Uniting, cementing, productive LIFE is lacking.
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Many American Lutheran churches do not sing Lutheran church hymns at all. How deplorable! We often attend Lutheran church services where not a single Lutheran church hymn or Lutheran chorale is sung. Here is a serious flaw in American Lutheran education and leadership. How about the hymn singing in our American Lutheran Sunday schools? Would it not be well to sing at least one Lutheran church hymn each Sunday? Or shall we permit Lutheran hymnody to die? ”

“ Looking at the history of the church hymn, we may lay down as a fundamental principle that the church 64 hymn cannot live without connection with the life that has passed through the ages, from the prophets of old, Christ, the Reformation, and down to the present. ”

“ In this hymnal appeared the popular and beautiful Swedish Lutheran hymn, “A sinful man, who lay in trance of sin, he heard a voice from heaven: Awake, awake, list to the Word that comfort gives.” It has been claimed by several authorities that this hymn is the foremost hymn in the Swedish literature of the 51 sixteenth century, and also one of the greatest of Swedish Lutheran hymns. It is probably the work of Laurentius Petri Gothus.
Scandinavian Lutheran hymnody may be divided into five hymnological periods, similar to the five periods of German Lutheran hymnody. ”

“ Early sacred song in the Western Church is characterized by noble simplicity and clearness in form, as well as by a more practical Christianity; fine qualities which go to make the old Latin hymns more accessible and serviceable to us than the old Greek hymns. ”

“ Men of quite different minds and dispositions got along very amicably under the Benedictine rule at St. Gall. Among its one hundred monks there were in the ninth century four monks whose names were well known throughout the Western Church, namely, the learned Ratpert, the enthusiastic Notker, the highly gifted and greatly admired artist Tutilo, and the unrivalled hand-printer of books, Sintram, whose very beautiful handwriting was greatly admired throughout Europe. Ratpert, a stern educator, never sparing the rod, and not deeply interested in his devotional exercises—a great scholar. ”

“ The Church seeks to penetrate, in a highly beneficial way, the civic community, to ennoble its affairs and impart support and exhortation both to the governing and the governed, in times of prosperity and in times of trouble. ”

“ As the content is rooted in eternity and fundamentally consists of God’s incorruptible thoughts and works, so the hymnic language, which is the vessel for these realities of the eternal world, in a way also attains a character of eternity. ”