Colossians 3:16 talks about music in the local church. It says we are to sing “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.” But what are these three types of sacred music?
1) The Psalms
That seems simple enough. It refers to the 150 songs in the Old Testament book of Psalms. But did you know that for a time many were convinced that was all the church should sing? In the eyes of some, writing new hymns was like trying to add to the Bible–which would be sinful. John Calvin believed that. But it is a point on which he and Martin Luther (a hymn writer himself) took opposite views.
In 1696 Nicholas Brady and Nahum Tate collaborated to produce a new metrical version of the Psalms “fitted to the tunes used in churches.” Fine. But they had the boldness to include, in a supplement, sixteen new hymns. This caused an uproar! On one occasion, Tate was visiting a friend when the time came for family devotions. The maid explained her refusal to take part, saying indignantly,
“Sir, as long as you sung Jesus Christ’s Psalms, I sung along with ye; but now that you sing Psalms of your own invention, ye may sing by yourselves!”
It was a teen-aged Isaac Watts (1674-1748) who finally turned the tide in this debate. He argued that if churches sang only the psalms of the Bible, they were missing the great truths of the New Testament, about the life of Christ, His death and resurrection, as well as other crucial subjects. Finally, his father, a deacon in their church, told him to go ahead and see what he could do. With that, Watts began turning out a hymn a week for years. Through his life, he wrote about 600 of them! It is for his valuable contribution to sacred music that Watts is known as the Father of English Hymnody.
Bottom line: “Psalms” are the Psalms of the Bible. And perhaps, for our purposes, we could broaden the category to include any portion of Scripture set to music.
2) Hymns and Spiritual Songs
The distinction between hymns and spiritual songs is less clear. It has been suggested that the hymns may have been congregational numbers and the spiritual songs were solos, but that is not a widely held view.
Look again at Colossians 3:16. “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.”
Notice the phrases I’ve put in italics. Most likely, what we have with these two classifications is the difference between “to the Lord” songs and “one another” songs. Selections that are called hymns are more particularly addressed to the Lord Himself, in praise or prayer. Spiritual songs (now commonly referred to as gospel songs) are songs of teaching and testimony in which we address one another.
Some examples may help to make it clearer.
- Hymns: My Jesus, I Love Thee (talking to the Lord); How Great Thou Art; Great Is Thy Faithfulness.
- Gospel Songs (or Spiritual Songs): What a Friend We Have in Jesus; All the Way My Saviour Leads Me; Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus (meaning, Let’s you and I do that).
Often there’s not a hard and fast division. Some songs do both. For example, the hymn Praise the Saviour, Ye Who Know Him is clearly addressing our fellow-Christians. But a later stanza of the hymn turns to the Lord with a prayer, “Keep us, Lord, O keep us cleaving / To Thyself and still believing.”
In the nineteenth century, gospel songs were also commonly called Sunday School songs. An early pioneer in this style of hymnody was William Bradbury (1816-1868), who provided tunes for songs such as He Leadeth Me, and Sweet Hour of Prayer. These “Sunday School songs” had a strong evangelistic emphasis, and taught basic truths of Christian experience. They were often simpler in vocabulary, making them accessible to all, including children. But it is not right for purists such as Louis Benson to disdain them as unworthy. Their endurance speaks to the place they have found in the hearts of many believers. We need both, hymns and gospel (or spiritual) songs, just as the Scripture says.
Determining the exact terminology to be used–hymns or gospel songs–is not that important. In fact, the word hymn is commonly used for both. Many times, when we call a piece of music a hymn we simply mean it is a sacred song. In this blog, the term hymn will be used frequently in that generic sense. But even if we don’t classify each song in its technically correct category, there is an important point to be made here.
With some of our songs we talk to God, and with others we talk to one another. And there should be some kind of balance of both types in our singing. Remember, the Lord is present when we meet in His name (Matt. 18:20). Shouldn’t we speak to Him? How would you like friends and family to throw a party in your honour, and then spend the evening talking to one another and never talk to you! Let’s make use of the best of both.
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I once wrote an article called “Three False Reasons to Label Your Worship Song a Hymn.” But what about the other side of that? In a world that sometimes seems like hymn vs song, let’s look at characteristics of a true hymn.
1. It Functions as a Poem
In Sing With Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Hymnody, Harry Eskew and Hugh T. McElrath describe a hymn as a kind of poem set to music. They further write, “It should be simple and metrical in form, genuinely emotional, poetic and literary in style, spiritual in quality, and in its ideas so direct and so immediately apparent as to unify a congregation while singing it.”
Most song lyrics are not really meant to be taken as poetry. If you read them aloud without the music, the lyrics might not seem as powerful. They were meant to be taken with music, and were likely written after or at the same time the music was composed.
Hymns are likewise meant for singing, of course, but hymn lyrics are typically crafted as poetry, independent of music (at least, this is true of the hymns of our past by hymnists like Wesley, Watts, Cowper and Newton). When you read a well-crafted hymn such as When I Survey the Wond’rous Cross, you will feel the cadence, even if unaware of the melody composed for it. This is why composers can keep writing new tunes for old hymn texts. It’s also why many people (particularly in ages past) would read hymnals as they would any devotional book, and even delight in the hymns they’d never heard.
2. Economy of Words
What? Hymns aren’t wordy? Hymns often contain more words than contemporary popular songs, but each line is metrically precise. The hymnist establishes a “metrical contract” with worshipers in the first verse. This contract sets terms like “every line will be eight syllables long” or “lines will alternate between lengths of eight syllables and six syllables.” This is true for old hymns like When I Survey the Wond’rous Cross and it is true of modern hymns like In Christ Alone (eight syllables per line, in both hymns—we call that “long meter”).
3. It’s All About the Verse
While the chorus is the most important element of most contemporary songs, classic hymns did not contain choruses. Many hymnologists will say that if a song has a chorus or refrain—even if the verses are composed in hymn meter—it is a “gospel song,” not a hymn (think “Blessed Assurance”).
Hymn vs song? Is this pedantic? Maybe. Modern songwriters draw from so many influences that the lines begin to blur. Sometimes clear-cut distinctions between hymns, gospel songs, spirituals, and praise and worship songs are unhelpful. But in general, a hymn tells a story or presents an argument in a series of verses, each one building on the other or continuing the narrative of the other. Because of this, hymns can cover more theological ground or present a wider narrative arc than other songs.
This doesn’t make In Christ Alone better than Holy Is the Lord. Rather, we should be thankful that we have so many different kinds of wonderful songs, like In Christ Alone and Holy Is the Lord.
4. Praise First, Poetry Second
We’ve already established that a hymn is a kind of poem. But the reason you can read many fantastic poems and think, “I have no idea what this is about,” is because many classic and modern poets are chiefly concerned with the sound of the words or the images conveyed, rather than any specific meaning. But the hymnist William Cowper said of his hymn-writing:
“I always write as smoothly as I can, but that I never did, never will, sacrifice the spirit or sense of a passage to the sound of it.”
Hymn vs song? A hymnist writes in such a way that all worshipers can understand and sing along, regardless of their level of education or their experience with literature and poetry. The hymnist’s goal is the same goal of any true writer of songs for God and His church: to give worshipers a language for thankfully praising our Lord and for speaking His truth to each other.