All of God's lyrics, please

To the Editor:

I write in response to Peter Wallace's review of God's Lyrics in the June 2011 issue of New Horizon (p. 23-24). As I have not read it, I cannot comment on the book itself, so I wish to make clear I am focusing on a deficiency in the review.

Mr. Wallace presents his understanding of Douglas O'Donnell's arguments with what appears to be approval. He presents four characteristics of Old Testament song, and explains why, by these criteria, much of modern and classic hymnody is deficient (including "Amazing Grace" and "Jesus Paid It All"). Mr. Wallace's review would have been stronger had he asked how another source of worship song would measure up under these criteria: namely, the Psalter. In particular, Psalms 16, 51, 127, and 128, while much beloved, do not recount the Lord's acts in salvation history, nor do they celebrate his judgments. While one might argue they do encourage God's "ways of living," they are much more interested in recounting "just my experience." (Many other Psalms might be cited: I challenge anyone to count up how many Psalms meet all four of Mr. O'Donnell's criteria.)

It seems to me Mr. O'Donnell has identified the characteristics of songs which respond to significant episodes in redemptive history; however, if Mr. Wallace's review is accurate, he has not presented all "principles of hymnody from Scripture itself," at least not if one considers the Psalter part of the Scriptures. The review would have been stronger if Mr. Wallace had noted this deficiency.

I write at this late date because I believe some in our Churches wrongly believe censoriousness is identical with orthodoxy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the criticisms leveled against much of the song used in worship today. If Mr. Wallace's review is accurate, Mr. O'Donnell's standards for hymnody are so narrow they have the effect of criticizing Scripture itself.

With Mr. Wallace, I believe congregations should sing these redemptive-historical songs, and all the other songs of Scripture, and I hope the new psalter-hymnal being prepared by the Committee for Christian Education will make them more widely available. With Mr. O'Donnell, I believe we need to learn our principles of hymnody from Scripture itself, but we must pay heed to what all the songs of Scipture actually say, not what only some say or what we might wish they would say. With all the pastors and members of the OPC, I hope, I believe we should treat everyone (including hymn-writers) with charity and also give expression to the full range of Christian experience in our worship of the Risen Savior.

grace & peace,
The Presbyterian Curmudgeon

A good day over at First Things

First, Peter Leithart demonstrates that a truly prophetic call for social justice must be rooted in Biblical law.

Next, David Hart worries grammatical laxity will lead us, inevitably, to cannibalism.

Finally, Leroy Huizenga rehabilitates the medieval fourfold sense of Scripture, in the process helpfully pointing out the overlap between allegory and typology.

The very strange habits of Amazon shoppers

I just added D.G. Hart's From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin to my Amazon wishlist. When I did so, Amazon informed me "Customers buy this book with He Stopped Loving Her Today: George Jones, Billy Sherrill, and the Pretty-Much Totally True Story of the Making of the Greatest Country Record of All Time by Jack Isenhour."

Customers? Plural? Really?

Thing is, I find myself interested in both titles.

Science discovers the obvious (again)

Think of all the money these researchers could have saved on lab mice if they had only interviewed a few addled parents of infants. Of course, the coffee bill would have to be pretty considerable if they were to get anything coherent...

A time to fight: rough draft

The Presbytery of the Dakotas, OPC (of which I am currently moderator) is to meet next September 27-28 in Freeman, SD. The Arrangements Committee is, well, arranging a symposium on "Sex, Gender, and American Presbyterianism" for the preceding evening on Monday, September 26. I hope to contribute a paper entitled A Time to Fight: Sex, Gender, and the Confessions of the Reformed Churches in North America. I've posted the rough draft on Google Docs and welcome your thoughtful comments as I prepare it for submission.

Measure for Measure

Measure for Measure has bothered me ever since I was assigned a scene from it for an acting class in college. There's nothing happy or comic about it up until the very last moments: I wondered whether Shakespeare got his pages mixed up and an everyone-gets-married scene got transposed from As You Like It in place of the tragic bloodbath which would fit much better with what came before.

In a post on the First Things website, Gabriel Torretta argues that while the conclusion is technically comic, it should be read darkly as the usurpation of the state over all other institutions. Then, in a nice turn, he considers the parallels between Shakespeare's Venice and present-day state behavior in these United States.

The restlessness of the temp

Whilst in seminary, I worked as a security guard for Pinkerton, assigned to the Hewlett-Packard plant in north San Diego county. Like the security guards, most (if not all) of H-P's non-salaried employees were in fact contract employess, including the line workers assembling printers. A regular feature of my job came whenever a line was shut down, the product run having been completed. The standard procedure was to wait until the last day, inform the workers about halfway through the shift, and also notify them their contract was up and they were now without work. Extra guards would be assigned to the line area to make sure nothing was stolen and no one indulged in a little spiteful vandalism. At the time, it seemed to me a policy which assumed it would offend and outrage those subjected to it might need some rethinking.

In a discussion of the Sabbath as occasion for enjoyment, Peter Leithart draws out some spiritual implications of these hiring policies:

The problem is that many larger corporations fail to give employees any sense of being part of a larger whole, and this is especially true when the employee’s employment is precarious. How is a worker supposed to experience the social satisfactions of labor when he’s never sure if he’ll be part of the team for the next project? It is like being in Egypt; it is like bricks without straw, labor without Sabbath.

Lisbeth vs. Katniss

I began reading Stieg Larsson's Millenium Trilogy about a year ago, and got through the last book sometime during the winter. In one sense, it became a journey of personal discovery: I realized I tend to subconsciously skip over names I can't pronounce, which meant that, since the series is set in Sweden, I had lost track of at least half the characters by the time I got a few pages into the second book. Given its best-selling status in the U.S. as well as world-wide, I am now much more cheerful about my countrymen's ability to concentrate on difficult details.

While the overall plot of the Millenium trilogy is interesting, Larsson, like John Grisham, tends to focus on unimportant details which serve only to fatten the page count. Seriously, I don't need to know what kind of sandwich the characters were eating when they met in a café. By the end, I was glad to know Larsson (being dead) wouldn't be writing any more books I'd feel obliged to read.

Not so with The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins' dystopian trilogy written for teenagers. (The publisher is Scholastic, which is not the first imprint to which I look for dystopia; but then, I am a worn-out curmudgeon.) In the Millenium trilogy, you get literally hundreds of pages of people talking or looking at computers before 10-20 pages of action. The Hunger Games are extremely plot-driven, and hence are much more difficult to put down. As the series progresses, the narrative takes on a fever-dream quality reflective of the mental and emotional disintegration of its main character and narrator, Katniss Everdeen. I appreciated this not only stylistically but artistically. In this post-apocalyptic future, adolescents are forced to fight each other to the death. Instead of making the survivors cold-blooded killers, Collins chooses instead to portray them as damaged goods, a much more likely scenario.

Interestingly, The Hunger Games is much more successful as a feminist work than is the Millenium trilogy; interestingly because the latter has an explicitly feminist agenda. (SPOILER ALERT: crucial plot points will now be revealed.) The sections of the first and third books of the Millenium trilogy are headed by epitaphs of a feminist bent: in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, statistics on domestic violence; in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, a history of female warriors. One of Larsson's main characters is the much-ballyhooed punk hacker Lisbeth Salander, who in the first book falls for the other main character, idealistic journalist and stud Mikael Blomkvist, but by the end is embittered against him when she realizes he is still romantically entangled with another woman. Throughout the trilogy, Blomkvist tells woman after woman that he is happy to have sex with her, but will not commit to any one of them. At the end of the third novel, Lisbeth chooses to let Blomkvist back into her life. Although there's no commitment to a sexual relationship, implicit or otherwise, she does clearly accept him on his own terms: that is, as a philanderer. A feminism which endorses the worst forms of chauvinistic behavior is not much of a feminism at all.

The Hunger Games likewise ends on a crucial decision for its main character. Here, however, Katniss, having been exploited by two competing power bases, chooses to assasinate the president of the newly victorious rebel coalition. In one stroke, she rejects her own history of exploitation and frees (what once was) North America from a pattern of political and military oppression. Her move is a classic example of feminist empowerment, over against Lisbeth's implicit acceptance of male sexual dominance.

In the epic match-up of Lisbeth vs. Katniss, I know which I will encourage my daughters to read.

The Married Lifestyle

In a post on the First Things website, Gabriel Torretta succintly shows why same-sex marriage is merely a symptom of the disease of self-centeredness which has been infecting the institution of marriage for a long time now. Hence, opposing the legalization of same-sex marriage will be a losing battle so long as no-fault divorce is the national standard and the Churches (particularly those attended by evangelicals) continue to neglect calling husbands and wives to self-sacrifice in imitation of Christ.