Carl Trueman is departmental chair of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He has an MA in Classics from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. in Church History from the University of Aberdeen. He is editor of the IFES journal, Themelios, and has taught on the faculties of theology at both the University of Nottingham and the University of Aberdeen. He has authored a number of books, including The Claims of Truth: John Owen’s Trinitarian Theology and The Wages of Spin: Critical Writings on Historic and Contemporary Evangelicalism. He lives in Oreland, a suburb of Philadelphia, with his wife, Catriona, and his two sons, John and Peter.Some years ago I wrote a short editorial for the journal Themelios entitled `What do miserable Christians sing?’ It took me about thirty minutes to write, edit and email to head office; yet of all the things I have ever written, I have received more – and more positive – correspondence on that short piece than on anything else I have ever done. What was my basic thesis? That the typical Christian church offered the broken-hearted nothing whatsoever to sing in praise to God on a Sunday; and in so doing, the church was failing in her duty to care for the hurting, the downtrodden, the depressed. The answer I proposed was a recovery of psalm singing, not on the grounds that psalm singing is the only pure form of worship but because it offers a truly deep and authentic idiom for expressing the full range of human emotion and experience to God in the very act of praising him. No hymn book or collection of choruses of which I am aware even comes close to offering what the psalms offer in this regard; and for this reason alone I would personally be quite happy to sing nothing but the psalms.
Now, one of the calls I hear most frequently from those sections of the church which have identified themselves broadly as `emerging’ is for authenticity. Of course, calls for authenticity are a bit like calls for an end to poverty or child abuse or wife-beating. None but the criminally insane would disagree with such pike-staffishly desirable things, though it is true that there may be little consensus on how to achieve such ends. Nevertheless, whatever my reservations about emerging church theology, I am grateful for the sincere and well-intentioned reminder that Christianity needs always to seek to be authentic; and I am convinced that the psalms should be a basic to such, not simply because of what they say but also because of the way they say it.
My assumption in all this is that human life as we know it is, considered in itself, ultimately a tragedy. Yes, many of us enjoy good times, have loving families, experience delight and joy, but even the wealthiest, happiest life ends in tragedy. Death is the boundary that shatters all humanity; it is a wicked and chaotic invasion of creation; and it condemns all of our lives to ultimate, unavoidable tragedy. I believe that this reality of evil and death gives life its tragic architecture; and that it should therefore inform all that we do. In my earlier editorial I argued that the Psalms should be central in public praise because they give divinely sanctioned expression of all human emotion which can then be used in the worship of God; in this article I want to expand on that theme a little and to argue that the tragic vision which the Psalms so beautifully express also demands that we broaden and enrich the ways in which orthodox theology is taught in the home, in church, in seminary.
The tragic truth of life in a fallen world can be expressed in a variety of ways. We are all probably familiar with the neat summaries of such which appear on bumper stickers, variations on a statement like `Life sucks; then you die.’ Not particularly profound, for all of the truth it may contain. It is, of course, essentially the same thought which underlies the following famous passage from Shakespeare’s great play, Macbeth. In the play’s fifth act, Macbeth, the man who has gained the crown of Scotland through murder and treachery, hears of the death of his wife, he utters one of the great speeches in English drama:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted foolsThe way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,And then is heard no more: it is a taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury,Signifying nothing.
The meaning of the two, the bumper sticker and the Shakespearean soliloquy, is basically the same: life is nasty, meaningless, and short. Yet there is a sense in which the latter enriches the reader’s understanding in a way that the former does not. The language, the sounds of the words, the images, the alliteration, the metrical structure – all provide an elaborate and complex expression that draws the audience into a deeper, more frightening, more striking encounter with the absurdity of existence. Shakespeare not only provides us with a poetic manner of talking about an aspect of life which we knew already; in so doing, I would argue that he actually changes and deepens our knowledge of the same in subtle yet appreciable ways. Both the bumper sticker and Shakespeare tells us that life is short and apparently pointless; but only the latter actually confronts us with the full complexity of the truth and thereby transforms us in relation to it. The more we wrestle with the form of expression, the subtlety of the images, and the sheer beauty of the words, the deeper we are forced to probe into the nature of what is actually being claimed about existence in general and our own existence in particular. What is being taught is inseparable from how it is being expressed.
This is a point which I did not develop in my earlier call for more psalm singing in churches but which is, I think, critical to the importance of the Psalms in Christian life and experience, both individual and corporate. They not only teach us what to expect from life, and allow us to express our deepest emotions in praise to God; they also provide us with an idiom, a way of doing these things which allows us to understand ourselves better both in relation to God and to the world we experience around us. And, crucially, this is communicated as much through the poetic structure and language of the psalms as it is through the realities beyond the text which the psalmist has in view. As Macbeth’s painful reflections on the futility of life cannot be separated from the way in which he expresses it, so the psalms teaching cannot be separated from the forms of words which they use; and as the images used by Shakespeare continue to haunt and to shape our thoughts long after the curtain falls at the end of the play, so the Psalms continue alternately to agitate, to provoke and to soothe those souls which have soaked themselves in the psalter’s rich and poetic world.
This literary complexity is critical because of the complexity which evil and death cause for life. Death gives all human lives an unavoidable dimension of mysterious tragedy. To stand at the graveside of a child or of an octagenarian really makes no theological difference. Nobody should have to stand at a graveside for the simple reason that nobody have to die. Mortality is an unnatural and unwanted trespasser in our lives, and it wreaks nothing but havoc both on the one taken and on the loved ones left behind. It is the most obvious manifestation of evil in the world, and as such the most problematic aspect of human existence. I would suggest, therefore, that it is impossible to grasp the full dimensions of the tragedy of evil, suffering and death by simple statements of fact. To do so is to fall into the trap of reducing the truth about life and death to something approximating bumper sticker wisdom: such slogans may be true, but they scarcely offer an adequate account of the subject in hand. This is where the Psalter comes into its own: it offers a full account not just of the range of human emotions but, specifically, of the range of human emotions within the humanly incomprehensible framework of a fallen world which cries out for salvation, knows that salvation is coming, but endures agonies and contradictions during the time of waiting for that salvation to arrive. The Psalms are brutally honest about the fact that, in this fallen world, against all that God purposed, evil yet has a reality which creates unimaginable conflict for human beings with creation, with each other, and, most mysteriously of all, even with their very selves. Human language strains to do justice to this reality; and this is where literary form and not just theological content become so critical. The poetry of the Psalms is thus vital to grasping the tragic realities of a world invaded by death and those countless lesser evils which point towards it. Bumper sticker statements simply do not sound authentic in such circumstances. The confusion and tragedy of death and evil defy such literary reductions; authenticity in the face of these things requires the genius of literary expression we find in the Psalter.
The nature of the Psalter indicates that authentic Christian teaching, teaching which connects divine truths to real life, must therefore take into account not only the content, baldly conceived, of Christian theology but also the forms in which this theology is expressed. The preacher can teach about evil, both cosmic and personal; but evil and suffering are inscrutable, and the complexity of the subject demands a literary form to reflect this. The poetry of the psalter offers us a pattern of how this can be done as it draws us into its world, resonates with us, expresses and explains our deepest feelings and thoughts, and draw us into understanding ourselves and the world as it really is.
What is the practical implication of what I am trying to say here? I think it is threefold. First, and most obvious: the psalms should have a central place in Christian worship, both privately and corporately. Martin Luther was once asked by his barber (or, as my kids would say, male hairdresser) how to improve his prayer life. Luther rushed home and wrote a wonderful little treatise on prayer (imagine that: the most significant and busy Reformer in Europe was yet so concerned for his people that he was eager to write a treatise for a barber struggling with prayer!). His primary advice in this work? Read the psalms privately, and if that does not help, go to church and listen to the psalms being sung in public worship. The psalms meet us where we are; and they take us from where we are to where we should be. That is authenticity for you.
Second, we should not settle for praise songs and prayers which are less honest and thus less authentic than the psalms. The psalms give us a benchmark of authenticity which flies in the face of so much Christian piety throughout the ages. Too often Christians try to conform to what they think Christianity should look like rather than what it is like. For Dylan fans out there: which is more authentic, the sentimentalized material on Slow Train Coming, a product of Dylan’s Christian phase, or the complex emotional bitterness of, say, `Like a Rolling Stone’ or `Positively 4th Street’? Tragic that Dylan’s Christian phase seems less authentic in its depiction of human experience than his earlier material.
Third, and perhaps most controversial, I want to suggest that the very existence of the Psalms require that those of us in the confessional, evangelical tradition think long and hard about the very way we teach theology. We are often criticized for our referential views of language and our propositional views of truth. I would fight to the end to maintain the important place which both of these must play in our theology. But as I hinted above, I think that the propositional truth content of Christian theology can be dramatically enriched by taking seriously the literary form of the way the Bible teaches us. Again, I am not arguing for exchanging Bavinck and Berkhof for some fuzzy touchyfeely nonsense. But I wonder if, say, discussions of total depravity might not be dramatically enriched by engaging with the poetry of the psalms; more than that, perhaps they might be enriched not simply by seeing how our great systematicians formulate the doctrine, but also how great writers wrestle with the issue in poetry and prose. Perhaps studying the character of Pinkie in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock or Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello or Claggart in Melville’s Billy Budd might offer Christian students of human nature some insights. Or what about the struggle between good and evil that all Christians feel within themselves? Again, we can and should teach this in a straightforward manner. But consider these verses from the poem, `The Welsh Marches’ by A E Housman. Building on the image of medieval English and Welsh armies clashing on the border of the two lands, he moves to identifying these with the division he feels within himself:
In my heart is has not died,The war that sleeps on Severn side;They cease not fighting, east and west,On the marches of my breast.Here the truceless armies yetTrample, rolled in blood and sweat;They kill and kill and never die;And I think that each is I.
This may not be the greatest example of English poetry, but the movement of the poem’s image, and the rhyming of the couplets both serve to bring home the inner conflict with memorable emotional force. Again, the poetic richness of the psalms, combined with the brutal honesty of the psalmist’s own self-expression, is crucial to enriching our knowledge of ourselves, the fallen world, and the God who acts to save within that world. Indeed, the savage anger about the prosperity of the wicked, the seething resentment of God that bursts forth in particular psalms, the imprecations and cries of rage – all of these things strike a chord with all who have ever wrestled with the unfairness of life in all of its contradictions and absurdities. Such psalms have a ring of authenticity because they are mirrors of the deepest, most tormented parts of our own souls. That the Lord legitimates such expression in songs of praise is surely an act of supreme grace and condescension; as is the fact that by the very poetic movement within these psalms, he gently leads those who take these psalms as their own to the realization of his gracious sovereignty. But there is more. Surely there is a lesson here about Christian pedagogy: the dramatic expression of these struggles in a poetic, literary form is significant and should profoundly influence how we teach theology in the classroom.
The Bible writers clearly appreciated the need for complex literary forms to give full expression to complex theological ideas and to the complexity of life in covenant with God in a fallen world. Theological curricula, at home, at seminary, and at church, should surely take the forms of the Bible’s teaching with similar seriousness to that with which they take the basic content (to the extent that it is even possible to separate them). Only then can we avoid the reduction of biblical wisdom to bumper sticker slogans; only then will our theology find authentic expression.
Now, one of the calls I hear most frequently from those sections of the church which have identified themselves broadly as `emerging’ is for authenticity. Of course, calls for authenticity are a bit like calls for an end to poverty or child abuse or wife-beating. None but the criminally insane would disagree with such pike-staffishly desirable things, though it is true that there may be little consensus on how to achieve such ends. Nevertheless, whatever my reservations about emerging church theology, I am grateful for the sincere and well-intentioned reminder that Christianity needs always to seek to be authentic; and I am convinced that the psalms should be a basic to such, not simply because of what they say but also because of the way they say it.
My assumption in all this is that human life as we know it is, considered in itself, ultimately a tragedy. Yes, many of us enjoy good times, have loving families, experience delight and joy, but even the wealthiest, happiest life ends in tragedy. Death is the boundary that shatters all humanity; it is a wicked and chaotic invasion of creation; and it condemns all of our lives to ultimate, unavoidable tragedy. I believe that this reality of evil and death gives life its tragic architecture; and that it should therefore inform all that we do. In my earlier editorial I argued that the Psalms should be central in public praise because they give divinely sanctioned expression of all human emotion which can then be used in the worship of God; in this article I want to expand on that theme a little and to argue that the tragic vision which the Psalms so beautifully express also demands that we broaden and enrich the ways in which orthodox theology is taught in the home, in church, in seminary.
The tragic truth of life in a fallen world can be expressed in a variety of ways. We are all probably familiar with the neat summaries of such which appear on bumper stickers, variations on a statement like `Life sucks; then you die.’ Not particularly profound, for all of the truth it may contain. It is, of course, essentially the same thought which underlies the following famous passage from Shakespeare’s great play, Macbeth. In the play’s fifth act, Macbeth, the man who has gained the crown of Scotland through murder and treachery, hears of the death of his wife, he utters one of the great speeches in English drama:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted foolsThe way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,And then is heard no more: it is a taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury,Signifying nothing.
The meaning of the two, the bumper sticker and the Shakespearean soliloquy, is basically the same: life is nasty, meaningless, and short. Yet there is a sense in which the latter enriches the reader’s understanding in a way that the former does not. The language, the sounds of the words, the images, the alliteration, the metrical structure – all provide an elaborate and complex expression that draws the audience into a deeper, more frightening, more striking encounter with the absurdity of existence. Shakespeare not only provides us with a poetic manner of talking about an aspect of life which we knew already; in so doing, I would argue that he actually changes and deepens our knowledge of the same in subtle yet appreciable ways. Both the bumper sticker and Shakespeare tells us that life is short and apparently pointless; but only the latter actually confronts us with the full complexity of the truth and thereby transforms us in relation to it. The more we wrestle with the form of expression, the subtlety of the images, and the sheer beauty of the words, the deeper we are forced to probe into the nature of what is actually being claimed about existence in general and our own existence in particular. What is being taught is inseparable from how it is being expressed.
This is a point which I did not develop in my earlier call for more psalm singing in churches but which is, I think, critical to the importance of the Psalms in Christian life and experience, both individual and corporate. They not only teach us what to expect from life, and allow us to express our deepest emotions in praise to God; they also provide us with an idiom, a way of doing these things which allows us to understand ourselves better both in relation to God and to the world we experience around us. And, crucially, this is communicated as much through the poetic structure and language of the psalms as it is through the realities beyond the text which the psalmist has in view. As Macbeth’s painful reflections on the futility of life cannot be separated from the way in which he expresses it, so the psalms teaching cannot be separated from the forms of words which they use; and as the images used by Shakespeare continue to haunt and to shape our thoughts long after the curtain falls at the end of the play, so the Psalms continue alternately to agitate, to provoke and to soothe those souls which have soaked themselves in the psalter’s rich and poetic world.
This literary complexity is critical because of the complexity which evil and death cause for life. Death gives all human lives an unavoidable dimension of mysterious tragedy. To stand at the graveside of a child or of an octagenarian really makes no theological difference. Nobody should have to stand at a graveside for the simple reason that nobody have to die. Mortality is an unnatural and unwanted trespasser in our lives, and it wreaks nothing but havoc both on the one taken and on the loved ones left behind. It is the most obvious manifestation of evil in the world, and as such the most problematic aspect of human existence. I would suggest, therefore, that it is impossible to grasp the full dimensions of the tragedy of evil, suffering and death by simple statements of fact. To do so is to fall into the trap of reducing the truth about life and death to something approximating bumper sticker wisdom: such slogans may be true, but they scarcely offer an adequate account of the subject in hand. This is where the Psalter comes into its own: it offers a full account not just of the range of human emotions but, specifically, of the range of human emotions within the humanly incomprehensible framework of a fallen world which cries out for salvation, knows that salvation is coming, but endures agonies and contradictions during the time of waiting for that salvation to arrive. The Psalms are brutally honest about the fact that, in this fallen world, against all that God purposed, evil yet has a reality which creates unimaginable conflict for human beings with creation, with each other, and, most mysteriously of all, even with their very selves. Human language strains to do justice to this reality; and this is where literary form and not just theological content become so critical. The poetry of the Psalms is thus vital to grasping the tragic realities of a world invaded by death and those countless lesser evils which point towards it. Bumper sticker statements simply do not sound authentic in such circumstances. The confusion and tragedy of death and evil defy such literary reductions; authenticity in the face of these things requires the genius of literary expression we find in the Psalter.
The nature of the Psalter indicates that authentic Christian teaching, teaching which connects divine truths to real life, must therefore take into account not only the content, baldly conceived, of Christian theology but also the forms in which this theology is expressed. The preacher can teach about evil, both cosmic and personal; but evil and suffering are inscrutable, and the complexity of the subject demands a literary form to reflect this. The poetry of the psalter offers us a pattern of how this can be done as it draws us into its world, resonates with us, expresses and explains our deepest feelings and thoughts, and draw us into understanding ourselves and the world as it really is.
What is the practical implication of what I am trying to say here? I think it is threefold. First, and most obvious: the psalms should have a central place in Christian worship, both privately and corporately. Martin Luther was once asked by his barber (or, as my kids would say, male hairdresser) how to improve his prayer life. Luther rushed home and wrote a wonderful little treatise on prayer (imagine that: the most significant and busy Reformer in Europe was yet so concerned for his people that he was eager to write a treatise for a barber struggling with prayer!). His primary advice in this work? Read the psalms privately, and if that does not help, go to church and listen to the psalms being sung in public worship. The psalms meet us where we are; and they take us from where we are to where we should be. That is authenticity for you.
Second, we should not settle for praise songs and prayers which are less honest and thus less authentic than the psalms. The psalms give us a benchmark of authenticity which flies in the face of so much Christian piety throughout the ages. Too often Christians try to conform to what they think Christianity should look like rather than what it is like. For Dylan fans out there: which is more authentic, the sentimentalized material on Slow Train Coming, a product of Dylan’s Christian phase, or the complex emotional bitterness of, say, `Like a Rolling Stone’ or `Positively 4th Street’? Tragic that Dylan’s Christian phase seems less authentic in its depiction of human experience than his earlier material.
Third, and perhaps most controversial, I want to suggest that the very existence of the Psalms require that those of us in the confessional, evangelical tradition think long and hard about the very way we teach theology. We are often criticized for our referential views of language and our propositional views of truth. I would fight to the end to maintain the important place which both of these must play in our theology. But as I hinted above, I think that the propositional truth content of Christian theology can be dramatically enriched by taking seriously the literary form of the way the Bible teaches us. Again, I am not arguing for exchanging Bavinck and Berkhof for some fuzzy touchyfeely nonsense. But I wonder if, say, discussions of total depravity might not be dramatically enriched by engaging with the poetry of the psalms; more than that, perhaps they might be enriched not simply by seeing how our great systematicians formulate the doctrine, but also how great writers wrestle with the issue in poetry and prose. Perhaps studying the character of Pinkie in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock or Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello or Claggart in Melville’s Billy Budd might offer Christian students of human nature some insights. Or what about the struggle between good and evil that all Christians feel within themselves? Again, we can and should teach this in a straightforward manner. But consider these verses from the poem, `The Welsh Marches’ by A E Housman. Building on the image of medieval English and Welsh armies clashing on the border of the two lands, he moves to identifying these with the division he feels within himself:
In my heart is has not died,The war that sleeps on Severn side;They cease not fighting, east and west,On the marches of my breast.Here the truceless armies yetTrample, rolled in blood and sweat;They kill and kill and never die;And I think that each is I.
This may not be the greatest example of English poetry, but the movement of the poem’s image, and the rhyming of the couplets both serve to bring home the inner conflict with memorable emotional force. Again, the poetic richness of the psalms, combined with the brutal honesty of the psalmist’s own self-expression, is crucial to enriching our knowledge of ourselves, the fallen world, and the God who acts to save within that world. Indeed, the savage anger about the prosperity of the wicked, the seething resentment of God that bursts forth in particular psalms, the imprecations and cries of rage – all of these things strike a chord with all who have ever wrestled with the unfairness of life in all of its contradictions and absurdities. Such psalms have a ring of authenticity because they are mirrors of the deepest, most tormented parts of our own souls. That the Lord legitimates such expression in songs of praise is surely an act of supreme grace and condescension; as is the fact that by the very poetic movement within these psalms, he gently leads those who take these psalms as their own to the realization of his gracious sovereignty. But there is more. Surely there is a lesson here about Christian pedagogy: the dramatic expression of these struggles in a poetic, literary form is significant and should profoundly influence how we teach theology in the classroom.
The Bible writers clearly appreciated the need for complex literary forms to give full expression to complex theological ideas and to the complexity of life in covenant with God in a fallen world. Theological curricula, at home, at seminary, and at church, should surely take the forms of the Bible’s teaching with similar seriousness to that with which they take the basic content (to the extent that it is even possible to separate them). Only then can we avoid the reduction of biblical wisdom to bumper sticker slogans; only then will our theology find authentic expression.
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