Yesterday I commented on the hymn “And Are We Yet Alive,”
and to a much lesser extent “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing.” Both of these hymns (texts by Charles Wesley)
play an important part in the history of the Methodist movement. This is not only because they are hymns that
we frequently use in worship, and therefore that the great majority of
Methodists know (or at least recognize).
These texts are also important because they serve to carry the freight
of traditional Methodist theology.
Charles Wesley wrote an average of 10 poetic lines a day for
50 years. He wrote 8,989 hymns. He wrote
hymns that taught and reinforced understanding of the basics of scripture and
of Methodist theology. In “And Are We
Yet Alive” for instance, according to The United Methodist Church’s
Discipleship Ministries website:
The
original four stanzas represent a progression through the Wesleyan "way of
salvation." The first stanza reminds us that God's prevenient grace has
been present with us, preserving and protecting us even in our absence from one
another; the second that God's justifying grace has saved us from sin and
imputed to us his righteousness. In the third stanza, we see that God's redeeming
grace has saved us and starts the work of regeneration in us. The final
(omitted) stanza reminds us that God's sanctifying grace continues to work in
us until the day we finally meet Christ, moving us from our imperfect state to
entire sanctification.
The measure of great church music is that it transports the
heart and mind heavenward. Great music is not a theological treatise,
that aims at the intellect only. But
neither is it mindless repetition that purposes to create feeling to the
neglect of understanding: (O come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come,
come… to the church in the wildwood).
Our worship time is too short, its opportunities too
precious, to fritter away on meaningless verbiage. Fred Craddock used to say that “We don’t get
nourishment by chewing, but by chewing food.”
He was talking about preaching.
But it works for church music as well.
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