Why sing the Psalms?

At Psalm Roar 2023 we asked Alastair Roberts to speak about the Psalms and why we sing them. That video is here, followed by further reflections of his in the days after Psalm Roar. They were written up in his substack The Anchored Argosy and are reproduced here with permission. 

On account of the Psalm Roar in Shrewsbury, psalm-singing has been at the forefront my mind. I shared some thoughts on the Psalms and psalm-singing in my talk at the event, but many further things occurred to me during the event and afterwards.

Christians can easily think of Scripture as a collection of texts containing moral precepts, doctrinal instruction, historical information, random devotional nuggets, and other such things. Scripture is imagined principally as inert words on a page whose informational content needs to be extracted by the mind of the reader—in an activity typically termed ‘interpretation’. Indeed, some might be surprised by the implication that there might be other ways to think of it. This can function as a set of constraining expectations, greatly limiting our engagement with it.

A frequent consequence of such an approach to the scriptural text is inattention to, or even disregard for, the form of Scripture. Believing that some supposed doctrinal, ethical, or devotional content is thoroughly extricable from the form of Scripture, the degree to which the revelatory end of Scripture is achieved through literary structure, artistry, and rhetoric, for instance, or through ‘scripted’ forms of engagement, can be missed. For any who regard them chiefly as containers or vehicles of meaning to be extricated, the notion that much of their meaning is discovered through attention to the form of scriptural texts and submission to their direction can be strange and disorienting. In such cases one often won’t encounter strong resistance to alternative postures towards the text, mostly because their possibility hasn’t really been considered.

When a reader is narrowly concerned to discover and abstract the all-important propositional theological content of a scriptural text, they can easily lose sight of the text as a specific form of speech act and the significance of that. The form of the Scripture can be regarded as if it were a disposable husk containing a theological kernel for the detached mind, rather than as a means of directing the hearer or reader’s meditations upon or internalization of the text, a means of conscripting and forming—not merely informing—its addressees, or as the scripting of authorized performances. This posture towards the Scripture can also render it inert for us, as we have subconsciously filtered out all the activity implied in its form.

The book of Psalms is a good example to consider here. The psalms don’t primarily inform us of doctrine. Although they can be powerfully formative of ethics, they do not principally instruct us in ethical ideas. And, while they contain a great deal of a devotional nature, much of this doesn’t really fit many Christian’s expectations of devotional material, expectations which remain strongly didactic in character.

Psalms, for instance, are not helpfully considered as ‘containers’ of moral or doctrinal truth. Such a way of imagining texts tends to spatialize them, to treat them as if they were objects that belonged in the immediacy and ‘present’ of the mind’s speculation, in a largely timeless space. However, psalms are principally written to be sung in the assembly, something that takes time (and practice). And that time is frequently integral to their meaning. To understand a piece of music, you can’t merely quickly read the score, you must listen to—or better, perform—it, submitting your attention to its playing out over time. Many psalms narrate a movement of the heart and mind, in which the singer is invited to participate. The psalmist commonly ends up in a different state of soul at the end than he was in at the beginning of the psalm, and his words can lead the worshiper into a similar journey of the soul. Rather than containers of truths to be extricated and held in the atemporal immediacy of some internal realm of thought, psalms are chiefly external and collective performed texts, whose movements we are both called to enter and to take into ourselves, being formed by them.

Our ways of conceiving of Scripture can also dull us to it as something to be treasured and repeatedly performed. This is likely in part a consequence of the printed word, mass production of texts, and the weakening of many habits characteristic of oral society. Our Bibles are not physically valuable objects and, as printed texts of Scripture are readily available to us, practices of memory, meditation, and public reading are greatly diminished.

Learning and singing the Psalms can greatly deepen our sense of God’s Word’s relationship to us. The Psalms are presented to us as means of the indwelling of Christ’s word (Colossians 3:16) and of his Spirit’s indwelling (Ephesians 5:18-21). They are means of knitting bodies of God’s people together in common song.

The Psalms are largely divinely inspired speech for us, much of them first-person in character. God is not merely speaking to us, but giving us words to express to him and to each other. The words aren’t chiefly about informing minds, but about conscripting hearts and inscribing his Word upon them, and placing it upon our lips. The force of this shouldn’t be missed. The psalmist speaks of the word of the Lord as sweet like honey to his taste (19:10; 119:103), as stored up in his heart (119:11), and as his meditation all the day (119:97). The promise of the new covenant is the law of the Lord placed in our hearts (Jeremiah 31:33). The psalmists describe this experience from the very opening psalm—“his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night” (Psalm 1:2). This is such a fitting beginning to the Psalms, because the law in the renewed heart is revealed by the words of the lips, and the rest of book gives us wonderful words in which we can delight and grow. “He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God” (Psalm 40:3). New covenant hearts will be hearts filled and overflowing with psalms.

Singing the Psalms teaches us to delight in God’s words. God’s words are not merely disposable containers for ideas, information, and directives, but glorious things to be savoured, expressed beautifully, borne in memory, and treasured within in the deep meditations of the heart. In singing the Psalms, we take inspired words of the Spirit as our words, recognizing also that the words are ultimately of Christ and that he leads us as we sing. We sing back to God the words that he has given to us, seeking to do so in a way that manifests our close attention to and internalization and treasuring of them. And in singing psalms back to God, we join with the assembly, taking God’s words and glorifying them with our music and mouths, our musical composition and performance a form of loving attention to God’s gift of such voice to us as his children, that gift redounded to his glory.

Too often, modern worshipers treat worship as if it were something chiefly to be consumed by them as individuals (leading to a great concern that church music styles cater to their more general tastes in music consumption). Yet worship is not chiefly to be consumed quasi-passively, but to be an act. In the purposeful and practiced act of singing psalms together, we joyfully and lovingly present our hearts and our assemblies to God and we take his Word into us. Because it is an act of worship, we should want to take time to learn how to do it well. Typically greater delight will follow.

A huge obstacle to good psalm-singing is the ingrained passivity that comes with a lifetime of being consumers of music. Great psalm-singing is entirely achievable, but we must approach worship more as an act of making music before the Lord, demanding practice and effort.

Indeed, the more the Church’s music is driven by the musical tastes of religious consumers, the more divided it will be. The corporate act of making music has a power to unite that exceeds the unity produced by the convergence of private tastes in its consumption. Congregational psalm-singing is a form of expression of God’s Word by which, within the body of Christ, we address each other and by which Christ’s word and his Spirit indwell us (Colossians 3:16; Ephesians 5:18-21). As we do it, the body can become self-aware in a new way. As we don’t merely sing along with performers at the front, but sing in unison or in harmony as a congregation, we take fuller ownership of the words that God has given us as our own joyful and purposeful expression and also receive those words from the lips of our neighbours. Along with responsive liturgy, psalm-singing as a congregation’s service of the Lord and ministry to each other is a powerful way to practice, amplify, and develop the voice of the laity. The loss of this voice might be one reason we get so fixated on those speaking at the front.

There are great hymns, but only the psalms are the very words of God, to store up in memory and treasure within, to give ready channel to the expression of full hearts, to unite us with our neighbours in song, and to gather the people of God for over 3,000 years in common praise. I suspect much resistance to psalm-singing arises from the impression it is dull and dour and its advocates legalistic and joyless. However, seeing many different ways it can be done well, the question is not whether we have to sing psalms, but whyever we wouldn’t want to!

[The Theopolis Institute’s work on the Psalter was recently mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article: “The Theopolis Institute is producing a Psalter with new chant settings of all 150 psalms. Expressly written for untrained singers—i.e., most of us—this new psalter is intended to renew the chanting of psalms as a central element of Reformed worship.”]