Wonderful Words of Life: Hymns in American Protestant History and Theology

Wonderful Words of Life: Hymns in American Protestant History and Theology.

Edited by Richard J. Mouw and Mark A. Noll. Eerdmans, 308 pp., $18.00 paperback.

How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans.

By David W. Stowe. Harvard University Press, 368 pp., $27.95.

HYMNODY AND sacred music, long the domain of hymnologists and musicologists, have become hot topics in scholarship about American religion, and the "worship wars" of the 1980s and '90s have sparked a reexamination of denominational hymn traditions by historians of American religion.

Richard Mouw and Mark Noll's Wonderful Words of Life and David Stowe's How Sweet the Sound represent two divergent directions in the new cultural, interpretation of American sacred music.

Wonderful Words of Life is a collection of papers presented at a May 2000 conference on American Protestant hymnody held at Wheaton College's Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals and funded by the Lilly Endowment. The essays lean heavily toward evangelical hymns, but in his introduction, Mouw, president and professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary, points beyond the often assumed individualism of those texts to the neglected communal dimensions of evangelical hymnody. The collection ably accomplishes this task with essays that are original in research, diverse in theme and period, and stylish in presentation. This pioneering volume will reward any reader interested in how evangelical religion has been lived in the U.S.

Noll, a professor at Wheaton, opens with an essay on three "defining roles of hymns" in the 18th century: "hymns mediated between differences of class and race.... offered a public voice to women, and ... functioned to pacify intra-evangelical disputes." Esther Rothenbusch Crookshank follows with a fine overview of Isaac Watts's impact on the early U.S. She shows that in addition to transforming the hymnody of Reformed worship, his works promoted the development of singing schools and tune books, introduced generations of children to "divine and moral songs" and supplied African Americans with sacred lyrics that have profoundly shaped the black church. Crookshank concludes that "Watts became the liturgist for a new nation."

This achievement was not without some irony, as Rochelle Stackhouse illustrates in her study of two early American "national hymns," Watts's "Our God, Our Help in Ages Past" and Timothy Dwight's "I Love Thy Kingdom, Lord." In both cases, Stackhouse argues, hymns calling for believers' allegiance to church over nation were "domesticated" into bland paeans to America by editors and pastors who dropped verses from the hymns, ignored their relationship to the Psalms and sang them in "entirely new contexts."

A second group of essays discusses the role of hymns in missions and evangelism, as well as hymnodie crossovers among white evangelicals, Catholics and African Americans. Kevin Kee and Thomas Bergler provide insightful pieces contrasting the use of music as entertainment in early-20th-century Canadian revivalism with the development of pop-style praise songs as evangelistic tools in the roughly contemporary Youth for Christ movement in the U.S. Felicia Piscitelli and the late Virginia Lieson Brereton present a quite different contrast in their essays on Catholic appropriation of Protestant hymns and white Protestant acceptance of black gospel music.

Wonderful Words of Life concludes with three essays on hymnodie theology. Jeffrey VanderWilt's challenging piece carefully reconstructs the major tropes of death, heaven and judgment in evangelical hymnody. Susan Wise Bauer offers a nuanced analysis of narrative songs of experience and systematic doctrinal hymns in the evangelical tradition and "reclaims a confidence" in narrative hymnody because it "makes a theological statement too complex and painful to be put into systematic form, yet too important to be ignored." Mouw offers a telling critique of recent interpretations of nautical rescue themes in gospel hymns as psychologically passive and socially retrograde.

Whereas Wonderful Words of Life treats the dominant hymnodic tradition in the U.S., How Sweet the Sound is a bold expedition to the historical and stylistic limits of American sacred music that contests received categories and offers fresh, often controversial interpretations.

Stowe, associate professor of writing, rhetoric and American cultures at Michigan State University, supplements the cultural historian's customary interdisciplinary toolkit with ethnomusicology, anthropology, literary criticism and folklore studies, applying these methodologies with postmodern brio to a remarkable range of American sacred music. The result is not a comprehensive survey but a series of "exemplary interlinked case studies to convey something of the range of religious and musical expression."