The Hymnodic Barometer
As I said a few posts ago, I’ve been reading (ever so slowly) through Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. The book really is excellent, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to get a grasp on why Christian Thought is the way it is today. In this post I want to highlight one of Noll’s better strengths: charting the changes in the Christian mind through history.
He does this in several ways in the book, each delineated in its own chapter: the university, American culture, politics, science, etc. He points to the shifts and changes through time that show the effects that the deficiency in Christian thinking has had on each institution. At the end of the chapter on the “Intellectual Disaster of Fundamentalism” Noll makes an aside that I just found too interesting to pass up.
The rest follows after the jump.
He says:
“Evangelical hymnody, often a sensitive barometer to shifting deep structures, well illustrates the intellectual history. Two lovely hymns, separated by only two generations, bespeak the momentous influence of fundamentalism. Both are, in their own terms, entirely appropriate expressions of piety. Both can be sung with a clear conscience. But the use of metaphor is revealing.” [1]
The first is a hymn written by George Croly in 1854, entitled “Spirit of God, Descend upon My Heart.” In the first stanza, Croly asks that God make changes in his heart to orient him how he ought to be. Then in the second he describes what he humbly wishes most for his soul:
I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies,
No sudden rending of the veil of clay,
No angel visitant, no opening skies;
But take the dimness of my soul away.
Upon first reading that quote, I instantly assented to the same wish as Croly. I don’t really want to have great visions, I want my vision to be great. Actually, I’d settle for vision that’s just a little better. What a convicting sentiment. How often do I seek after a “big moment” where I can grasp what’s out there? What I should daily seek is to remedy the “dimness of my soul.” And no, I don’t mean the salvific cleansing available through Christ. Obviously that has been attained already. I mean being transformed by the “renewing of the mind”. The making new of the mind brings metamorphosis (root: μεταμορφ) to the soul.
The second hymn Noll describes is by Helen H. Lemmel, who wrote the words and music to this gospel song in 1922. I think you will find it very familiar:
Turn your eyes upon Jesus
Look full in his wonderful face
And the things of this world will grow strangely dim
In the light of his glory and grace.
What a difference a few generations makes. The key is in the use of the word “dim.” Croly wishes for his dimness to be taken away that he might perceive better. Lemmel wishes to perceive only Christ, and the world outside will grow dim accordingly. Now surely we do wish for Christ to be our all, but an inward/upward focus that ignores the world beyond Christendom denies all that Christ wishes us to be to that world. This is the failure that evangelical fundamentalism fell into. A view of prophecy as the final script to the end of the world killed any desire or felt obligation to explore or understand the world better. A “let go and let God” attitude towards Christian life fostered a world-abandoning mentality that ignored the command to be “salt and light.” And finally, a scripture doctrine that treated the Bible as words linked directly from God’s mouth to the reader excised original cultural relevance and authorly intentions, which then bled over into everyday life. For if you see no connection between the source that provides most of the important information for how you live your life, and the world in which you live it, you will not make the connection between your life and that world, that is to say, you will have no impact on it.
And that is what has happened. While The Scandal is a very good book, it is also a sad commentary on the heritage of American evangelicals, and a stunning indictment for those living today. I haven’t got to the chapters on Hope yet. I suppose I’ll make a more uplifting post then.
Brian | October 12, 2006
Hm. That’s really interesting – and very perceptive. It reminds me a lot of what I’ve been reading recently… as well as thoughts I’ve had for some time now. He expresses the ideas pretty well, I have to say.
Anyway, that’s cool that you’re reading this – I can’t wait to talk to you about this sort of stuff over Christmas!
Interesting hymn exegesis… I’d say I disagree with Noll’s critique of the second hymn. It seems to me that the line, “and the things of this world will grow strangely dim” is a very simple thought, that Christ’s “glory and grace”, when spiritually beheld, will be so greatly significant in our thoughts and lives that the “things of this world” will have no sway on us.
I guess I have a hard time packing so much meaning into the word “dim”. I can’t connect that with the idea of “ignoring the world outside Christendom”. Sure, that was a big, if not the biggest, downfall of Fundamentalism. I just think it’s a stretch to use a hymn to support and show that.
Other than that, I think Noll’s critique is spot on.