Chronological Snobbery: Celebrating the Trinity Psalter Hymnal

This article originally appeared in Christian Renewal magazine.

In my last column, “Celebrating the Trinity Psalter Hymnal,” I argued that we should celebrate and embrace the new Trinity Psalter Hymnal (TPH) on missional, ecumenical, and confessional grounds. In short, this songbook gives us the opportunity to sing songs that are more familiar and more widely sung, to make our worship more accessible to guests and visitors, and to sing songs that are more frequently sung in sister Reformed churches. 

It gives us the opportunity, in short, to think about the preferences of those who aren’t yet sitting in our pews, but those whom we pray will be through our evangelistic and missionary efforts. It gives us an opportunity to be outward facing, not inward facing, in our worship choice. And, just to be clear, this “outward facing” stance isn’t about bending to cultural whims. The TPH is about embracing the best of five hundred years of Reformed hymnody. 

But still, that’s a hard decision for a church to make. Music is a communal experience. When we sing a familiar tune, it makes us feel as though we are a part of something bigger than ourselves, the body of Christ not only today but also down through the ages. To adopt a new songbook invariably means abandoning some familiar songs and learning some new ones. This is where conservatism in Christian worship is so important, it connects us to the past.

In my last column, I claimed that “much of the music we love to sing… can be found in the new book.” Since I’m a bit of an amateur numbers guy — and a very amateur student of music — I figured I’d attempt to quantify how many songs from the Blue Psalter Hymnal (BPH) carry over into the TPH, and look at a few other statistical elements. 

First, a caveat. I’m not an expert in music; the following statistics are by my own count, and I certainly could have made a mistake here or there. I haven’t served on the Psalter Hymnal Committee, and I don’t have any access to solid data. Also, I’m going to focus on the psalter portion of the TPH and set the hymn collection to the side, because I think introducing the psalms to a new generation in the church should be one of the most important goals of the TPH. 

How Much Has Changed?

The new songbook has 279 psalm settings in it, with every psalm having at least one full-text setting, with the exception of Psalm 119, which has a full-text setting for each of the 22 stanzas. In addition, there are 40 partial settings and 32 paraphrases. While I’m focusing on the music in this article, the texts in the TPH are generally far more faithful to scripture than the BPH.

The BPH had 310 psalm settings, 31 more than the TPH. Of these 310, 81 psalm settings are carried over into the TPH, or about 25% of the whole collection. While 1 in 4 might not seem like a great deal of overlap, it is worth noting that these are distributed over 74 psalms. In other words, half of the psalms in the psalter will be represented by a tune that is familiar from the older collection. 

Of course, most congregations don’t sing all 150 psalms with any regularity. Given that the committee sought to preserve the best and most frequently sung psalms in the old collection, the odds are good that this 49% of the psalms represents far more than half of the psalms that were actually sung out of the old book. 

Chronological Snobbery? 

In Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns, T. David Gordon noted that one of the flaws of “contemporary Christians music” is that it elevates “contemporaneity” itself to a musical virtue. Newer music is de facto better music. 

Of course, we don’t believe that. But it has always struck me that the BPH had a heavy bias toward a single period in church history, namely, the 19th century. While the dates of tunes can be a bit misleading — sometimes traditional folks tunes are first publish at a much later date — a count of dates of tunes and/or composers bears out this fact. Fully 76% of the tunes in the BPH are from the 19th  or early 20th century (61% and 15% respectively). The nearby chart shows the relative percentages of tunes in the collection from each century.

While many fine tunes were written in the 19th century, I confess to harboring a bias against much 19th century American church music, much of which was infected by the revivalistic spirit of that age. The pre-1800 songs in the BPH (23% of the collection) have stood the test of time. They are the cream of the crop. The same can’t be said for the tunes from the 19th century, a whopping 186 of them, or 61% of the collection. Reflecting on the fact that the BPH contained such a thick slice of a narrow band of the church’s music, I once overheard someone say that the BPH is contemporary Christian music from a hundred years ago.  

Though it is a newer collection, including a number of tunes from the 21st century and later 20th century, the TPH manages to slide the average date of its collection back about ten years. The average date in the TPH is 1806, versus 1814 for the BPH (if you throw out the 21st century songs, the average drops back to 1799). Both collections draw about the same share of their tunes (13%) from the 16th century, mostly Genevan settings. But the TPH has three times as many tunes from the 17th century (6% vs. 2%) and almost twice as many tunes from the 18th century (14% vs. 8%).  

As the accompanying chart makes clear, the TPH represents a much broader swath of Protestant sacred music, with 33% of its tunes coming from pre-1800, 50% from the 19th century, and 17% coming from after 1900. Many of these new tunes are drawn from English and Welsh sources, and will sound familiar to God’s people from popular hymns. The collection of psalm tunes is therefore more mainstream, more relatable, and less eccentric, while also being more historic. That’s quite an accomplishment, and those who assembled this work are to be commended.

All of these numbers exclude the hymn collection, but by incorporating much of the hymn music from the widely used red Trinity Hymnal, there will most likely be a similar broadening effect. 

Conclusion 

Of course, none of this should be read as a condemnation of the BPH. It has served the churches well, and many of its tunes are beloved by our people. There will invariably be some loss in moving to a new songbook. Furthermore, this frustration will disproportionately fall upon those who have sung from this book for the longest, and we should always be slow to cause our senior church members any unnecessary sorrow. I speak as a convert to the tradition with barely 20 years experience, and the last thing I’d want to suggest is that newcomers should cast off the tried and true ways.

And yet, we must not forget the “benefit” side of the ledger. A new collection that preserves the best and most beloved of the old, while incorporating a broader sweep of church history can make the singing in our churches more attractive to a new generation of Psalm singers. Lord willing, the TPH can help re-introduce some of our Presbyterian brethren to the benefits of psalmody. And unity in song across the OPC and URC — as well as any other Reformed churches that adopt the TPH — is for the good of an increasingly mobile membership of our churches.