Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T15:20:48.510Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Psalm Singing as Eucharistic Act

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Timothy Radcliffe OP
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

What is the significance of singing the psalms? It is the one form of prayer shared by every major Christian denomination. Whatever the disagreements about the Eucharist, charismatic prayer, the rosary or whatever, the singing of psalms has gone unchallenged as the typical form of Christian prayer. And yet it is not immediately obvious in what sense the psalms are either Christian or, for that matter, prayer. How can it be an act of Christian prayer to long to dash out your neighbour’s children’s brains on a rock, to celebrate a law by which we are no longer bound, and to proclaim God’s mysterious intention to use Moab as his washbowl? The question is not what this or that psalm, might have meant originally in the Temple. It is not even of what Christian theological sense we might discover or construct for any or all of the psalms. That is an important question but its answer will not make sense of our practice of singing the psalms, in which there is no time to carry out complex theological hermeneutics and during which our minds are often enough dull, vacant or distracted. The question is not of the meaning of the psalms but of the meaning of singing them, though, as we shall see, the relationship between the two is complex.

The first thing to note is that we are not just singing the psalms, we are singing the psalter, and it is the canon of the psalter that gives us a preliminary definition of the significance of psalm singing. It is true that we do not sing all the psalms in the psalter, and even the psalms that we sing are sometimes bowdlerised of the nastier verses. But even if we only ever sung just a few of the psalms it would still be true that the canonical form of the psalter makes a claim about what sort of an activity psalm singing is.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 63 , Issue 742 , April 1982 , pp. 170 - 181
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Childs, B S, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture, London, 1979. pp 508–523Google Scholar.

2 Westermann, Claus, ‘The Role of the Lamment in the Theology of the Old Testament”, Interpretation vol 28, 1974, pp 20‐38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brueggemann, Walter, ‘The Formfulness of Grief”, Interpretation vol 31, 1977, pp 263–275CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Op. cit.

4 Op. cit, p 265.

5 Eaton, John, Vision in Worship, London, 1981Google Scholar.

6 Westermann, Claus, The Praise of God in the Psalms. ET London, 1966, p 25Google Scholar.

7 Op. cit. p 28.

8 B S Childs, op. cit. p 520f; “Psalm Titles and Midrashic Exegesis”, Journal of Semitic studies vol 16, 1971, pp 137–150Google Scholar.

9 I am indebted to Paul Beauchamp's stimulating treatment of Ps 22 in Psaumes Nuit et Jour, Paris, 1980, pp 210–252Google Scholar.

10 Midr. Teh. xxii 2, quoted by Reumann, John H, “Ps 22 at the Cross”, Interpretation vol 28, 1974, p 56Google Scholar.

11 “Prayer”, Doctrine and Life. August 1970, p 415.

12 'Transubstantiation: A Reply to G Egner”, New Blackfriars 1972, p 547.

13 Psalms, ET London, 1981, p 25Google Scholar.