What the What???

That Liz Lemon catchphrase popped into my head when I got up yesterday morning and realized it was the first day of the fall semester here at Duke Divinity School. What the heck happened to the summer, anyway??

Ok nerds, it's time to hit the books again. And what better way to get ready for that than Opening Convocation, a service at Duke that is so medieval it makes me giddy. (That is, because the awesomeness of most anything increases in direct proportion to how medieval it is. Except the bubonic plague, of course, which is just the opposite.)

Our processional hymn for the convocation was the great hymn of St. Francis of Assisi, "All Creatures of Our God and King" (#62 in the United Methodist Hymnal). The final verse is so powerful that I wanted to share it with you as a fitting way to praise our Creator at the beginning of a new academic year:

Let all things their Creator bless,
and worship him in humbleness,
O praise ye! Alleluia!
Praise, praise the Father, praise the Son,
and praise the Spirit, Three in One!
O praise ye! O praise ye!
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

For those of you young and old who are trekking back into the halls of academe during this time, may you go with a song of praise to the triune God on your lips and in your heart.

New Hymnal, Old Controversies

A new United Methodist Hymnal is currently under development. A hymnal revision committee was approved at the General Conference in 2008, and if all goes as planned, a new hymn book will come up for approval at the General Conference of 2012.

The hymnal is enormously influential in the life of the church, and so changes to it will be hotly contested by those who want to see particularly theological or political perspectives represented in it.

Controversy is already occurring, in fact. There's a Facebook group that's been set up to discuss various issues related to the new hymnal's development. Most of the questions that are asked are for informational purposes. But when the question turned to gender inclusive language for God, the discussion got heated.

I tend to think that most debates over God language do not take historic doctrine very seriously. Revisionists mostly tend to see God language as political and/or sociological, meaning that it is a product of time and place and should be adapted as often as needed to fit new situations. That kind of view doesn't look back into history much further than 1960. And that's a shame. It will be an even greater shame if the new hymnal waters down Trinitarian doctrine worse than the 1989 version did.

Here is a version of some comments I left on the discussion board about changing hymns and liturgies with each new edition of the hymnal:

When going about the process of altering historic hymns of the faith (or even contemporary ones), we need to take seriously our Trinitarian language for God. The persons of the Godhead have been revealed by as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - first in Scripture and then in definitive doctrinal form at Nicaea. This does not mean that God the Father is male, of course. But it does mean that we must use discipline in our language, and if Christian theological language/concepts do not agree with the political flavor du jour of society, then it is incumbent upon us to educate our people rather than descend into sloppiness in our theological grammar.

For instance, the Fatherhood of God is attested by Christ (e.g., Luke 10:21-22; John 10:29-30). The Son is the Son of the Father; when the Son became incarnate he was born to a mother - the Virgin Mary. Thus, attempts to rename God the Father as 'Mother' or as 'Parent' go directly against both the direct testimony of Scripture, the Trinitarian nature of the Godhead, and Calcedonian doctrine of the Incarnation. Moreover, attempts at non-gendered language (Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer) produce nothing but forms of the heresy of modalism.

Generally speaking, those who attempt to apply standards of the nouveau contextual theologies as a way to radically alter our God language do not take Trinitarian doctrine seriously. Words like 'justice' that are often thrown around to make revisionist arguments are used carelessly and speak more to the egalitarian aspirations of liberal democratic society than they do to our ecclesial existence. Justice as biblically-understood is a different, theological (rather than sociological) concept. It isn't that there's no overlap; of course there is at points. But to say that it is 'unjust' to women to refer to God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is entirely non-biblical.

I hope the hymnal revision committee will take these points seriously. The advantage of revising a hymnal every 25 years is the possibility of including new and fresh hymns that speak to the exaltation of the triune God in creative ways. The disadvantage is the inevitable political pressure to conform to whatever the current political climate happens to be. I hope our revision committee will take the riches of the Christian tradition seriously - riches that are much deeper and more life-giving than the panicky impulses to appear politically correct vis-a-vis the secular intelligentsia of this country in the immediate present.

Thanks be to God

Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices,
who wondrous things has done, in whom this world rejoices;
who from our mothers' arms has blessed us on our way
with countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.

O may this bounteous God through all our life be near us,
with ever joyful hearts and blessed peace to cheer us;
and keep us still in grace, and guide us when perplexed;
and free us from all ills, in this world and the next.

All praise and thanks to God the Father now be given;
the Son, and him who reigns with them in highest heaven;
the one eternal God, whom earth and heaven adore;
for thus it was, is now, and shall be evermore.

- by Martin Rinkart (1636); trans. Catherine Winkworth (1858);
The United Methodist Hymnal, 102