Psalmody and Apostasy

It’s odd, isn’t it, how things apparently unrelated can connect in your head.  “We are living in a day of great wickedness,” said the lady, and she was right, of course.  She had noticed that someone had nicked her neighbour’s wheelie-bin, and drawn the obvious conclusion.  We are indeed living in an age of great wickedness.

This story kept going round my brain as I tried to make sense of all the recent lamentations and groanings about the state of the Free Church.  It’s as if we were worse than Sodom and Gomorrah: a modern city of destruction peopled by apostate vow-breakers, and leaving wise men and good no alternative but to flee.

But why?  Has there been an outbreak of wheelie-bin thieving among Free Church ministers?  No, but something almost as bad.  Congregations are now allowed to sing hymns.  Could there be any clearer proof of an age of great wickedness, harbouring apostate churches?

Well, probably yes, because by this criterion all the churches in the world are synagogues of Satan, the only exceptions being the Free Presbyterian Church and the Free Church Continuing; and even they are not quite pure, because they’re proud of it.

The time has come, surely, for a sense of proportion and an end to the rhetoric of alarmism.  Elders who gladly worship in hymn-singing churches when on holiday and ministers who preach in them when invited should abandon the pretence that the Free Church is now facing the judgement of God simply because it has fallen into line with the churches of Martin Luther, Jonathan Edwards, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, John Stott and James Montgomery Boice.  How often, indeed, are Free Church preachers compared unfavourably to the giants who adorn the pulpits of other denominations!  And yet these giants, to a man, are hymn-singers.  Is it simply a case of “iteagean breagha air no h-eoin tha fad as” (the birds far away have lovely feathers)?

It’s not as if the symptoms of apostasy are hard to detect. Apostasy is when we deny gospel miracles like the virgin birth or the empty tomb; or catholic doctrines like the deity of Christ or the sinlessness of Jesus; or such great Protestant messages as justification by faith alone.

I would challenge the keenest theological pathologist to spot any of these symptoms in even the most “liberal” of our Free Church congregations.

When will our people, and especially those elders who have caught the Separatist bug, wake up and realise that in every Free Church pulpit there is one and the same message, safeguarded by a Confession of Faith which every single minister subscribes as a summary of his personal faith?

Is every Free Church minister a pulpit giant?  No!  But then neither is every teacher a Matthew MacIver nor every lawyer a Lord Mackay of Clashfern.  Suffice that each is faithful to his calling, and soldiers on faithfully, often amid relentless discouragement.

If the Free Church doesn’t wake up to appreciate the quality of my younger colleagues, it will soon find itself reduced to a collection of leaderless and bewildered vacancies.

But what of those “ordination vows”?  Aren’t we now under divine judgement because we harbour so many perjurers in our midst?

I had heard of these vows so often, and seen them so widely taken for granted, that I simply assumed that, yes, there are such vows, and we’ve all taken them.  But then it suddenly occurred to me to check; and I found to my astonishment that there are no such vows.  In fact, the phrase is entirely foreign to our practice.  The only vow mentioned is the one taken by witnesses giving evidence before a judicial hearing; and this oath is in a very explicit form:  “I swear by Almighty God….”

There is nothing remotely resembling this phraseology in our Ordination Services; and with good reason.  An oath is a solemn thing.  We swear on the Bible, we invoke God as witness, and we call down upon ourselves a divine curse should the oath be broken.

This is why our Fathers were sparing with oaths, and it certainly never occurred to them to ask ministers and elders to swear an oath of life-long, blind loyalty to a mere Act of Assembly.  They were content with asking us to approve, to adhere and to promise.  But they shrank from making us swear.

This is not to say that we are not bound to keep our word, whether sworn or not.  But we have no right to up the rhetoric as if Presbyterian ministers had taken the sorts of vows imposed on Cistercian monks.  We haven’t, and it’s just as well because there isn’t a man among us who has kept to the letter “the form of worship presently authorised” in the Church.  Few of us, for example, use the Lord’s Prayer, despite its being stipulated in our Directory; all of us engage in some sort of graveside ceremony, despite its being forbidden; and all of us avoid using the Gaelic Paraphrases despite their being recommended by the General Assembly.

The most puritanical among us is clearly very selective when it comes to which bits of our “vows” we are prepared to implement.

And let’s be careful before speaking ill of so-called “uninspired materials of praise”.   Luther and Calvin were rightly adamant that if a preacher is content simply to explain the Bible his sermons are the word of God.  The same is true of a hymn.  If it is scriptural, it is the word of God; and precisely because it is poetic and lyrical it has the power to set forth that word in a way that no prose can match.

On a personal note: I am perfectly happy singing the old psalms to the old tunes, and I have no personal agenda for change.  In fact, at my age whenever I meet an innovation I feel I am in the presence of an enemy.  But personal taste is not the issue.  There is a fundamental matter of principle.  Our songs must catch up with the fact that the Messiah has come and that the merest Christian child, the least in the Kingdom of God, now knows far more about him than King David could ever have dreamed of.

Those who disagree with the decision of the Plenary Assembly should at least acknowledge that there are consciences on both sides of the House.



This article first appeared in the West Highland Free Press, 3 February 2011.

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