Transcript
Our speaker this morning is Dr. Bernard W. Anderson, who is professor of Old Testament in our particular seminary in a sense emeritus, but we still count him as very operative and hardworking. He is going to talk to us during these messages in the area of theology in the Psalms. And as soon as we have a prayer together, I'm going to let him take you over. I'm not going into a long introduction because you can read about
him in our brochure. I simply point out that the fellow with the beard in the brochure right above his name is not Dr. Anderson, that's Dr. Farrell. I'm sure you knew the difference, but I needed to tell you that. Let us look to God in prayer, let us pray. O Lord God of our fathers, who rule us the nations of the earth, give the spirit of wisdom and godly fear to all of us, those who serve
in places that we think are humble and unimportant give, we pray thee, your guidance to those elected to places of authority over us in government. We pray, our Father, for understanding this morning that we are represented in this group by nations not only on this continent, but overseas as well. We're particularly thankful for the friendship we enjoy with our friends in Canada. O God, you who have founded the church and have promised to dwell in it
forever, enlighten it and sanctify it, we pray you by word and spirit. Give all pastors, all ministers, your grace that with joy and assurance we may guard and feed your sheep, looking to the great shepherd and bishop of souls. We pray your blessing upon all who serve in the rule of the church, in the care of the poor, in the ministry of praise, and in the teaching of your people. Strengthen them in their labors, give them
courage to witness a good confession and cause your church to increase more and more, that every knee may bow before you and every tongue confess Jesus Christ as Lord. Amen. Barney, welcome. Glad to have you do it for us. Thanks a lot, Jack. It's good to be back here. And on home ground, what I'll always consider home ground, though I'm in the so-called state of retirement in the beautiful area of Northwest Massachusetts, I so far
have found myself so engaged and committed that one of these days I may have to devise a way to retire from retirement. The celebration of the 500th anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther provides a marvelous occasion to turn to the Bible. The scriptural witness to what we are calling in this conference the reforming word. The reformation of the church, which Martin Luther instigated, was based on the rediscovery of the theology of the Bible. Not in
the sense that Luther presented a biblical theology such as might be taught as an independent study at a seminary today, but rather in the sense that as a dogmatic theologian, as a theologian of the church, he took the Bible with radical and existential seriousness as the authority for Christian life and Christian thought. We could celebrate Luther's rediscovery of the Bible in several ways during these periods together. For instance, by considering his view of the relationship between
the Old Testament and the New, by considering his conception of a canon within a canon, or by taking up his Christological view of Scripture. Since, however, my subject for this occasion is the theology of the Old Testament, I propose to turn to a single book of the Old Testament which was Martin Luther's favorite, namely the book of Psalms. Luther held a very high view of the place of the Psalms in Christian life and worship. In the
translation of the Psalter, which he composed in 1528, he put at the head of all of the translated Psalms a preface which I should like to read in part. Said Luther, a human heart is like a ship on a wild sea, driven by the storm winds from the four corners of the world. Here it is stuck with fear and worry about impending disaster. There comes grief and sadness because of present evil. Here breathes a breeze of
hope and of anticipated happiness. There blows security and joy in present blessings. These storm winds teach us to speak with earnestness, to open the heart and pour out what lies at the bottom of it. He goes on to say a little later on, what is the greatest thing in the Psalter but this earnest speaking amid these stormy winds of every kind? Where does one find finer words of joy than in the Psalms of praise and thanksgiving?
On the other hand, where do you find deeper, more sorrowful, more pitiful words of sadness than in the Psalms of lamentation? So when the psalmist speak of fear and hope, they use such words that no painter could so depict for you fear or hope, and no Cicero or other orator so portray them. And that they speak these words to God and with God, this, I repeat, is the best thing of all. This gives the words double
earnestness and life. He concludes his introduction to the translation of the Psalms, a 1528 translation, with these words. Hence it is that the Psalter is the book of all saints, and everyone in whatever situation he may be finds in that situation Psalms and words that fit his case, that suit him as if they were put there just for his sake, so that he could not put it better or find or wish for anything better. Well, we
turn to the Psalms today and this week not to deal with Luther's hermeneutic, but because Luther has directed us to a portion of the Old Testament that we surely know out of our Christian life together is crucial for our worship and theology. Now, the book of Psalms presents a special problem to the biblical theologian. Athanasius, the great Christian leader of the fourth century, reportedly said that the Psalms have a unique place in the Bible, for, said
Athanasius, most of the scripture speaks to us, whereas the Psalms speak for us. And that explains, by the way, why my study book on the Psalms called Out of the Depths, which is coming out, by the way, in a new and expanded edition this fall, that explains why that little study book carries the subtitle, The Psalms Speak for Us Today. Not to us, but for us. What a difference that preposition makes. There's much truth in Athanasius'
observation for much of the Bible. We say in the Christian community is the medium of God speaking. It is the word of God in human words. But the Psalms of the Old Testament are different. Here, for the most part, we find people addressing God in response to God's overture, addressing God in the moods of lament in times of distress, of thanksgiving in times of liberation, and in hymnic praise in times of rejoicing in the goodness and
the wonder of God's creation. In this sense, the Psalms speak for us by expressing the whole gamut of human response to God's grace and judgment, and thereby teaching us how to pray. As Luther said in the preface to his translation of the Psalms, these Psalms are expressed in such language that they really do express our prayer and our worship to God. So the Psalms are not word of God in the proper sense, but human words. That
is, the prayers of the people of God. And since these prayers in various moods and modes were intended to be sung, the Psalms are also songs of praise sung in response to God's initiative. Yet, as we well know from our hymn books, songs presuppose and express a theological understanding of who God is, how God and human beings are related to one another, and what we are called to be and do as we live in the presence
of God. The Psalms then represent a kind of theology in song, and it is our task in these days together to explore some of the theological dimensions of the praises of Israel. As you Hebraists know, the title for the book of Psalms in the Hebrew Bible is Tehillim, which means praises, the praises of Israel, the people of God. To be sure, these songs, these praises of Israel have a different resonance when used in Christian liturgy. If
I may borrow a figure of speech, which some of you who are musicians will appreciate, the same notes may have a different tone quality when the sounding board is changed. You know that, for instance, when we change the sounding board from a violin to a cello or from a harpsichord to a piano or from a piano to an organ. Even so, to Christian ears, and I say it is to Christian ears, the notes of the Psalms
have a fuller and deeper resonance when played against the sounding board of the Christian liturgy which celebrates the presence of God in human history through Jesus Christ. Accordingly, it is appropriate in our Christian worship services to conclude the responsive reading or the chanting of a psalm by singing together the ancient Christian hymn called the Gloria Patria. Christians, however, though playing the Psalms against the sounding board of Christian liturgy should be in tune with the psalmist, with
Israel's psalmist. And Christians should let the rich sonorities of Israel's faith be heard even though they are heard in a different context of worship. So let us listen to some of the theological notes that reverberate throughout the Psalms, the overtones of which are picked up in our Christian worship services. Now a note which sounds forth like a steady deep organ diapason is first of all the theme of the presence of God in the world, particularly in
the history of the Pilgrim people called Israel. The God whom Israel worships is transcendent to be sure. God is not a process of history. God is not a social ideology that justifies the existence and way of a people. God is not an idol of the human imagination. God is transcendent. God is holy. And that means that God is outside and beyond our human word world. Indeed, God is the sovereign before whom all people and all nations
must bow. As announced in Psalm 46, remember those words, be still and know, that is, acknowledge that I am God. Or as Moffat translated some years ago, give in and admit that I am God. And yet, the God who is distant in divine sovereignty and otherness is also near. The God who is a stranger in this world is also present, especially when the people of God gather for worship. Accordingly, the refrain that echoes through Psalm 46,
to which I have just alluded, a refrain that probably echoes through that Psalm three times, sounds the note, God is with us. Yahweh of hosts is with us. So one of the most frequent motifs in the Psalms is that of the face of God. Hebrew, panim, could be translated not only face, but the presence of God. And that's a motif, of course, that is picked up in the New Testament in a key verse, which we all
know very well, 2 Corinthians 4:6, which announces that the manifestation of the divine presence or face is in Jesus Christ, God who in the beginning caused light to shine out of darkness, has shown in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the of the love of God in the face of Jesus Christ. So you see, one of the fundamental motifs of the Psalms is the panim, the face or the presence of
God. Here it is picked up very beautifully in Psalm 41, a well-known Psalm to all of you, which begins with the motif of the deer, the heart that pants and sniffs for fresh and running water. And so the psalmist says, comparing himself or herself to that deer, my being thirsts for God, for the living God, when shall I come and behold the face of God? Here the psalmist is not speaking of a mystical experience. Like
Wordsworth's lines in his famous poem, I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts, rather to seek the face of God in the psalmist's idiom is an expression for attending the public worship services in the temple. Nevertheless, it would be wrong, I think, to reduce the meaning of this language only to a liturgical presence, maybe as we want to do at times, even in the Christian community, that is, to reduce the
presence of God to the presence in the temple. For the psalmist are also very much concerned about the presence of God in human history out there in the world where people are suffering and are being oppressed. Israel's worship, as reflected in the Psalter, is based on the witness to divine revelation which is enshrined in the very core of the Torah, the Pentateuch, especially in the book of Exodus. Remember what lies at the heart of the whole
Torah tradition, the announcement that the holy God, who is not a phenomenon of the human world and who is not to be represented by any icon, any image, became manifest to Moses and a band of slaves as the power of holiness in the world. Holiness experienced, however, not as impersonal power, but as redemptive concern and ethical demand. In short, Israel's worship is based on root experiences. Here I am using the language of the Jewish philosopher Emile
Falkenhaym in his little book, God's Presence in History, root experiences, as Falkenhaym puts it, which lie at the very source and the fountain of the whole Torah tradition, namely the presence of God, the presence of God as saving power, and the presence of God as demanding power. These are the root experiences which lie at the very source of the whole biblical tradition. So from the very first, the presence of the holy God in the world as
redemptive concern and ethical demand was experienced as revelation, and it was experienced in that very moment of revelation as radical wonder, wonder that found expression at the outset in song and in story. Such spontaneous awe and radical amazement provides the motive for praise in an old poetic couplet known as the Song of Miriam. You find that old poetic fragment back there at the very climax of the Exodus story, Exodus 15:21. Some scholars maintain that it may
have been composed by an eyewitness of that event, the event of the intrusion, the presence of God in human history to a band of slaves. Remember, sing to Yahweh. Glorious is he, horse and the rider he has hurled into the sea. Miriam's song belongs to the literary genre of the hymn, the oldest example of the hymn which we find in the Old Testament, and later on this week we're going to take up the subject of the
hymns of the Psalter. The Song of Miriam begins with an invitation to the whole community to join in praise to Yahweh, for the verb sing is in the plural in Hebrew, sing to Yahweh. And this hymn proceeds to indicate the basis or the motive for worship. Worship is not motivated by some general awareness of God's greatness in the cosmos, God's far-flung glory and dominion, but rather worship begins and is motivated by the experience of God's
saving presence in a situation of distress when, humanly speaking, there was no way out, no exit, no exodus. Now I want to remind you that it is highly significant that Israel's history of worship, Israel's whole history of worship which reaches its climax in the Psalms of the Psalter was initiated in that crucial hour at the very beginning of the tradition when women, under the leadership of Miriam, sang and danced to music, inviting the people to join
them. I especially like to remind Roman Catholics of that when I'm speaking on this subject and considering the problem of women's ordination. Notice how at the very beginning of the tradition, the liturgical, the Psalmic tradition, we have Miriam's song, Miriam's song. Israel's praise to the liberating God, the Lord of the Rings, finds expression in Psalms, long Psalms, which are not only found outside of the Psalter, such as the Song of the Sea, Exodus 15:1 through
18, a very great and old song, and of course, the Songs of the Psalter, many Psalms of the Psalter which reverberate with that motive of liberation from the sea, like Psalm 114, which began when Israel went forth from Egypt, or the storytelling Psalms, sometimes called the Salvation History Psalms, like the great narrative Psalm here in Psalm 136. I think there are Bibles at the pews and you may want to turn with me to some of these
passages of Scripture. Psalm 136, one of the great storytelling Psalms, which is punctuated with the antiphonal refrain, for God's chesed endures forever. The chesed, the loyalty, that's a good way to translate that. Revised really means loyalty or faithfulness. Notice how that antiphonal refrain rings and reverberates throughout this long storytelling Psalm. And notice too how this Psalm ascribes praise to God in a series of who phrases. Who, who, who. You see how narrative it is. You can't
praise, which is formulated in a who expression. So Israel praises God, who brought Israel out from among the Egyptians, and then the refrain, for the faithfulness of Yahweh abides forever. Who led his people through the wilderness, and then the refrain. Who gave their land as a heritage a refrain. Who remembered us in our low estate. Who gives us, who gives food to all flesh. You see this is praise of God in a narrative mode. In the
mode of storytelling and song. This is poetry that tells a story. And that mode of praise we are now learning more and more was characteristic of Israel's faith at all levels of the tradition. Which we finally receive their final form and compilation in the Pentateuch or the Torah as we have received it. Surely we in the Christian community realize how deeply indebted we are to the Israelite community for this narrative mode of praise. Various theologians have
called our attention to it. H. Richard Niebuhr in his great book on the Book of Revelation. Amos Wilder in his book on the language of the gospels. They all remind us that the early Christian church in its own expression of faith has relied very heavily upon the Israelite tradition which characteristically ascribes praise to God by telling a story. By using the narrative mode. The God who, who and who. So the God whom Israel worships is the
God who is with the people. Who is present in their midst. And I will have to say in a very summary form that narrative praise of the liberating God expresses two major religious convictions. First the God whom Israel worships is the God who is involved with human beings. Who takes them seriously. Who is concerned about their situation. Yahweh is not the remote apathetic God of the Greek philosophers as Abraham Heschel reminds us in his great book
on the prophets. But rather the God of pathos. The God who is sensitive to human suffering and responsive to human prayer. And secondly the God whom Israel worships is the God of the sufferers. As Martin Buber has reminded us. Yahweh does not support the great imperial structures of power. Nor does Yahweh cater to the aristocracy but Yahweh comes to the side of the oppressed. The poor. The weak. The powerless. Anyone in Israelite society. Anyone in the
world may appeal to this saving God with the assurance of being heard. But let's move on to another note that is struck in the Psalter. We've already said that the Psalms with many voices are human responses to the holy God who chooses to reveal the divine self. That is to enter into relationship with a people and to become God who chooses to be known. The Israelite people do not worship an unknown God. A nameless God. But
rather the God who chooses to be known. Who chooses to have identity. Who chooses to be God to a people. And this leads us to an important issue in the exposition of the theology of the Psalms. Namely the name of God. Our attention is called to this matter within the Psalter itself for one group of Psalms. Namely Psalms 42 through 83 show a decided preference to choose the general name for God Elohim instead of the special
divine name Yahweh which the revised standard version translates as the Lord. Some statistician has computed that the divine name Elohim appears 200 times in the Psalter whereas Yahweh appears only 43. This is in the Elohistic Psalter. And in the rest of the Psalter, Yahweh appears 642 times and Elohim only 29. So apparently in the circle of worship represented by the Elohistic Psalter which is now buried in the heart of the book of Psalms, the special divine
name was avoided either out of reverence or perhaps out of the desire to use a more ecumenical term. In any case, two Psalms appear in almost identical form. Namely Psalm 14 which uses the name Yahweh and Psalm 53 which uses the name Elohim. This is a very striking phenomenon. Now the problem that emerges in the book of Psalms also appears in modern worship when the Bible is used. We are aware of the fact that in the
biblical period the fear of taking the name of God in vain led to the use of various substitutes for the personal name Yahweh such as avonai, holy one, heaven, think of the kingdom of heaven, or even name, hallowed be thy name. The common synagogue practice even to the present day was to substitute for the sacred name, that is the Tetragrammaton, those four mystic Hebrew letters, the word avonai, that is Lord. That practice is exemplified in the
Greek translation of the Old Testament where Yahweh is rendered as kurios. And since the early Christian community read the scriptures of Israel in Greek, this synagogue custom is also found in New Testament quotations from the Old Testament. This synagogue convention has been adopted widely in modern Christian worship. The older form, Jehovah, an artificial construct, has been superseded by the masculinism avonai, which translates into English as the Lord, into German as der Herr, into Spanish as el
señor and so forth, terms for mister. This practice has advantages, but it also leads to difficulties in the use of the Psalms. The Book of Common Prayer, in its preface to the Psalter, has an explanatory note pointing out that the synagogue practice is to be followed except for two passages where, I quote from the Book of Common Prayer, the context requires that the divine name be spelled out. And those Psalms are Psalm 68:4 and Psalm
83 verse 18. Let's see what Psalm 83 verse 18 says. Well, we read here, let them know that thou alone, whose name is, art the most high over all the earth. Let them know that thou alone, whose name is, art the most high over all the earth. So the Book of Common Prayer insists that at this point, in liturgy, the name Jehovah is to be used. The Jerusalem Bible, as you know, a Roman Catholic translation, freely
uses Jehovah. And this is the liturgical practice in many Catholic worship services today, as I know from experience of attending the Mass. So, you see, we encounter a problem, a major theological issue. That is, the meaning of the personal name Jehovah and its use in worship. With the exception of the Elohistic Psalter, where there is reticence to use the divine name, the Psalter as a whole ascribes praise to Jehovah, who is God. Bless Jehovah, my whole
being, and all the powers within me. Bless his holy name. That's the way the magnificent 103rd Psalm begins. Living as we do in an increasingly cosmopolitan world, this Israelite zeal to know God's name and to call upon God's name in worship sounds strange. There's great appeal in the mystical religions of the East, which declare that the divine is unnameable. The naming of God, it is said, is a limitation which reduces God to the realm of human
experience or to cultural relativity. How then are we to understand the announcement enshrined at the very heart of the Torah that the holy God, the one who transcends our human world and is therefore beyond our naming, chooses to be known and worshiped as the God who has a personal name? Well, you know how this momentous announcement is reported in the 3rd chapter of Exodus, the story about the burning bush. Moses attempts to sidestep his commission to
be God's spokesman by protesting that if he goes back to his kinsfolk in Egypt and reports a divine visitation, they will want to know the name of the deity. And at first, the answer is given in enigmatic terms, translated usually, I will be who I will be, a phrase, of course, which in Hebrew is a wordplay on the name Yahweh. Apparently, the Israelite narrator wants to suggest that God's name is not given lightly. Lest people take
it in vain by attempting to manipulate and domesticate God in the world, as occurred in the incident, the story of the making of the golden calf. So God takes a risk in being named, in becoming a part of the human world, but taking this risk, so the story goes, God tells Moses to say to the Israelites that he has been sent by Yahweh, the God of the ancestors, this is my name forever, and thus I am
to be remembered through all generations, Exodus 3:15. So in this manner, God graciously enters into a personal I and thou relationship and becomes a participant in the story of the people. Well, what's in a name? The question asked in Shakespeare's tragedy, Romeo and Juliet. Among the ancient Israelites, the name was highly significant. A person's name was understood to be the expression of the nature or the identity of the person. We could understand that psychology to
some degree, I believe, for nothing is more pathetic than a man who because of amnesia cannot remember his own name, that is, who he is, his own identity. A person's name designates the self that has a particular history, a unique life story, and as we all know, to be introduced to a person by name, if that introduction leads into any depth of relationship, is to perceive and to some degree to enter into the life story of
the person who bears that name. Analogically, and we must remember that religious language is symbolic and analogic, analogically, God's name is the disclosure of God's identity, of who God is, of God's relation to a people in their story. The name of God signifies the holy God who turns personally to a people, whose self, that is, whose identity is disclosed in the people's historical experience. It's significant that an ancient formula for the act of worship is to
call upon the name of Yahweh, and that idiom appears in the Psalms in all of the genres, that is, the laments, the thanksgivings, and the hymns. Well, etymologies are interesting, whether we think of our own personal name in its etymology or whether we think of the name of God, Yahweh, but the name, let me remind you again, is the carrier of a history, a story, everything that makes you, you. And that is true according to Israelite
tradition of the God disclosed to this people. Israel does not worship God in a general sense, Elohim. God is a kind of cosmic X. Most people today, at least in the United States, seem to believe in God in general, and many religious services appeal to the layperson's definition of God as a vague, oblong blur. The faith of the psalmist, however, is not a faith in God in general, but faith in the God who has identity, who
is known by relationships, and who participates in the story of our life, to use the expression of H. Richard Niebuhr in the book to which I alluded a few moments ago. Therefore, the God whom Israel praises is again and again identified by who clauses, which may be a narrative reduced to a single sentence, just a single sentence, as in the prologue to the decalogue, I am Yahweh, your God, who brought you out of the land of
Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Indeed, this event of liberation, this event of liberation was in a profound sense the key to the identity of God, and hence to the will and the purpose of God in the world. The God known personally in the shared history of Israel is the God who liberates, and whose liberation sets the pattern for human action and ethical behavior. It's that simple and it's that profound. Hosea puts it this way,
speaking in the name of God, I am Yahweh, your God, from the land of Egypt. You know no God besides me, and there is no liberator except me. Hosea 13 verse 4. Well, perhaps we can begin to understand why the Psalms emphasize the name of God. Even in the Elohistic Psalter, where the name is revered by seeking a substitute, the personal name of God, Yahweh, expresses, let me summarize, God's being in relation to a people, God's
turning to a people in personal relationship, God's participation in the drama of Israel's history. To know the name, that is, the identity of God is to be granted a gracious privilege, namely to address God personally in prayer, to call upon the name of Yahweh. More than that, worship is based on and it is motivated by the disclosure of who God is. The God who is concerned about the plight of human beings, the God who chooses to
take part in the human situation, and above all, the God who is faithful, the God of Chesed. As one psalmist says, I quote now Psalm 9 verse 10, those who know thy name put their trust in thee. Now, from this point, we should venture into the various ways in which Israel expressed the divine human relationship, the various patterns of symbolization in which the relationship between God and people was expressed. The revelation of God is not the
revelation of the inaccessible being of God, God in God's self, but rather the revelation of God's relation to human history. As in a drama, God is known only on the basis of the actions that establish relations and therefore challenge a human response. Now, the biblical term for relationship between God and people is covenant, Hebrew bereith. From at least the time of the post-Reformation theologian John Koch or Kokeus, who developed a federal or covenant theology, to
the Swiss Old Testament theologian Walter Eickroth, whose work on Old Testament theology was a major theological breakthrough in the history of biblical theology in the modern period, covenant has been regarded as a key to the understanding of the Bible. We have come to realize in biblical circles, however, that covenant is not a unitary term for expressing the relationship between Yahweh and Israel. Rather, there are several covenants or modes of covenant symbolization, each of which constitutes a
symbolic pattern or a linguistic gestalt. I wish there were time to go into this more at length. I can only summarize three of the covenants that are mentioned in this altar, the Mosaic Covenant pattern. Remember the famous Hittite suzerainty treaties with vassals based on the treaty-makers' benevolent deeds, including legal stipulations and upheld by sanctions of blessing and curse. That's the Mosaic Covenant pattern, very conditional. A psalm in that covenant tradition is Psalm 50, which in
the Revised Standard Version has the inspired translation, I will accept no bull from your house. Try that as a text from Psalm 50 sometime. Or there is the Abrahamic Covenant, the covenant of Genesis 17, which is connected with the whole priestly symbolization of the tabernacling presence of Yahweh in the people. And that covenant, that Abrahamic Covenant, is reflected above all in the exquisite Psalm 103. I wish we had time to read verses 7 through 11. And
then there's the royal or the Davidic Covenant, which draws upon the cosmic symbolization of king and temple, two institutions that were alien to Israel's earliest traditions, draws upon those salvific institutions in order to understand the relationship between Yahweh in a more universal and ecumenical perspective as spacious as creation. So you see there are various patterns of covenant symbolization which are used in order to express that fundamental relationship between God and people, which is signified preeminently in
God's giving the personal name, Yahweh. Well suffice it to say then that the various modes of covenant relationship express with their various theological accents what it means to live in the presence of God, in the face of God. Their common theme, if I may use an expression of Abraham Heschel in his common theme, is coexistence with God. Coexistence with the God who is known personally by name and who participates in the human drama. The Psalms in
all their variety and richness express the meaning of living in the presence of God. The judgment of God, which condemns human presumption and exposes human sin. The vindication of God, which achieves justice for all who are oppressed. And the mercy of God, which in the last analysis is not dealt out according to our sins or measured according to our iniquities. The book of Psalms in its final form however, the 150 Psalms composed and finalized in the
period of the second temple is dominated by the figure of David and hence by the royal or Davidic covenant theology associated with the symbolism of Zion, the city of God. It's appropriate then for me to conclude by referring as I did at the beginning to Psalm 46, the poem that inspired Luther's great reformation hymn, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. The theme of confidence in the transcendent God, the whose sovereignty over the cosmos and history is
centered in Zion is developed in this Psalm in three strophes as I have already remarked. Each of which is punctuated with a choral refrain, Yahweh of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our bulwark, our fortress. In the first strophe of this Psalm, the poet draws on mythical language. The poet draws to describe the shaking of the foundations of the world, language that I think reverberates in our own anxieties today. Even though the earth
should be shaken with cosmic tumult and even though the waters of chaos were threatened to overwhelm us, God known personally as Yahweh is the transcendent source of meaning and security. So Yahweh of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our bulwark. In the second strophe, the poet also draws on mythical language to portray the symbolic meaning of Zion, the city of God. The motif picked up of course in Augustine's great work. Zion is portrayed
as an Olympus, a mountain of the gods as it were, through which runs a marvelous river of God. Welling up from the subterranean abyss, this life-giving river which erupts at the center or the omphalos, the navel of the earth signifies that God is in the midst of Zion and present with us, the people of God. Therefore the people may trust that even when threatened with conflict and catastrophe, divine help will come surely with the break
of dawn. And so Yahweh of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our bulwark. The climactic third strophe opens by inviting worshippers to contemplate the awesome deeds of God on the earth. Seen under the aspect of God's majestic sovereignty, the military activities of the nations, evident certainly at this very moment, the nations who foolishly suppose that their power is decisive are all in vain. For above the tumult and shouting of history, the community of
faith hears the stentorian command of the God whose deity must be recognized, yield, and acknowledge that I am God. I am exalted among the nations, exalted in the earth. And so Yahweh of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our bulwark. Martin Luther's Reformation hymn has given the tones of Psalm 46 a new resonance. A new resonance which shows how the notes heard in Israel's worship services have a different ring when played against the
sounding board of the Christian liturgy. Luther's hymn affirms that God is a bulwark against, I quote, the prevailing flood of mortal ills. That hymn says that we would be lost in the battle with dark and demonic forces if we trusted in our own resources. And that hymn affirms that through Jesus Christ, God speaks in a stentorian fashion the divine word which is above all earthly powers. A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing. Tomorrow
in our further exploration of the Psalter, we are going to consider the theme, the eclipse of God. Before you leave, I want to just mention that this afternoon our conversation with Dr. Anderson will be in the dining room at four o 'clock rather than over in Spear Library. Also, you will find, I think, if you feel crowded, that you can hear very well down in the Campus Center Auditorium. There are about 40 people there and I
was listening to you and came through very well. If you find yourself a little crowded next hour, you can again go up into the dining room and it will come up there very well and it's comfortable. No food but it will be nice. Thank you, sir, very much. We're dismissed.