Reformation Treasures: Hymnody on The Commemoration of Philipp Nicolai, Johann Heermann and Paul Gerhardt: Hymnwriters and Confessors, 26 October

This painting is by the English artist and poet, William Blake. It depicts the Lord’s Parable of the 5 wise and the 5 foolish virgins. This parable is the basis of Philip Nicolai’s hymn, Wake, Awake for Night is Flying.

Almighty God, the apostle Paul taught us to praise You in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. We thank You this day for those who have given to Your Church great hymns, especially Your servants Philipp Nicolai, Johann Heermann, and Paul Gerhardt. May Your Church never lack hymnwriters who through their words and music give You praise. Fill us with the desire to praise and thank You for Your great goodness; through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Bio: 

• Philipp Nicolai (1556–1608) was a pastor in Germany during the Great Plague, which took the lives of 1,300 of his parishioners during a sixth-month period. In addition to his heroic pastoral ministry during that time of stress and sorrow, he wrote the texts for “Wake, Awake, for Night Is Flying” and “O Morning Star, How Fair and Bright,” known, respectively, as the king and queen of the Lutheran chorales. 
• Johann Heermann (1585–1647), also a German pastor, suffered from poor health as well as from the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). His hymn texts are noted for their tenderness and depth of feeling. 
• Paul Gerhardt (1607–1676) was another Lutheran pastor who endured the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War. By 1668 he lost his pastoral position in Berlin (for refusing to compromise his Lutheran convictions), and endured the death of four of his five children and his wife. He nevertheless managed to write 133 hymns, all of which reflect his firm faith. Along with Martin Luther he is regarded as one of Lutheranism’s finest hymn writers.(From The Treasury of Daily Prayer, Concordia Publishing House)

Reflection:  These pastors and hymn writers, with their congregations and families,  suffered plague, war and sickness.  What sustained these men through such turmoil, when the ground beneath them was shaking and then write some of the greatest hymns for the Church’s song?  They may have seen plague, war and sickness as God’s judgment and the Word of God makes us stop at His judgment so that we hear His grace in Christ who suffered our plagues, wars and sickness.  We have expectations of life being easy but not so long ago, man did not have such an expectation.  Expectation, though, is not hope. Such calamities remind us we can not fix the world so we can look again, not to our selves, but to where true joy is found: The rock of salvation, Jesus Christ.

Faith can only have something or someone to seize for salvation and this is the justification of the sinner by Christ’s Atonement, the Savior, once and for all from the Cross, preached and taught into our ears and hearts, by sermons, yes!  But also by hymnody.  

In the Service Book and Hymnal (1958), the former worship book of the ELCA’s predecessor Lutheran denominations,  the forward states that they wanted the hymns to be more “devotional” and have a less of  a “didactic” content.   Nowadays, the search for the mere “devotional” devolves into a music that makes me feel a certain way. The didactic or teaching content of Lutheran hymnody is so important because it is the objective Word of God written in Scripture sung in words and music so we can learn and learn to praise aright in heartfelt devotion. Consider “Wake, Awake, for Night is Flying”:  this hymn is the Parable of the Foolish and Wise Virgins (Matthew 25: 1-13) set to music. It is usually sung in Advent, pointing to the time on earth when the Bridegroom arrived and the time to come when those who are eager for His appearing, He will come again.  It is didactic and  instructional.  Dispensationalist and millenialist false doctrine is shown for what it is in that magnificent hymn of Scripture by the true and correct doctrine of our Lord’s parousia, in Scripture, correctly taught. He comes not when we expect it as chiliast timetables lay out and get wrong.  He comes at the fulfilled time for those who long for His appearing (cf. 2 Timothy 4:8).

At Concordia Junior College, I took a one credit course on hymnody. Professor “Ollie” Rupprecht pointed out that J.S. Bach had some 80 volumes in his library (quite an expensive acquisition in that day) and 60 volumes were on Lutheran Doctrine. This doctrine has been derided as too “sterile”.  It is not.  Like Jack Webb in Dragnet said: “The facts, ma’am, just the facts.” The objective justification by the life, word and work of Jesus Christ is the reason to sing in the midst of the world when the “nations rage” and “kingdoms totter” (Ps. 46: 6).

We give thanks to the Lord, the Conductor of the  “choir immortal” (from “Wake, Awake”),   for all church organists (underpaid and being squeezed out by contemporary worship), church musicians, choirs and the Lord’s people who sing their praise of their Lord through hymns replete with the Scripture, that is, the Word of God and so the Holy Spirit.  Pray for your organist, choir director, choir members and church musicians in petition and  praise to the Lord and tell them all this  Sunday:  thanks!

“Wake, Awake, for Night is Flying” (#516, Lutheran Service Book) by Philipp Nicolai

3. Now let all the heav’ns adore Thee,
Let men and angels sing before Thee,
With harp and cymbal’s clearest tone.
Of one pearl each shining portal,
Where, dwelling with the choir immortal,
We gather round Thy radiant throne.
No vision ever brought,
No ear hath ever caught,
Such great glory;
Therefore will we Eternally
Sing hymns of praise and joy to Thee.

“O Christ, Our True and Only Light” (#839, Lutheran Service Book) by Johann Heerman

1. O Christ, our true and only Light,
Enlighten those who sit in night;
Let those afar now hear Thy voice
And in Thy fold with us rejoice.

“O Sacred Head, Now Wounded” (#450, Lutheran Service Book) by Paul Gerhardt

8. What language shall I borrow
To thank Thee, dearest Friend,
For this, Thy dying sorrow,
Thy pity without end?
Oh, make me thine forever!
And should I fainting be,
Lord, let me never, never,
Outlive my love for Thee.

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“Charlie Hebdo” Style Cartoons Are Really Nothing New

 

It has not been widely reported that the French satirical magazine, “Charlie Hebdo” has also published offensive cartoons about Christianity.  One in particular is lurid and can be found here.  This is their equivalency for the cartoons about Mohammed.  They are against all and any religion.  We should be shocked but the difference is that Christians did not surround Hebdo offices and  killed the writers. As Anthony Sacramone  wrote in his acute observations about this satirical magazine:

There is no right not to be offended, a lesson many in the United States have yet to learn. But there is a right to be offended,  nevertheless,  whether by ideas that do not reflect back to you a precious self-conception or by sloppy or creepy satire. But ideas you find wanting should be countered with better ideas, and sloppy or creepy satire, especially sloppy or creepy satire, should be met with better and more pointed satire. Not with violence, not with threats of violence, and not with threats to one’s livelihood.

 My goal, though, in this article is not to  reiterate the many keen observations about this sad event, and build upon them, but it is historical on nature.

In looking at the Hebdo anti-Christian cartoon the other evening,  I remembered another cartoon, actually a graffito.  This 3rd century graffito was found in the ruins of a soldiers’ room in a building used for training  imperial guards, on the Palatine Hill, in Rome.  It shows a man in front of a crucified man with the head of jackass and the inscription reads:  “Alexamenos worships his god”.

This graffito clearly indicates the historical veracity of Christ’s crucifixion, and continuing from the Lord’s Cross and Resurrection, His crucifixion was central for Christians, as the Apostle Paul wrote a 2 centuries  before this cartoon:  “We preach Christ and Him crucified” (1 Corinthians 1: 23).  Alexamenos had heard this Gospel and came to faith by the work of the Holy Spirit and he was mocked for worshiping this crucified god.   I find this graffito as crude and offensive as the Charlie Hebdo cartoon which  depicts the God who is love, as perverted love. Obviously, the graffito’s  artist is mocking Alexamenos’ faith for laughs, as is part of the intent of the French 21st century cartoonist.  

I came across a research paper on this graffito and it will be the basis of this historical article which is worth the read in its entirety:   “The Palatine Graffito: A Mimic Interpretation” by L. L. Welborn (Fordham University,  Macquarie University”  All the quotes, unless otherwise indicated, are from this paper.

First:  In the second century, the Roman Empire was severely persecuting Christians.  It is known that there were many Roman soldiers who were Christians.  In a persecution of this magnitude, a Roman Christian soldier would have been one of the first to be singled out and mocked…maybe more.  Alexamenos was probably such a soldier and a Christian.  

Secondly,it was also quite common to denigrate people by comparing them to a jackass. especially, “… the ass-man was a theme featured in ancient mimes.” This is still prevalent today as in the slur, You’re nothing but a jackass.

Thirdly, extant plays and writings of that time have the theme mocking Christians and their practices and belief, even the  crucifixion of Christ or of crucifixion in general for its comedic possibilities, especially in mime theater.

“…“the Christian” became the newest type of the mimic fool upon the popular stage. Gregory of Nazianzus complains: “The Christians now serve as a theater-act, not before angels and men, as Paul did, but before the lowest level of the populace.”26 Christian baptism was a favorite subject of ridicule in the mime, as we learn from the Martyrdom of Porphyrius.”  (Note:  Gregory of Nazianzus was one of the Church Fathers)

“The soldier who sketched the Palatine graffito had probably seen such mimes, and had seen Christians, if not Christ himself, upon a stage-cross”

In one such play a known actor  Genesius, a mime, a pagan,  confessed his faith in Jesus Christ  in a play mocking the Christian faith!  He was eventually horribly tortured and killed.

 The  depiction of crucifixion upon the stage was not specific to the persecution of Christianity in that time period of the Empire. Rather, the crucifixion was a well-established subject of the mime. Evidently, in one such popular  1st century play, Laureolus, about the crucifixion of a runaway slave who becomes the leader of a band of thieves, acted on stage, the Jewish historian Josephus reports,

““a great quantity of artificial blood flowed down from the one crucified.”

In one production of this play,

” Suetonius notes that the performance was immediately followed by a humorous afterpiece in which “several mimic fools so vied with one another in giving evidence of their proficiency at dying that the stage swam in blood.”

Again, this was done for laughs.  Wellborn then has some interesting speculations about the reason for such gallows humor.  And he concluded that the graffito’s artist and Alexamenos’ fellow soldier, was doing this as well for laughs: a crucified god, indeed!

Prof. Wellborn concludes his paper and I quote it, almost in full, because it is cogent and powerful in the discussion about the mocking of the Christian faith in our day as we see in Charlie Hebdo and around the world (emphases my own):

The crucifixion of an unfortunate fool, one who was socially inferior or physically defective, was a welcome reminder of what it was like to be a fully human part of society, and thus invulnerable to such cruel punishment. For such persons as our imperial guard, the representation of the crucifixion of a misfit in an artistic medium, such as a graffito or the mime, must have been especially pleasurable…

Our conclusion with respect to the Palatine graffito may take the form of an argument a minori ad maius (note: “from the lesser to the greater): if the crucifixion of a slave or a poor man provoked humor, for the reasons given above, then how much more the faith in a crucified god. That one who had suffered the death of a slave and had experienced the extreme limit of human misery, an ass-man, should be worshipped as a god—this was surely the purest folly! That a piece of human trash, one of those whom life had demolished, should be hailed as “god”—was the most laughable scenario imaginable.

Thus, in the Palatine graffito, the central mystery of the Christian faith is parodied as a scene from the mime, in which the crucified god of the Christians is mocked as a grotesque, much-slapped ass.

Then Professor Wellborn asks an important question:

And what of that central mystery—the message about the cross—and its appeal to Alexamenos? On the principle that an effective parody must always preserve the thing parodied, may we venture to ask why Alexamenos worships a crucified figure with an ass’s head as his god? In the mime, and in other literature written from “the grotesque perspective,” we discover that the fate of the fool is the source of a “laughter of liberation”…The fool in the mime is ugly, deformed, and beaten. Yet, for the common people who delighted in the mime, the fool was a locus of value and meaning.  This psycho-social dynamic explains the extraordinary popularity of the Laureolus mime (Note:  the 1st century mime, I talked about above) , in which a runaway slave was crucified on stage.

Alexamenos’ faith in a crucified god builds upon this dynamic and supersedes it. In the message that the Son of God had died the contemptible death of a fool, a little man like Alexamenos heard that he had been “chosen” by God. Paul explained the mysterious “calling” of the crucified God two centuries before Alexamenos believed:

“Consider your calling, brothers and sisters, that not many of you were wise in a human sense, not many powerful, not many well-born; but God chose the foolish of the world,…and God chose the weak of the world,… and God chose the low-born of the world and the despised, mere nothings” (1 Cor. 1:26-28).

Or, to put it the other way around, the message that a piece of human garbage, a half-man and half-ass, one of those whom life had demolished, and who had touched bottom, has been vindicated by God and is now “the Lord of glory”—this message was a power capable of rescuing those who trusted in it from despair over the nothingness of their lives. So that, even if they live in the shadow of the cross and die a bit every day, and even if the cross should be their tomb, as it was  of their fathers and grandfathers, even there life would have value and meaning, because the One who died in this contemptible way was the Son of God.”

He still is the Son of God.  Alexamenos knew by faith that Jesus is Lord.  This is the work of the Holy Spirit and so it was for Alexamenos to hang in there.  I think the Hebdo cartoon above  depicts that it is laughable for a god to so  love that His love is poured out through His beloved Son for us all for a people as contemptible as Alexamenos, the graffito artist, you and me. 

In a Roman age as our own, when love is so perverted, a cartoonist makes fun of that love by the only love he knows, perverted love, though he would defend that perverted ‘love’ and its expression,  anal intercourse as a secular sacred right.

In an article in the 1/10-1/11, 2015 Weekend Wall Street Journal, “The Mocking Tradition Behind Charlie Hebdo”,  the writer, Dr. Weber, professor of French at Barnard College,  points out that in France the mocking of Christianity beginning with the philosophes, such as Voltaire, has a long pedigree.  She thinks that this 500 years of French anti-clericalism, anti-Catholicism and anti-religion of any of sort (especially Judaism), the desired result has been,

“…Catholicism has finally become “banalized” (that is, lost its status as a taboo subject), in a neologism coined by Charb himself (note: the murdered editor of CharlieHebdo) in 2012. He went on to say, “We have to keep at until Islam is as banalized as Catholicism.”  

In other words, it’s open season on any religion, but Charb got it wrong. “Banal” means  “lacking force or originality; trite; common place”. For a faith that is trite and unoriginal he sure kept going after  Catholicism and Christianity.  As a Christian and a pastor, let Charb’s followers continue on. It’s been going on since a soldier scraped into a stone wall a crude drawing mocking Alexamenos’ faith.   The faith has lasted and so will the mocking.  Did not our Lord say that His Church built upon the Rock will last and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it?  Did He not say we would be maligned, persecuted, and even martyred?  As Lutheran Satire put it (probably by Pr. Hans Fiene):  

“When the devil is mocked, he sheds the blood of the mockers. When God was mocked, He shed His blood on the mockers.”

I wonder what Alexamenos did when he may have found out who did the graffito…he probably did not burn out his home, killing his family,  nor kill his fellow soldier.  Not even hit him because Jesus said to turn the other cheek.  I would guess he prayed for his fellow soldier because Jesus said pray for your enemies, and He did so from the Cross that would be mocked…right there at the foot of His Cross, see St. Matthew 27:  39ff.

A Facebook friend, Dave Carlin, pointed out that in the Roman Catholic Church in the ’50s, they would end every Mass with a prayer for the conversion of Russia.  Maybe we should be so praying for the conversion of Islamic nations, for the neo-pagan European nations…and our own.

 

1. Lord Jesus Christ, with us abide,
For round us falls the eventide;
Nor let Thy Word, that heavenly light,
For us be ever veiled in night.

2. In these last days of sore distress
Grant us, dear Lord, true steadfastness
That pure we keep, till life is spent,
Thy holy Word and Sacrament.

3. Lord Jesus, help, Thy Church uphold,
For we are sluggish, thoughtless, cold.
Oh, prosper well Thy Word of grace
And spread its truth in every place!

4. Oh, keep us in Thy Word, we pray;
The guile and rage of Satan stay!
Oh, may Thy mercy never cease!
Give concord, patience, courage, peace.

5. O God, how sin’s dread works abound!
Throughout the earth no rest is found,
And falsehood’s spirit wide has spread,
And error boldly rears its head.

6. The haughty spirits, Lord, restrain
Who o’er Thy Church with might would reign
And always set forth something new,
Devised to change Thy doctrine true.

7. And since the cause and glory, Lord,
Are Thine, not ours, to us afford
Thy help and strength and constancy.
With all our heart we trust in Thee.

8. A trusty weapon is Thy Word,
Thy Church’s buckler, shield and sword.
Oh, let us in its power confide
That we may seek no other guide!

9. Oh, grant that in Thy holy Word
We here may live and die, dear Lord;
And when our journey endeth here,
Receive us into glory there.

“Lord Jesus Christ, With Us Abide”
by Nikolaus Selnecker, 1532-1592
Translated by composite

The Lutheran Hymnal
Hymn #292

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Reformation Treasures: Hymnody on The Commemoration of Philipp Nicolai, Johann Heermann and Paul Gerhardt: Hymnwriters and Confessors, 26 October, 2,012

Almighty God, the apostle Paul taught us to praise You in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. We thank You this day for those who have given to Your Church great hymns, especially Your servants Philipp Nicolai, Johann Heermann, and Paul Gerhardt. May Your Church never lack hymnwriters who through their words and music give You praise. Fill us with the desire to praise and thank You for Your great goodness; through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Bio: Philipp Nicolai (1556–1608) was a pastor in Germany during the Great Plague, which took the lives of 1,300 of his parishioners during a sixth-month period. In addition to his heroic pastoral ministry during that time of stress and sorrow, he wrote the texts for “Wake, Awake, for Night Is Flying” and “O Morning Star, How Fair and Bright,” known, respectively, as the king and queen of the Lutheran chorales. Johann Heermann (1585–1647), also a German pastor, suffered from poor health as well as from the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). His hymn texts are noted for their tenderness and depth of feeling. Paul Gerhardt (1607–1676) was another Lutheran pastor who endured the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War. By 1668 he lost his pastoral position in Berlin (for refusing to compromise his Lutheran convictions), and endured the death of four of his five children and his wife. He nevertheless managed to write 133 hymns, all of which reflect his firm faith. Along with Martin Luther he is regarded as one of Lutheranism’s finest hymn writers.

(From The Treasury of Daily Prayer, Concordia Publishing House)

Reflection:  The last fad in congregational music was “Christian music”.  My response was, Yes, I love Christian music,written and composed by Heerman, Nicolai and Gerhardt!  On this day we sing to the Lord in the words and music by the 3 great Lutheran hymn writers commemorated  and it is all thoroughgoing Christian and Biblical music.

Now the latest buzz phrase has been: “praise songs”.  Both my wife and a colleague  responded to “praise songs”:   ‘We sing praise music every Sunday!”  Listen to the hymns below!  As friend and colleague once would say:  “Lutheran hymnody is my glossasalia.” Just think: these hymn writers and pastors were probably not paid a cent for their hymns, fought false doctrine  and disease and the devil, and in the midst of all that, in the Lord they had joy to sing and pray and write hymns.

The other criticism is that Lutheran hymnody is not personal enough and expressive of ‘my’ feelings.  Can anyone, if you will, top, the sheer intimacy, poetry and passion of Paul Gerhardt in O Sacred Head, Now Wounded?

What language shall I borrow
To thank Thee, dearest Friend,
For this, Thy dying sorrow,
Thy pity without end?
Oh, make me thine forever!
And should I fainting be,
Lord, let me never, never,
Outlive my love for Thee.

What sustained these men through such turmoil?  The rock of salvation, Jesus Christ.  Faith can only have something or someone to seize for salvation and this is the justification of the sinner by Christ’s Atonement, once and for all from the Cross, preached and taught into our ears and hearts, by sermons, yes!  But also by hymnody.  In the Service Book and Hymnal (1958), the former worship book of the ELCA’s predecessor Lutheran denominations,  the forward states that they wanted the hymns to be more “devotional” and have a less of  a “didactic” content.  They were so wrong!  The didactic or teaching content of Lutheran hymnody is so important because it is the objective Word of God written in Scripture sung in words and music. Consider “Wake, Awake, for Night is Flying”:  this hymn is the Parable of the Foolish and Wise Virgins (Matthew 25: 1-13) set to music. It is usually sung in Advent, pointing to the time on earth when the Bridegroom arrived and the time to come when those who are eager for His appearing, He will come again.  It is didactic and so instructional.  Dispensationalist and millenialist false doctrine is shown for what it is in that magnificent hymn of Scripture by the true and correct doctrine of our Lord’s parousia, in Scripture, correctly taught.  At Concordia Junior College, I took a one credit course on hymnody.  Professor “Ollie” Rupprecht pointed out that J.S. Bach had some 80 volumes in his library (quite an expensive acquisition in that day) and 60 volumes were on Lutheran Doctrine. This doctrine has been derided as too “sterile”.  It is not.  Like Jack Webb in Dragnet said: “The facts, ma’am, just the facts.” The objective justification by the life, word and work of Jesus Christ is the reason to sing.

We give thanks to the Lord, the Conductor of the  “choir immortal” (from “Wake, Awake”),   for all church organists (underpaid and being squeezed out by contemporary worship), church musicians, choirs and the Lord’s people who sing their praise of their Lord through hymns replete with the Scripture, that is, the Word of God and so the Holy Spirit.  Pray for your organist, choir director, choir members and church musicians in petition and  praise to the Lord and tell them all this  Sunday:  thanks!

Philip Nicolai:

Johann Heerman:

Paul Gerhardt:

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