Book Review: Hermeneutics of Hymnody: A Comprehensive and Integrated Approach to Understanding Hymns

by Paul Westermeyer

Hermeneutics of Hymnody: A Comprehensive and Integrated Approach to Understanding Hymns by Scotty Gray (Macon: Smyth & Helwys, 2015).

This book arises from the tension between the need for an interdisciplinary study of hymnody (see pp. 1ff. and throughout) and the difficulty language has in expressing a polyphonic valence (see pp. 10ff., 238, and throughout). It could have been written in a relatively brief version with headings, subheadings, and contents laid out as an outline. Scotty Gray has not chosen that route. He has instead written a book of 411 pages that spins around each point with copious quotations, examples, definitions, and descriptions. These elucidate the subject from various kaleidoscopic angles in an ecumenical context. This is not therefore a book that can be digested at one or even several sittings. It is more like an encyclopedia that needs to be contemplated slowly with detail, piece by piece, but, unlike the way one normally uses an encyclopedia, in this case with a continual sense of the whole and the relationships of its various parts.

Scotty Gray was a seminary professor for thirty-five years and before that a minister of music and education in local churches. He has lived in England, Germany, and Switzerland, and  has thoroughly researched the interdisciplinary nature of hymnody for many years. He does not pretend to be an expert about every topic that hymnody brings into its orbit and that requires a hearing (see p. xvi), but he is knowledgeable enough about them all to be able discuss them ably so that their juxtaposed insights shed light on the whole.

The book is structured with a prelude that explains the “comprehensive and integrated” approach. Chapters follow that break the whole into parts: Bible; theology; liturgy; poetry; music; history, biography, socioculture; and practice. A postlude argues for the necessity of this approach. A list of figures, bibliography, and indices (hymns, hymn tunes, scripture, persons, and topics) follow.

The resources and people who are quoted cover a wide swath. Those who have worked with hymns as poets, musicians, and hymnologists are there as might be expected, but so are many others, among them Louis Berkhof (p. 217), Pablo Casals (p. 23), Ernest Hemingway (p. 23), Douglas Hofstadter (p. 230), Kierkegaard (pp. 184-6, 217, 375), Otto Klemperer (p. 23), Locke (pp. 145, 315), Isaac Newton (p. 145), Elvis Presley (p. 23), Savonarola (p. 163), Socrates (p. 162), Spinoza (p. 145), Stravinsky (p. 23), and E. O. Wilson (p. 9).

Examples of hymns and tunes are included. This is not a book of theory devoid of practice. Copious examples of hymns and tunes are discussed. (A printing error occurs on p. 93. The example there is intended to be Martin Luther’s “From Heaven Above to Earth I Come” as the note at the bottom of the page indicates, but the example given repeats ”Of the Father’s Love Begotten” from p. 60.) By including actual hymns and hymn tunes Gray points to the character of hymnody as growing organically out of the intrinsic being of the church in its theory and praxis where “sing and say”— words and music—form a polyphonic valence.

Carlton Young refers to this book in the endorsements before the title page as “an informing and timely contribution to the bibliography.” The “timely” part of that reference  encompasses the irony that a discussion like this is just what our theological education and dialogue need, but which the theological establishment finds so difficult to include, not only because it is daunting, but because it will not fit its rational system of words-alone. Nevertheless, Scotty Gray is to be thanked for providing us with this valuable interdisciplinary study and for the years of careful work it represents. Fortunately there are forums like PrayTellBlog.com where topics of this sort are welcomed and where important, timely work can be and is being done.

Paul Westermeyer is Emeritus Professor of Church Music at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he taught, served as the Cantor, and directed the Master of Sacred Music degree program with St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Westermeyer is an ordained Lutheran pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and a graduate of Elmhurst College, Lancaster Theological Seminary, the School of Sacred Music at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and the University of Chicago.