Theopedia

Hymns

Definition

Hymns are songs of praise to God, sung together with psalms and spiritual songs as one of the ordinary parts of Christian worship (Eph. 5:19; Col. 3:16). Paul commands believers to teach and admonish one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing with grace in their hearts to the Lord (Col. 3:16); congregational singing is accordingly a commanded practice, not merely a customary one.

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession of 1677/1689 lists singing among the ordinary elements of worship alongside preaching, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper:

“The reading of the Scriptures, preaching, and hearing the Word of God, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing with grace in our hearts to the Lord; as also the administration of baptism, and the Lord’s supper, are all parts of religious worship of God, to be performed in obedience to him, with understanding, faith, reverence, and godly fear.”1

The Philadelphia Confession of Faith (1742), the American Particular Baptist adaptation of the 1689, repeats the same clause verbatim.2 By naming “hymns” and “spiritual songs” alongside “psalms” rather than restricting sung worship to the Psalter alone, the confession settles the question of whether uninspired hymns may be sung in worship for Theopedia’s own confessional tradition; the contrary position, held by some other Reformed and Presbyterian bodies, is treated below under Opposing Views.

Biblical Basis

Paul’s twin commands to the churches at Ephesus and Colosse give the governing text: believers are to address “one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart” (Eph. 5:19), and to teach and admonish “one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Col. 3:16). Singing is also gathered among the gifts Paul expects believers to bring to corporate worship at Corinth: “each one has a hymn, has a lesson…” (1 Cor. 14:26).

Christ himself sang: on the night of his betrayal, after the Last Supper, he and his disciples “sang a hymn” before going out to the Mount of Olives (Matt. 26:30; Mark 14:26), traditionally understood as the Hallel psalms sung at Passover. Many New Testament scholars further regard Philippians 2:6-11, with its rhythmic, confessional description of Christ’s humiliation and exaltation, as an early Christian hymn embedded in Paul’s letter rather than his own spontaneous prose, though this identification is itself debated among commentators.3 Scripture’s own vision of consummated worship is likewise sung worship: the heavenly host sings “a new song” to the Lamb (Rev. 5:9-10) and the song of Moses and of the Lamb (Rev. 15:3-4).

Historical Development

The early church

Christian hymn-singing is attested outside the New Testament almost as early as within it. The Odes of Solomon, a Syriac collection from the second century, preserves hymns doctrinally rich enough to sing of Christ’s divinity, his death on the cross, and his resurrection from the grave, and even, according to one recent study, a developed doctrine of justification by grace through faith bound up with union with Christ.4 Writing to the emperor Trajan around AD 110, the Roman governor Pliny the Younger reported that Christians “are accustomed to meet together on a set day before light and sing a song to Christ as to a god” (carmenque Christo quasi deo dicere); whether the Bithynian Christians Pliny had interrogated were singing material like the Odes themselves is speculation, but the practice of hymn-singing to Christ is independently corroborated.5

The Particular Baptist hymn-singing controversy

Congregational hymn-singing was, for a time, a live and divisive question among England’s own Particular Baptists. In the last decade of the seventeenth century, Isaac Marlow, a London jeweller and Baptist layman, disputed with the Baptist pastor and hymn-writer Benjamin Keach over whether singing uninspired hymns, and not only the biblical Psalms, was a lawful part of congregational worship.6 The controversy was serious enough that a chapter defending the singing of Psalms in John Gill’s own Body of [Doctrinal] Divinity has been read as a response to it.7 Gill, pastor of the Horsly-Down, Southwark congregation that had previously been Keach’s own, took up the question directly in A Discourse on Singing of Psalms as a Part of Divine Worship: From 1 Corinthians 14:15, a sermon preached in December 1733 and printed the following year with more than fifty footnotes defending the practice, including patristic testimony that even pagan Egyptians had sung hymns to their gods.8

Opposing Views

Not every Reformed body has agreed that hymns and spiritual songs, as distinct from the biblical Psalms, may be sung in worship. Exclusive psalmody, the position that only the inspired Psalter may be sung in public worship, has historically been held by some Presbyterian and other Reformed churches on regulative-principle grounds: if God has not commanded the singing of uninspired human compositions, the argument runs, then such singing is not warranted in worship. The Particular Baptist controversy of the 1690s shows the same question dividing Baptists among themselves, with Isaac Marlow taking the restrictive position against Benjamin Keach’s introduction of hymn-singing in his own congregation.6 Theopedia’s confessional standard rejects this restriction, since the Second London Baptist Confession names hymns and spiritual songs, not psalms alone, as elements of acceptable worship.1

Related Doctrines

External Links

  • The Cyber Hymnal, a resource for biographical information on hymn writers and composers

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 22, “Of Religious Worship and the Sabbath Day,” para. 5. ↩ ↩2

  2. The Philadelphia Confession of Faith (1742), chap. 22, para. 5. ↩

  3. Peter T. O’Brien, The Epistle to the Philippians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 186-202; contra Gordon D. Fee, “Philippians 2:5-11: Hymn or Exalted Pauline Prose?” Bulletin for Biblical Research 2 (1992): 29-46, quoted in Brian John Arnold, Justification One Hundred Years After Paul (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), 196n1. ↩

  4. Arnold, Justification One Hundred Years After Paul, 195-196. ↩

  5. Pliny the Younger, Epistles 10.96, in Pliny: Letters and Panegyricus, trans. Betty Radice, Loeb Classical Library 59 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 288, quoted in Arnold, Justification One Hundred Years After Paul, 196n1. ↩

  6. Steven Tshombe Godet, “The Trinitarian Crisis of the Long Eighteenth Century,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill (1697-1771): Context, Sources, and Controversy” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 89. ↩ ↩2

  7. Christopher Green, “Baptist Catholicity in the Ecclesiology of John Gill (1697-1771),” Themelios 49, no. 3 (2024): 652. ↩

  8. Godet, “John Gill: Patristic Scholar,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill,” 126. ↩