Can We Sing Outside the Psalter?

Can we sing outside the Psalter?

That might strike you as an odd question. Christianity has a tradition rich in moving verse and melody with some of its songs surviving the test of time for more than a millennium. Yet, some, at least, in my denomination do not believe in using hymnals in worship. They believe that the only legitimate music and verse permissible in worship is from the book of Psalms. I think they have a good idea taken too far.

First, let me state that I agree with them on the Regulative Principle. This is the Reformed doctrine that God may not be worshiped in any way that He has not already ordained in Scripture. This is a perfectly Biblical position. I think the best text to support this is Deuteronomy 12:32. In the context of His distinguishing Israelite worship from the Canaanite variety, God says, “‘What thing soever I command you, observe to do it; thou shalt not add thereto nor diminish it.’” Or we could consider the famous outbreak against Uzzah, which David ultimately caused by not following God’s instructions to carry the Ark of the Covenant on the priests’ shoulders and instead loading the Ark on an ox cart. God took great pains to lay out Israel’s rules for worship, and while we’re not bound by the ceremonial aspect of that worship, it does show that God cares very deeply exactly how we worship Him. In Acts and the Epistles, we don’t see the Church innovating any from the pattern of worship laid out in the moral part of the Law or in Jesus’s explicit additions to it (such as Baptism and the Lord’s Supper).

The Regulative Principle is the only reason I can think of why someone would insist on singing Psalms only in worship. Doing that relies on words inspired by the Holy Spirit to praise God, so nothing could be safer for the soul or more pleasing to God than to sing His own words back to Him, right? We are told not to speak our own words on the Sabbath (Isaiah 58:13), so should we step beyond the prayer book God Himself endorsed? If people are fallible, should we sing their words in preference to God’s? Well, I think the answer is a little more nuanced than that.

I think it’s pretty clear from Scripture that the Regulative Principle applies to forms of worship and not the exact words used, per se. Let’s do a little reductio ad absurdum. If we’re only to give God’s words back to Him in worship, then preachers shouldn’t give their own exposition of Scripture. They should limit themselves to the sermons explicitly written out in Scripture, as in the Sermon on the Mount, Paul’s sermon in Acts 17, or the book of Deuteronomy, etc. No one would claim that a preacher could come up with anything better than those himself, but obviously pastors are supposed to expand on the text and make connections and illustrations for their flock to better understand and apply those words to their own lives. Or, if we’re limiting our prayers to only those approved in Scripture, I’m afraid we can’t pray for Mrs. Jones in her battle with cancer since she’s not in the Bible either.

Obviously, no one would claim we can’t do these things in worship (in fact, we’re commanded to carry out those forms of worship with our own words), but if we’re going to stick with only safe, God-ordained words in Psalms, we might as well limit ourselves to these as well to stay safe. Besides, if we were to be extra safe, we would only sing those Psalms to the original melodies that accompanied them. Fascinated as I’d be to hear those, I’m afraid God in His providence did not permit them to survive down to the present day. Or, for that matter, why are we using a fallible man’s translation of Psalms, which could be in error and often have to really change the words to make them fit the meter and rhyme in English and the melody selected? I think, under that interpretation of the regulative principle, it would be safest for everyone to learn Hebrew and sing the Psalms in their inspired originals.

But I think the Bible provides God’s endorsement of singing our own words, making it thus a “regulatively legitimate” aspect of God-ordained worship. Twice, in Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16, Paul tells us to sing, both to ourselves and to each other, “Psalms and Hymns, and Spiritual Songs.” The tripartite division there can be read to differentiate Old Testament Psalms from hymns (which would mean to a Greek audience a song of paise addressed directly to God) and spiritual songs, meaning there is a place for songs beyond just the 150 Psalms.

Now, I grant that Paul doesn’t explicitly say to sing these during worship and some believe all three terms are just three ways of referring to the Psalms, so I call as my next witness Pliny the Younger. In his letter to the Roman Emperor Trajan somewhere around 110 A.D., in which he requested guidance on how to prosecute and discipline Christians, he said that when they met on their fixed day, they sang a hymn “to Christ as to a God.” These very early Christians would have found this very hard to do if they were just singing out of the Psalter, which says so much about Jesus and His work, but never mentions Him by name. The Psalms remain an anticipation of the work of Jesus, while we in the New Testament are on the other side of its realization. That right there-—the ability to sing praise directly to God the Son and God the Holy Spirit by name—is the main advantage that hymnals have over strictly Psalter singing.

There are several majestic portions of the New Testament Epistles for which a strong case can be made that they are borrowings from early Christian hymns: Philippians 2:5-11; Colossians 1:15-20; I Timothy 3:16; Hebrews 1:1-3l and I Peter 2:21-25. Clearly these are Spirit-inspired passages with apostolic authority behind them, but the clear implication seems to be that the Church innovated in its worship in addition to just singing the Psalter.

While I agree that the Regulative Principle is the only way to approach worship, I think there’s enough flexibility in it to allow for Christians to sing hymns and spiritual songs outside just the Psalms. I think that if we apply it that strictly, we miss out on a lot of legitimate instances of worship that have Scriptural authority for the form, just not the exact text.