The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

by N.T. Wright

In some parts of contemporary Christianity, the Psalms are no longer used in daily and weekly worship. This is so especially at points where there has been remarkable growth in numbers and energy, not least through the charismatic movements in various denominations. The enormously popular “worship songs,” some of which use phrases from the Psalms here and there but most of which do not, have largely displaced, for thousands of regular and enthusiastic worshipers, the steady rhythm and deep soul-searching of the Psalms themselves. This, I believe, is a great impoverishment.

By all means write new songs. Each generation must do that. But to neglect the church’s original hymnbook is, to put it bluntly, crazy. There are many ways of singing and praying the Psalms; there are styles to suit all tastes. That, indeed, is part of their enduring charm.

But I’m not writing simply to say, “These are important songs that we should use and try to understand.” That is true, but it puts the emphasis the wrong way around—as though the Psalms are the problem, and we should try to fit them into our world. Actually, again and again it is we, muddled and puzzled and half-believing, who are the problem; and the question is more how we can find our way into their world, into the faith and hope that shine out in one psalm after another.

Good liturgy, whether formal or informal, ought never to be simply a corporate emoting session, however “Christian,” but a fresh and awed attempt to inhabit the great unceasing liturgy that is going on all the time in the heavenly realms.

In particular, I propose in this book that the regular praying and singing of the Psalms is transformative. It changes the way we understand some of the deepest elements of who we are, or rather, who, where, when, and what we are: we are creatures of space, time, and matter, and though we take our normal understandings of these for granted, it is my suggestion that the Psalms will gently but firmly transform our understandings of all of them. They do this in order that we may be changed, transformed, so that we look at the world, one another, and ourselves in a radically different way, which we believe to be God’s way.

The Psalms thus transform what I have called our “worldview.” I use this term in a specific way that I have developed over the last twenty years. A “worldview” in this sense is like a pair of spectacles: it is what you look through, not what you look at. Worldviews, in this sense, are complex and consist of the swirling combination of stories, symbols, habitual praxis, and assumed answers to key questions (Who are we? Where are we? What’s wrong? What’s the solution? and What time is it?).

Our knowledge of Israel’s early history is patchy at best, forming a very uneven surface on which to hit the billiard balls of ancient evidence around the table.

It seems wisest to think of the Psalms, in their present form, being collected and shaped in the time of the exile in Babylon (beginning in the sixth century BC), when paradoxically the people who found it unthinkable to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land may have found that actually singing those songs (and writing some new ones) was one of the few things that kept them sane and gave them hope.

As with the sacrificial cult, the people would come to the Temple, but the regular officials would perform the final act on their behalf. This doesn’t mean that the majority of worshipers were ignorant of what was being sung or unmoved by the words or the music. It just means that they almost certainly had more of a sense of corporate solidarity than is common today in modern Western individualism. The worship was that of the whole people of God, even if some people were set apart, trained and equipped to offer it publicly.

This means, of course, that the Psalms were the hymnbook that Jesus and his first followers would have known by heart.

So in these reflections I am seizing an opportunity to step back and examine something that has been there throughout my life and ask, “What are these poems that I have been praying and singing all this time? What have they been doing to me, or in me, or helping me to do or to become?”

The main difference between the worldview of the first Christians and the worldview of most modern Western persons has nothing to do with “ancient” and “modern.” It has almost nothing to do, except at a tangent, with the development of modern science. The main difference is that the first Christians, being first-century Jews who believed that Israel’s God had fulfilled his ancient promises in Jesus of Nazareth, were what I and others call “creational monotheists”: that is, they believed that the one creator God, having made the world, remained in active and dynamic relation with it. What’s more, they believed that this God had promised to return to his people at the end of their long, sad years of desolation and misery to dwell in their midst and to set up his sovereign rule on earth as in heaven. And they believed that in Jesus of Nazareth, and in the power of his Spirit at work in their lives, this God had done exactly that.

The problem we face when we read, pray, or sing parts of the Bible is not that it is “old” and our current philosophy is “new” (and therefore somehow better). The problem is that, out of many ancient worldviews, the Bible resolutely inhabits one, and much of the modern Western world has resolutely inhabited a different one. Our prevailing modern Western worldview is no more “modern” than the worldview of the first Christians. All that has happened is that many leading scientists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who were attracted to Epicureanism for quite other reasons (not least social, cultural, and political), have interpreted their perfectly proper scientific observations (for instance, concerning the origin and development of different species of plants and animals) within an Epicurean framework. It has then been assumed that “science” actually supports this view of a detached “god” and a world simply doing its own thing. But this is profoundly mistaken.

Epicureanism, then, is of course an ancient worldview, but it has been retrieved in Western modernity as though it were a new thing. Creational and covenantal monotheism is likewise both ancient and modern, rooted in God’s covenant with Abraham as described in the book of Genesis, elaborated in the great covenantal writings of the first five books of the Bible, developed in the traditions we find throughout the Old Testament, and still thriving where the followers of Jesus learn to pray and live his Psalm-soaked gospel.

Part of my reflection in this book is that when the Psalms do their work in us and through us, they should equip us the better to live by and promote that alternative worldview. The biblical worldview, I will suggest, is both far...

The Psalms, I want to suggest here, are songs and poems that help us not just to understand this most ancient and relevant worldview but actually to inhabit and celebrate it—this worldview in which, contrary to most modern assumptions, God’s time and ours overlap and intersect, God’s space and ours overlap and interlock, and even (this is the really startling one, of course) the sheer material world of God’s creation is infused, suffused, and flooded with God’s own life and love and glory. The Psalms will indeed help us to understand all of this. But it will be an understanding that grows out of a deeper and richer kind of knowing—something that brings together imagination, insight, and love.

The Psalms are the steady, sustained subcurrent of healthy Christian living. They shaped the praying and vocation even of Jesus himself. They can and will do the same for us.

Third, “matter.” All singers discover that to use the human body as a musical instrument is physically, emotionally, and mentally transformative in a way nothing else quite is. What’s more, people who learn the serious business of prayer often discover something that therapists in other traditions sometimes stumble upon as well: that prayer encourages a rhythm of breathing that facilitates a calmer and wiser bodily approach to life than might otherwise be the case. (I am not, of course, suggesting that all people who pray, including me, are always calm or wise, but the point is to make progress along the way.) To sing prayerfully, then, is to invite a physical transformation as well as to stand at the borderlands of time and space.

The reason the Psalms do this, however, is not simply so that a few verses here and there point forward across a void to events in the life of Jesus (Psalm 2 to his baptism, Psalm 22 to his crucifixion, Psalm 47 to his ascension, Psalm 72 to his rule of justice and peace over the whole world, and so on). No: they resonate with Jesus because he was the one who stood, by divine appointment, precisely at the intersection of God’s time and ours, of God’s space and ours, of God’s matter and ours.

I am suggesting that the entire worldview that the Psalms are inculcating was to do with that intersection of our time, space, and matter with God’s, which Christians believe happened uniquely and dramatically in Jesus.

Part of the strange work of the Psalms is to draw the terror and shame of all the ages together to a point where it becomes intense and unbearable, turning itself into a great scream of pain, the pain of Israel, the pain of Adam and Eve, the pain that shouts out, in the most paradoxical act of worship, to ask why God has abandoned it. And then of course the Psalms tell the story of strange vindication, of dramatic reversal, of wondrous rescue, comfort, and restoration.

The Psalter forms the great epic poem of the creator and covenant God who will at the last visit and redeem his people and, with them, his whole creation.

The Psalms thus exemplify and embody the actual “authority” of scripture in its specifically Christian sense. (See Scripture and the Authority of God.) Scripture is not simply a reference book to which we turn to look up correct answers—though it’s full of those when we need them. Scripture is, at its heart, the great story that we sing in order not just to learn it with our heads but to become part of it through and through, the story that in turn becomes part of us. And if that is true of scripture as a whole (and, in the New Testament, of the Gospels as a whole), we might say that the very heart of scripture, working properly like this, is the book of Psalms.

Sing these songs, and they will renew you from head to toe, from heart to mind. Pray these poems, and they will sustain you on the long, hard but exhilarating road of Christian discipleship.

Make us, in other words, to be people who know how to stand at the threshold of human time and God’s time, and there to learn both humility and hope. Our time is not worthless, but any worth it may possess will come from God’s goodness, not our control of our circumstances:

This does not mean, of course, that the Psalms are inconsistent. This is the regular “now and not yet” of the people of God, with all the emotions raw and (as usual in these poems) on the surface. The celebration is wild and uninhibited; the misery is deep and horrible.

(We shouldn’t miss the extra point here. It may be impossible to “sing YHWH’s song” in this foreign land, but this particular psalmist turns this impossibility itself into yet another of “YHWH’s songs,” thus making a psalm out of the fact that one can’t sing psalms here. If that reminds us of Israel’s greatest prophet sensing himself utterly abandoned by God and yet still able to ask God why he has abandoned him, that is probably part of the point.)

To recognize that the Psalms call us to pray and sing at the intersection of the times—of our time and God’s time, of the then and the now and the not yet—is to understand how those emotions are to be held within the rhythm of a life lived in God’s presence.

The Psalms, all of them and not least these royal ones, mean what they mean within the larger worldview that (if we may generalize for a moment) scripture as a whole articulates. It goes something like this: God created humans in the beginning to be his vice rulers over the world.

But there is then a further vocation, one that has routinely been forgotten throughout much of church history. In the Bible, God not only called human beings to look after creation. He also called Israel to be the means of rescuing the world from the plight into which it had fallen.

Here is the ecstasy and the agony of the Old Testament: the rich, breathtaking vocation of Israel and the dark, tragic fact that this vocation, this rescue mission, was to be undertaken by a people who were themselves in sore need of the very same rescue.

And whereas Psalm 105 celebrates God’s choice of Abraham and his family, and his deliverance of them from slavery in Egypt, Psalm 106 immediately goes on to tell the dark side of the same story:

Now, at last, we come to the central point. Here is the larger framework: God calls humans to be his rulers over creation, and though humans have distorted this vocation into ugly parodies, treating God’s creation as if it were a mere toy to play with or resource to exploit, God has not rescinded the project or the vocation. Here is the narrower framework: God calls Israel, a human family, to be his rescue operation for the world, and though Israel has distorted this vocation and used this opportunity to bite the hand that feeds it, and to worship other gods instead of him, God has not rescinded the project or the vocation.