Worship, Revised and Expanded Edition: Reformed according to Scripture

by Hughes Oliphant Old

But now the question is, did the first Christians understand their hymns, the hymns they wrote, to be the hymns of the Holy Spirit in the same way they understood the Psalms to be the hymns of the Holy Spirit or the canticles to be the reflection of the heavenly worship? When Paul spoke of “spiritual songs” did he mean songs inspired by the Holy Spirit, which were a Christian counterpart of the Old Testament Psalms? Probably not. The reason is that all these early Christian hymns disappeared. The New Testament never included a collection of Christian psalms to go with the Gospels and Epistles. In the course of the second century the gnostics wrote lots of “spirit-inspired hymns.” But the orthodox became more and more of the opinion that there was something much more inspired in the psalms and canticles than in the “spiritual hymns” that appeared in the worship of the early church. It seems much more likely that the earliest Christians understood their hymnody as a sort of elaboration, a sort of drawing out, a commentary, or perhaps a sort of meditation on the canonical psalms and canticles traditionally used in the worship of the Temple and the synagogue.

Thus ep can stil be true since thr hymns sung could have been inspired but not preserved