How Can the Psalms Help Christians Worship? A Conversation with David Koyzis

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful, theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'd like to welcome back David Koyzis. David, again, is affiliated with Global Scholars of Canada and is engaged in international academic ministry of writing, researching, lecturing, and conversing with the readers of various books. I had him on previously. We talked about his book, Political Visions and Illusions, and we answered to another authority office in the image of God. But he's also interested in the liturgical use of the Psalter. And so after the last interview, we got to talking about that, and I thought it'd be great to have him back on because this is one of those areas where I am becoming increasingly interested as well. So I'll put the link to his blog in the show notes. I just encourage you to go and check that out, see the work that he's doing on the liturgical use of the Psalter. But before we jump into that, David, welcome back. Thanks for being back on. Oh, thank you very much. I enjoy being here. Well, why don't we start out because I think maybe people, you know, most people know what the Psalms is, and most people maybe understand liturgy. But why don't you just talk us through, what is that liturgical use of the Psalms, the liturgical use of the Psalter? Right. Well, in ancient times, as the Psalter was being compiled in the first millennium before Christ, the ancient Israelites were accustomed to singing these Psalms. And of course, we don't know exactly how they were sung. There was a French woman, a French scholar by the name of Suzanne Huyck-Vontura, who thought she had discovered how they were to be sung. And you can actually find recordings of this on YouTube and possibly elsewhere. You know, but you'd have to have some knowledge of Hebrew, of the Bible, and also of musicology. And it's the rare scholar that can combine all of those together. So, so people are just not entirely sure how they were sung, but they were sung because there are, I mean, the Psalms themselves talk about singing, sing to the Lord a new song. And so it's not, it's not that unusual. It's apparently the, for the ancient Israelites, the day was divided into so many prayer hours. And there are some oblique references to this in both the Old Testament in the book of Daniel, also in the book of Acts as well. There is a reference in Psalm 119 towards the end of that Psalm, where it says seven times a day, I will praise you for your righteous statutes. And so there was a, and, and each of these prayer hours would involve the, the, the use of Psalms or praying them or singing them in some fashion. And again, we don't know exactly how that was done. But, and that was carried forward into the, into the church age as well. We most associate it now with the Benedictine monasteries where we have the different prayer offices, maybe 5 to 7 of these throughout the day, including a midnight office, which has an interesting story behind it. You know, you might think that it would, it would be a bit of a, a hardship to be woken up in the middle of the night to, to sing the Psalms, but, but apparently it wasn't. And there's a reason for this that maybe we can get into a little bit later. But eventually singing through the Psalms came to be associated with the monasteries and ordinary Christians seem to have lost the ability to do that throughout much of the, of the Christian world. At the time of the reformation in the 16th century, there were efforts to put the Psalms to verse so that they could be sung to the singable tunes. And a lot of these were, were based on Gregorian chants that were well known at the time. One of the major Psalters that was put together was the Genevan Psalter in, that was published in its entirety in 1562. In England, there was the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter that was published the same year, 1562, that had been compiled by some of the exiles in the European continent during the time that, that the bloody Queen Mary was on the throne persecuting Protestants. So the, so singing, singing the Psalms, that's something that, that is very ancient, but, but many Christians, especially Protestant Christians, seem to have lost the ability to do that in, in recent generations. And when you're talking about these various Psalters that are developed, these are selections from the book of Psalms that are put together in varied arrangements and then set to music. Is that, am I understanding that correctly? Or is it just the Psalms set to music in the same order that they're found in all? Okay. Okay. All 150 Psalms were, were set to verse and put to music. It started about 1538, 1539 in Strasbourg during the time that John Calvin was there. It continued over the next generation and it was finally completed in 1562. All 150 of them, even the, the Psalms that call down God's anger on his enemies. Those are the sorts of things that you won't find many evangelical Christians in mega churches across the United States and Canada singing Psalms that call down God's wrath on his enemies. But as a matter of fact, those were the, those were the some of the Psalms that were, that were set to verse first because the early Protestants in the seven in the 16th century were facing people who were persecuting them. And so, you know, the, one of the, the, the major songs that was taken up by the French reformed Christians was Psalm 68. Let God arise and by his might scatter his enemies. And it became the, the anthem of the French Huguenots during the wars of religion in the 16th century. So those are the very Psalms that we would be reluctant to sing, but our forebears were not at all reluctant to sing. And so when they, when they put these together, you know, the, the, the grid that I suppose I'm, I'm looking at this through is almost like a common book of prayer where you'd have, you know, different prayers, maybe on different days of the month of the week or what have you. But am I thinking about that rightly or wrongly, you know, when, so when they dip into the Psalms to sing them, are they singing them through in order? Are they singing them just sort of occasionally? How is that, how is that done in the practice of these churches? Yeah, it's it varied. There was in fact, a kind of lectionary in that set out during the 16th century in which during the two services on Sunday and a midweek service in, on Wednesday, it was set out which Psalms are to be sung. And it was pretty much in order. So that over a certain number of weeks, I think probably well, I have that on my, my blog that's devoted to the Genevan Psalter, but I'd have to look at that again. But these, but, but they would go through all the Psalms over a certain period of time that fell into use eventually. And, and people were more likely to be singing the Psalms that were appropriate to different to different moments in the, in the worship service. So you would, you would sing Psalm 51 as a, as a confession of sin at the very beginning of the service. Perhaps after receiving the elements of communion in Geneva, they would sing Psalm 103 at Zurich. They would sing Psalm 113. Yeah. It's interesting, you know, I mean, I, I grew up Lutheran, Missouri Synod Lutheran. And so I have some of this sort of that lectionary in my background, you know, every week we'd read a section of the gospels. We'd read, I believe an Old Testament passage, if not a Psalm specifically, you know, they had this cadence of reading that you'd get through various portions of the text in. You'd usually have a collect or a prayer of the day, you know, those kind of things created a structure around our worship and a regularity about it that was intended to be, you know, sort of, I think, instructional and impactful and to really familiarize God's people with God's word and various things. We didn't sing the Psalms, but we had that sort of cadence about us. And so it's, it's interesting now looking at our current modern day churches and the general lack of anything that resembles that. I've been to a handful of churches where, yeah, you know, you're going to go in, you're going to start with a song. There are going to be announcements and then you're going to keep singing. Then there's going to be a, you know, a sermon. Then you give maybe there's Lord's supper and then you leave, you know, like you have all those kinds of things, but it's primarily the, the participation of the congregation is around the singing. But I think, you know, I read one of your blogs. You, you mentioned, you know, these Psalms have been largely replaced.

I sort of worship hymns or something like that, that don't often cover the breadth of what the Psalms would, just like you're talking about with the Psalms that are calling down God's wrath. We start to get a little bit anemic or a little bit, anemic is probably not a fair word, but a little narrow in the way we're understanding these things. So maybe talk about how you view that liturgical use of the Psalm as helping Christians to have more robust practice and theology in these churches. That's right, yeah. And I think that the Missouri Synod Lutherans are a very good example of Christians who have maintained, I think there may be some that still retain the old one-year lectionary that would take them through the New Testament and the gospel, but very little Old Testament, except for the Psalms, but more recently, many churches, including the Missouri Synod Lutherans, have adopted a three-year lectionary, which takes them through an Old Testament reading, an epistle reading, a gospel reading, and then there's a psalm. So it's a way of trying to get through more of the Scripture in the course of a three-year period. Most Protestant churches simply have topical preaching and the passage is chosen by the presiding minister. And in that case, you're getting a diet that's fed to you through the taste of the individual minister. Whereas a church that's following a lectionary, like the Lutherans, they're very much aware of what is being taught to the people in the congregation, to the parishioners. And I think that's a very valuable thing, and I think churches should be reluctant to give up on that too easily. And the psalms are a part of that, because the psalms are, we think we have to invent worship songs every few years, a new worship song comes out. There are good ones, there are not so good ones. You know, I happen to think that In Christ Alone by Keith Getty and Stuart Townend is one of the great hymns of the 21st century. And, of course, it came out in the very first year, 2001, of the present century. But I think we have ignored, you know, we have worship songs that borrow from the psalms, but do not actually render the psalms in a way that we can sing through the whole psalm. Psalm 23 is probably an exception, because there's the very famous The Lord's My Shepherd, I'll Not Want, He Makes Me Down to Lie from the 1650 Scottish Psalter, usually sung to the tune Crimmen. And it's familiar to English-speaking Christians virtually everywhere, and it's beloved by Christians as well. In my youth, I worshipped along with my family in a Baptist church that did not sing the psalms, but nevertheless, that hymn was in the hymnal. And I personally think that all the psalms should be in our worship collections, you know. And it doesn't matter whether we're Lutheran or Reformed or Methodists or Baptists, that we should be singing the psalms, because they're there for that purpose. Well, and the interesting thing is, you say that, and I envision, I remember, you know, having the hymnal in my hand, you know, holding it and singing out of a hymnal at the Lutheran church I grew up in. But now, I'm just thinking of the snide comment, yeah, they should be part of all our PowerPoint decks. We don't have, you know, a lot of the churches I've been to lately, they don't have any hymnals. And so we're, we have this sort of, it's an odd detachment, I think, that is happening in churches nowadays, where we just don't have the tangibility of some of these things that would, you know, I can remember the, even if I think about it now, the feel of the cover of those hymnals on my fingers. Right, right, yeah. And all of that just sort of adds to our experience, but now we've kind of digitized and made this into something that's a little quicker, maybe a little easier, and more guided, as opposed to maybe being more formative. Yes, right, right. Yeah, and there's that tangible element of a book that you're holding in your hand that I really appreciate. Now, admittedly, I'm of an older generation, maybe the younger people are not so keen on that, but, you know, I've worshipped in church with my daughter and her fiancé, and, you know, they start reading the scripture and they take out their Bible apps on their phones. You know, I don't actually have a phone, believe it or not. I do have an iPad, so I suppose it's kind of a bit of a larger version of a phone. But there's something about holding a Bible in my hand, paging through it, because I can, I know where things are, you know, and if I have to go through a Bible app, it's not intuitive for me. You know, it may be for younger people, and I don't want to get down on the use of PowerPoint and overhead slides and so forth, but I think there is something about this tangibility of holding a physical copy of God's Word or of the Psalms and the hymns that we sing on a weekly basis that I think, and may keep us grounded. Yeah, yeah. Well, maybe, I mean, do you think that background that you have and that I sort of share, you know, I've adapted into the, I'm a Gen-Xer, so, you know, I grew up with books and I grew up without the internet. I went to college without a computer, all those kind of things, right? Right, right, right. You know, I actually went to a library and got books. And so I sort of have this nostalgia about those things and an appreciation for them. How are these two perhaps connected? You know, this sort of leaving behind of the psalters and of singing the psalms and the diminishing prevalence of the lectionary, you know, more of an ad hoc, topical, let's just do a series, you know, six to eight weeks sort of, you know, quick hit. Are these things connected in your mind? Like how do you put those pieces together, David? Yeah, it was almost an unintentional development because during the Reformation era, there was a kind of division between those that followed the old one-year lectionaries and those that went for what's called Lectio Continua. So, you know, my church right now is having a series through the book. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. 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And hymns are chosen on that basis as well. So to keep everyone grounded in the Word, the lectionaries were a kind of imposed discipline that kept the clergy grounded in the Word of God and communicating that to the people on a week-to-week basis. So, you know, it didn't matter whether you were in, I don't know if you were in Stuttgart or Mecklenburg, you know, if you were in Brandenburg. I'm using these German terms because of, for the Lutherans especially. You would be preaching from the same passage every week because you were following that lectionary. Well, that's probably a little bit too rigid for most Protestant Christians, at least in churches. But I think there's something admirable about keeping your congregation, you know, worshiping with the very Word of God that he has given us for that purpose. That's the function that the Psalms perform. But also the, like the Lucan canticles, like the Magnificat, the Song of Mary.

The Benedictus, the song of Zechariah, the Nunc Dimittis, the song of Simeon. And I think these are important to keep us anchored in the Word of God. And so is that why you got interested in this? I'm curious. I mean, you do mostly sort of political theology, or at least, you know, and so now all of a sudden it's the Psalter. How did you find your way into this? Yeah, it was almost by accident. I was attending a place called the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto in the late 1970s. And one of the senior members, one of the professors there, was a man by the name of Calvin Sierveld. And he played the piano for us at one point, and it was a metrical versification that he had done to Psalm 128 to the Genevan tune. And I thought, Whoa, this is interesting. And I'm something of an amateur musician myself. When I first started university, I had attended a major in music before moving to political science. But so I, I made up my own tune and made up a versification of one of the Psalms, and I can't even remember which one it was. But then a few years before that, this was in 1976, I visited Prague, which is the stunningly beautiful Baroque capital of what's now called Czechia, but at the time it was Czechoslovakia, and the communists were still in charge at that point. And I am a huge fan of antiquarian bookshops. And I went to a few of those in the city of Prague, and I found a Czech Psalter and hymnal dating from 1900, used by the descendants of the Hussites. These are the heirs of Jan Hus, who was a pre-reformer. This is before the Reformation era itself. And the Hussite wars were fought. The counter-reformation suppressed it eventually. But the church continued to exist, and they were saying the Psalms as late as 1900. And I thought, Well, this is interesting, but I put it away, and it wasn't for another almost 10 years that I discovered that these were the Genevan Psalms that were rendered in the Czech language. And it took me another 10 years before I realized what I had in my hands, and that was about the same time that I came into contact with a copy of an English version of the Genevan Psalter that was put together by the Canadian Reformed churches. There are a number of CanRef congregations here in the Hamilton, Ontario area, and I know some people who are members of those churches. And I was interested in that, but one thing that I noticed is that the Genevan psalm tunes and the texts did not necessarily match each other with respect to the stresses. So you could have a stressed ending in one line and an unstressed ending in the next line. But that did not necessarily correspond to the stresses in the tunes. At first I thought this was just the Canadian Reformed that had done this, but then I discovered that every translation that I know of of the Genevan Psalms, even the original French from the 16th century, tended to mismatch the stresses and the texts and the tunes. So beginning around 1985, I decided that I was going to try to rectify that. I came up with my own texts to which the Genevan tunes, that could be sung to the Genevan tunes. And I did maybe about 30 in fairly short order. This was in the 1980s when I was still a graduate student at Notre Dame at the time. And I kept working on it over the years. I finally finished in 2021. This is a long time. I finally finished it, and I now have a collection with all 150 Psalms. They could be sung. Some of them are rhymed. A lot of them are not rhymed, but it doesn't really matter because I was trying to render them in as accurate a way as I could based on, you know, admittedly, I don't know Hebrew, but based on English translations of the Bible, comparing those and trying to come up with accurate renditions of the Psalms and also relying on some Hebrew scholars who don't do know Hebrew and to try to get input from them in terms of their interpretation or their reading of particular passages within the Hebrew text. So I did that, and I'm still, I've got a few grants from different organizations to be able to do that. And for the time being, I've put that aside. I still want to try to find a publisher for this. It's not the kind of thing that's going to be a New York Times bestseller, of course, but I think it's something that could be useful to many Christians. But while I'm working on this next book of mine that's coming out, Citizenship Without Illusions, I put this on the back burner for the time being, but I hope to come back to this fairly soon. You know, going back to the unmatched stressors, I find that really interesting. And I don't know music at all. I know Hebrew, but I don't know music, so I'd be horrible. I would not be particularly helpful. But here's what I wonder. Was there a theological point to those unmatched stresses? So in other words, when they're doing it, are they stressing a particular line that they really wanted to emphasize and sort of highlight and low lighting other lines, or was it just totally random? I don't think there was any theological purpose behind it. No, I think these were some of the tunes, as I mentioned, especially those for Psalms 80 and 141, were almost directly from well-known Gregorian chants at that time. Others, you know, there are many people who have this idea that, oh, these were pub songs that were repurposed for liturgical use, you know, which was not the case. People think that's the case with the Lutherans and the Reformed and so forth, but that's almost certainly not the case. But the Genevan tunes are interesting because they're not like the Scottish Psalter. So I'll just hold up a copy of the Scottish Psalter. This is the 1929 version. This was given to me by a good friend in graduate school at Notre Dame. And as you can see, the pages are split. So the text in the Scottish Psalter of 1650 are so monotonously regular. They can be matched to virtually any tune in the Scottish Psalter. So they made these split-leaf Psalters that you turn the page, you know, if you want to use a particular tune for the psalm, you can, but it would be the minister out front or the precenter, whoever was leading the singing, who would say, okay, turn to such and such a number in the text and turn to another number in the tune. We're going to sing this text to this particular tune. And those are what the Scottish Psalms are like. The Genevan Psalms are not like that at all. They are incredibly irregular. So, you know, you can have long ones that would have, oh, like maybe 10 beats to the measure, followed by 9 beats to the measure, followed by 11 beats to the measure, followed by 11 beats to the measure again, followed by 6 beats to the measure. So very highly unusual. You could never mix and match the text and tunes in the Genevan Psalter. And in that respect, they're like the German chorales, which you would have been familiar with growing up in the Lutheran church. So there's one, it's almost like a single genre, the Genevan Psalms and the Lutheran chorales. You know, Ein Fest Burg ist unser Gott, our mighty fortresses are God. Yeah, that's right. And some of these other marvelous Lutheran hymns that are well-known, but to Lutherans, but not outside the Lutheran tradition that I wish we knew more about. But the very similar to the Genevan Psalms in that respect. So there can be repetition, but the repetition will be followed by Something completely different after that. And that's what the Genevan Psalms are like. You know, I know where, obviously, we benefit from having the printing press and written documents and all those kinds of good things. But I'm wondering if you're aware, so the psalms in the Old Testament would have been sung in part because they're easier to remember that way. You know, there was a practical element to it, you know, paper, papyrus, you know, vellum, all those kind of different materials that these psalms would eventually be transmitted on wouldn't have been readily accessible to the everyday Israelite if they were even literate to be able to read it on page. And so a lot of that would have been geared toward helping them remember and understand God.

through singing and worship, and so there is a memorial aspect to it. I'm wondering if prior to the printing press, you have something similar in these churches, that there are, there's this practice of singing the Psalter such that people familiarize themselves with that Psalter through these worship songs, or is it just onset after the printing press? I guess that would be the... Oh, I think the printing press had a huge impact, because I think, you know, I think if without the printing press, I doubt that the Reformation would have occurred. At least not, at least not when it did. You know, the idea of congregational singing, I think, was fairly new in the 16th century. And this is why, you know, that many people in, not only in England and Scotland, you know, Geneva, elsewhere, wanted to put together Psalters so that people could sing them to rhythmic form. And there were rhythmic chants indeed, you know, even prior to the Reformation, you know, in Latin. I actually have one on the wall in back of me here. You can see it. This is a 500-year-old manuscript that comes from Venice. I think it was printed in 1503. And I picked it up at an antiquarian bookshop in Toronto back in the mid-1980s. And it's in Latin. It's in medieval musical notation. But people were familiar with that, but they didn't necessarily sing during the services. You know, when the liturgy was taking place, they may have been engaging in private devotionals in their pews, if there were pews in the church, but they were, you know, praying the rosary or perhaps muttering the prayers in the Book of Hours that they might have in their possession. So, you know, the idea of congregational singing, that was, I don't want to say that that was exactly an innovation of the Reformation, but it was an attempt to recover something that was undoubtedly more familiar in the early church, but had fallen out of use during the Middle Ages. Interesting. Okay, so these really would have developed sort of in that new age to reinforce maybe the unity of the congregation, sort of underscore something like the priesthood of believers that, you know, that sort of doctrine that would have been, hey, come participate, come worship. This is, you know, this is mediated anymore. It's connection directly to Christ. Those kind of ideas. That's right. Yeah. Now there is some evidence. We find out, for example, that Psalm 136, which has a refrain, you know, that comes every verse is followed by a refrain, you know, his loving kindness is forever. And it's a recitation of the history of Israel followed by this refrain. And there's some evidence that there may have been a cantor who would sing the first part and that the people present would then sing, you know, there's an antiphon that would sing that at the after each song. That may have been done with other Psalms as well, but again, we don't know that for sure. Maybe some people do and I just don't know, but this is, this is all outside of my formally credentialed area of competence, but it's something that I've developed simply out of, out of love over the last four or five decades. I think there are a lot of theories around Israelite practice in worship and singing. And so there are some basics that we are pretty sure of, and then there are other things that are more speculative that seem to make sense. And then there are still other things that are speculative and don't seem to make any sense. That's right. Yeah. I mean, I, I don't think there's any way to know unless we find something new and fresh, that's really going to lay it out for us, which we just don't currently have. That's right. There's always been that sort of speculation around certain Psalms and what is their sitzen leben, you know, their situation in life. How are they used? What did this look like? And, and so I think that, you know, the basics we know is they were sung, you know, they, they would have been, they would have been at the very least recited, probably chanted, you know, there would have been some sort of cadence to it because again, that that sort of helps with the memory. And I can see that this sort of interaction you're talking about making perfect sense whether, whether that's the way it happened or not, who knows, but it does make sort of perfect sense to see it that way and to understand that it could have been used that way. That's right. And there are two elements of Hebrew poetry that, that, that you can see in the Psalms as well. One of them is, is parallelism, which, you know, my daughter went to a Christian school and she, you know, she learned about Hebrew parallelism. And I said, Whoa, boy, I wasn't in it. It wasn't until I was in university that I discovered this, you know, that I learned about that, but she learned about it in elementary school, which I thought was a, that's, that's a really wonderful thing. But you know, the, the, in, in, in Hebrew poetry, there's a statement followed by a second statement, a repetition of the first statement, but in using other words. Yes. So, you know, this is, this is something that we find sometimes you find that it develops the thought. Sometimes it simply repeats the thought. Sometimes it develops it in three lines. Other times in just two lines. So that's one of the things that's very familiar to us in Hebrew, in Hebrew poetry. Now, admittedly, I think the Scottish Psalter of 1650 more easily because of its, its complete regularity more easily carries forward the, the Hebrew parallelism than does the Genevan Psalter and Seminole Psalters. But now there's another element in Hebrew poetry as well, and that's that they have rhythms. They have even, they have rhythms that repeat in each line. You know, so it doesn't come out necessarily in English, but, but it sometimes it does in the, in, in some of the translations. For example, at the end of Psalm 147, there's a kind of, of recitation. Some people think it might've been a distinct Psalm in its own right, but it's a kind of recitation. I don't have the text in front of me at the moment, but in, in many English translations, the rhythm comes forth. So it could be one, two, three, one, two, three. It's a little bit like our nursery rhymes, you know, Hickory Dickory dock, the clock ran up the clock, the mouse ran up the clock. It's been a long time since I recited this, you know, cause I was small, but, but, but yeah, that's what Hebrew poetry was like. And, and there are, there was a man by the name of Robert Alter, who has translated the entire Old Testament. Hebrew scholar. I, I have his copy of the Psalter and he tried to render the Psalms in English such that they would replicate this Hebrew poetic pattern. So do the Psalms of Joseph Janino, who is a French priest who rendered the Psalms in this kind of rhythmic form and came up with a way to sing them in the rhythmic form beginning around 1953. And those were incorporated into the into La Bible de Jerusalem, the Jerusalem Bible in its various editions. I think there are three editions now in English and there are, there are at least three in French as well. And you can find the grail Psalter, the Janino Psalter is used throughout Roman Catholic churches, at least in North America and probably elsewhere as well. It's a way of trying to replicate the Hebrew poetic the rhythmic patterns in, in singing the Psalms and it works quite nicely. It's such an interesting wrinkle when you think about that in terms of translations. You know, we often think of it just like word for word, but really when you're looking at the poetry, there are these other factors that you really do want to consider. They're there in other, in other ways and other places, you know, Hebrew word plays and different rhyming schemes that you may be able to find in Hebrew and different stuff like that that just aren't, they're going to be very difficult to replicate in English because of the different vocabulary. But I think that thinking through that with regard to the Psalter and giving people a better sense of how that meter might work, obviously preserving the parallelism parallelism isn't overly difficult, although, you know, it's still challenging, but that meter is something and I would just say, you know. Growing up, I was always horrible at poetry. It didn't matter what language it was in. I mean, I just never understood it. It's like, what is this on it? You know, lines. And I know of something. I, I think I've heard of iambic pentameter, but I couldn't really tell you what that is. You know, and so I don't think we're attuned to poetry in the way that maybe previous generations were, which do make some of these things even more difficult to convey when you're just, you know, straight looking at the Psalter. Oh, I think you're right. Yeah. And, and, um, you know, I come from a long line of poets. You know, my, my father wrote poetry in both Greek and English and he was published. I think his first poem was published when he was eight years old, you know, so, so it is. Yeah. And, um, and I visited my grandmother, um, his mother in Greece in 1983. And, uh, you know, she would make up these poems on the spur of the moment about her.

grandson coming over from Chicago, Chicago, and she would, and it would have perfect rhyme and meter. Now, admittedly, it's a lot easier to do it in Greek than it is in English. But you know, because because they have certain endings to the words, you know, and you can tell whether it's a, you know, it's a participle or whatever, you know, case endings, conjugations, and so forth that tend to be similar from one to the next. So it's a lot easier to do that. But there's a in Cyprus, there are these poetry competitions. They call it chatista. And I have no idea exactly what what that means, but, but people would chant poems made up on the spur of the moment to each other, you know, as a kind of, of competition. So, you know, this is what my grandmother was doing when I visited her, you know, 40 years ago, my, my father could do this. So apparently it goes back thousands of years in Cyprus and people have been doing this for a long time. Let me ask you a serious question. 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And even when my, my daughter was in elementary school, she started writing poetry, you know. So I don't know if it's something in the DNA, but it's, there's something in the tradition that, that carries down from one generation to the next. That's very cool. Well, you know, you, you talked about getting, getting your Psalter published. So how would you envision, I mean, if it's your perfect world, right? You know, no, no obstacles. It's your perfect world. How do you see people picking this up and using it? What, what, what would you, what would your ideal outcome of that be? Well, the outcome, the ideal outcome would be to get Protestant Christians whose forebears stopped using the Psalms generations ago to take them up again. You know, to, to, to intentionally sing through the Psalms, even the tough Psalms to, to sing through. Psalm 88 is the darkest of all of the Psalms. And, and there are very few, even in, in some of the, the hymnals that include, such as the hymnal that I grew up with in the, in the Presbyterian church, that had the vast majority of the Psalms, metrical versions of the Psalms, but they didn't include Psalm 88, which ends on a very sour note. You know, darkness is my one companion left. And then, and then Psalm 109, which has a whole litany of implications of calling down God's wrath on, on enemies, you know, and those are the, those are the sort of things that are left out. But I myself, you know, I started, I discovered back when I was about 23 years old, I discovered something called the daily office. And it was a book that was published by Concordia Publications, which you will be familiar with from your, from your upbringing. Yeah. Great book. I, I, I found it in the seminary, in the bookstore of Luther Theological Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. I was studying, I was studying in Minnesota at the time. I went there, picked up this book. I thought it was very interesting because it was basically the, the, the prayer offices of morning and evening prayer organized according to the church calendar from Advent all the way through the, through the Pentecost seasons. And I thought, this is, this is unusual. I've never seen this before. But I started praying using that pattern. And I've, I've done that for almost half a century. And it, it ended up completely changing my prayer life. You know, it, it, I, I ended up going through the Psalms using the Book of Common Prayer schedule of praying the Psalms every 30 days. So basically every month I'm praying, praying through the Psalter once again, approximately three Psalms, morning prayer, three Psalms and evening prayer, um, on average, depending on the length of the Psalm. So that, that could vary. So I'm actually reading through Psalm 119, praying through Psalm 119 now, which I, I think it takes about, um... I think it's about five different prayer hours to get all the way through it. And, um, uh, but, but that was, that really stuck, stuck with me. And I found, you know, I'm, I'm somebody who suffers from depression on a, on a semi-regular basis. For years, I was on antidepressant medications, but I found that reading through the Psalms, I had to do that, you know, in the, the, the tough Psalms, the joyful Psalms, all of them. And there was something about the Psalter that resonated with me because it was, it was like my life. You know, there, there were times of just unimaginable joy that I've experienced in my life, other times of almost unimaginable darkness. And the Psalms, um, contain all of that. Um, you know, and, and, and we are so reluctant to, to, to sing the Psalms of lament, or even the Psalms that trace, um, God's actions through the history of, of, of God's people. You know, Psalms 105 and 106 are good examples of that. And, and those are the kind of, or Psalm, um, Psalm 78, which is um ascribed, it's ascribed to Moses in, in the Psalms. And, you know, these are the kind of things that, that we need to sing. Um, and I'm tempted to say whether we feel like it or not. Yeah. You know, so, you know, not, don't just let our emotions guide us, but let Scripture guide us as, as we're feeling, as we're experiencing life, the ups and downs of life. And it's a really interesting, I, I just finished writing a piece or a four-part series for uh Christianity.com on the Old Testament and slavery. And one of the things that I sort of came to was that, you know, we're living in a broken world and that um what we all want is for God to restore it and we're frustrated that he's not restoring it right now. And we can't understand why he's allowing these broken structures to continue. And, you know, why isn't the world more just? And you just keep, it's almost like a circular argument. You sort of say, well, the world's more just because God hasn't fixed it yet. But yeah, but God should fix it. And it's like, well, he will, but, you know, it just keeps going around in that circle. And so God gets blamed for a lot of things that really are our fault. And, and, you know, sort of gets entailed in our mess in, in ways that um we defame his reputation in probably ways we shouldn't. But as I've been thinking through those and, and just thinking through why is it that we have such a hard time wrestling with this in the church, I think one of the reasons is that we don't really allow ourselves to see and to deeply understand the laments, the frustration, the anger, those sort of emotions that you, that come out within the Psalms are not anywhere near as familiar to us as praise, you know, uh adoration, you know, those kind of happier emotions, the joy, the thanksgiving. But the reality is that these appear right alongside praise and joy within the Psalms. Those laments, those deep moments of anger. And so, yeah, I love the idea of praying through them and just allowing us to connect to the brokenness of the world through the lens of that lament and that anger. Exactly, that's right. Yeah. So I remember after the um the 9-11 attacks on the Sunday after that, we were in church and um and there was a young man who um was heading to seminary, but he was actually, he was, I know, I think he was, I don't know if he was preaching or not, but, but he was leading the singing of the songs and he was having us sing these kind of happy clappy type type of songs, you know, which I really didn't feel like singing at that point, you know. I, I really wanted to, to, to pray or sing one of the laments. And, and in that Psalter and hymnal, there were in fact laments that we could easily have sung um for that occasion. You know, and, and, and it just, it just rubbed me the wrong way and I just left feeling something's amiss. You know, this isn't right. The laments are there, you know, just, just horrible thing that happened, you know, the country of my birth was, was, was attacked and, and that's, that's, you know, I was quite upset about it, very upset as were, were all of us at the

You know, it's something that's associated with the Benedictine tradition and the monasteries and so forth. You know, the rule of St. Benedict describes this and so forth. But I think all Christians need to do this. And honestly, you know, when Islam, amongst the Eastern Orthodox, my father would always tell me, he was raised Greek Orthodox. He would say, oh, Islam is a Christian heresy. That's what you're going to get from many of the Orthodox, because they are, you know, cheek by jowl to Muslims during the Ottoman Empire. My grandparents were born nominal subjects of the Ottoman Empire in Cyprus, you know. And the Muslims have a practice of praying five times per day. Yes. And I remember going to a local indoor mall to have a new battery put into my watch. And there was a kind of kiosk in the middle of the mall, and there were selling watches and batteries and watches. And I realized that there was somebody down on the floor, and I thought, what's going on? You know, something that was going, you know, the man put the battery in my watch. And then all of a sudden, I realized that the other man stood up, picked up his rug, and rolled it up again. I thought, oh, my gosh, he's a Muslim and he's praying. Can you imagine if Christians were to start praying multiple times a day? Right. I envy the Muslims that, you know, the Muslims are heir to a tradition that was found in both Judaism and Christianity, but may have faded in Christianity after the collapse of Rome to be taken up again by the monasteries. Yeah. But boy, I wonder how our societies would change if Christians were to pray at least morning and evening in their homes, in their churches, in their workplaces, in schools, everywhere on a regular basis together. Yeah. I think it could change the world. Yeah. No, I agree. I think we do see this. We see it in Judaism to some degree. We also see it in Judaism has that sort of different cadences of life and their high holidays have disciplines associated with them quite deeply. You see that in, again, the Lutheran liturgical calendar. You know, Lent and Advent. There are certain things associated with those where you tend to practice or you go to special services or you do specific readings. We're missing out, I think, to a large degree on those cadences of life that draw us in and out of a sacred time, in and out of a sacred space to some degree. And just we sort of run where time is meaningless. You know, one day just runs into another. And so I love this idea of the of praying through the Psalter, singing through the Psalter, you know, sort of bringing this back as part of a not a rigid practice, but a formative practice within the church. Exactly. Exactly. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, because, you know, you're not you're not going to gravitate towards, how should we say, towards the banal and towards the, how should we say, like the sacred. You know, you're not going to gravitate towards that if you have a regular practice praying through the Psalms. Right. And that's going to reflect the way that you sing, the way that you worship in church as well. And I think there are whole, I sometimes wonder if the rise of what might be called confessional liberalism in Protestant churches in the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries, if that was not aided and abetted by the collapse of Psalm singing, maybe half a century before that. And I do wonder about that. You know, if you're going to have a robust faith, if you're going to have a strong faith, or even if your faith is not strong, I think it was Tim Keller who said that it is better to have a, if you're falling, it's better to have a weak faith in a strong branch than to have a strong faith in a weak branch. Weak branch, right. You know, our faith comes and goes, you know, my faith, it flows and it ebbs. You know, there have been times that my faith has been at an exceedingly low point, but I still immerse myself in the Psalms because I recognize I need to do this. And I need to worship with my fellow Christians because if I don't, my faith will die. Yeah. It's, I think the Psalms represent that sort of point of struggle. And what I find really compelling about this, and I may have been, I interviewed a woman whose church doesn't, the way she described it, she doesn't preach anymore at service. They've replaced the sermon with a communal prayer of lament. And so someone will come up and they'll talk through what they're going through. They'll share their difficult experience with the rest of the congregation. The congregation then prays over them and does, you know, it's a different cadence to the church service. Now, I wasn't like super wild on getting rid of the sermon, but I can understand there's certain points of it where it's like, when the sermon becomes this fetish that we sort of view as magical, it's the talisman of the church service. You know, there's a certain point where I'm okay getting rid of it. I don't think she was getting rid of it forever, but there was this period of time where she was saying, yeah, we just needed to do the laments. And I think there's something in that training that could be really powerful going through the Psalter. So, I mean, I love the idea. As you, you know, as you think about it, you know, obviously, you know, before churches probably get all on board with this, right, before a whole church adopts it and, you know, changes their entire structure, there's probably going to be a lot of Christians listening to this who are saying, how can I do what you're talking about? You know, obviously we'll link to your blog and you've got a lot of different resources there, but what would you, where would you steer people to begin a practice of praying through, if not singing through the Psalms? Yeah, I guess the Psalter section of the Book of Common Prayer, because that's where it's divided up into 30 days, you know, so it's, I think Psalms 1 through 5, morning prayer the first day, Psalms 6 through 8, evening prayer the first day, the second day, you know, and you keep on going until you get to the 30 days have elapsed. You know, that's one thing. But if you want to sing the Psalms, you know, there are so many resources out there. This is one resource that I think is fairly easy to use. It's called the Trinity Psalter. It's produced by the Reformed Presbyterians in North America. I think with the, you know, also with the cooperative project of the Presbyterian Church in America, the PCA, and the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America, which is centered in Pittsburgh and I think some places around Kansas as well. But it's based to some degree on the Scottish Psalter. It uses the kind of regular meters that are familiar to most Protestants in their hymnals. And, you know, you can choose a tune to go with virtually any one of these. That's probably a good place to start. But, you know, just do a Google search and find metrical Psalters. They're fairly easy to find. Yes. Well, I will say, I mean, just my experience with the Book of Common Prayer over the years has been really profound. I like the structure of it. I like the way that it's laid out. I mean, they just do a fabulous job of helping you walk through these different things. And I will say earlier this year, or maybe late last year, one of the two, I realized we were doing a sort of trying to think of a challenge that we could give to people through our website and that kind of stuff. And we came up with 30 days in the Gospels. I didn't realize you could read through the Gospels in 30 days only reading about four chapters a day. It's relatively easy to do to read through the Gospels. And as you're talking through the Psalms, you know, I tend to think of the Psalms like this massive book. It's really only 150 Psalms. And so when you divide that out, it's not overly taxing to read through the Psalms in 30 days either. And I think people need to have that perception. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's right. I think, and for years, I think I read maybe one Psalm a day in morning prayer, or if I were, if I was praying morning and evening, then I would pray one Psalm in the morning and another one in the evening. And that was something that I picked up from this daily office book from Concordia, you know, published in 1965. So I kept that up for a number of years. And then, and then at some point I became aware of the 30-day schedule that Thomas Cranmer had put in the, in the book of common prayer. And that's, that's pretty much what I followed for the last, oh, I don't know, maybe 15, 20 years, something, something along those lines, you know, and, and I think it's, I think it's a good discipline. It's a good discipline, you know, and you know, we're not, we're not earning our salvation in so doing. You know, that's the sort of thing that you want to, that you want to emphasize.

And Cranmer didn't think we were either. You know, Cranmer was a very, you know, a really profound, he had a really profound understanding of the doctrines of grace, and he tried to incorporate that into the Book of Common Prayer. And that's, there was a marvelous book about that by a man named Zach Hicks on, I forget the exact title of it, but you can find it. I've reviewed it on my blog. You can alert people to that. But about the, about Cranmer's intentional editing of liturgies that had been used, not just translating them from Latin to English, but editing them so as to emphasize the doctrines of grace in the Reformation. And especially the distinction between law and gospel. In that respect, he was influenced by Luther. Yeah. It's yeah. I find the practice fascinating. Any last words on this? I know we're kind of closing in on time. Anything you want to say that we haven't covered? I mean, we've covered a lot of ground, so. That's right. Yeah. I guess just to say that, you know, if, if you're listening to this, pick up your Bible, turn to the Psalms and start, start praying through them, you know, and you know, it's nothing fancy, just go through them in a very intentional way. Think about, about, about what you're saying, you know, and some of the, some of the Psalms are messianic Psalms. Psalm 2 is sometimes thought of as being a messianic Psalm. Psalm 69. You know, there, there are any number of Psalms that, that seem in some way to, to, to prefigure the arrival of Jesus Christ into the world. There's a marvelous book written by Patrick Henry Reardon. It's called Christ in the Psalms, published several years ago. He himself is an Orthodox priest, uh, but it's a very good place to go to if you want to, to find Christ in the Psalms in the way, in the way that the, that the early church, the church fathers did. Yeah. Fantastic. Well, you know, I usually end the episode, David, just by asking what topic do Christians need to be thinking about to become, uh, be and make more faithful disciples for Jesus Christ. But I have a feeling I know what the answer is going to be. Exactly. That's right. Yes. Yes. a great place to start. Yes. That's right. Go and read the Psalms, folks. I'd just encourage you. And, uh, we'll link to all this stuff and we'll link to David's blog. I'll put the book links that we mentioned, uh, in the show notes. I just encourage you to do the same. Go and read the Psalms. It's not as daunting as it seems. Um, I realize some of the language in there can get a little overwhelming, but honestly, if you're reading in an NIV or a, uh, ESV, they do a really nice job of smoothing some of those things out. If you have a good study Bible, they'll explain a lot of it. And so just don't be intimidated by the Psalms. It's a fantastic book that's absolutely necessary for our life and faith and will form and shape our perspectives in ways that, um, I know I've benefited from. So, um, I'd just encourage you all to do that. So David, thanks for being here. This is a fabulous conversation. I hope you get, uh, your, your Psalter published. Um, I think it'd be really cool. I know you've got another book in the works, but you know, circling back around to this, it just seems like such an important thing. And, uh, and hopefully, um, we can be praying that churches will, uh, realize the value of doing these kind of things, um, developing electionaries, praying through the Psalms and really giving folks this cadence of life. So anyway, thanks for being here. I really appreciate it. You're very welcome. I enjoyed our conversation. Absolutely. Hey, everybody, we'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. Finding uplifting news in today's headlines is often like searching for a needle in a haystack. At the Story Behind podcast, we believe in the power of finding heartwarming tales and are happy to share empowering stories with you every week. Hear about how Steve Harvey surprised a dying man on Family Feud with $25,000. Get inspired by the note a waitress received from a patron dining alone. And even hear about how one VIP passenger made a hardworking pilot get emotional before his flight. To start listening to The Story Behind podcast, visit lifeaudio.com or search Story Behind on your favorite podcast platform.