My copy of this book, The Psalms as Christian Worship: A Historical Commentary
just came today, and already I am hooked. This is a significant book in so many ways. In general Waltke provides exegesis of key psalms and Houston provides a history of reception and interpretation. Together they seek to persuade the church to attend again to the rich spiritual resources of the Psalms.
They describe how the Psalms have been so central to Christian (as well as Jewish) worship and spirituality.
“The Psalms were and are of key importance in the daily life of the Christian and in Christian community worship.” (2)
“As ‘the Bible in miniature,’ the Psalms have been uniquely central to the history of the church’s devotion, right up until the eighteenth century.” (13)
They also lament how the Psalter has been drained by overly technical analysis and has been lost to our contemporary worship, both private and corporate.
“So we deplore the confessional reductionism in much contemporary Biblical scholarship, which overlooks two thousand years of Christian devotion and orthodoxy or ‘right worship,’ in the use of the Book of Psalms. It ignores the historical continuity of tradition in the communion of saints. It is like studying the activities of a seaport, and yet ignoring the existence of its hinterland…
“With the loss of their continuity and ‘historical hinterland,’ the psalms then lose their spirituality, and the whole heritage of devotion becomes ignored for both Jews and Christians. As the Jewish scholar James L. Kugel, Harvard professor of Hebrew, has observed: ‘it would not be unfair to say that research into the Psalms in this century has had a largely negative effect on the Psalter’s reputation as the natural focus of Israelite spirituality, and much that was heretofore prized in this domain has undergone a somewhat reluctant re-evaluation.’ Rather than being inspired by the spirituality of the Psalter, critical ‘moderns’ despiritualize the Psalms.” (3)
Waltke and Houston go on to state three of their goals as (10-11) :
1) To restore the unique role of the Psalms in worship
2) To restore the role of the Psalms in spiritual formation
3) To restore the holistic use of a Psalm
On the last point they state:
“Our purpose, therefore, is to recover these losses through accredited exegesis and hearing afresh the rich devotional response of the true church. We are heirs of all the ages, and we are the poorer for our failure to hear and embrace that rich heritage” (11).
I am encouraged by this book so far. While quite different, it resonates with the essential aims of the forthcoming book, Forgotten Songs: Reclaiming the Psalms for Worship (B&H), which Richard Wells and I are editing. May these efforts contribute to a re-embracing of the Psalms.