Cantus Christi: 2020

Last month I received in the mail a copy of Cantus Christi 2020, the latest edition of a psalter and hymnal produced by Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. The reason I was sent this is because I provided the music for their metrical text of Psalm 137. Whether it is appropriate to review a collection to which one has contributed I will leave the reader to decide. But given that I was in no way connected with the planning and editorial process, I believe I am permitted to post my impressions of the volume as a whole.

In that spirit I will indicate that this is a remarkable achievement drawing on the liturgical riches of the larger Christian tradition as well as on the gifts of the living contributors. That it was produced, not by a denomination, but by a single congregation is all the more impressive, although this makes for certain deficiencies, two of which I shall mention below. I myself worshipped at Christ Church during my visit to New Saint Andrew's College in late 2018, so I was able to make a brief acquaintance with the confessional and liturgical ethos of the congregation, which is part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a quite new denomination that is unusual for not having broken off from another larger Reformed denomination in the past.


To begin with, this volume is a psalter and a hymnal, containing sung versions of all 150 Psalms, including Psalm 88, the darkest of all the Psalms, which many such collections are accustomed to omit. Like the old blue Psalter Hymnal of the Christian Reformed Church, this one often carries more than one version of each psalm, which means that the Psalter section covers 300 songs. Fully 31 of these use the tunes of the Genevan Psalter in their rhythmic forms, as opposed to the isometric versions to which Dutch Reformed congregations became accustomed in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Twenty-nine texts are from the 1912 Psalter, which influenced the CRC's Psalter Hymnal and those of the Presbyterian denominations, including the Trinity Hymnal with which I grew up. Only 17 texts are from the successive Scottish Psalters, with their tediously uniform metrical structures. Cantus Christi uniquely draws on Heinrich Schütz's music for the Becker Psalter, whose tunes appear 29 times in this collection. Even more unique are the brilliant through-composed psalms and songs of NSA professor David R Erb, which number 65. During my visit two years ago, I was quite taken by hearing students sing these with such fervour and enjoyed getting to know the composer.

The remainder of the volume includes hymns from the major Christian traditions and service music near the end. Most denominational hymnals tend to focus on the liturgical tradition which formed them, along with some entries from other traditions. But because Christ Church as a congregation is sui generis and has not emerged from, say, an evidently Scottish or Dutch or other ethnic Reformed heritage, it has the advantage of drawing on a variety of hymnic traditions, making this volume more comprehensive than most. Whether the congregation will actually sing from all these I cannot, of course, say. The liturgical table is spread like a smorgasbord, and it is likely that the congregation will tend to gravitate to certain songs over others.

The Lutheran hymnic tradition was not well-known in the English-speaking world until Catherine Winkworth translated many of these hymns from German a century and a half ago. But it is unusually well represented here. A Mighty Fortress is rendered in both its original rhythmic form (407) and its isometric form (408) more familiar to non-Lutherans. O That I Had a Thousand Voices (464), We All Believe in One True God (710), Isaiah, Mighty Seer in Days of Old (724), How Lovely Shines the Morning Star (554), and Wake, Awake, for Night Is Flying (546) are among the songs that one finds in Lutheran hymnals, but not all of these are necessarily found in Reformed hymnals, except for Cantus Christi. Lift Up Your Heads, Ye Mighty Gates (550) often appears in North American hymnals, but not necessarily to the German chorale tune used here.

I was pleased as well to see Behold the Bridegroom Cometh (545) set to Thomas Tallis's SECOND MODE MELODY, which provided the setting for Psalm 68 in Archbishop Matthew Parker's Psalter in the 16th century. Tallis's better known THIRD MODE MELODY, from the same Psalter, is the setting for Psalm 63 (119) in this collection. So England too is well represented, with Tallis providing music for 17 songs, and Orlando Gibbons' work amounting to five songs. Isaac Watts provided 46 texts for both the psalter and hymnal sections, and Charles Wesley provided 20. John Mason Neale's translations of the ancient Greek and Latin hymns make up 15 of the selections (although one is incorrectly numbered in the index).

Only one of the thousands of hymns written by Fanny Crosby is found here: Blessed Assurance (434), which is probably her very best. The revivalist tradition is not well represented, but the Reformed tradition, with its emphasis on the ordinary means of grace working in the believer's heart through the Holy Spirit, has not generally warmed up to revivalist methods and hymns. However, the volume does include my favourite childhood hymn, Trust and Obey (395), which we sang endlessly in sunday school when I was a boy, and which originated in Dwight L Moody's evangelistic meetings.

We should perhaps not be surprised to find 31 metrical psalms and hymns written by a certain Douglas Wilson, who happens to be the principal minister at Christ Church.

As a political scientist, I was interested to see in this collection one hymn (514) that makes two references to "the state," that is the political community of citizens led by government. While looking at it, I noticed something unusual about the first stanza:

God send us men whose aim 'twill be,
In keeping with our ancient creeds,
Submission to our triune God
In every thought and word and deed.

The author is Frederick J. Gillman (1866-1949), but hymnary.org gives us a rather different rendition of Gillman's first stanza:

God send us men whose aim ’twill be,
Not to defend some ancient creed,
But to live out the laws of right
In every thought and word and deed.

Given that Cantus Christi's version implies exactly the opposite of Gillman's meaning, the editors' placement of "alt." (for "altered") after his name seems a severe understatement. Whether the collection contains other examples of this sort of treatment I could not say without a more in depth study.

Finally, near the end is a full array of so-called service music (703-744), such as the Kyrie (703), Gloria in Excelsis (706), the Decalogue (707), the Apostles' Creed (712), and Magnificat (717).

There are two significant omissions in this volume. The first is the African American hymnic tradition, including such songs as Let Us Break Bread Together, Were You There, and He's Got the Whole World in His Hands. Of course, the congregation may have few if any members whose faith developed in this tradition, yet many of these hymns long ago moved into the evangelical mainstream. Even the CRC's grey Psalter Hymnal, with its Dutch roots, carries fully 12 "Afro-American spiritual" songs. The 1990 Presbyterian Hymnal contains 23 songs from this tradition, which again is conspicuously absent from Cantus Christi.

A second omission is the growing corpus of hymns and psalms written by Keith and Krystin Getty and Stuart Townend since the beginning of the century. In Christ Alone is, of course, the most famous of these, but given the spiritual depth of these texts and the singability of the music (although at times the vocal ranges are a little wide), they deserve to be sung in churches throughout the English-speaking world. Our own church, a 180-year-old congregation predating Confederation by a generation, sings these hymns regularly, including Holy Spirit, Living Breath of God, Beautiful Saviour, and How Deep the Father's Love for Us. I suspect that, if Cantus Christi had been a denominational effort, both African American hymns and Getty/Townend hymns would have been included.

Nevertheless, despite these drawbacks, I believe Cantus Christi constitutes a wonderfully rich liturgical resource that could easily be used by other congregations in the Reformed tradition, and perhaps even by those in the free church traditions. I offer a heartfelt congratulations to the people who worked diligently to produce so worthy a volume for singing God's praises.