The secret weapon of the Reformation

In the run-up to Reformation Day, Johan van Veen posted this article in Dutch: Het geheime wapen van de Reformatie, or The secret weapon of the Reformation. This is adapted from the google translation into English:

For several months I have been immersed in a thorough book on The Reformation, written by the British historian Diarmaid MacCulloch. It's a thick book – more than 700 pages plus an extensive notes apparatus . . . . I recently came to a section in which he deals with the troubles of France in the last decades of the 16th century. He shows how "ordinary believers" – he calls them laymen – got moving. Writings such as the Bible and Calvin's Institutes played a role in this . . . but those books were thick and expensive and therefore not widely distributed. He therefore seeks the explanation elsewhere: the Psalter. He even calls the rhymed psalms the "secret weapon" of the Reformation, not only in France, but wherever the Reformed brought new vitality to the Protestant cause.

He gives several reasons for the power and influence of the Psalms. The singing of the psalms united the literate and the illiterate. The rhymed psalms easily stuck in the memory, so that printed texts soon became obsolete. They were sung in unison to appealing melodies, so that one did not have to be musically trained. Because the words were linked to a certain melody, one did not even need to know the entire text. “[Even] to hum the tune spoke of the words of the psalm behind it, and was an act of Protestant subversion”. The psalms also landed in the middle of reality: there was a suitable psalm for every situation. “Psalm 68 led a crowd into battle, Psalm 124 led to victory, Psalm 115 scorned dumb and blind idols and made the perfect accompaniment for smashing up church interiors.” The psalms also acted as landmarks and forged a sense of community “just as the football chant does today in the bleachers.” In the singing of the psalms there was also no distinction between men and women. Women were not allowed to preach, but they were allowed to sing with the men. MacCulloch concludes: “To sing a psalm was a liberation – to break away from the mediation of priest or minister and to become a king alongside King David, talking directly to his God.”

MacCulloch's book can be found here.