Beeson Podcast, Episode 393
Timothy and Julie Tennent
May 22, 2018
www.beesondivinity.com/podcast/2018/Singing-the-Psalms

Announcer:	Welcome to the Beeson Podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George.
Timothy George:	(singing) Welcome to Today's Beeson Podcast. Well this is a little different podcast, because I have two very special guests, friends of mine. We're going to do an interview about a two volume work they have jointly published. My friends are Dr. Timothy C. Tennent and Julie M. Tennent, his wife. Timothy Tennent is the president of Asbury Theological Seminary, one of our sister institutions here at Beeson. Has done that job since 2009. Before that, he taught at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. He's spoken at Beeson. We read his books. He's the author of many books, including Christianity at the Religious Roundtable, Theology in the Context of World Christianity.
Timothy George:	He is a leading evangelical missologist, did a PhD at the University of Edinburgh. Julia M. Tennent, herself, is a musician, a church musician with degrees from Westminster College, Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. She's taught piano and organ and served in Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist churches. I love that ecumenical spirit that you have. She herself helped established a school of music in India where she also teaches. Welcome Tim and Julie.
Julie Tennent:	Thank you so much.
Timothy Tennent:	Thank you. Good to be here.
Timothy George:	Now, our purpose for this conversation is to talk about this wonderful metrical psalter that the two of you have done. It's actually a two volume set. One is called a metrical psalter, the book of psalms set to meter for singing. The other is a meditative journey through the psalms, through each one of the 150 psalms. I'm holding this in my hand. It is a beautiful set. We want to tell people how they can get it before we get off the podcast, but let's just begin by having each of you comment a little bit on what led you to this project.
Timothy Tennent:	Well I think, it goes back for us, to April of 2011, when we were seeing a need to go deeper into the Lord because of all the challenges that we face in our ministries. The Lord led Julie to pose to me that we might get up earlier every morning and spend an extra hour in the psalms every day. We started that, not knowing where that would lead, and that's been over seven years ago, and we've done it every day now for seven years. It just brought us into a great place and the Lord opened up many doorways to us and it was a means of grace to us. That's how all of this actually got started.
Julie Tennent:	That's right. We started with a metrical psalter that was already published, and we had never sung through the psalms before. We had only encountered them as, I think, many people in the church do today, just as occasional times of worship, calls to worship, devotionals, but to systematically go through one psalm a day, every day, just the full journey of each psalm was a tremendous means of grace and a new experience for us, frankly, and we decided after 150 we couldn't stop. We had to start back over at number one.
Timothy George:	Well one of the wonderful things ... You have so many nice features in this collection, and one of them is the fact that for each psalm, you give a number of hymn tunes to which this particular version can be sung. Say a little big about that. How do you choose these hymn tunes. How do you know which hymn tune fits? And do you yourselves sing them?
Julie Tennent:	Oh yes. Oh yes. We sing them together every morning. The distinctive thing about a metrical psalter is that it is taking the words of the psalms, as closely as possible retaining the actual words and phrases as much as possible, but setting them into poetry, into meter, which has a certain number of syllables per line and basically rhyme as well, so that it is a poetic rendering of the full psalm. So that way, any tune, we think of them as hymn tunes, but any tune that has that same number of syllables in that same meter, can be used for that metrical pattern that the psalm is in. 
Julie Tennent:	In the metrical psalter, we note the meter for each psalm and then a list of tunes, in the back of the hymnal, there is a metrical index. Many people don't realize that, but a metrical index in the back of the hymnal. Any tune that matches that meter can be used to sing that particular psalm.
Timothy George:	And you have all of these features included in this version. Now, sometimes you will say this is from the Scottish Metrical Psalter and you will give that particular text. Others are different. How does that work out?
Timothy Tennent:	We of course just had to write all 150 ourselves, which we did, but there a couple of times where, because the Scottish tradition is a very longstanding tradition of doing metrical psalms and that, like Psalm 123 for example is so famous in that tradition, that we didn't want to leave it out, so we included it in addition to our own rendering, because it's so well known in the church. It was a way of acknowledging the history of this tradition. We lived in Scotland for three years. We have a lot of affection for the Scottish psalm singing traditions.
Timothy George:	Yes, right. 
Timothy Tennent:	That's why we included that there. Psalm 100 and Psalm 23.
Timothy George:	So you get two versions on those particular, very famous settings.
Julie Tennent:	Passages.
Timothy Tennent:	Yeah. 
Timothy George:	I want to ask you, you said a little bit about what a metrical psalter is. The whole tradition of singing psalms .... You know, I come from a tradition, the Baptist tradition, and this would be true of a lot of reformed congregations, its churches. For a long part of our early history, only psalms could be sung in worship.
Julie Tennent:	That's right.
Timothy Tennent:	Right.
Timothy George:	Because these were the very inspired word of God, so maybe hymns were okay in your private devotions over in the corner, but not in church. There was a great revolution of course, where hymnody became acceptable and desirable in evangelical churches, and we're grateful for that, but almost to the point it seems to me, psalms have lapsed out of our worship a lot. Talk a little bit about that importance of psalmody, not neglecting hymnody of course. You're Wesleyans, so you can't talk to two Wesleyans who are musical without thinking about the Wesley's and hymns. Talk about psalm ...
Timothy Tennent:	Ask us about the hymns verses choruses, so called worship wars. We said we still haven't gotten over the earlier challenge, which was the real displacement of psalms by the hymn tradition, because as you said, [inaudible 00:07:42] Psalm Book was published in 1640 and was the very first book published in America, was a psalm book, a metrical psalm book. That's the first book ever published in America.
Timothy Tennent:	It says a lot about that tradition, just as you said. I think the particular vibrancy of men like Isaac Watts, late 17th and to mid-18th century and of course Charles Wesley in the 18th century, which brought so many vibrant hymns in. It was a gradual process where the hymns began to replace the psalms. The churches always had hymns of course, through its history, but as you said, worship was centered on the psalms in church.
Timothy Tennent:	That change happened, began to happen in the 18th century, and it continued and so today, there are churches that still sing exclusively psalms, but they're quite few. Probably a dozen churches globally are only exclusively psalm singers, and the rest would be what we normally experience often today in churches, where hymns predominate, hymns and choruses.
Julie Tennent:	Yes, I think Watts and Wesley really opened this channel by their beautiful hymnody that they produced. Then the 19th century of course with the gospel hymns that flooded into the church. It just started to eclipse the singing of psalms. I think as wonderful as hymns are, they were never meant to supplant the psalms, only to supplement and to enrich our worship. But I'm holding here in my hand right now, a Scottish hymnbook from 1899, which still has the split psalter at the beginning of it, followed by hymns.
Timothy Tennent:	Explain what a split psalter is, Julie.
Julie Tennent:	A split psalter has the music at the top and the text of the psalms at the bottom, so that you can mix and match the meters and the tunes, as we were speaking of earlier. But this was called CH1, Church Hymnal 1, from England and Scotland, and as far as I know, this was the last one produced this way. All that followed, CH2, 3, 4, only contained hymns with a smattering of psalms intermixed in there. So I think they have been eclipsed and we are missing a tremendous means of grace by neglecting them.
Timothy George:	We want to advocate both/and, not either/or.
Julie Tennent:	Absolutely.
Timothy Tennent:	Both/and, yeah.
Julie Tennent:	Absolutely. 
Timothy George:	Now, I wonder if one of you, maybe Julie, as a musician, how does this tradition of psalmody relate to the spirituals that come out of our own African-American history and the very plaintive, moaning kind of singing that we think, as well as the jubilation of the spirituals.
Julie Tennent:	Right. That's a great question, Timothy. I think the psalms, we have caricatured them as praise and worship and thanksgiving in our minds often, and we forget the fact that many, many, many of the psalms are laments and are cries of penitence or just lamenting spiritual needs in our own lives. 
Julie Tennent:	I do think that this is a great connection that you're making, that the role that the psalms played, of giving us a channel of lamenting before God, was very similar to the moaning and groaning of the spirituals, which also cried out from this very soulful place to God, and I love the distinction between lament and despair. That lament is actually the voice of faith, which is crying out to God who we believe is there and hears our cries. That's the voice of faith, and it's a very different voice than the voice of despair which gives up on God and turns from God. Lament is returning to God in the midst of the things that are deep in our soul.
Julie Tennent:	The psalms are a tremendous resource for that. I believe actually that God, you know this is God's inspired word, so he has given us this channel and intends for us to have it, and I think it's to our detriment that we have gone to only praise, worship and thanksgiving in our worship.
Timothy George:	You know, I'm wondering, I'm thinking of you both getting up in the morning, an hour ahead of time. That's really a remarkable discipline in and of itself, for some of us who like to sleep in late. You do that, and then you read these psalms, one a day, I guess, and in doing so you are going through the psalter and you're going through life, the highs, the lows, the good the bad, the shades, the shadows. How has that impacted your spirituality.
Timothy Tennent:	Well, we found that the psalms are really 150 separate journeys. That's how we kind of conceptualize it. Each of these journeys represent a wide variety of experience before God. They're obviously lament. You have penitent. You have praise, worship, exhuberation, even historical recitation, et cetera. By laying the tracks you might say, learning those psalms, those journeys, we have embedded into our hearts over the last seven years, journeys so even the mention of a number of a psalm would bring to mind that journey.
Timothy Tennent:	I have experienced psalms mostly as choruses which they've taken out one or two verses and made them into a chorus, but when you actually follow the whole journey of the psalm, it really is a very powerful journey, and you don't know when you might need that journey, and so what I found in my life is, we decided early on, not to go to a psalm that we felt like was the one that we wanted that day, but we actually go through them numerically, and we found that that actually helps us to store up in our hearts each of the journeys, and then when we need them, God calls them forth basically. That's been the biggest spiritual discipline for us, and the means of grace, is just laying those tracks down of all 150 journeys and knowing that God present 150 journeys for the people of God and this of course was Jesus' prayerbook, and we thought what better way for us to deepen our life and to get into Jesus' own prayerbook.
Timothy George:	And that's the title of one of these volumes, "A Meditative Journey through the Psalms." Every single psalm is introduced with a special ... It's not enough to call it a devotion. It is devotional, but it's also deeply theological. I've been reading this particular volume in my own morning devotions in recent months, since I've discovered this resource, and I've been challenged. I've been provoked by thinking theologically and spiritually about the depth that is there in each and every psalm. So you've given us a great gift in this.
Timothy Tennent:	Thank you.
Julie Tennent:	Thank you.
Timothy George:	Let me, let me say, you have a number in the introduction to this volume, what you call frequently asked questions, FAQs, is that what we call them now? I wonder if I could ask you a few of those, and see what you would tell our listeners. One of the things about the psalms that's always, I think, challenging, maybe difficult for a lot of people, are those sections of the psalms in which vengeance is called against the enemies of God, the wicked. The psalms say a lot about the wicked, and it seems at time to call on people, on us to hate people with a perfect hatred. That's a phrase in the psalms. We just had a chapel here at Beeson this last Tuesday, and the text was Psalm 137, one of the famous imprecatory psalms, and it was a great sermon on it, but it kind of held us on knife's edge. How could this be a part of the word of God? Talk about those imprecatory psalms. 
Timothy Tennent:	Great word. And of course, the wicked in general are found in over 140 of the psalms, so it's hard to dance around the presence of the wicked in the psalms, as you say, but there's a particular class of the psalms that are calling down curses, the imprecatory psalms and in the book, we basically reflect on some of the ways that we have processed this in our daily psalm singing, because we sing through all the psalms.
Timothy Tennent:	Basically have come to four different lenses, I'll just briefly mention each of the four. First of all, we really believe that for Christians, Paul of course says, our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities and powers, so we see the enemy of the psalms for the Christian becomes our spiritual enemies, the principalities and powers, and we do stand opposed to them. So in that sense, there is a spiritual warfare that is continued on in the life of a Christian.
Timothy Tennent:	Secondly, as Julie often says to me when we encounter these, these are after all prayers. They are transference, so we know from psychology even and Christian counseling, that transference is a really important part of dealing with anger and dealing with where you feel betrayed perhaps. So part of what happens is that transference. The bible says, "Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord," and so we, part of the psalm singing is transferring to God those moments where we feel neglected, we feel betrayed, we feel deeply hurt. We pray about that, and the psalms give us the language of prayer to help us transfer to our God.
Julie Tennent:	To put it in his hands.
Timothy Tennent:	To put it in his hands. That's right.
Julie Tennent:	To bring about justice. 
Timothy Tennent:	The third lens for us has always been the fact that when we read these curses being brought down, we of course recognize that Jesus bore these curses on the cross of Calvary. That's part of the power of the cross, that Christ only bears our guilt. He bears our shame. He bears our imprecations. He bears the hatred and bitterness of this world. He bears all of that, and Galatians 3 of course says that. The tree is the curse, and so, Christ bears these curses.
Timothy Tennent:	So when we read the psalms, we actually see Christ bearing them as we reflect on this. Then of course, finally we know that Christ has provided this window of grace, that we announce to the world, the gospel. There is that eschatological reality, that the world will be judged and he will set things right, and he does stand opposed to evil, and the time will come and God will actually render unto those who have rejected the gospel the due that is theirs. There's an eschatological reality to these judgments that are very, very powerful. Those are just four of the ways in which we processed these over the years, that we feel like, of course, Christ fulfills them, but we also feel like that we don't do well by just simply ignoring them, but we try to sit with them, live with them and God's blessed actually through these psalms, difficult as they are.
Julie Tennent:	Yes, I think when we wrestle with things, which we should do. When Jesus says you should forgive your enemies, we have as Christians, we wrestle with these, and yet in the wrestling, God has brought us many, many insights and just windows into his character through wrestling with these difficult psalms, and we are grateful for them.
Timothy George:	One of the psalms that has meant so much to me at that very point is Psalm 77, which is a psalm, you call it the journey of unanswered questions, and there are lot of questions in that psalm. Has God forgotten me? Has his loving kindness ceased? Have his promises come to an end? Has he forgotten to be gracious? What a question. Has he withdrawn his compassion from me, and yet these are the very kinds of questions we know our Lord Jesus asked. My God, my God why have you forsaken me, which of course is Psalm 22.
Timothy George:	Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a lot about the psalms, and a little book on the psalms, in which he teaches us that when we pray the psalms, we are joining our prayer, our voice with that of Jesus himself, and that's helped me through some of those difficult psalms. 
Julie Tennent:	Yes. In fact, Psalm 88, which is a very deep and dark psalm, we, whenever we sing that one, which asks similar questions to the ones you've just enumerated, we think of Jesus the night before he's going to be crucified, in Caiaphas' pit and this psalm of great question before God and pouring out of his soul. We think this, Jesus may have, he knew the psalms, he sang them his whole life as any Jewish boy would have grown up learning them. Maybe, perhaps these were his words.
Julie Tennent:	To hear these words as his soul's journey in his humanity, to be crying these same things, helps us remember that we are never alone. When we are in those places of feeling abandoned or forsaken, we know that we never are alone because Jesus has been there.
Timothy Tennent:	Amen.
Julie Tennent:	And he has [crosstalk 00:20:51]
Timothy George:	That's wonderful, yeah. You've titled your meditation on Psalm 88, "Darkness is my Closest Friend." 
Julie Tennent:	Yes.
Timothy George:	That's so good, yeah. Now, I'd like to ask you both a question about, we've talked about the displacement of psalms by hymns and choruses, but I think we are all agreed it would be wonderful if we could recover in some way, retrieve this great tradition of psalm singing in our worship, in our churches. You're speaking to a lot of pastors and worship leaders. What advice would you give them about how to go about doing that?
Julie Tennent:	That is a great question, because it is a very foreign territory for those who have been immersed in hymns and chorus. It's just suddenly you're thrown into what feels like a foreign land. I think the most important thing would be for the pastor to himself or herself give an introductory lens to the psalm that is about to be sung. 
Julie Tennent:	Maybe just a one minute kind of summative focus for the singing of that psalm. I think to introduce it beforehand that way would enable the congregation to venture into this foreign territory with some sense of where they're going on this unfamiliar journey. That lens, I think it would be critical, especially for some of the more difficult psalms that we've been discussing.
Julie Tennent:	I think also the tune selection, of choosing tunes that are familiar to the congregation, so that they're not struggling with how to do this new thing, but it's a familiar tune and the psalm just sings with it. I've had the experience many times of being before a group that has never done this before, and we read the psalm and they experience it as they've always experienced it, just as a read psalm, and then we sing it, and I look out and I see people with tears in their eyes or just with elation on their faces, and they say, "It is so different when we sing it." 
Julie Tennent:	I can't really explain what happens in the soul when you sing, but when you sing, something is different than when you just read it. These were, after all, songs. They were meant to be sung. I think when we can sing them, God's Spirit enlivens them in a different way into our souls and it's just a beautiful means of grace.
Timothy Tennent:	I want to just say that we did introduce psalm-singing for a whole semester as Asbury, as kind of a trial project for our future pastors, and we found of course that there are a number, though most choruses are irregular meter, and so you can't use chorus tunes. There are choruses that are regular metered, so [inaudible 00:23:47] Stuart Townend, some of those new hymn writers that are putting out some beautiful words, those tunes are well known by our students and they loved using those tunes. That is part of the sensitivity. Then also just explaining to students the timing of psalms.
Julie Tennent:	That's a good point.
Timothy Tennent:	I think one of the things that we explain to them is that when you sing a hymn, you're used to a certain timing of a hymn. If it's three or four verses, that's about as long as you can take, and if goes into like six or seven verses, that feels long, whereas the psalm go from very short psalms that are just very, very quick, all the way to very, very long lengthy journeys. It takes a while for someone to kind of adapt to that, but those who adapt to that, and we had times where we would sing three or four verses, and have someone read three or four verses, then sing three or four verses. We did different creative ways, and our chapel staff was really good, and the pastor did this with their church, learning creative ways to maybe combine singing with some reflective reading because people need to adapt because singing hymns and psalms are two very different kind of enterprises, and you can't conflate the two as being the same.
Julie Tennent:	That's right. I think also, it's good for the pastor to remind the congregation, this is Gods' word. As beautiful as the hymns are, and eloquent as many of Wesley's hymns are and they're so rich in theology, they are still the words of men, but this is God's word, so it is a different enterprise, to embark upon this journey of singing a psalm and so, it's a distinctive journey to hymns or choruses.
Timothy George:	You all have given us a wonderful gift, a gift to the whole church I would say in these two volumes. A metrical psalter, itself, which is actually the psalms set to meter, with variation translations offered, and then a meditative journey through the psalms. Timothy and Julie Tennent. Can you all tell us how these books might be made available to people?
Timothy Tennent:	Yes. There's actually two ways. They're available for purchase on seedbed.com, that's our publishing house. That site gives discounts and various things to enjoy. You can also of course go to amazon, but seedbed.com is probably the way to go, and you'll see them there in our collection.
Timothy Tennent:	We also wanted to have this as a free resource for the church globally, so the metrical psalms have been put on a site, www.psalms.seedbed.com, and that provides the entire metrical psalter. You can actually click and listen to the tunes be sung. You can have those tunes be played, Julie, actually plays the tunes so you can sing along with the piano, if you want to listen to that, that way, and that's all freely available to the church.
Julie Tennent:	An open resource.
Timothy Tennent:	We wanted to have an open resource. So that's being used by thousands around the world. They've written us and enjoyed that site. That's psalms.seedbed.com. But others wanted to have the actual book because people love the book and that's available through seedbed.com.
Timothy George:	Thank you so much. I want to encourage every listener to get this copy. If you have a special person you want to give a gift to, you couldn't find a better gift. Beautifully produced books. A meditative journey through the psalms, and a metrical psalter, the book of psalms, set to meter for singing, by our friends Timothy and Julie Tennent. I recommend it highly. Five stars.
Julie Tennent:	Well, you're very kind. Thank you so much. 
Timothy George:	It's just a wonderful gift and thank you so much for this conversation, and for all you're doing to encourage the revival of psalm singing in the church today.
Timothy Tennent:	Thank you so much Timothy.
Julie Tennent:	Thank you so much. Thank you.
Timothy George:	God bless you both. Bye. 
Timothy Tennent:	Bye.
Julie Tennent:	Bye.
Kristen Padilla:	For you our listeners, you can receive a metrical psalter and a meditative journey through the psalms at a special 20% discount rate at seedbed.com/george. That's seedbed.com/george. Enter in the discount code GEORGE in all caps at the checkout to receive 20% off. Again, the link is seedbed.com/george and the discount code is GEORGE in all caps. Additional music was provided by Crown and Covenant. Learn more at crownandcovenant.com.
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