Scottish Spirituality: Horatius Bonar, Victorian hymns and contemporary praise songs

The fierce Scottish presbyterian minister in the photo is Horatius
Bonar (1808-1889). The Bonars were like a Presbyterian theological dynasty in
Victorian Scotland. Horatius studied under Thomas Chalmers, Andrew
edited Rutherford's Letters and the life of Robert Murray McCheyne, and
other members of the Bonar family served the Kirk and then the Free
Kirk as distinguished ministers.

Horatius
Bonar
was a popular devotional writer and one of Scotland's most
prolific hymn writers. Some of his hymns are too sentimental, allowing
emotion to dominate responses and eclipse the place of thoughtful
doxology, weakening any literary impact as verse, and diluting that
theological force which at its best in a good hymn both educates and
inspires. Others were occasional and read now like what they
are – poems so historically and contextually specific to their age that
a later age lacks the right interpetive keys and needs to go looking
for them. Others are long, theologically ponderous and even at times
tedious in the writer's anxiety to spell out spiritual truth with
serious devotional intent. But when Bonar's hymns are good, they are
amongst the best. I reckon I've read most of the 600 or so he wrote,
some of them only once! But some of them repeatedly, and several of
them I think are so important they couldn't be displaced from the
singing tradition of the Church in Scotland without serious deficit.

I say in Scotland, for Bonar's hymns reflect the deep piety of Reformed
Calvinism of a very Scottish flavour, fired by theologically principled
ecclesial disruption, shaped into verse which is unembarrassed in its
use of Scottish idiom, and focused on Christ the Redeemer King who
alone is Head of the Church and whose rights are supreme above all
other claimants. His best hymns percolated into the hymnbooks
of other denominations, though I suspect they are slowly but surely
disappearing from use, even in Scotland. That's a pity. A Christian
spiritual tradition at its healthiest has an enduring respect for those
figures of the past, both great and unknown, whose piety and lived
faith gives biographical shape to the faith. Yes the reformed church is
always being reformed, and therefore changing and welcoming change, but
with the qualification that Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today
and forever. And yes, those convictions about the sufficiency of Christ
and the claims of His Gospel, forged for Bonar in the heat of Victorian
scientific optimism colliding with pious triumphalism, have ongoing
life-giving significance for the church today and always. But only when
they are translated into convictional practices valid for a church
seeking to be faithful to Christ, now, in a postmodern,
post-Christendom, pluralist society where consumer capitalism, not
Christian conviction, is the primary social and spiritual driver.
Christ, who is not time-bound, dares us to follow Him, learning from
the past and from the communion of saints, demands that together we
discern His mind for us now, and trusting the One in whom all things
hold together, invites us to accompany Him into that future which is
the coming of God. Yesterday, today, forever – Jesus Christ the same –
but those who follow Him do so in the changing contingencies,
challenging contexts, and moral perplexities, of our own and the
world's history.  

So
yes, as disciples of Jesus we need now more than ever, hymns and other
sung resources for contemporary worship, which reflect our contemporary
malaise and our contemporary hopes, our contemporary anxieties and our
contemporary search for peace, and which put into words and thought a
faith resonant with the huge cultural shifts we are living through. But
the word contemporary is a risky word, a word habitually dismissive of
past insights, and easily overused as in the last sentence. But it is
an important word, a reminder of how time bound we all are, and that
our life together, our being time bound together, in this unstable and
"fluxing" society, provides the context where we are now, in our own
time, to hear Christ's call to follow faithfully after him. (Footnote:
I owe the effectively descriptive word "fluxing" to Stuart.)

In
worship I want hymns / praise songs / worship songs to encourage,
envisage, enable such faithful following. Hymns that help me bear with
the hard questions, because they are soaked with Gospel; hymns that
know how to tell the triumph of the cross without the pretences of a
discordant triumphalism; hymns that gather up Gospel grace and
unsearchable riches of love, and help me behold the beauty and glory of
that Triune community of love Who embraces the universe with mercy
that is eternal in its faithfulness. I long for worship songs that
don't forever encourage me to tell God what I feel about God, but
enable me to respond from my deepest being to John 3.16 and Romans
8.38-39, which amongst other things are telling what God in Christ
feels about all human beings, and why that mighty love is to be
trusted. And if we must insist on "praise songs" as an alternative to
"hymns", then let's also have "response songs"; songs that through the
beauty of language and image, express certainties but don't forbid
hesitations, celebrate beauty wherever it is found and lament and
resist ugliness, and with equal passion let me sing songs that don't leave me
hymning my own emotions, but invite me to share in the communal act of
saying thank you to the great Giver of Gifts who is himself the Gift.

All
of which, by a long and circuitous route, brings me back to Horatius
Bonar. Whatever else the church today is called to be and do, it
remains a baptised community centred on Christ and gathered round the
table of communion, in company with God and with each other. And one of
the hymns that best expresses the individual Christian's response to
that gathering around the Lord's Supper is Bonar's "Here O my Lord, I
see Thee face to face". Like much else in his writing, Bonar isn't so
strong on the communal or the catholic (in the sense of universal). But
in this hymn Bonar describes, and through the description invites, face
to face encounter between the believer and Jesus, through actions
perfomed together, of bread broken, wine poured out. The hymn is nearly always
edited and the verses rearranged – acts of sympathetic improvement
because in its original form it is disjointed. I've copied the original
below – for myself, it has long been one of the prayers I have open at
communion – if there's a hymn-book! That has it in it!!

The
photo (above) of "The Hymns of Faith and Hope" is of the copy of
Bonar's hymns I picked up in a wee secondhand shop a week or two ago, for the
price of a fish supper! It's a bit worn, but dated 1876, when they knew
how to make a book that would last, and would be worth keeping more
than a century later.

Here, O my Lord, I see thee face to face;
here would I touch and handle things unseen;
here grasp with firmer hand eternal grace,
and all my weariness upon thee lean.

Feast after feast thus comes and passes by;
yet, passing, points to the glad feast above,
giving sweet foretaste of the festal joy,
the Lamb's great bridal feast of bliss and love.

Posted By Jim Gordon