Veni Redemptor Gentium

Some of my favourite hymns are Advent hymns. No, not the Christmas songs that fill the malls and airwaves around this time of year, but the Advent hymns that fill us with a sense of expectation at both comings of the Messiah. One of the very best has to be Saviour of the Nations, Come. The Latin text, Veni, Redemptor gentium, is attributed to St. Ambrose of Milan, famed mentor to the even more famous St. Augustine of Hippo. It was translated into German as Nun Komm, Der Heiden Heiland by Martin Luther in 1523. The tune was adapted from a 12th-century gregorian chant by Johann Walther the following year.

As great as J.S. Bach, Buxtehude and others are, I much prefer the old German chorales before the baroque composers got their hands on them and so heavily ornamented them. Accordingly, here below the hymn is sung in Latin by the Schola Cantorum Riga in Latvia. Simple is better.



Here is a version of the same tune beautifully performed by lute and descant viol. (I make no apologies for the busy visuals at the edges!)



Finally here is an intriguing jazz rendition of the hymn as arranged by Christian Steyer for piano and choir, performed a year ago in Berlin:

Finnish Orthodoxy and a Finnish ancestor

The vast majority of Finns are at least nominal Lutherans, but there is a small percentage of Orthodox Christian Finns, most of whom originally came from eastern Karelia, the historic territory around Lake Ladoga. Today I rediscovered in my vinyl record collection two volumes of Orthodox Church Music from Finland, published by Ikon Records. The first volume contains music sung by the Hymnodia Choir under the direction of Archbishop Paul of Karelia and All Finland, and the second includes music by the Ecumenical Quartet. Texts are sung in both Church Slavonic and Finnish. I think I purchased these at the Anglican Book Centre in Toronto close to 15 years ago, when they were selling the last of their stock of vinyl albums.

Most of my Finnish ancestors were Lutherans, but among the meticulously-kept parish records which have come into my hands one often finds someone listed as having been transferred to the Orthodox parish in Kajaani. This would appear to signify a conversion, probably due to intermarriage.

Incidentally, just yesterday I received a remarkable letter from a distant cousin in New Mexico who found my genealogical webpages. She was kind enough to send me three photographs, one of which (below) is of my great-great-grandfather, Justus Korpinen (1848-1941), who is buried in the cemetery in Oskar, Michigan, located in that state's upper peninsula.


Photo courtesy of Mary Ann Kauppila

Justus Korpinen, seated, with grandson

I was, of course, pleased to receive this, as I had never before seen a photograph of this particular forebear, although I had known of his existence since childhood. I doubt that I look much like him. We both have beards, but I myself am not bald. Then again he was apparently in his 80s when the above photo was taken. By that age I too might be bald.

Lutherans, liturgy and society

Reading Richard Lischer's Open Secrets has prompted me to think about Lutherans once again. I spent nearly half a decade in the mid-1970s in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. There I attended Bethel College, a Baptist undergraduate institution. Bethel was something of a Baptist island in a Lutheran sea. Minnesota is, of course, heavily Scandinavian in influence, so the prevalence of Lutheran churches would scarcely be surprising. Moreover there are a large number of excellent undergraduate universities in the region, with Lutheran-affiliated institutions a dominating presence.

The glory of Lutheranism is definitely its liturgy in general, and its hymnody in particular. Unlike the Reformed churches, the Lutheran churches took a more moderate approach to reforming the liturgy, retaining such elements as the Gloria in excelsis, the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei, that is, the so-called ordinary of the mass. They further retained the traditional western one-year lectionary, which the Reformed abandoned.

Luther himself took the initiative and composed a number of hymns, some of which might be described as christological paraphrases of the Psalms. For example, "A Mighty Fortress" is such a rendering of Psalm 46. And "Out of the Depths I Cry to You" is Luther's interpretation of Psalm 130. Luther stands at the beginning of the tradition of German chorales, many of which, like the Genevan Psalms, were highly rhythmic and possessed something of the flavour of renaissance madrigals. Nearly two centuries later J. S. Bach would arrange these to conform to the more baroque patterns of his era.

The full richness of the Lutheran liturgical tradition can be found in the Lutheran Book of Worship, the chief resource for worship in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada. I particularly like the liturgies printed in the front of the volume, complete with the musical settings. Unlike Anglicans, who generally have to shuffle between two or more books in the course of worship, Lutherans quite sensibly have everything in a single volume.

However, it has always seemed to me that the chief weakness of the Lutheran tradition is its relative lack of a cultural and social witness, which is rooted in its two kingdoms theology. When Lutherans find it necessary to take up such a witness, they generally have to look outside their own tradition. Dietrich Bonhoeffer comes to mind here. In our own day Jean Bethke Elshtain, whom I find a joy to read, is quite evidently influenced by Roman Catholic social teachings. And Richard John Neuhaus, once a Lutheran pastor, jumped ship entirely and became a Catholic priest.

Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, I've actually attended very few Lutheran worship services. But some of my favourite hymns are the old chorales, often translated into English by Catherine Winkworth. The singing of "Deck Thyself, My Soul, with Gladness" during the eucharistic celebration never fails to move me. Though I am definitely a Reformed Christian and an heir of John Calvin, I nevertheless gratefully acknowledge a debt to Luther and his followers.

From Luther's Deutsche Messe

At the time of the Reformation of the 16th century, Martin Luther translated the hymns of the mass into the German language and generally put them in metrical form. For the Latin Sanctus, he expanded the text to encompass more of the passage in Isaiah 6 from which it is taken. This was the result: "Isaiah, Mighty Seer, in Days of Old." Nancy and I heard this sung by a wonderful church choir this morning, as part of the celebration of Trinity Sunday. Generations of Lutherans are familiar with this hymn; it deserves to be known more widely in the rest of the body of Christ.

The ordinary of the mass

In the western church for well over a thousand years, the historic shape of the liturgy has encompassed a number of elements deemed essential to its proper celebration. Together these have formed what is known as the ordinary of the mass, including in outline form:

     The Confiteor
     The Kyrie
     The Gloria in Excelsis
     The Scripture Lessons
     The Sermon
     The Credo
     The Offertory
     The Sursum Corda
     The Eucharistic Prayer
     The Sanctus
     The Agnus Dei
     The Post-Communion

The Church of England's Book of Common Prayer retained much of this shape of the liturgy; however, under the influence of the continental reformers, it moved a reading of the Decalogue to the beginning of the liturgy and moved the Gloria in Excelsis to the end, where it became a post-communion thanksgiving hymn. The Lutheran churches retained this structure as well, although, with the elimination of a weekly observance of the Lord's Supper, only the ante-communion segment was retained on most sundays.

The Reformed and Presbyterian churches undertook a more radical reform, virtually eliminating the ordinary of the mass and substituting for it the basic structure that Old and Hart describe in their books. It has long seemed to me that, in so doing, the non-Lutheran reformers were doing more than just to reform; they came close to creating a new liturgy -- one that would inevitably seal the 16th century breach within western Christendom. Had they taken a more measured approach, namely, to remedy the defects while preserving what was right and good, they might have seen fit to keep much of what we know as the ordinary of the mass.

Imagine, if you will, an alternative history in which Reformed Christians have grown up singing and loving the Gloria in Excelsis, knowing the Sanctus by heart, praying with heartfelt passion the Agnus Dei, and seeing in these hymns a liturgical treasure shared with all other Christians in the western tradition. There would be one less cause of division among these traditions, even where genuine confessional differences remained, because we would all hold in common something very beautiful and ancient -- a way of worshipping God in spirit and truth.