By Harry T. Cook
6/21/13
Sixty years ago right about this time, I was enrolled in the last Vacation Bible School of my childhood years. I had just graduated from the eighth grade in a class of 16 kids who lived in our little village or on nearby farmlands. Together we had progressed through that four-room schoolhouse starting three weeks after the end of World War II and walking out the door for the last time as the fighting in Korea was finally coming to an end.
We would see each other at least once more in the Vacation Bible School at the little Methodist Church down the hill a quarter of a mile from the schoolhouse. But when that week (and era) came to an end, we would become strangers as some would go off in the fall to one high school, some to another and thus drift apart. I think I have not seen a single one of those people in nearly 60 years.
Yet I think of my one-time classmates every time the songs we learned to sing in bible school come to mind, which, believe me, is too often. We sang those songs, all right -- over and over again at the top of our lungs. Their lyrics were pretty much doggerel and the music even worse, but both stuck with any kid who had the slightest sense of rhyme and an inclination to hum a simple tune to death for the rest of his or her life.
Over the years, even knowing better, I have found myself singing,
Go, go, go; the Bible says to go
To every man and every land, that boys and girls may know
That Jesus died on Calvary's tree to give us all salvation free.
Oh, who will go? Oh, will you go?
Mostly because with proto-pubescent interest my attention was focused on a certain girl -- who, I am sure, would wish not to be mentioned in this regard -- I did not realize then that the song was a recruiting tool for would-be missionaries. By the way, I did not go.
Other of those songs have stuck with me well into my 70s, much to the occasional consternation of my wife, mainly because I mutter and hum them during early morning hours during which she prefers for aural ambience a Trappist kind of silence.
It was the persistent memory of those bible school songs and hymns that, several years ago, led me into a world of research that has culminated in the publishing of my eighth book, What a Friend They Had in Jesus: The Theological Visions of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Hymn Writers. It is being issued by Polebridge Press/Westar Institute, home of the Jesus Seminar.
The thesis of the book is that many hymn texts deriving from Protestant piety in the latter half of the 19th century and the first third of the 20th are, in the main, expressions of raw religious sentiment having little connection to the work of theologians and scholars of biblical texts.
A good many of the hymns and songs I dealt with in my research are much loved and still sung by millions of Christians in America as well as in some of the places to which we 14-year-olds were urged to "go, go, go."
The colleagues who graciously wrote endorsements of the book saw clearly that such hymns and songs helped shape the belief systems of a huge chunk of the American Protestant population in the same way that ritual texts common to Roman Catholicism --the Rosary, for instance -- have shaped the piety of generations of American Catholics.
It seems almost unforgivably elitist to say that those belief systems and pieties have steered far too many people in wrong directions and turned them away from trying to sort out the monumental question bearing on what Paul Tillich called "ultimate concern."
Religion, Tillich said, "is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life."
The little Sunday school song Jesus loves me. This I know, for the Bible tells me so does not cut it for deep thinking. Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine; oh, what a foretaste of glory divine is an insult to the theological task.
I approached the writing of this book in the only way I could -- that is, as an aspirant scholar of biblical texts, their history and the ideas to which they have given rise in the human experience. In slogging my way through a century and a half of pious doggerel (and I shall not even mention the execrable tunes and harmonies to which that stuff has been set), I came to see why religion in America, at least, is still infantile in its application to life and likewise uninterested in the kind of inquiry of which Tillich wrote.
The hymns and songs that seemed so natural to me as a largely clueless 14-year-old boy from the provinces are the same ones that must have followed many of my friends of that day into adulthood. Some of them probably took St. Paul's clue and "put away childish things" and in due course excused themselves from organized religion.
Who knows how many of the rest were drawn into it? Otherwise intelligent adults trapped in a nursery-rhyme kind of religion that is ill-equipped to lead its adherents to the straight-line pursuit of Judeo-Christianity's obvious purpose, which is, in the words of the Hebrew prophet Micah "to do justice and love mercy" and of his contemporary Amos to "let justice roll down like waters and righteousness as an ever-living stream."
With that understanding, I will return to research I hope will yield in due course to book No. 9 on the development of Reinhold Niebuhr's moral philosophy that, I will propose, had its origins in his Detroit years (1915-1928) as he discovered in modern mass manufacturing -- Henry Ford's assembly line in particular -- a profound dehumanization of the worker and a general lack of social and economic justice.
