Hymns of the Faith

“Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise”

I Timothy 1:17

A Presentation of First Presbyterian Church

Jackson, Mississippi

With

Dr. Ligon Duncan, Dr. Derek Thomas, and Dr. Bill Wymond

Dr. Wymond:  Good morning! This is “Hymns of the Faith,” brought to you by Jackson’s First Presbyterian Church. The minister of the First Presbyterian Church is Dr. Ligon Duncan. Stay tuned for “Hymns of the Faith.”….. Here with “Hymns of the Faith” is Dr. Duncan.

Dr. Duncan:    Thank you, Bill Wymond. This is Ligon Duncan, along with Derek Thomas, for “Hymns of the Faith,” where we talk about these great hymns that have been handed down to us through the history of the church, which we in the English-speaking world benefit from, whether they were written in English or written in another language and then translated into English.

      We have had the joy of talking about some of the finest hymns ever written on this program for the last number of months, and today we come to another excellent hymn. This is a hymn that we often use to open a service at First Presbyterian Church, because its praise is directed to God. It’s based right out of I Timothy 1:17 – “Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.” And it was written, it was composed, authored by a Scottish Free Church minister (Free Church of Scotland – I’ll get Derek to explain what that is in just a little bit) back at the end of the nineteenth century. You can tell the influence. He would have been used to singing metrical psalms, and what he has done is he has basically gone to the Scriptures, and he has in a poetic paraphrase, in a metrical form, set Scriptural truth to song, and given us a lyric that is squarely based on the affirmations of Scripture, but it is in the form of a hymn and is directed to our heavenly Father. The song is Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise. Many of you in our listening audience will immediately recognize the tune to that hymn, which is a marvelous Welsh hymn tune, which no doubt Bill and Derek will talk about in just a few moments. But maybe, Bill, it would be good, just for those who don’t know this tune, to hear it once before we even start talking about it. [Dr. Wymond plays hymn.]

Dr. Thomas:   Perfect!

Dr. Duncan:    Absolutely! Derek, tell us about Walter Chalmers Smith, the author of this wonderful text, and then, if you could, maybe tell us a little bit about the pronunciations of this Welsh tune and some other things like that.

Dr. Thomas:   Walter Chalmers Smith was born in Aberdeen in Scotland on December 5, 1824, and had a marvelous education at grammar school and the University of Aberdeen, and studied theology in Edinburgh. He was ordained a pastor of the Scottish Church in Chadwell Street in Islington, in London.

      I suppose we need to explain. The Scottish Presbyterians always, unto this day, have a presence in London, which may sound a little odd. But really there was no Presbyterian church in Wales for…well, since the time of the Westminster Assembly to this day. There is now a small denomination, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of England and Wales. They have maybe a dozen, fifteen congregations – smallish congregations.

Dr. Wymond:  In England, you’re saying?

Dr. Thomas:   England and Wales. Because Wales does have – has always had – a Presbyterian Church, though it’s called the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Church, because it sprang out of The Great Awakening, and…

Dr. Duncan:    …Methodism… which didn’t refer to polity; it referred to an approach to piety and sanctification in the Christian life.

Dr. Thomas:    So he was a pastor then in the Chadwell Street congregation in London.

Dr. Duncan:    Partly this is because there were so many expatriate Scots who were there from the time of the Union of the Crowns, and then much more so even after the Union of Nations in 1707. You just had tons of Scots working in London. I mean, the economy in London has obviously always been bigger than the economy in most of Scotland, and so you’ve always had Scots that came to London to work.

Dr. Thomas:   Right. And the fact that they would feel the need to gather together in a clannish ethnic sense for worship and not mingle with the rest of the British may seem a little odd, but if you’ve worshiped as a Presbyterian for your entire life, going to London and worshiping, say, as an Anglican…if you’re a paedobaptist there would be considerable differences. And to this day many of the Scots who are from, especially, the north of Scotland, when they come to work in London as civil servants or something, they attend the Scottish Church in London. And Walter Chalmers Smith was the Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland in 1893?

Dr. Duncan:    Yes, the Jubilee Year of the Free Church.

Dr. Thomas:   And help me with the history of the Free Church of Scotland…the disruption from the main line…

Dr. Duncan:    Well, in Scotland there had always been a legal requirement that the state and nobility not interfere with the affairs of the church, but this had been violated ever since the Treaty of Union in 1707, when England and Scotland became together part of Great Britain, along with Wales and Ireland. There were provisions that were made to protect the independence of the Scottish Presbyterian Church, because the Church of England had always been interfered with by the state and by the nobility. Nobility in England had always been actively involved in appointing pastors in their particular areas and such, and Scotland wanted none of that.

      But when the Treaty of Union went through, lots of Scottish nobility wanted to have the same kind of advantages and influence that their English cousins to the south had. So there was a conflict, and really every major Scottish church split that occurred from 1707 to 1921 had to do somehow with the interference of the state or government or the nobility in the affairs of the church.

      Well, in 1843, things came to a head in Scotland about, basically, local landed nobility interfering with the appointment of pastors, or the blocking of pastors being appointed in their area of landholdings. There had been an ongoing battle probably for twenty years in the church about this, and Thomas Chalmers – [and I wonder if there’s any family relation there…I don’t know about this fellow. I’m going to have to go back and study him a little bit more.] But Thomas Chalmers was the very widely regarded leader of this movement, and many of the young leaders of the Free Church had actually been educated under his ministry.

      Thomas Chalmers led what was called “The Disruption” where about a thousand ministers of the Church of Scotland left the Church of Scotland. They walked out of the Church of St. Andrew in Edinburgh (it’s now called St. Andrew’s and St. George’s). They left the Church of St. Andrew, walked around the corner, went down to the Canonmills and started their own General Assembly. Basically, they left their homes, they left their stipends, they left their churches because they were going to lose all those things over the spiritual independence of the church. They did not want the state to interfere with the local church being able to call its own minister…and with the church being able to conduct its affairs without the interference of the state.

Dr. Thomas:   And not all of those who bravely walked out of the Assembly in 1853 were on the same page theologically. They walked out because of the principle of the interference of state, so that emerging church were still theologically mixed, and so more splits would take place later.

Dr. Duncan:    …later on, that’s true. We were just talking off-air before we came on, one of the differences was many of these men were committed to only singing Psalms, but many of them believed that we should sing Psalms and hymns. And we were commenting on how it was interesting that this very distinguished Free Church of Scotland minister – a denomination that certainly predominantly practiced exclusive psalmody (that is, only singing metrical psalms)…we commented that it was interesting that he would write a hymn. In fact, he wrote a collection of hymns. Now maybe that was for use in private worship in the homes, but there were certain…I mean, you and I could immediately name a number of very famous Free Church ministers who were hymn writers. The Bonar brothers gave us some wonderful hymns that we sing.

Dr. Thomas:   He was also a minister, possibly before he went to London, of a very famous church in Glasgow, the Tron.

Dr. Duncan:    Tell us what a “tron” is, Derek.

Dr. Thomas:   I have no idea! [Dr. Wymond laughs]

Dr. Duncan:    Well, the tron was the weighing device in the center of a city, so if you were selling cabbages and such you would put it on the tron, and this would be weighed for the purpose of sales. And so the tron was a center point in every city. It’s where they would set up the Saturday markets and such, and all the farmers from the countryside would come in and sell their wares. And so the Tron Kirk in Glasgow would have been the kirk that was closest to the center city. And if you go to St. George’s Tron today it’s just smack-dab in the middle of the city.

Dr. Thomas:   I never knew that. I never knew about those musical signs that you were talking about earlier, and I never knew the meaning of tron!

Dr. Wymond:  Shaped notes!

Dr. Thomas:   Shaped notes! I drove around the Tron just a month or so ago – five or six weeks ago. Very famous men, of course, in our time have been ministers there: Eric Alexander, who’s now retired; and Sinclair Ferguson, a dear friend of ours.

Dr. Duncan:    And before Eric Alexander, George Duncan, who was famous in his own right, in his own day.

Dr. Thomas:   And still a very prestigious congregation in the Church of Scotland – not the Free Church of Scotland.

Dr. Duncan:    Our own friends…Emily Stone, who’s now got a different last name because she’s gotten married, are there. She’s there along with her husband, Josh. This is the daughter and son-in-law of Bill and Gayla Stone in our congregation. They’re worshiping there.

Dr. Thomas:   And I spent Christmas Eve with them in Glasgow, having a very British Christmas Eve dinner.

      But this hymn is perfection. There’s an interesting question I wanted to throw in your direction. If…apart from this hymn, if you were strictly exegeting I Timothy 1:17, on which it is obviously based

“Now to the King eternal, invisible, the only God
be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.”,

is that a reference to Christ, or is that a reference to God the Father? Certainly the hymn is a reference to God the Father. I’ve often wondered that, because that issue apart, this is a marvelous way to begin a service. If the service is going to have a hymn to God the Father, and a hymn to Christ, and an appropriate hymn of the Holy Spirit before the reading of Scripture and preaching, and then the final one to close off whatever one was doing in the sermon, I mean, that would be a perfect service! And I can’t think of a better hymn ascribing praise and glory to God. It is immediately God-centered. It takes us right to the throne of God, which is so appropriate at the beginning of worship.

Dr. Duncan:    And the tune is majestic. Bill, tell us about this marvelous tune.

Dr. Wymond:  I think this is the happiest tune I know! I love this tune! It’s so joyful, and I think that comes from two things. One is the meter of it. It’s set in ¾ time, and that is the waltz time, and so you just don’t have an unhappy waltz, as far as I know! And the second thing is that it is made up primarily of the intervals of a third, like [plays] 1,2,3…1,2,3… like that.

Dr. Thomas:   Do you think at all that Trinity was behind choosing this …?

Dr. Wymond:  I’m not sure. I would say probably not, on this particular tune. On one other, I would say quite possibly. But the result of having so many intervals of third is…it’s the happiest and the most consonant interval I know…is that you get such a pleasant tune here, a joyful…[playing]…almost all intervals of thirds. Those are all intervals of a third right there. And then this is a third…then more thirds…that’s not a third, that’s a fourth. So both the intervals and the meter just lead to a very, very happy song.

      I wanted to ask you something. This tune actually comes from a Welsh ballad. It was a secular song at one point, and the words say something about “a hundred years from now.” I’m not sure what it’s saying will happen in a hundred years from now in a secular way, but can you tell us that Welsh word right there, or…?

Dr. Thomas:   Right. Well, there’s hun cant blynedd chan awron, which means a hundred years from now. And then the tune first appeared in John Robert’s Canaidau y Cyssegr, which means “Songs of the Assembly” or something like that, or as translated here, “Sacred Songs” in 1839, originally called Palestrina. But just as How Firm a Foundation to the American folk tune that we spoke about previously has that folksy tune, you know this to me has a Welsh folksy element to it. You can imagine almost a children’s lullaby, or at least a children’s song, being set to this tune.

Dr. Duncan:    But it’s interesting that we tend to associate, at least in the Welsh hymnody that has taken root in America…we tend to associate Welsh tunes with tunes that have lots of feeling in them. They’re often in a minor key; they can be incredibly robust, but still in a minor key. And this is very, very cheerful in comparison to many of the Welsh tunes that we’re associated with. Now, in your mind, Derek…I mean, you grew up in Wales hearing… What’s the range of Welsh tunes that you’re…?

Dr. Thomas:   Well, there are very divergent tunes in Wales, and the ones that you’re thinking of are the ones…O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing, my great Redeemer’s praise…and you need a thousand voices to carry that tune well.

Dr. Wymond:  Or this one…[plays]…I’m giving you….

Dr. Duncan:    O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus…yes.

Dr. Thomas:   And they were sung, and I think set to hymns, in a time of Welsh revival, when Welsh churches (or chapels, as they would have been called) might have been a thousand or fifteen hundred strong, and the Welsh love to sing, so you can imagine that volume. And sometimes they don’t work, when a congregation isn’t prepared to sing with gusto.

      But you know the Welsh instrument is the harp, and therefore a lot of Welsh folk tunes are quiet and of the opposite kind. So, in school, for example, a lot of my friends learned to play the harp – I sort of wish I did; I love listening to harp music. And you can imagine…I’m pretty sure that Ralph Vaughan Williams, in his setting of Welsh hymn tunes, has an orchestration of this that is set to harps. You [to Dr. Wymond] can imagine how that might be set out for harps.

Dr. Wymond:  We’ve talked about it before, but let me ask you once again: Why do the Welsh like to sing so much? They sing at their football matches!

Dr. Thomas:   Oh! But this year was a special event! Six nation rugby tournament in Cardiff! You know, just the sheer volume! I sent you a link on the internet of them singing the national anthem.

Dr. Duncan:    It was really, really powerful!

Dr. Thomas:   Eighty, ninety thousand in the stadium, and…

Dr. Duncan:    And you would see clips of those rugby players, and there’d be tears in their eyes as the Welsh national anthem was being sung.

Dr. Thomas:   I remember growing up and going to what was called Gymanfa Ganu that would be held once a year in the chapel. All the other churches in the town would close. Everyone would gather. People who never adorned a church building from one year to the next would go there, and they would sing just hymns – very familiar hymns, Welsh tunes mainly. I mean farmers who you would never see in church would be there singing hymns. I remember that as a boy, and it still takes place, though probably less so now.

Dr. Wymond:  Well, it’s just a remarkable phenomenon. Now, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but it just seems like a contrast in circumstances, because I think of Wales as somewhat a rainy country – is that right?

Dr. Thomas:   You’ve hurt my feelings now… [Laughter]

Dr. Wymond:  A little bit, you know…a little bit dour in certain ways…and yet they have this robust singing. You’d think they would go around mourning all the time instead of…

Dr. Thomas:   You know, people who are exuberant often have a dark side, too. And there’s an expression in Welsh called Y ci du which means a black dog that sits on your shoulder and whispers sort of very dark, somber, melancholy thoughts in your head.

Dr. Duncan:    The Welsh are Celts, and this is typical of all of the Celts. There’s deep emotion that is not perhaps expressed in the sort of obvious sort of way that we express emotion in America.

Dr. Thomas:    But the Irish love to sing, and it’s a different kind of singing. And if you go to any Irish…well, you wouldn’t go to an Irish bar. But if you went to an Irish bar you’d hear Celtic music, which is very much alive. There are entire radio stations devoted to Celtic music.

Dr. Duncan:    But even in Scotland, where I would guess that the kind of singing culture that exists in Wales has largely died amongst the young people in lowland Scotland, but when you get up into the Gaelic parts of Scotland, there is still some of that singing culture left, and especially on the Island of Lewis, where the Gaelic psalms would be sung. You get maybe a little taste of that with the Celtic roots there.

Dr. Wymond:  So for whatever reason, we have inherited a wonderful group of songs in our hymnody here in the United States from the Celtic tradition. Thank you!

Dr. Thomas:    Well, this one…you know we’ve talked in the past about the marriage of tunes to words, to a hymn, and it would be sacrilege to try and sing this to any other tune! It is so perfect, and fits these words, “Immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes.”

Dr. Duncan:    Looking at the text, Derek, apart from that very interesting issue you raise about whether this text is actually one of those great pauline attributions of deity to Christ, talk about the focus of the hymn text itself on the person of God the Father.

Dr. Thomas:    It’s like the answer to The Shorter Catechism, “What is God?” “God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, justice, holiness, goodness and truth.” And it’s as though it’s a comment on that first section. Of course, The Catechism is a comment on Scripture: “God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, unchangeable…”; and here it’s “Immortal, invisible, God only wise,” so the immortality of God, the invisibility of God, and the wisdom of God. But it’s looking at the attributes of God, and we’ve said in the past that one of the best antidotes to depression is read a book on the attributes of God!

Dr. Duncan:    You pointed me just this week to a book in which there was a wonderful article on the doctrine of God in pastoral care. In fact, I have your copy of that book and have already read that article. I was so deeply impressed even by the opening paragraph that makes that very point, that the doctrine of God is a source of tremendous comfort and ought to be part of our pastoral care.

      But you know, as good as that first stanza is, the second stanza is every bit as good:

      “Unresting, unhasting, and silent as light,

      Nor wanting, nor wasting..” [That is, never lacking, never wasting]

       “…Thou rulest in might.”

[And I love this line…]

      “…Thy justice, like mountains high soaring above

      Thy clouds which are fountains which are goodness and love.”

Bill, let’s hear this great hymn.

Dr. Wymond:  Today we’ll hear the hymn Immortal, Invisible sung by the choir of The Winchester Cathedral, with David Hill, Music Director, and David Dunnett, the organist.

“Immortal, invisible, God only wise

In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,

Most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,

Almighty, victorious, Thy great name we praise.

“Unresting, unhasting and silent as light,

Nor wanting, nor wasting, Thou rulest in might;

Thy justice like mountains high soaring above

Thy clouds which are fountains of goodness and love.

“Great Father of glory, pure Father of light,

Thin angels adore Thee, all veiling their sight;

All praise we would render; O help us to see

‘Tis only the splendor of light hideth Thee!

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