Hymns of the Faith: Hark, the Herald Angels Sing


by Bill Wymond, Derek Thomas, J. Ligon Duncan on December 23, 2007

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Hymns of the Faith


Hark!
the Herald Angels Sing”

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.”…..And now here is Dr. Ligon Duncan.

Dr. Duncan: Thank you, Bill Wymond. And it’s a joy
to be here again for “Hymns of the Faith” with Bill, and Derek Thomas. Good
morning.

Dr. Duncan: We are continuing to look at favorite
Christmas carols… and, you know, we just don’t have enough Sundays in the
month to do all of them! I think I start listening to Christmas carols sometime
in October and continue right on through to the end of the year!

And today we are actually looking at one of the
favorite Christmas carols of all time. And it’s interesting that just as
Charles Wesley
gave us Christ the Lord is Risen Today, which is still
one of the favorite Easter hymns, so also he gave us Hark! the Herald
Angels Sing
.

I want to talk a little bit about the history of the
text of this song as well as its background. We were talking off-air, that in
his original version, which was actually changed in the hymnal that George
Whitefield produced, that he didn’t say, “Hark! the herald angels sing,
‘Glory to the newborn King.’” What did he say, Derek?

Dr. Thomas: “Hark! How all the welkin rings, glory
to the King of Kings.” W-e-l-k-i-n.

Dr. Duncan: Now, is welkin…is that Middle
English, or is …? Tell us a little bit about that, because the Oxford English
Dictionary tells us a little bit about that word.

Dr. Thomas: Yes, it describes the “welkin” as not
only the sky, but also the abode of the Deity — the celestial regions, or what
we might call heaven.

Dr. Duncan: From Greek times, the term heaven
or heavens has been used to describe various things. The first heaven was
referred to by the Greeks and the Romans after them as the skyouter spacethe abode
of the gods
— or, in the case of the Apostle Paul, speaking in Corinthians,
the abode of the one true God. And he spoke of having been caught up into the
third heavens (although he did it modestly, by saying a man he knew had been
caught up into the third heavens).

And the welkin, then, refers to the first
and the third heavens
in that sort of scheme of things…not only the sky, but
the abode of Deity. It is a word that perhaps even in Wesley’s time was…I mean,
obviously some people thought fairly soon after the writing of the hymn that it
would be better to describe this with different language. And so by the time
Whitefield, who is a contemporary of Wesley, is crafting his hymnbook, he’s
ready to change that language.

And there’s another phrase that’s changed, as well.
I’m trying to think of the minister…whose name was Madan, changes another line
in the hymn. But it’s pretty well intact, although we end up only with three
stanzas. And as Bill Wymond was reminding us last week, Charles Wesley’s hymns
sometimes would have eighteen stanzas! And I have no idea how many of them they
would have commonly sung, Bill, in the course of a worship service. But
typically we have three stanzas of Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.

Dr. Thomas: It first appeared in Hymns and Sacred
Poems
in 1739. That’s right smack in the middle of the Great Awakening, so
the period of Jonathon Edwards here in…well, it was still Britain then…but…or at
least a colony… [Laughter] …but let’s say ‘the United States!’ And of
course the period of George Whitefield in England. And I think Whitefield
published his volume about 1755 or so, about fifteen years after the publication
of this hymn by Wesley.

Now, Charles Wesley… Some people would say, Bill,
that Charles Wesley is perhaps the greatest hymn writer of all time. I suppose
he vies with Isaac Watts, but in terms of quality and quantity and
survivability, perhaps, Charles Wesley’s hymns are…

Dr. Duncan: He wrote, Bill, around 7,000 hymns? Is
that right?

Dr. Wymond: You’ve caught me off guard here, but I
think it was 5,000 hymns or something like that.

Dr. Thomas: Six thousand five hundred, according to
this account I have.

Dr. Duncan: And tell us about, Bill… Did he
collaborate with people on tunes? Did he use his own tunes? I want you to tell
us more about this tune, because there’s a wonderful history to it. But in
general, did Wesley collaborate with someone on tunes, or did he just sort of
pick up what was in common use?

Dr. Wymond: I think it was a bit of both, but he
ranged far and wide for tunes. And one thing that he did that I think helps so
much with his tunes is to choose good tunes — tunes that really did match the
words well, tunes that had quality to them. And so a lot of tunes that otherwise
probably would have passed out of memory because they didn’t have a good text
took on a great life because of that.

Dr. Duncan: Well, this particular hymn probably has
attained the universal popularity that it enjoys, not only in the
English-speaking world but all over the world, because of a tune that later
became associated with it. Presumably this tune that we sing the carol to now
was never sung in the time of Wesley, because it was a tune that basically was
borrowed from Felix Mendelssohn, who would have written maybe a hundred years
after the text was originally penned
. And it’s a great tune. It is one of
the most memorable tunes of all of hymnody. Bill?

Dr. Wymond: This tune comes from a collection of
anthems of praise that Mendelssohn did. There were three that were grouped
together in a collection called Festesang, which means hymns of praise.
And these hymns of praise are very exalted. I don’t know what the occasion was
for this, but they are centering on the concept of the light that the word of
God brought, praising God for the way that the appearance of His word through
prophets and written word and so on like that changed society
.

And this particular tune in its original setting
started off with these words: “Let our theme of praise ascending blend in
music’s lofty strain, soaring through the starry main, peal in echoes never
ending.” And then it says, “learning dawn.” And learning here alludes to
the actual teaching of the Scriptures, and so on like that. But it’s a very bold
and assertive text right there in the beginning, and so is the hymn tune.

The hymn tune is one of my very favorite of the carol
tunes because it is so well-conceived, so singable, so well-matching the
text…just a wonderful joyful tune, as is the text. And Mendelssohn’s music is
fun for choirs to sing, because he just had a gift for giving everybody an
important part
. If you sing Mendelssohn’s Elijah, you do not miss out
because even if you are an alto or a bass, or something like that, the theme
will come to you somewhere along the way in the song that you’re doing.

This particular song — I’m probably going to tell you
more than you want to hear! —

Dr. Duncan: I doubt it!

Dr. Wymond: This particular song is in unison a lot
— everybody doing the melody [plays first phrase], so it has a lot of
strength because of that. And most of the anthem is in unison there. It
does have, though, the parts that are used straight into the carol where it goes
[plays].

And then later is has more tune and text than were
found in the carol, and it talks about one sort of negative thing. It says,
“Mortals roamed without a guide; darkness clouded every nation, not a ray could
be described. All was gloom and desolation…” and so on like that. And so
Mendelssohn goes with his tune into a minor key [plays]–sounds like doom
and gloom and like that right there with the augmented fourth,
especially.
And so Mendelssohn was so good at matching tune to text and so on, and so I
think that’s just a good illustration of that. But I do like this tune!

Dr. Duncan: And this tune was arranged by someone
named Cummings… to be used with this carol, Bill, or was it just used and
associated by somebody else with the carol?

Dr. Wymond: That’s my understanding, yes.

Dr. Duncan: And Derek, you are my friend who has
been reading the British classical magazine longer than anybody else I know.
Catch people up on who Mendelssohn was, because actually some of this “darkness
to light” poetry that he’s chosen for these songs actually fits into his own
story. Tell us just a little bit about him.

Dr. Thomas: Well, Mendelssohn … Of course, I first
encountered Mendelssohn as a teenager. I remember purchasing a copy of his
Fourth Symphony, The Italian Symphony, and the overture…The New
Hebrides
. Perhaps in our context here his Third Symphony — the so-called
Reformation Symphony, set to …

Dr. Duncan: You’ll hear A Mighty Fortress
sort of woven through that symphony…

Dr. Thomas: …coming through very clearly at the end
of that symphony. And I’ve always loved Mendelssohn, not perhaps with the same
intense musical analysis that my friend Bill has, but I’ve always loved
Mendelssohn.

I was just always intrigued by Charles Wesley. You
know he’s the eighteenth son of Samuel and Susannah Wesley. If you go to London
today and go to Bunhill Fields opposite Wesley’s headquarters there in London,
there’s a graveyard called Bunhill Fields where Daniel Defoe and John Owen and
John Bunyan…but also Susannah Wesley is buried there — the mother of these
eighteen children.

And Charles went with John Wesley to Georgia. It was
an ill-fated mission. He was only there for a few months, basically because
even though he’d been ordained as an Anglican minister, priest…he wasn’t
converted.
And like his brother, John, when he comes back…he is 31 years old
when his heart was strangely warmed. And Charles had a similar experience. And
this hymn is written the year after. So it’s one year after his conversion. And
I’ve always loved this hymn because of the way it closes with the reference to
the second birth:

“Born to raise the sons of earth,

Born to give them second birth.”

An allusion, of course, to John 3 and Jesus’ words to
Nicodemus: “Unless a man is born again….” I always wonder if Charles Wesley is
actually recalling what had happened to him the previous year, having come to
faith in Christ.

Dr. Duncan: Bill, you just played for us some of the
music from which the melody that we sing this hymn to is drawn. Play us a stanza
of the hymn as we know it now. You’ve got in your mind both the major and the
minor that Mendelssohn… Now Cummings takes that and puts it together like this.
[Dr. Wymond plays “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing”.] OK. Now, Derek and
Bill, my armchair musicologist/psychologist friends, explain to me why is it
that Mendelssohn soothes me? And why is it that that tune is so…I mean, I just
love that tune! Why is it just every fiber of my being just likes that tune?
What’s happening to me in that tune, Bill?

Dr. Wymond: Well, the tune is a positive tune, I
think partly because of the intervals
. I think that the interval of a
fourth [plays] is a very bright and happy kind of interval
, and
Mendelssohn used it in other places. Brides love this one because…
[plays first two chords as “Here Comes the Bride]…

Dr. Duncan:
That’s true! Dum-dum-da-dum!

Dr. Wymond:
And then, there are a lot of thirds in this [plays to illustrate],
and as those intervals walk up the scale, it’s just a combination of joyful,
energetic intervals
. So I think that’s one thing that makes this tune
really happy.

And then, it has some
of the vigor of some of the German folk songs and choruses, too. I think in the
third line where it goes “joyful all ye nations, rise” — that’s just a very
assertive and happy…and you can just see the folks walking along the meadows and
the hills, almost like The Sound of Music.

Dr. Duncan:
It’s very proclamatory. It’s very…you’re declaring this. It’s soothing at the
same time that it’s bold, and the music supplies you the kind of energy that you
need in order to make this grand declaration.

Derek, you’ve already
drawn our attention to a few of the lines, but the images that are piled up by
Wesley and the statements of declaration about what God is doing in Christ are
beautiful:

Hark! the herald angels
sing,

Glory to the newborn
King;

Peace on earth, and
mercy
mild,

God and sinners reconciled!’”

And by the way, that parallels that beautiful
statement about the second birth. You know Wesley can’t get out of the first
declaration without saying the very heart of the glory of Christmas is the glory
of reconciliation of God and sinners, which is so healthy for us today.

Dr. Thomas: Well, I have a mission to reinstate some
of the original text, which Whitefield dropped. Wesley wanted to put incarnation
in the context of the fall, and there are some extraordinary lines that come
after the text as we know it. There were verses seven to ten:

“Come, desire of nations, come;

Fix in us Thy humble home.

Rise, the woman’s conquering
seed,

Bruise in us the serpent’s head.

Now display Thy saving power,

Ruined nature now restore,

Now in mystic union join,

Thine to ours, and ours to thine.”

Dr. Duncan: I have a feeling that these are going to
show up somewhere in the Morning Guide to Worship to be sung at First Pres!

Dr. Thomas: Well, it gets better!

“Adam’s likeness, Lord, efface;

Stamp Thy image in its place.

Second Adam from above,

Reinstate us in Thy love.”

“Let us Thee, though lost,
regain;

Vive the life, the inner man.

Oh, to all Thyself impart,

Formed in each believing heart.”

(Well, not so good right at the end there!) [Laughter]
The theology, of course, of Romans 5 — “As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall
all be made alive”….Wesley’s very, very strong Adam/Christ dynamic there.

Dr. Duncan: These strong simple intervals
progressing up and then coming back down also help him say in the second stanza:

“Christ, by highest heaven
adored,

Christ the everlasting Lord!”

[I love this line…]

“Late in time behold him come,

Offspring of the Virgin’s womb.”

I think that’s maybe special to me because in the era
of the early church, one of the charges of the skeptics against Christianity was
why, if your religion is true, did it take so long for the Christ to come
into the world?
And of course the church fathers responded by pointing
out that God had been at work for the redemption of mankind from the very
beginning of our history; that there was a reason and a logic for Christ to come
into the world when He did
. And so that line, “Late in time behold him come,
offspring of the Virgin’s womb.”

“Veiled in flesh the Godhead see;

Hail the incarnate Deity,

Pleased as man with men to dwell,

Jesus, our Emmanuel.”

Amazing poetry!

Dr. Wymond: Well, I am amazed at the amount of
theology, frankly, that is in here. As Derek was reading each phrase, I thought,
“There’s a whole theological discussion on every one of those.” And so, as I
think with other teaching songs
such as A Mighty Fortress and so on
like that, when there’s declaration being made, you keep hearing this repeat
of the music, the same note
[plays to illustrate]…and then… [plays
to illustrate
]…and so when they’re trying to really underscore what
they’re saying, they repeat the note over and over again
.

That’s, I think, a musical device to emphasize and to
add punch. And I will tell you that when I am in the malls or shopping and
Christmas music is playing and I hear this carol come on, I don’t resent it even
though it’s being used for commercial reasons because it is just pouring
theology, and people are learning and hearing these words perhaps not even
realizing what’s happening. But it’s what I would think is a kind of
pre-evangelism.

Dr. Duncan: The text of this carol actually picks
up a number of the themes in Philippians 2
, some parts of the Christ-song
that we were studying earlier this year at First Presbyterian Church, as it
celebrates the self-emptying, the willingness to make himself nothing of Christ.
“Mild He lays His glory by…” — what a beautiful rendering of Philippians

2:5-11, in which Christ makes himself of no reputation.

“Mild he lays his glory by,

Born that man no more may die”

[…beautifully stating the redemptive purposes of His
enfleshment, of His incarnation. And then there’s, as you said, Derek…]

“Born to raise the sons of earth,

Born to give them second birth.”

He gets regeneration, he gets the vital importance of
conversion; and that again, in the first Great Awakening, though there would
have been theological differences between Calvinist Presbyterians and Calvinist
Methodists, that would have been something that we would have all shared a great
concern for, to see divine Holy Spirit regeneration. And it’s something that we
still care about today, and so even as we sing about something very precious to
us, the coming of Christ in the world, we see the work of Christ tied to that
regenerating work.

Are there other stanzas that come to mind in the same
way, as you look through parts of the hymn that have been left out to us today,
Derek? Are there background things that you would think it would be helpful for
people to know about Wesley or about the hymn?

Dr. Thomas: Well, this particular hymn I think for
us signals Christmas. I’m not so sure that that’s the first intention of Wesley
when he writes this hymn, to write a Christmas hymn. It’s a hymn about the
incarnation, to be sure.
And what is fascinating for me…some of Wesley’s
great hymns — And Can It Be That I Should Gain?Christ the Lord is
Risen Today; Come, Thou Long-expected Jesus; Jesus, Lover of My Soul; Love
Divine, All Loves Excelling; O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing; Soldiers of
Christ, Arise!
— and we could go on. Those are all very familiar hymns by
Charles Wesley. But the quality of Charles Wesley’s hymns is that
theological content.

Dr. Duncan: And they almost always get to the
second birth, the new birth, somewhere in there
. You know, even in the ones
you just listed — And Can It Be? — this beautiful picture of the Holy
Spirit breaking in and quickening us, bringing us alive from the dead — finds
its way into his hymns.

Dr. Thomas: And the way in which this particular
hymn is so thoroughly Christ-centered
. You might say how could it not be,
since it’s about the incarnation, but every line of it is examining and
turning over a variation on the enfleshment of Christ and what it means for God,
where
(in another of Wesley’s hymns) “God contracted to a span” — from
the elbow to the tip of your finger.

Dr. Wymond: But you know, in that connection there
has sometimes been a misunderstanding, I think, of Wesley when they were talking
about the incarnation and His setting aside His glory. Some people thought
that He had set aside a lot more than just His glory, and really had lost
aspects of His divinity and so on
.

Dr. Duncan: Which Wesley clearly didn’t
mean, but people in the nineteenth century took him to mean.
Let’s listen to
this carol together, Bill.

Dr. Wymond: The version that we will be listening to
of Hark! the Herald Angels Sing is sung by the Philadelphia Chorus and
Orchestra, with Eugene Ormandy conducting. This is a very nice arrangement done
some years ago by Arthur Harris.

“Hark! the herald angels
sing,

‘Glory to the newborn King;

Peace on earth, and mercy
mild,

God and sinners reconciled!’

Joyful, all ye nations, rise,

Join the triumph of the
skies;

With th’angelic host
proclaim,

‘Christ is born in
Bethlehem!’

Hark! the herald angels sing,

‘Glory to the newborn King.’

“Christ, by highest heaven
adored,

Christ the everlasting Lord!

Late in time behold him come,

Offspring of the Virgin’s
womb.

Veiled in flesh the Godhead
see;

Hail the incarnate Deity,

Pleased as man with men to
dwell,

Jesus, our Emmanuel.

Hark! the herald angels sing,

‘Glory to the newborn King.’

“Hail the heav’n-born Prince
of Peace!

Hail the Sun of
Righteousness!

Light and life to all he
brings,

Risen with healing in his
wings.

Mild he lays his glory by,

Born that man no more may
die,

Born to raise the sons of
earth,

Born to give them second
birth.

Hark! the herald angels sing,

‘Glory to the newborn King.’”

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