Piety in the Psalter. Calvin views the Book of Psalms as the canonical manual of piety. In the preface to his five-volume commentary on the Psalms – his largest exposition of any Bible book – Calvin writes: “There is no other book in which we are more perfectly taught the right manner of praising God, or in which we are more powerfully stirred up to the performance of this exercise of piety.” Calvin’s preoccupation with the Psalter was motivated by his belief that the Book of Psalms teaches and inspires genuine piety by (1) teaching us our need for God; (2) serving as our sung creed; (3) demonstrating God’s amazing goodness; (4) fostering prayer; (5) providing a vehicle for communal worship; (6) showing the depth of communion we may enjoy with God; and (7) covering the full range of spiritual experience, including faith and unbelief, joy in God and sorrow over sin, and divine presence and divine desertion. As Calvin says, the Psalms are “an anatomy of all parts of the soul.”
Calvin immersed himself in the Book of Psalms for twenty-five years as a commentator, preacher, biblical scholar, and worship leader. Early on, he began work on metrical versions of psalms to be used in public worship. Later, he recruited the talents of men such as Clement Marot, Louis Bourgeois, and Theodore Beza to produce the Genevan Psalter. Two years before his death, Calvin was delighted to see its first completed edition.*
The Genevan Psalter, a remarkable collection of 125 melodies, clearly expresses Calvin’s convictions that piety is best promoted when priority is given to text over tune, while recognizing that psalms deserve their own music. Since music should help the reception of the Word, Calvin says, it should be “weighty, dignified, majestic, and modest” – fitting attributes for the benefit of a sinful creature in the presence of God. This protects the sovereignty of God in worship and promotes proper conformity between the believer’s inward disposition and his outward confession.
Psalm-singing is one of the four principal acts in church worship, Calvin believed. He saw it as an extension of prayer. Also, Calvin thought that corporate singing subdued the fallen heart and retrained wayward affections in the way of piety. Like preaching and the sacraments, psalm-singing disciplines the heart’s affections in the school of faith and lifts the believer to God. It also amplifies the effect of the Word upon the heart and multiplies the spiritual energy of the church. With the Spirit’s direction, psalm-singing tunes the hearts of believers for glory.
The Genevan Psalter was an integral part of Calvinist worship for centuries. It set the standard for succeeding French Reformed psalm books, as well as those in English, Dutch, German, and Hungarian. As a devotional book, it warmed the hearts of thousands, but the people who sang from it understood that its power was not in the book or its words, but in the Spirit who impressed those words on their hearts.
The Genevan Psalter promoted piety by stimulating a spirituality of the Word that was corporate and liturgical, and that broke down the distinction between liturgy and life. The Calvinists freely sang psalms not only in their churches but also in homes and workplaces, on the streets, and in the fields. The singing of songs became a “means of Huguenot self-identification” (W. Stanford Reid). In fact, this pious exercise became a cultural emblem. T. Hartley Hall writes, “In scriptural or metrical versions, the Psalms, together with the stately tunes to which they were early set, are clearly the heart and soul of Reformed piety.”
*More than 30,000 copies of the first complete, 500-page Genevan Psalter were printed by more than fifty different French and Swiss publishers in the first year [1562], and at least 27,400 copies were published in Geneva in the first few months.
From: “The Soul of Life”: The Piety of John Calvin, introduced and edited by Joel R. Beeke (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Press, 2009), pp. 41-45.
