[MN] "Lutheranism's Sweetest Voice Turns 400" (Paul Gerhardt)

[Rev. Todd A. Peperkorn]

> [Today is the 400th anniversary of the birth of the
> great hymn writer, Paul Gerhardt (1607-76). The
> article below is an expanded version of the article
> that appears in the March "Lutheran Witness."]
>
> http://concordia.typepad.com/vocation/2007/02/lutheranisms_sw.html
>
> Lutheranism’s Sweetest Voice Turns 400
> Paul Gerhardt’s beloved hymns were a product of
> suffering
> By Uwe Siemon-Netto
>
> Malcolm Muggeridge once called suffering the only
> method by which we have ever learned anything. Nothing
> corroborates this British author’s insight more
> profoundly than the poetry of Paul Gerhardt, who was
> born exactly four centuries ago, on March 12, 1607, in
> Gräfenhainichen near Wittenberg. For most of his
> childhood, youth and maturity, this Saxon pastor
> experienced one of the worst calamities that ever
> afflicted Central Europe – the Thirty Years’ War
> (1618-48). Yet “the religious song of Germany found
> its purest and sweetest expression in the hymns of
> Paul Gerhardt,” wrote Catherine Winkworth (1837-1878),
> whose English translations of Gerhardt’s verses
> reflect their purity of thought, their beauty and
> elegant iambic meter with astonishing accuracy.
>
> We live at a time when in many Sunday services
> saccharine platitudes take the place of the
> traditional chorale with its theological weight,
> choice of words and musical splendor, to wit
> banalities such as this: “He is able more than able /
> To accomplish what concerns me today / He is able more
> than able / To handle anything that comes my way.”
> Hence it seems imperative to ponder the exquisite
> beauty of Gerhardt’s songs, for example:
>
> Entrust your days and burdens
> To God’s most loving hand;
> He cares for you while ruling
> The sky, the sea, the land.
> For he who guides the tempest
> Along their thunderous ways
> Will find for you a pathway
> And guide you all your days. (LSB 754).
>
> This was written in 1653, a mere five years after the
> Westphalian Peace, when Germany was still in ruins;
> when the country still mourned the loss of 20 to 30
> percent of its population; when its agriculture,
> indeed its entire economy was destroyed; when
> peasants, Lutherans and Catholics alike, were still
> traumatized by the memory of having to drink gallons
> upon gallons of liquid manure called Schwedentrunk
> because it was forced down their throats with crude
> funnels by marauding Swedish soldiers.
> A remarkable mix of Trost und Trotz (consolation and
> defiance) lends Gerhardt’s hymns its unique allure,
> according to Heidelberg theologian Christian Möller.
> This defiance is directed against pain while
> consolation comes from his trust in God’s governance
> and goodness – and from the knowledge that all torment
> will pass. Gerhardt’s genius lies in his insight that
> one would not work without the other, said Möller:
> “Consolation without defiance turns into a whine,
> while defiance without consolation embitters you.”
>
> Among the 17 Gerhardt hymns in the new Lutheran
> Service Book of the LCMS, there is one that reflects
> the Trotz und Trost in his faith most clearly:
>
> Why should cross and trial grieve me?
> Christ is near with his cheer;
> Never will he leave me.
> Who can rob me of the heaven
> That God’s Son for me won
> When his life was given (LSB 756).
>
> What makes Gerhardt so unique is his ability to
> describe the reality of the Cross in elegant meters.
> The Germans’ knowledge of this reality was one of the
> great assets of the 17th century; for all its
> darkness, this was a century in which, in Winkworth’s
> words, the very genius of the German people expressed
> itself in religious rhymes.
>
> Paul Gerhardt ranks the second most important crafter
> of hymns in German Protestantism, after Martin Luther
> himself, but he had worthy competitors among his
> contemporaries. There was, for example, his fellow
> Saxon pastor Martin Rinckart who in 1636, as the
> Swedes laid siege on the town of Eilenburg, wrote,
> “Now thank we all our God with hearts and hands and
> voices” -- and this in-between burying an average of
> 50 plague victims every day!
>
> It says a great deal about Christianity’s
> trivialization in the last 400 years that a retiring
> bishop of the Church of England recently informed an
> interviewer he considered it his greatest
> accomplishment to have purged this choral – the basis
> of a wonderful cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach – from
> the hymnals in his diocese. The significance of the
> cross clearly eluded this supercilious prelate.
>
> In an interview with the German Protestant magazine,
> Zeitzeichen (signs of the times), Christian Möller
> explained Gerhardt’s greatness in part with the fact
> that he “belonged to the era of Lutheran orthodoxy,
> which was attentive to doctrinal clarity, and
> therefore sang with clarity.” Möller went on, “I do
> wish the days of doctrinal clarity came back… leading
> to more clarity in people’s lives and song.”
>
> The Rev. Henry Gericke, organist and choirmaster at
> Concordia Seminary and an editor with Concordia
> Publishing House, feels that “if the Lutheran Church
> had patron saints, Gerhardt should be the patron saint
> of Lutheran pastors.” Indeed he should. The author of
> 139 hymns including, “O Lord, how shall I meet you?”
> (LSB 334) and “A Lamb goes uncomplaining forth” (LSB
> 438) led a life bearing the Cross.
>
> There was the Thirty Years’ War when he lost his
> parental home. There was the loss of his wife and four
> of his five children to disease. There was his
> personal illness. There was the loss of his powerful
> pulpit at the Nikolaikirche (St. Nicholas’ Church) in
> Berlin after a contest between Frederick William I. of
> Prussia, called the “Great Elector,” and the Lutheran
> clergy in that city. The prince was a Calvinist while
> most of his subjects were Lutherans.
>
> Ministers of both communities used to attack each
> other ferociously in their sermons. In 1665, the
> Elector tried to put a stop to that, insisting that
> Lutheran pastors signed a document pledging not to
> criticize Reformed theology anymore. But this meant
> that in their homilies they could no longer refer to
> the Formula of Concord, which condemns Reformed
> doctrines.
>
> Until that point, Gerhardt had been restrained in his
> public disapproval of Calvinism, so much so that the
> Elector’s pious wife, Louisa, herself an authoress of
> hymns, often attended his services. But after the
> prince’s edict, Gerhardt became very outspoken. Though
> ill, he assembled Berlin’s Lutheran pastors his
> sickbed, imploring them to remain steadfast in
> asserting their right to free speech.
>
> And so he lost his influential position, a deprivation
> he later called “a small sort of Berlin martyrdom,”
> which was all the more egregious as he was now
> separated from his organist Johann Crüger, who had put
> many of Gerhardt’s poems to music. In a sense,
> Gerhardt’s “small martyrdom” foreshadowed the
> confessional struggles in Prussia a century and a half
> later when King Frederick William III forced Lutherans
> in his realm into a union with the Reformed, an event
> which led to the emigration of confessional Lutherans
> to America and ultimately the formation of the LCMS.
> So Gericke has a point: If Lutherans had patron
> saints, Gerhardt would be the one.
>
> Yet there was also a fascinating ecumenical side to
> Gerhardt’s work. Only thirty years after his death in
> 1676 in the small town of Lübben, then Saxony,
> Gerhardt became perhaps the first Lutheran poet to
> have a song published in a Roman Catholic hymnal. That
> hymn was, “On Sacred Head Now Wounded” (LSB 449). It
> is rooted in medieval mysticism and specifically in a
> genre going back to St. Bernard of Clairvaux
> (1090-1153), a Cistercian abbot. It involved pondering
> and saluting separate body parts of the suffering
> Christ, such as his head in Gerhardt’s perhaps most
> haunting verses.
>
> Ironically, the sanctuary in Lübben where this
> confessional Lutheran last served as archdeacon, and
> where he is buried, is no longer a Lutheran but a
> Union church because Lutheran Saxony lost Lübben to
> Prussia in the 19th century. The church bears his
> name, though: Paul Gerhardt Kirche. And there, an
> inscription at his portrait reminds visitors of his
> “little sort of Berlin martyrdom”: “Theologus in
> cribro Satanae versatus” – a theologian sifted in
> Satan’s sieve.
>
> Uwe Siemon-Netto is scholar-in-residence at Concordia
> Seminary, St. Louis
>

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