# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1854 07 05_S177
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Der Lutheraner.
"God's Word and Luther's doctrine pass away now and nevermore."
Rev. John, Chap. 14, v. 6. 7.
Published by the German Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio and other States.
Edited by C. F. W. Walther.
Volume 10.  St. Louis, Mo., July 5, 1854.  No. 23.
Terms: Der Lutheraner appears once every two weeks at the yearly subscription price of One Dollar for subscribers living out of town, who are to pay for it in advance and bear the postage. — In St. Louis each single number is sold for 5 Cents. Only the letters which contain communications for the paper are to be addressed to the editor; all others, which contain business matters, orders, cancellations, money, etc., are to be sent hither under the address Mr. F. W. Barthel, care of C. F. W. Walther, St. Louis, Mo.

(Submitted by Pastor A. Hoyer.)

On Rhythmic Singing in the Christian Church.

All the members of our Synod will have been instructed, by the pastors as well as by articles in the Lutheraner, about the rhythmic way of singing our church hymns. Many members of the congregations have already come to love this way; in many congregations a hymn is sung rhythmically now and then, and there is in any case the prospect that the slowly dragging manner of singing, which came into the church with the unbelief of more recent times, will soon be done away with in all our churches. God grant it soon! Yet rhythmic church singing still does not at all please many, very many members of the congregations; perhaps they like it quite well when they join in the singing in the church itself, but then they come out, and neighbor So-and-so meets them, a member of those congregations which still sing out of the "Gemeinschaftliches Gesangbuch," for example on Reformation Day, the rationalist hymn: "Religion, von Gott gegeben," etc.; this acquaintance or relative takes hold of them, calls out, cries: Do you still go to the "Old Lutherans," even now, when they have introduced something new again with the singing? Can you not yet see that they are no Lutherans at all, that they are merely leading you around by the nose in order to get their innovations going through you? Do you want to have it otherwise than other sensible people?— Such and similar talk many a member of our Synod has no doubt heard, and has become anxious and fearful about rhythmic singing, and that something quite new is being introduced into the church with it. This at least is certain, that most of those who have anything to object to it do so because they fear the gossip of the people and are suspicious of whatever looks new. Now you should indeed carefully examine everything new before you accept it — certainly; but rhythmic singing is just nothing new in the Christian church, but precisely what is old; the Christians in the ancient church sang rhythmically before the Roman Catholic system crept in, they sang rhythmically in the church at the time of the Reformation. I will, with God's help, tell you something about it.

Concerning the manner in which our Lord Christ sang the hymn with his disciples in the night in which he was betrayed (Matt. 26, 30), or how Paul and Silas praised God in the prison at Philippi (Acts 16, 25.), we have indeed received no particular report; but we know quite exactly how the Christians in the first centuries afterward sang. The Christians who had formerly been Jews brought with them from the divine services of the synagogues or Jewish schools a definite manner of psalm-singing, which was then imitated in the Christian congregation and developed further. They were not melodies such as we now have; only later were many Greek melodies hallowed for the service of God: the Christians sang the psalms and hymns similarly to the way collects and antiphons are now sung, so that in the course of the single verses or sentences they held to the same tone and only at the end of them, or at pauses in the middle, let the voice either sink or raise it, but in general laid more emphasis on the expression of the words than on the tone or sound. Even in their singing the chief thing was rhythm; indeed, if we did not know that, we should still have to presuppose it, since they spoke their hymns more than they sang them, and in speaking some words or syllables are always delivered more slowly, others more quickly; this manner of rhythmic singing is therefore as old as the Christian church itself, and if you follow it, you introduce no innovation. It attained, however, a twofold development in the ancient church. In the East, that part of Christendom which was governed chiefly from Constantinople, the many heretics and sects arising there soon hit upon the idea of bringing their false doctrines among the people through singing; so the Gnostic Bardesa-