Carol line "no crying He makes" ... an "embarrassment" and "bizarre nonsense"
[mounty] For starters, “Joy to the World” is really only appropriate after the millennial kingdom has started, but for the purposes of my previous statement I’m just going with what the good Bishop and others in this thread have mentioned. Of course one’s soteriological bent comes into play with such hymns as “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” and I’m sure once I wake up I can think of a few more. :)Mounty, I think you have a good point, specific examples aside. Hymn editing has been around for a long time, and most of us feel very little compunction about making some edits to old songs, or simply dropping a stanza, since after all, there are 14 other good stanzas you can sing. Such an idea, though, is almost unthinkable toward certain Christmas songs. The difference is that many of us have beautiful memories of singing Christmas songs with our families, surrounded by the soft glow of candles and colored electric lights. Suggesting that there is a deficiency in some of the songs is an affront to those memories. But that’s life; people make decisions for emotional reasons.
Maybe “doctrinally incorrect” was a bit of an overstatement. However, the point remains that we allow things to go through in Christmas songs that we rush to change in other non-Christmas songs, or we simply drop them. We change the last stanza of “Arise, My Soul, Arise” because it’s we, not God, who are reconciled…but we leave the very same idea in “Hark.” And I’d venture to say we sing “Hark” more often than “Arise.” So at what point did we all collectively decide that God being reconciled in “Hark” was okay but that the same idea by the same author in “Arise” was not?
(And for the record, I’m very much in favor of leaving songs as the author wrote them. Few things are more embarrassing than singing a song I’ve known for years, without using a hymnal, only to find some well-meaning [I’m sure] editor completely changed the entire last half of the first stanza of “Rock of Ages” because he didn’t understand the lyrics. But I don’t want to get off-topic…)
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[mounty] We change the last stanza of “Arise, My Soul, Arise” because it’s we, not God, who are reconciled…but we leave the very same idea in “Hark.” And I’d venture to say we sing “Hark” more often than “Arise.”
I promise not to jump ship on the OP here, but I guess I always understood “reconciled” in this text to be in the sense of “to be resolved.” This was my society hymn at BJU, so my radar picked it up. :)
As for “no crying he makes” I am with Angela. It does not say He never, ever cried. Every mother knows crying is a natural means of communication for infants. There is a “tired cry” a “hungry cry” & etc. as well as some that manifest the sin nature early on.
"I pray to God this day to make me an extraordinary Christian." --Whitefield http://strengthfortoday.wordpress.com
Exactly my point. The song’s lyric is:
“The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes (or “poor baby wakes” depending on what text you read ;))
But little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.”
And somehow the bishop extends this to portraying Jesus as a baby who doesn’t cry? Just because the mooing of the cows woke him up but didn’t make him cry? In a child’s lullaby, no less? It’s just contributing to the quiet atmosphere of wonder at the stable scene that the song is meant to invoke.
I’m a little confused by the objection to “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.” Could someone explain that in a little more detail? What is wrong with the statement, “God and sinners reconciled”?
Speaking of “Hark the Herald,” I’ll mention something interesting that occurred to me listening to one recording of this carol a while back. The lyric “offspring of the virgin’s womb” had been changed to “offspring of the favored one.” At first, I was a little miffed. This secular artist is casting doubt on the virgin birth! However, as I listened to the rest of the album, I realized that similar opportunities in other songs had not been tampered with. And as I thought about it, I realized that the change created no error - Mary was indeed “highly favored” among women in being chosen. And the change serves to iron out the awkward rhyme of “come” with “womb”, making it “come” and “one” - at least the vowel sounds match now. I found that the more I considered it, the more I liked the change. I wouldn’t necessarily suggest that it ought to be a universal change, but I could genuinely appreciate it as an appropriate one.
But for the most part, I heartily agree about changing/updating lyrics, particularly that of changing “men” to “all” out of some misplaced gender confusion. “Men/Man” is a perfectly legitimate and correct way of expressing the concept of mankind as a whole. And besides, it’s enormously frustrating to have a song you’ve sung one way for years be suddenly altered for no good reason.
“The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes (or “poor baby wakes” depending on what text you read ;))
But little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.”
And somehow the bishop extends this to portraying Jesus as a baby who doesn’t cry? Just because the mooing of the cows woke him up but didn’t make him cry? In a child’s lullaby, no less? It’s just contributing to the quiet atmosphere of wonder at the stable scene that the song is meant to invoke.
I’m a little confused by the objection to “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.” Could someone explain that in a little more detail? What is wrong with the statement, “God and sinners reconciled”?
Speaking of “Hark the Herald,” I’ll mention something interesting that occurred to me listening to one recording of this carol a while back. The lyric “offspring of the virgin’s womb” had been changed to “offspring of the favored one.” At first, I was a little miffed. This secular artist is casting doubt on the virgin birth! However, as I listened to the rest of the album, I realized that similar opportunities in other songs had not been tampered with. And as I thought about it, I realized that the change created no error - Mary was indeed “highly favored” among women in being chosen. And the change serves to iron out the awkward rhyme of “come” with “womb”, making it “come” and “one” - at least the vowel sounds match now. I found that the more I considered it, the more I liked the change. I wouldn’t necessarily suggest that it ought to be a universal change, but I could genuinely appreciate it as an appropriate one.
But for the most part, I heartily agree about changing/updating lyrics, particularly that of changing “men” to “all” out of some misplaced gender confusion. “Men/Man” is a perfectly legitimate and correct way of expressing the concept of mankind as a whole. And besides, it’s enormously frustrating to have a song you’ve sung one way for years be suddenly altered for no good reason.
[mounty] For starters, “Joy to the World” is really only appropriate after the millennial kingdom has started,yes, this song is about the millenium. at least we sing it at some point during our calendar year—we could sing it all year round!
[Angela Stewart] Exactly my point. The song’s lyric is:
“The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes (or “poor baby wakes” depending on what text you read ;))
But little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.”
And somehow the bishop extends this to portraying Jesus as a baby who doesn’t cry? Just because the mooing of the cows woke him up but didn’t make him cry? In a child’s lullaby, no less? It’s just contributing to the quiet atmosphere of wonder at the stable scene that the song is meant to invoke.
My exact thoughts. I think the bishop’s literary analysis is embarrassing :-) The line is a poetic description of an atmospheric point in time. Not a theological statement denying our LORD’s humanity.
Puh-lease.
Dave
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