Imagination in Hymnody
Below is an excerpt from a larger paper that I titled “Music as More than Mental Mechanism: An Analysis of Imagination in the Hymnody of Thomas Hastings.” The paper explored the topic of imagination, especially the use of a sanctified imagination in worship. This particular section speaks to the importance of the imagination in hymns, revealing the role that music plays in congregational singing.
The imagination awakens as a muscle that must be exercised into right thinking, allowing its sanctification to lead the mind, will, and affections into true worship.
Hymns inspire the use of the imagination due to their poetic and musical construction, with one hymn-writer believing that “hymns make demands on the whole person – on the heart, soul, and mind, and they have special power to communicate memorable spiritual truth.”[1] If Janine Langan is correct when she states that a Christian imagination “does not see the world as a prison from which the soul must escape, but as the stage of humanity’s interaction with its God,”[2] then hymnody serves as the channel for worshipers to express “sentiments which they can honestly acknowledge and share, providing a form which, at best, finds fitter words for their devotion and aspiration than they might find themselves.”[3] Since hymns call for active participation through seeing, hearing, singing, and possibly touch if one is holding a hymnal,[4] then through the engagement of these senses, the imagination awakens as a muscle that must be exercised into right thinking, allowing its sanctification to lead the mind, will, and affections into true worship.[5]
For centuries, pastors have recited hymns in their sermons because hymns express theological truths in beautiful forms. One theologian believes that hymnody “represents a renewing cycle of spiritual power: the wonder of God gives rise to the creation of hymns which in turn invites a renewed sense of wonder.”[6] The imagination, then, does not solely depend “on the clear definition of belief and doctrine, but on language that helps us to taste and glimpse the truth and the wonder of a God who makes all our definitions seem frail and tattered.”[7]
Because hymns are sung responses to God, it is important to note the role music plays in forming our imaginations. As Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony conveys multiple images of the composer’s experience in the English countryside (“Arrival in the Country,” “By the Brook,” “Peasant Merrymaking,” “The Thunderstorm,” and “The Shepherd’s Song after the Storm”), so spiritual melodies, when sung with the engagement of the imagination, “allow the Spirit to attend and to sanctify.”[8] David Music asserts that people tend to remember things better when there are rational and emotional components in what they do, and Ryken similarly claims that music has the ability to “heighten reality beyond what we find in real life.”[9] Since music has the capacity to fuse our cognition with our affection, one now understands that the imagination is “a religious power of the highest order.”[10]
[1] Paul Steven Jones, “Writing Hymns,” In The Christian Imagination, edited by Leland Ryken (New York: WaterBrook Multnomah, 2002), 401.
[2] Janine Langan, “The Christian Imagination,” In The Christian Imagination, edited by Leland Ryken (New York: WaterBrook Multnomah, 2002), 67.
[3] Timothy Dudley Smith, “The Poet as Hymn Writer,” In The Christian Imagination, edited by Leland Ryken (New York: WaterBrook Multnomah, 2002), 392.
[4] David Music discussed why hymns are effective educational tools in his presentation through the Northcutt Lecture Series at Baylor University on April 6, 2021, and hymns requiring active participation was his fourth point. The video is archived at https://sites.baylor.edu/ccms/2021/04/06/david-music-2021-northcutt-lecture-series/.
[5] Andrew Peterson expressed the thought of the imagination as a muscle that must be exercised or it would atrophy in his interview by Al Mohler on the Thinking in Public podcast, “Always Looking for that Bridge: A Conversation with Andrew Peterson About the Christian Imagination,” December 9, 2019, https://albertmohler.com/2019/12/09/andrew-peterson. Peterson also discusses how the imagination functions in our daily lives in his book Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing, 2019).
[6] Thomas H. Troeger, “The Hidden Stream the Feeds: Hymns as a Resource for the Preacher’s Imagination,” The Hymn 43, no. 3 (July 1992), 6.
[7] Troeger, “The Hidden Stream,” 7.
[8] Douglas Sean O’Donnell, God’s Lyrics: Rediscovering Worship Through Old Testament Songs (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2010), 110.
[9] David Music Northcutt Lecture Series, April 6, 2021; Ryken, Liberated Imagination, 112.
[10] George H. Morrison, “Christ and the Imagination,” in Developing a Christian Imagination: An Interpretive Anthology, compiled by Warren W. Wiersbe (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1995), 66.
