Teaching God to Speak like a Christian? Isaac Watts at 350
It would be a shame to let 2024 close without marking a significant anniversary – 350 years since the birth of Isaac Watts. (Much in the same way as it would be a shame to let the 5th of November pass without remembering Guy Fawkes).
“In the Beginning was Watts”
Watts was born in Southampton on 17th July 1674. At the age of 24 he was appointed assistant pastor at an independent church in London, founded by Joseph Caryl, and where John Owen and David Clarkson had also ministered. In 1702, he became the sole pastor, and ‘Though his Stature was low, and his bodily Presence but weak, yet his Preaching was Weighty and Powerful’.[1] In both his own day and ours, however, Watts would be best known for his hymns.
Indeed, Watts’ influence on the development of English hymnody, on both sides of the Atlantic, was so significant that a recent study on Hymns in American Protestant History and Theology starts: ‘In the beginning was Watts’.[2]
Trinitarian Experimentation
Critics of Watts often point to the fact that he voted against subscription to orthodox Trinitarian doctrine at Salters’ Hall in 1719. Donald Macleod says there is good reason to believe that Watts, along with Philip Doddridge, ‘were, or became, Arians, but what is more important is that they bequeathed to Evangelicalism a contempt for the great creeds and for the Fathers who had formulated them’.[3]
(Macleod goes on to say: ‘This lack of contact with Patristics has bedevilled Evangelicalism ever since, resulting in a truncated doctrine of God, a limited Christology and a defective worship’.[4])
Certainly, Watts ‘struggled to find a way of explicating the doctrine of the Trinity that would keep him within the bounds of orthodoxy’, and ‘these attempts aroused the suspicions of the rigidly orthodox’ – including one of his correspondents, Cotton Mather.[5]
John Owen’s most recent biographer, Crawford Gribben, says:
‘After his death, Owen’s congregation did not long continue in his theological footsteps. Isaac Watts, his successor in the pastoral office, experimented with Trinitarian doctrine to such an extent that, by the 1720s, London Unitarians were suggesting that he had come to support their cause’.[6]
However it is perhaps safer – and more damaging – just to let Watts speak for himself.
‘A sea change in Western Christianity’
George Eliot’s first published work of fiction was entitled Scenes of Clerical Life. It describes a rural Anglican congregation, around 1830, where ‘the innovation of hymn-books was as yet undreamed of ... for the lyrical taste of the best heads in Shepperton had been formed on Sternhold and Hopkins [a 1562 edition of the metrical psalms]’.
Eliot’s congregation may have been fictional, but it was true to life. Calvin’s ‘stern embargo’ on the use of uninspired material in worship, had, by the early 1700s, been broken by ‘the obscure hymns of Mason, Keach, Barton, and others’.[7] Yet even by 1800, hymns were still ‘a relative novelty’ in worship. By the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, however, they had become ‘a staple part of services in almost all Christian denominations’.[8]
We cannot understand this ‘sea change in Western Christianity’, as Mark Noll describes it, apart from Isaac Watts.[9]
‘Opposite to the Spirit of the Gospel’
Watts’ two most important collections were Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707) and The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament (1719). In the first, he complained that some of the Psalm, were ‘almost opposite to the Spirit of the Gospel: Many of them foreign to the State of the New Testament, and widely different from the present Circumstances of Christians’.[10] Christians feared to sing them, he claimed, lest they should ‘speak a Falsehood unto God’.[11] Useful enough in their day, all the psalms managed to do for the eighteenth century non-conformist was to ‘sink our Devotion, and hurt our Worship’.[12]
His views were a radical departure from those of contemporary theologians such as Jonathan Edwards, who argued:
‘The main subjects of these sweet songs were the glorious things of the gospel, as is evident by the interpretation that is so often put upon them and the use that is made of them in the New Testament’.[13]
Watts’ belief that ‘there are a thousand Lines in it which were not made for a Saint in our Day, to assume as his own’ was reflected in his Psalms of David Imitated twelve years later.[14] In it, he was ‘prevented by his theology from using twelve entire psalms and 285 verses of other psalms which he declared unfit for the New Testament church’.[15]
Philip Ross takes up the story:
‘Dissatisfied with previous Psalters that “only make David speak English”, Watts wanted “David converted into a Christian”, offering the church an opportunity to purify her “extreamly Jewish and cloudy” Old Testament songs “with the spirit of the Independent meeting house”.
As Ross concludes: ‘Were David able to see the result, he might wonder if Watts had done him more harm than Saul and Shimei combined’.[16]
‘Why may not a Christian omit all those Passages?’
Watts felt that he and his followers should not have to make ‘Confession of Sins which you never committed’.[17] No man could be persuaded, he was convinced, that an inspired sermon or prayer from Ecclesiastes, Ezra or Daniel was as edifying as a ‘well composed Prayer or Sermon’ delivered in ‘gospel’ language.[18]
(Such alarming views on inspiration would be echoed by Watts’ followers. While arguing that the Presbyterian Church in Ireland should introduce hymns, one minister at the 1895 General Assembly declared that ‘there was more inspiration in the hymn “Rock of Ages” than in the lines of the first Psalm’.[19])
Watts’ greatest problem was with the so-called ‘Imprecatory’ psalms. He asked his readers:
‘Why must I joyn with David in his legal or Prophetic Language to curse my Enemies, when my Saviour in his Sermons has taught me to love and bless them? Why may not a Christian omit all those Passages of the Jewish Psalmist that tend to fill the Mind with overwhelming Sorrows, despairing Thoughts, or bitter personal Resentments, none of which are well suited to the Spirit of Christianity, which is a Dispensation of Hope and Joy and Love?’.[20]
Such an attitude was repudiated by the Scottish RP minister J. P. Struthers in 1888, when he referred to:
‘Psalm 109, which Dr. Watts sinfully calls the “cursing Psalm.” David was a most generous man to his foes. Just as Psalm 110 refers to Christ, so Psalm 109 refers to his enemies’.[21]
For Watts however, ‘should the Sweet-Singer of Israel return from the Dead into our Age, he would not sing the Words of his own Psalms without considerable Alteration’.[22] Thankfully, Watts could provide him with just such a considerably altered Psalter.
Trojan Horse
Watts said that in all places he had kept his grand design in view – ‘to teach my Author to speak like a Christian’.[23] He did not specify whether he meant David or God. Apparently considering himself as belonging to a different religion from that of the patriarchs, he asked why he should wrap the honours of his Redeemer in ‘the dark and shadowy Language of a Religion that is now for ever abolished?’.[24] No wonder that a decade-old article on this website (not by an exclusive psalmist) suggests that Watts’ take on the Old Testament is very similar to Dispensationalism.
Finally he reminded his readers that as Christians face many circumstances that cannot be expressed by any paraphrase of the Psalms, he has already provided his own book of hymns.[25] Indeed, as he later wrote, he imitated the Psalms ‘not as the fittest book that could be made for Christian worship, but as the best which the churches would yet hearken to’.[26] Thus, congregations in Britain and America accepted Watts ‘Psalms’ and were soon singing his hymns, due to his ‘Trojan horse technique [which] had opened wide the closely guarded gates of the Christian system of praise.’[27] In the words of Louis Benson – an authority on hymnology and the author of numerous hymns himself – they served ‘as a bridge over which numerous Psalm singers crossed almost unconsciously into hymnody’.[28]
Watts did face opposition, of course, with many pamphlets written against him because of a ‘deep seated prejudice against hymns among many British Puritans’.[29] In the Established Church, the Revd William Romaine, rector of St. Anne’s in London, attacked the decision of congregations to ‘shut out the divinely inspired psalms and take in Dr. Watt’s flights of fancy’.[30]
The floodgates, however, had been opened. Watts’ predecessor John Owen, along with Thomas Manton, Thomas Watson, Matthew Poole, Edmund Calamy and many others may have written in their preface to the 1650 metrical psalter that ‘to us David's Psalms seem plainly intended by those terms of Psalms and Hymns and Spiritual Songs, which the Apostle useth’.[31] From here on, however, the average Christian would hear ‘hymn’ and think Watts.
Conclusion: Are the Psalms intended for New Testament Worship?
Many advocates of hymnody today would hopefully distance themselves from Watts’ views of Scripture. A reminder of how we got here, however, is instructive.
The key issue remains whether the Psalms are meant for New Testament worship. For Watts, the was only one answer:
‘Though the whole Book of Psalms was given to be read by us as God's Word for our Use and Instruction, yet it will never follow from thence that the whole was written as a Psalter for the Christian Church to use in Singing’.[32]
Again, Edwards’ answer is very different:
The Psalms spoke of Christ’s ‘incarnation, life, death, resurrection, ascension into heaven, his satisfaction, intercession, his prophetical, kingly, and priestly office, his glorious benefits in this life and that which is to come, his union with the church, and the blessedness of the church in him, the calling of the Gentiles, the future glory of the church near the end of the world, and Christ’s coming to the final judgment.’
As such they are:
‘appointed in the New Testament to be made use of in the Christian church in their worship…And so they have been and will to the end of the world’.[33]
[1] Cited in Isabel Rivers, ‘Watts, Isaac (1674–1748), Independent minister and writer’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) <https://www.oxforddnb-com.nls.idm.oclc.org/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-28888>.
[2] Richard J. Mouw and Mark A. Noll (eds), Wonderful words of life: hymns in American Protestant history and theology (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2004), p. 2.
[3] Robert Letham and Donald Macleod, ‘Is Evangelicalism Christian?’ in Evangelical Quarterly, 67:1 (1995), 23.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Rivers, ‘Watts’.
[6] Crawford Gribben, An Introduction to John Owen: a Christian vision for every stage of life (Wheaton, Il: Crossway, 2020) p. 40. See also: Crawford Gribben, John Owen and English Puritanism: experiences of defeat (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 272
[7] H. L. Bennett, ‘Watts, Isaac (1674–1748)’, in Dictionary of National Biography (1899) <http://www.oxforddnb.com /view/olddnb/28888>.
[8] John Wolffe, ‘“Praise to the holiest in the height”: Hymns and Church music’ in J. Wolffe (ed.), Religion in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 61.
[9] Mark A. Noll, ‘The Defining Role of Hymns in Early Evangelicalism’ in Mouw and Noll, Wonderful Words of Life.
[10] Isaac Watts, Hymns and Spiritual Songs, in three books (London, 1707), p. iv.
[11] Ibid., p. vi.
[12] Watts, Hymns and Spiritual Songs, p. 252.
[13] Jonathan Edwards, “Sermon Seven,” in A History of the Work of Redemption, ed. by John F. Wilson and John E. Smith, The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1989), ix, 210.
[14] Watts, Hymns and Spiritual Songs, p. vi.
[15] E. R. Crookshank, ‘"We’re Marching to Zion”: Isaac Watts in Early America’ in Noll and Mouw, Wonderful Words of Life, p. 21.
[16] Philip S. Ross, Anthems for a dying lamb: how six psalms (113-118) became a songbook for the last supper and the age to come (Ross-shire: Christian Focus Publications, 2017), p. 23
[17] Isaac Watts, The Psalms of David imitated in the language of the New Testament (London, 1719), p. xv.
[18] Ibid., p. xviii.
[19] Cited in Stephen Steele, ‘The debate over the introduction of hymns in the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland in 1896’ (Unpublished thesis, Queen’s University Belfast, 2007).
[20] Watts, Psalms of David Imitated, p. xx.
[21] A. L. Struthers (ed.), Life and Letters of John Paterson Struthers, M.A., late minister of Greenock Reformed Presbyterian Church (London: Hodder and Stoughton, [1919?], pp 157-8.
[22] Watts, Hymns and Spiritual Songs, p. 253.
[23] Watts, Psalms of David Imitated, p. xx.
[24] Ibid., pp xx-xxi.
[25] Watts, The Psalms of David Imitated, p. xxi.
[26] Cited in Michael Bushell, Songs of Zion: a contemporary case for exclusive psalmody (Pittsburgh, PA: Crown & Covenant Publications, 3rdedn, 1999) p. 202.
[27] Cited in Bushell, Songs of Zion, p. 203.
[28] Louis F. Benson, The English hymn its development and use in worship (Richmon, VA: John Knox Press, 1915), p. 217
[29] Crookshank, ‘"We’re Marching to Zion"’, p. 22.
[30] Cited in Crookshank, ‘"We’re Marching to Zion"’, p. 22.
[31] The Psalms of David In Meeter. Newly Translated and diligently compared with the Original Text, and former Translations: More plain, smooth and agreeable to the Text, than any heretofore (London: Company of Stationers, 1673).
[32] Watts, Hymns and Spiritual Songs, p. 248.
[33] Edwards, History, pp 210-11.
