A Review of N. T. Wright's "The Case for the Psalms"

Early on in my Christian life I knew that the Psalms were special.  I knew this because the local bookstore printed a New Testament edition that excluded the entire Old Testament but included the Psalms.  It was as if the unspoken message was, “We can do away

with all the Old Testament, but the Psalms are too important to lose.”  Not then knowing the theological problems with such an unspoken message (which I would later learn was the ancient Marcionite heresy), I realized even then that the Psalms are important. 

But what was I to actually do with the Psalms?  I would read them during my annual “through the Bible in a year” programs.  But even then the Psalms stuck out as unique, since most of them are addressed to God, whereas most of the rest of the Bible is addressed to the reader.  I felt as if I was reading other people’s prayers, eavesdropping on a personal conversation that I was only hearing one side of.  After I’d been a Christian for about ten years I realized that praying the psalms made more sense than just reading them.  Thanks to Eugene Peterson’s helpful book Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer (San Francisco, CA:  Harper One, 1991), I began to see the psalms as a framework for my personal prayer life.  At this time I began to sporadically pray anywhere between one and three psalms each day.  N. T. Wright’s recent book The Case for the Psalms: Why They are Essential takes us a step further.  Wright’s primary thesis is that the Psalms are intended to be a crucial part of the Church’s worship. 

When I first mentioned how much I was anticipating the release of Wright’s book, some of my friends said, “Why does a case need to be made for the Psalms?” “Aren’t the Psalms already important?” these friends asked.  Wright’s answer to this is that over time the Psalms have been edged out in our experience of corporate worship.  This is especially true in evangelical churches.  Consider Wright’s observation,

“The enormously popular ‘worship songs,’ some of which use phrases from the Psalms here and there but most of which do not, have largely displaced, for thousands of regular and enthusiastic worshipers, the steady rhythm and deep soul searching of the Psalms themselves.  This, I believe, is a great impoverishment.  By all means write new songs.  Each generation must do that.  But to neglect the church’s original hymnbook is, to put it bluntly, crazy” (p. 5). 

Or again,

“The Psalms offer us a way of joining in the chorus of praise and prayer that has been going on for millennia and across all cultures.  Not to try to inhabit them, while continuing to invent non-psalmic ‘worship’ based on our own feelings of the moment, risks being like a spoiled child who, taken to the summit of Table Mountain with the city and ocean spread out before him, refuses to gaze at the view because he is playing with his Game Boy” (p. 6)

Wow.  For someone like me in charge of crafting hundreds of worship experiences for young adults, this was a sobering reality check. 

Wright asserts that poems and songs have the ability to shape our worldviews in powerful ways that other kinds of literature and art do not.  The Psalms, says Wright, have the capacity to form our worldview as individual Christians and as worshipping communities in both conscious and unconscious ways.  Wright pays particular attention to how the Psalms invite us into a particular way of experiencing time, space and matter. 

Regarding time, the Psalms are historically located.  They envision Israel’s narrative, the narrative Jesus claimed finds its fulfillment in his life and work, the narrative we as the Church have been caught up in as well.  As such, references to creation, Moses, Israel, the Davidic King, exile, and such are all part of the story the Church’s story.  This story is leading to a final culmination, when the Kingdom of God is consummated on earth, and all of creation judged and redeemed.  In other words, the Psalms present us with an eschatological vision of time.  When we sing the Psalms, “the past of creation, the future of judgment and the present of celebration are drawn together” (p. 144).  The Psalms help us, “Bring the past into the present, and that will sustain us as we wait in the dark for your future” (p.73).

Regarding space, Wright talks about the unique role the temple plays in Israel’s worldview.  “The temple,” says Wright, “was built as a microcosmos—a little world.  Its design and decoration picked up motifs from Genesis 1-2” (p. 92).  Thus the temple was to demonstrate to Israel God’s intention to fill the entire earth with his glory, that people would experience all of creation as God’s temple.  Wright plays particular attention to how the theology of God’s presence in the temple is developed in the Psalms to include God’s presence in the Torah.  For Jewish people in exile (as they were when the psalms were compiled as a collection) their yearning for God’s temple presence finds fulfillment in the words of God they encounter in the Torah.  By extension, for Christians, God’s temple presence is incarnated in God’s Son, and then in the Church.  Wright observes,

“So, if the Temple was a microcosm, a small version of the whole world, the same is true of the Torah—or at least, the Temple and Torah between them point ahead to a new world, God’s new ‘place,’ the renewed creation filled with God’s glory and purpose as the waters cover the sea” (p. 104). 

Wright invites us to sing the psalms Christologically, viewing Christ as the ultimate fulfillment of God’s presence.  He invites us to sing them pneumatologically, envisioning the Church as “the new Temple, indwelt by the Spirit of the living God” (p. 110). 

Regarding matter, Wright claims, “The Psalms celebrate…the sheer physicality of creation” (p. 118).  Against the common predisposition to view matter with distrust in favor of a, “I’m just passing through” mentality, Wright invites us to join the psalmists in seeing the world as “throbbing with God-given life” even in its fallen condition (p. 120).  Here Wright draws on many of the creation psalms that name God’s glory in the midst of the world of matter.  Through Jesus’ resurrection, “We are invited to stand at the intersection of the original created matter and the matter of new creation, the original matter that reveals God’s power and glory and the new creation that will be flooded, saturated, with God’s presence and glory” (p. 136). 

Wright believes that singing, praying, and saying, the Psalms is itself transformative.  “The Psalms themselves indicate that the human beings who sing them are actually changed by doing so.  Their innermost selves—which include their physical selves—are being transformed” (p. 155).  This is why praying and singing the Psalms are so important, or, to use the book’s subtitle, essential.  This is why the Psalms need defending, claims Wright.  We need to recapture these songs of praise and trust in our personal and corporate worship to form us into the kind of people at home with the Bible’s worldview. 

So how does one do that?  For Wright, a lifelong Anglican in the Church of England, this has come through his daily practice of singing five psalms a day and worshipping in congregations that utilize the psalms in their worship.  But one need not be an Anglican in the Church of England to recover the essential role of the psalms.  Wright recalls hearing Billy Graham once say that he would pray five psalms a day.  Early monastics would pray the entire psalter each day.  In the later Benedictine monastic tradition, all 150 psalms are chanted each week as part of the communal worship.  The Anglican daily office guides worshippers through all 150 psalms every seven weeks.  This is the scheme I currently use.  However,  there is no one size fits all pattern for recovering the psalms. 

As an “Afterword” Wright describes his own personal experience in singing the psalms since he was a child.  Likening his daily time with the psalms with eating breakfast, Wright remarks that one don’t recall most of their breakfasts but a few stand out.  Here we learn some insights into Wright’s personal life that don’t come through many of his other writings.  This reveals just how personal this book is to this renowned New Testament scholar.  From his struggle with atonement theory to a bicycle accident he had while in college, from his experiences playing Rugby to his struggle with depression in his 30s, from his growing appreciation of nature to his father’s 91^st birthday, the Psalms have been Wright’s constant companion, forming him and shaping him into the kind of Christian he is today.