John Goldingay on the Psalms are Full of Theology and Straight Talking

The fact that the psalms are there in scripture as the Bible's hymnbook and prayer book, and therefore for us not actually to use them consistently, is really weird. And so with the book of Psalms, that we use the psalms themselves as worship and prayer, but also take them as our model for formulating our own worship and prayer.

From the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, you are listening to Public Worship and the Christian Life, a podcast that amplifies people and stories that share wisdom and wonder about Christian public worship. This season for the podcast, we are dwelling in the psalms, the prayer book and songbook of the Bible. Welcome to the podcast.

Hello, I'm Scott Hoezee, and I'm the director of the Center for Excellence in Preaching at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And for the last twenty years, I've been an associate member of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship at Calvin University. At the Worship Institute this year, we're doing a program called Dwelling in the Psalms, and we're having a real focus on the psalms this year. This podcast is part of that. And we're very happy to welcome one of the leading scholars on the psalms in the world, Dr. John Goldingay, who is with us. Welcome, Dr. Goldingay. I'll give you a chance to introduce yourself, tell us where you have taught, where you are teaching, your research interests, publications—anything you want to do to introduce yourself.

OK, thank you. That's terrible to be responsible for excellence in preaching.

It's kind of a heavy title!

Well, I was a pastor in London for a while, and then I taught the Old Testament in St. John's Theological College in Nottingham in England for twenty-odd years. And then I taught the Old Testament in Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena for twenty-odd years and was also for a while the priest in charge of a church there. And then my wife and I came back to England seven years ago, and now I go to morning prayer in the cathedral, sit in the Bodleian Library reading books, and go to the ocean to look at the sea whenever I get the chance. I've written a number of books on different aspects of Old Testament interpretation and commentaries and so on. The psalms have certainly been a focus of my interest.

Wonderful. Well, thank you. I think when a lot of people think of the psalms, they conceive of the psalms as nice poetry, it's nice imagery, or they're like songs that you sing. People like to take verses out of well-known psalms like Psalm 23 or Psalm 100, Psalm 121. They'll do it in counted cross-stitch, and they'll hang it in their den up on the wall. So, in other words, I think people think that the psalms are very different than the, let's say, headier parts of scripture, like Paul's epistles. The psalms are kind of the pretty part of the Bible; we kind of treat them a little lightly. But you have written, and I quote, “Theologically, the psalms are the densest material in the entire Old Testament.” Tell us what's behind that statement, and maybe what some of its implications are for worship and doxology.

Well, maybe first I should say that anybody who thinks that the psalms are the prettier parts of the scriptures hasn't read them.

Yeah, not all of them anyway.

OK. Hasn't read most of them. I mean, here's this morning when I went to morning worship, it happened to be Psalm 77. That's the psalm that's set for the day that ... asks the question whether God has cast us off forever, whether he's forgotten to be gracious, recalls how important it is to be mindful of the deeds of the Lord, to remember those deeds, recalls how God brought his people out of Egypt. It's full of theology, and it's full of straight talking. And those seem to me to be two of the key things about the psalms, that they are full of full of theology and they're full of straight talking.

What are some of the really important parts of theology that are fundamental to the psalms, that the psalms teach us?

The summary of theology in the Old Testament comes in Exodus, when God says, “I'm the God who's compassionate; I'm also the God who doesn't let people off.” And that's a summary of Old Testament theology that gets repeated quite often in the prophets, but also it's very dominant in the psalms. So they expand, they expound the nature of God as the compassionate and faithful and committed one, but also as the one who makes demands upon you and therefore that you need to be committed to. So it's those two sides of God that are expanded in the psalms. When I was at Sunday school, we used to sing, “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus but to trust and obey.” Do you sing that in the United States?

Yes, yes.

OK, right. So those two sides of our relationship with God are responses to those two sides of God that the psalms are really keen on.

Yeah, because the fundamental character of God is at the core of a lot of psalms, isn't it? You actually have to know your theology well fully to understand the psalms, even as they teach us that theology.

Or conversely, if you're ever to have a really full theology, you've got to have studied the psalms.

Exactly. You've also said that when you boil down the psalms to their basics, they reflect four primary things that believers need to say to God: You are great. Help. I trust you. Thank you. Say a little bit about each of those four, and maybe if you can think of examples of them from the psalms, maybe kind of show us what those are.

The first one is “You're great” or something like that. I can't remember what it was that I said, but that's where you begin. Let me put it this way: The relationship between God and us is one in which there are permanent truths about God, that is why we'll worship him in heaven, because they'll always be true. But then lots of time the kind of things that happen to us don't fit in, it seems, with who God is as the One who is gracious and powerful. And so we cry out to God and say, “It shouldn't be like this. I'm in a mess. Will you do something about it?” Then, all being well, God does something about it. And then we come back and say to God, “It's terrific, you did something about it! Thank you!” So that's the “You’re great” part. Part of the “saying help” is to say “I trust you.” The psalms that cry out “Help!” are ones that sometimes put more of the emphasis on “This is simply a terrible mess that I'm in, and you have to do something about it. Why aren't you doing something about it?” And there are others that put more emphasis on “It's a terrible mess, but I do trust you. I know that you're a God who cares and who is powerful.” So there are those two sides to the psalms of prayer, really, the “Help!” side and the “I trust you” side. And then, as I say, if God has answered and done something, then the fourth aspect to that relationship with God is saying to God in other people's hearing—that's really important, that you say to God in other people's hearing—”You acted, and you rescued me.” Because the saying it in other people's hearing is what builds up their faith in God for the time when something terrible happens to them and they need to relate to God in the same way.

I’ll let you respond to something that I've often thought about, and this kind of relates to the “You are great.” So obviously the psalms—you know, Psalm 8, "O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name over all the earth—there's a lot of psalms that have exclamations like that, doxologies like that. But it often strikes me that it reflected in the psalter—and again, you can just respond to this—it seems that Israel was almost equally gobsmacked by the fact that not only God was mighty and majestic and huge, but that he stoops to see us in our littleness, that he is mindful of the poor and of the woman struggling to have children. That seems to have struck them as much a part of God's greatness as what you would normally think of about great in terms of being mighty and powerful. That often strikes me that he—Psalm 113 comes to mind on that one as well. I was wondering too, what do we do with the psalms—and there are a number of them—that are singularly sunny-side up. They make broad claims that the righteous never suffer a bad day, their children always have enough to eat, everything is just absolutely wonderful, not a cloud in the sky—and the whole psalm is like that. There are a number of examples of that in the Psalter. How do you read psalms that are so unrelentingly hopeful and optimistic—nothing bad ever happens to the righteous people, but the wicked always take it on the chin. What do we do with psalms like that?

Well, what they're encouraging you to do is to acknowledge how ultimately things are—if you like, how things will be in heaven, the permanent truths about God. It's easy for us to be put off by the fact that things do go badly. And so what the psalms are doing there is asserting for your sake, but also for glorifying God, the things that you know are really true about God even when it doesn't look like it.

So they're aspirational, but also kind of eschatological almost. In the long run, this is what will be true?

They're what's ultimately true, yeah.

I'm often struck by the fact that those psalms, and there are a fair number of them, that just paint that very rosy picture, that those are more than counterbalanced by nearly, I think it's nearly a third of the Hebrew Psalter, which are often called psalms of lament. Now, you call them psalms of protest. Why do you use the language of protest instead of lament?

Well, I think a key thing there is that, as you have implied in what you said by way of introduction, I think it's very easy for us to make the psalms and prayer in general and worship in general something that's for our sake, and it wouldn't really matter if God didn't exist. What we think about is our faith, and what our attitude is, and how we're feeling, and how worship can be something that encourages us rather than worship being something that's for God's sake. And the language of psalms of lament—and lamenting is something you—God doesn't need to exist in order for you to lament. People can and do express their grief; even if they don't believe in God, they can lament. The thing about a protest is that it's addressed to somebody, and it's addressed to somebody who can do something about it. And that's the great thing about those psalms that are talking about things being tough, is that you are talking to somebody who's in a position to do something about it, and urging him to take action.

I think you've also pointed out, and I think others of us have seen this as well, that there seems in a lot of Christian circles today a real reluctance to protest, or, if you want to call it, lament to God, but let’s stick with your language of protest. There seems to be a real shyness about that. What do you think lies behind that, and what do the psalms teach us?

I don't know that I know what lies behind it. I mean, that's a question you'd have to ask of a sociologist or something like that, I guess. But whatever it is that lies behind it, what the psalms say to us is “Come on, God really is there. Talk to him, will you?” in the expectation that he's listening and that he'll take action.

I sometimes think—I mean, in my tradition, so you know, I'm Reformed and pretty much steeped in the teachings of John Calvin and in the Heidelberg Catechism, which is one of our three key confessions in my in my tradition. When it talks about providence, there's a question and answer that has something to the effect that everything that happens to us—fruitful years and and lean years, great things, tragic things, hardship, disease, sickness—none of it happens by chance, the catechism says. It all comes to us by his Fatherly hand. And I sometimes think that perhaps people who are steeped in the idea that everything that happens is God's will, therefore you can't protest it. Everything that happens is because of God, and therefore you can't protest to God. That would be rude. I'm sensing that you're saying that the psalms teach us that that's not true.

Yeah, it really depends on whether you want your theology to be scriptural or not, doesn't it?

Yeah. Well, I'd prefer it.

I mean obviously there is an ultimate truth—nothing happens without God allowing it to happen, certainly. But the psalms, and the New Testament likewise, assume that doesn't mean that you don't protest to God about things.

And that the psalms exist as testament that when you do, God can take it.

Right. And it's one of the ways in which I think the awareness of God as a Father helps us, because being a father in the human sense involves a kind of sovereignty over the family. But also it doesn't mean that you make everything work out in the way in which will feel nice for the kids. And a confident father-child relationship means that a child protests to the father, and sometimes the father will do what the child implores for, and sometimes the father won't. The father-child relationship helps a lot, surprise, surprise, in our understanding of God's relationship with us, and not least in the psalms.

You point out pretty consistently in the writings that I've read of you that in a way the psalms are kind of generic, or better said, we know very little about the actual authorship or the context that gave rise to any given psalm. But you also tell us that that's a good thing. How so?

Well, because the more a particular prayer is expressive of the particularities of an individual in one circumstance, then it easily becomes remote from where I am, because the circumstances are going to be different. But if it talks in more general terms and uses imagery and metaphors in the way that the psalmist does, then there's more chance of me being able to use it with regard to my circumstances and the context in which I live, the culture in which I live.

So in other words, if they were too specific, they might feel more at a remove from us.

That's what I mean. I don't know because the scriptures don't tell us, but if I'm trying to look into God's mind when he inspired people to pray that way and put prayers of that kind in the scriptures, then that would be my guess.

Right. We're able to see ourselves in the picture because the picture isn't too narrow. What do you do with the superscriptions? Because obviously the the psalms do have that generic quality. We don't know exactly what the circumstance was, who the enemy was. But in a few cases, somebody has tried to help it and said, “Well, this happened; this psalm was written after Nathan confronted David about Bathsheba and Uriah,” or “This was written after the whole bad business with Absalom.” And then there's all those of David, right? Psalms of David. How do you interpret the the superscriptions?

Well, there are two different things there. The the the general statement in those headings that says Davidic psalm, or Asaph’s psalm, or something like that, there's no reason to take a statement about authorship. They're more like statements of type, which one can see [in] the very fact that quite a number of psalms have got two of those, [which] shows that they are unlikely to be talking about authorship. And so they're talking about the, or maybe it's the earlier collection of psalms that the psalms were in. Moody’s and Sankey's hymns were not all written by Moody and Sankey. And “psalms of David” doesn't need to be a statement about authorship. The best theory about the smallish number of psalms that have got a heading like that one to Psalm 51 that you just quoted is something that comes from Rabbi Chiles:They're like Bible study notes. They are saying if you look at this psalm alongside this story, you'll find them illuminating each other. In the Church of England we have a lectionary in which we're—for instance, this morning, as well as reading Psalm 77, we were reading a chunk of Proverbs 8 and a chunk of Mark 8. Now the nature of a lectionary is to put passages alongside each other which aren't necessarily originally designed to have been alongside each other, but when you put them in association with each other, they'll often spark ideas. And so the headings to the psalms are making it possible to spark ideas by setting a passage from the story and a particular psalm alongside each other.

So that would indicate it's not somebody's guess that that's exactly when Psalm 51 was written, but it fits that well enough that they could, you know, cross-pollinate.

It overlaps enough for it to be worthwhile to  think about these two fit together. And that then saves you from the rather forced—I mean, Psalm 51 doesn't actually fit the David story very well, but at least it fits it 80 percent, but doesn't fit it 100 percent. That the psalm says, “Against you only have I sinned”—well, that's a bit hard on Bathsheba. And so the overlap, to think of it in terms of an overlap, gets you out of some difficulties, both with the psalm and with the story.

I know in preaching class I've often encouraged students to just,  for preaching purposes, if your psalm has a superscription that tries to pin it down historically, I usually encourage them to bracket it out because otherwise what they end up doing is they write a sermon not on Psalm 51, but on 2 Samuel 12, right? So you get a sermon on Bathsheba and David, and the psalm fades away.

Yeah, right. Which is a particularly a shame because to go back to what we were talking about ten minutes ago, Psalm 51 is one of the richest psalms theologically in what it says about God and God's relationship with us. And so if we lose that, then we've lost a lot of the point about the psalm.

While we're on Psalm 51, I think some people would probably be surprised to discover something that you pointed out in one of the books of yours that I read. You say there there's actually less talk of sin, and particularly there's less penitential confession of sin, in the Hebrew Psalter than one might think. Say something about that, and talk about how sin is dealt with in in the psalms and maybe what our theological takeaway is from that.

I wonder whether that verse at the beginning of 1 John kind of helps here. “God is light ,and in him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him while we're walking in darkness, we lie and we do not do what is true. But if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus' son cleanses us from all sin.” Now it's towards the end that that statement about the normal Christian life comes to sin. The normal Christian life ought to be one in which people don't sin, says the New Testament. And the Old Testament thinks the same. You need to allow for the fact that you can find forgiveness, but not to make sin the kind of focus over the nature of the relationship between God and us. That's implied in those kind of statements in the New Testament, and it's the assumption in the psalms that there is a normal relationship between God and his people that involves praise and prayer and trust and thanksgiving. But then when you've done things that are wrong, then you need to sort them out. But that isn't the center.

Yeah, I was struck that when we had the four primary things we say to God—you are great, help, I trust you, thank you—the one that you didn't have in that list, and I think it's because it's not as prominent as some people might think, is “I'm sorry.”

You're right, but it's because there's very, very little, apart from Psalm 51, there's hardly any real confession of sin in the Psalter.

Interesting. But going back to psalms of protest, maybe just say a few things about what many people generally regard as perhaps the darkest of the protest psalms, Psalm 88, which is the one psalm that doesn't ever seem to have any ray of sunshine. Other protest psalms either make future promises to vow to God, or say “I know you will come through,” or in the course of the psalm, it seems like God did come through and that gets reflected. But Psalm 88 is pretty relentless and ends with, you know, darkness is my best friend, and that's the end of the psalm. Talk about Psalm 88 a little bit and what how it functions in the Psalter.

Well, if you were in Sudan, in Darfur, now, or if you were in Gaza, then Psalm 88 is where you are. And one of the great things about the protest psalms is that they provide us with ways of praying with people in Gaza and people in Israel, people in Sudan, people in Ukraine, people in Russia, because the protest psalms are not just psalms we pray for ourselves, because most of us most of the time don't need to do that, but they are psalms that we pray on behalf of other people. So the fact that in worship, at least in my tradition, you work through the psalms day by day, not choosing a psalm that corresponds to where you are, but you're praying because it's there in the scriptures, means that it gives you the chance to be able to identify with and protest on behalf of people who need to be able to talk that way about God. And so Psalm 88 is an example of our being able to do that with regard to desperate situations. It illustrates how the range of the protest psalms is huge. There are prayer psalms at one end, like Psalm 23, that are very kind of trusting and sort of relaxed, even though there's pressure. There are psalms at the other end, like Psalm 88, that, as you say, are kind of relentless. And there are all sorts of points in between that indicate the position that the psalm takes. And the terrific thing about that is that we ourselves, or praying on behalf of other people, can find a psalm that matches where we are.

I like that. In your big commentary, or one of them, on the Psalms, which I think you wrote almost twenty-five years ago now, you noted at one point that it seemed like for a time the psalms had been neglected by the church, but that you were seeing some signs of revival of the psalms. Has that continued? Do you see that the psalms are playing a bigger role in people's lives and in worship than they once were, or are they still a little bit underused?

I don't think you could generalize that, because churches vary so much. The point I was aware of then twenty-five years ago, it's interesting, is that whereas the lament psalms have been a kind of psalm that nobody knew quite what to do with fifty years ago, over the last fifty years people have gotten much more used to using them. And it's that that I was referring to there. I don't know enough about the situation of the church to be able to comment on where things are now with regard to that. But that was a really a significant move, though it does need to be sort of corrected, in my view, by seeing that praying those psalms is a matter of protesting. It's the way that you pray, it's the way you seek to get God to do things, and not just a way of letting it all hang out so that I feel better.

Maybe one last thing we could touch on before we wrap this up. I think it's easy to think of the psalms as being sort of a private and personal way to pray to God, or we study them by ourselves over a cup of coffee in the morning devotionally. But you point out that we really need to read and and ponder and, I assume, maybe sing the psalms corporately as a community, that this is for the community. Say more about that.

Well, if you're a Reformed guy, you know that five hundred years ago your lot would only have sung the psalms, wouldn't they? And I'm with you, really. Well, I don't know, I think it's great that I mean the Newtons came to write some psalms and so the fact that Wesley and all those guys came to write some hymns as well, that's good. But the fact that the psalms are there in scripture as the Bible's hymnbook and prayer book, and therefore for us not actually to use them consistently, is really weird. We're not taking seriously theoretical commitment to the scriptures being the scriptures unless we're using them, I suggest. It's a bit like the question about the Lord's Prayer, isn't it? Sometimes people argue about well, is the Lord's Prayer something whose words you literally say, or something that becomes a model for prayer? And the answer must be both. And so with the book of Psalms, that we use the psalms themselves as worship and prayer, but also take them as our model for formulating our own worship and prayer.

Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much for your time and for your insights. I'm hoping and praying that all who watch this podcast will benefit from it as I have. So thank you very much.

OK, thank you.

Thanks, everybody, for tuning in.