“Doing Justice to Praise: An Evaluation of Modern Worship Songs in the Context of the Psalms”

Brent Strawn, in The Old Testament is Dying, utilizes a linguistic analogy to describe the Old Testament as a dying language, undergoing various stages of pidginization and creolization. I apply his pidgin and creole language to contemporary worship music, the American evangelical corpus (henceforth AEC), to assess the shift in conceptual worship language in the last decade.
I argue that our current culture has pidginized the conceptual language of worship by coopting therapeutic categories (here, I rely on Phillip Rieff’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic and Sacred Order/ Social Order and Christian Smith’s Souls in Transition) and abdicating categories like justice. Praise language in the AEC, unlike the Psalms, emits triumphalism that overreaches the context of Biblical worship, inadvertently removing significant attributes of God and His people from worship vocabulary.

To demonstrate this point, I structure my argument as follows: (1) I overview the Hymn genre in the book of the Psalms and highlight their key features (depending upon Gunkel, The Psalms in Israel’s Worship and Westermann, Praise and Lament in the Psalms); (2) I categorize the praise language in the AEC; (3) I compare the major themes and motifs in both the AEC and the Psalms to determine how contemporary conceptions of praise share and differentiate from praise elements in the Psalms.