Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation (review)

Music is undoubtedly important to the contemporary Lutheran church. The strong choral tradition at Lutheran colleges attests to that, as does the extensive television coverage of their annual Christmas concerts throughout the Midwest. The idea that this musical emphasis is not limited merely to today's churches is not particularly novel or new either; hymns composed by Martin Luther are sung and played regularly in a variety of Protestant churches and have been for centuries. This long history of Lutheran hymnody is the basis for Christopher Boyd Brown's Singing the Gospel, which argues that hymns were integral to the spreading and preserving of Lutheranism in the sixteenth century. Though Brown's argument does offer an intriguing angle on the significance of music in and for the early Lutheran church, Singing the Gospel is weighed down by the cumbersome presentation of the painstaking research on which Brown's hypothesis rests.

Brown's contention that hymns were used not just as celebrations of the gospel but more specifically as proselytizing tools for spreading Luther's reformation, much to the chagrin of the Catholic church, is both significant and interesting, particularly in the way in which it stresses the importance that the numerous Lutheran hymnals of the time held for the religion's converts and the very deliberate marketing techniques that were used to adapt subsequent editions of the hymnals to public tastes. Brown also wisely chooses to devote much of his text to an examination of the extensive use of music, especially hymns, in Joachimsthal, a Bohemian mining town. Using Joachimsthal as a single, extended example of the importance of hymns to the Lutheran Reformation provides a welcome focal point for Brown's readers, allowing them to more easily follow his contentions about the importance of music in the churches, schools, and homes of sixteenth-century Lutherans and the value of women's contributions in maintaining a strong commitment to the new faith—a notion that runs counter to more popular but perhaps mistaken notions about women's relative powerlessness in the society and church of the time.

Unfortunately, as is often the case, the chief virtue of Singing the Gospel is also its greatest flaw. The enormous amount of research that obviously went into the book is commendable, but it could be more effectively presented. With a text only 172 pages long, 123 pages of appendices, abbreviations, notes, and index seems excessive, as does the extensive footnoting throughout the book. When a single paragraph has as many as eight footnotes, it is unlikely that even the most ardently thorough readers will consult each one, and if they did, the continual flipping between text and supporting materials could very well become distracting rather than enlightening. Moving at least some of this information from the various appendices and footnotes to the text itself would simply make the work more readable. In addition, it would be helpful if somewhere among those footnotes the many German titles and lyrics were translated, as not all potential readers of the text can be counted upon to be fluent enough in German to translate them easily on their own.

The acknowledgments section of Singing the Gospel indicates that it began as a dissertation. In some ways, it still reads like one. Although it has much to contribute to the history of the Lutheran musical tradition, in terms of its style, it sadly seems a bit out of tune.