Sunday Morning Songs and Hymns, Post 7: A Mighty Fortress Is Our God

I tell people all the time: hymns are wild and woolly ... many of them have long stories in getting to Hive... this one is REALLY long and has a DEVASTATING plot twist ... the author would have pitched a holy fit had he known who has given us the most popular translation of this famous hymn!

This one PROBABLY begins 3,000 years ago, in or near the time the famous King David ruled the ancient kingdom of Israel. Although we do not know the human author for Psalm 46, it could have been David himself or any of the several Levite musicians that he had working on worship at that time ... or, it could have begun 4,000 years ago, for Moses, known all the way back in Exodus, is the author of Psalm 90!

Psalm 46 references an event that happened perhaps two or three thousand years before that: the Great Flood, the greatest catastrophe known to Biblical history ... but even in that catastrophe, God protected all those that believed on Him. That being understood all the way from Genesis to Psalms, the first three verses of Psalm 46 make sense as a testimony to God's power in the midst of every possible circumstance:

46:1 God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

2 Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;

3 Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Selah.

A few thousand plus a few hundred years later in Germany, a great deal of the world seemed to be turning upside down, and the powers thought of as pillars of society were all being moved by something that started in the 1400s.

The Roman Catholic Church had been synonymous with Christianity from the mid-300s to the 1400s ... to be Christian in Western Europe was to be Catholic, and few imagined it would ever be any other way.

But in the 1400s, some Christians began to openly question why they were not allowed to read the Bible in their own languages, and why the traditions brought down from Rome were held as God's own law when even the little that they knew of the Bible said that could not be true. They began to question the rank corruption of the Catholic Church as the church and the equally corrupt state of that time were one (as they had been in the Roman Empire), and one in ungodliness and oppression of the people, especially through coming up with schemes to lift money from the people and using God to justify it.

One fine day in 1519, a German monk named Martin Luther had enough. He wrote out 95 theses and nailed them to the door of the church in Wittenberg -- and the Protestant Reformation that had been slowly growing in strength for a century before this burst into the open.

Time would fail to tell of the struggle in Europe that the Reformers and the Catholic Church engaged in -- but one of the reasons we have so many songs and hymns today is that Protestants had to replace the chants common to the Catholic Church, and because of their concern that the common people needed to learn the Scripture for themselves, they used a great deal of Scripture in their hymns.

Martin Luther, the best known Reformer, was also a talented musician, and gave us the words and music to "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott," which of course we know today as "A Mighty Fortress is Our God." He also gave us "Away in a Manger," but that story will have to wait for December... meanwhile, notice that the first several lines of the first verse reference the catastrophe God's protection in terms of Psalm 46, while a great deal of the rest references the struggle for their very lives that the Reformers had to face in order to engage in Christian worship as they saw fit.

Bear in mind: to the Reformers, the power behind trying to keep the Bible from the people and in the exploitative systems of the existing organized church was the devil himself, making the agents that were indeed jailing and killing the Reformers and the early Protestants agents of the devil. That is how serious this hymn is!

"A mighty fortress is our God,
A bulwark never failing:
Our helper He, amid the flood
Of mortal ills prevailing.
For still our ancient foe
Doth seek to work his woe;
His craft and power are great,
And armed with cruel hate,
On earth is not his equal.

Did we in our own strength confide,
Our striving would be losing;
Were not the right Man on our side,
The Man of God's own choosing.
Dost ask who that may be?
Christ Jesus, it is he;
Lord Sabaoth is his name,
From age to age the same,
And He must win the battle.

And though this world, with devils filled,
Should threaten to undo us,
We will not fear, for God hath willed
His truth to triumph through us.
The Prince of Darkness grim,—
We tremble not for him;
His rage we can endure,
For lo! His doom is sure,—
One little word shall fell him.

That word above all earthly powers—
No thanks to them—abideth;
The Spirit and the gifts are ours
Through him who with us sideth.
Let goods and kindred go,
This mortal life also:
The body they may kill:
God's truth abideth still,
His kingdom is for ever."

So far as I know, Martin Luther never wrote a single word in English... and here comes the twist in the story, because he would have been horrified to know the belief system of the man who gave us the most commonly known English translation.

All the way back to around the year 300, there has been an argument in Christianity about the nature of God -- and, the people on either side think the other side are heretics. The clear testimony of Scripture is that there is one God, in three Persons ... God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit (sort of like 1 times 1 times 1 is STILL 1, to simplify it too much but to make it accessible ... Three-in-One, all God, all equally God, all one). The people who hold this belief are considered Trinitarians.

But, by the time we get to when this hymn was translated in the form we best know, the Unitarians -- who believed in God in one person and demoted the Persons of God the Son and God the Holy Spirit in favor of the idea of the universal fatherhood on God over a Creation not needing His redemption through the Son -- had also made a comeback, allowed to do so because of the freedom of worship allowed in the heavily Protestant portions of the world. One of these countries was the United States of America.

So it occurs that Frederic Henry Hedge, a Unitarian minister and a founder of the Transcendentalist movement, translated into English the version of "A Mighty Fortress is Our God" that most people know today, some time around 1888!

Mr. Hedge had studied music in Germany in the 1800s, and had been fascinated by the tremendous output of creativity and philosophy that the Reformation had made possible there in the two hundred years since Luther. Toward the end of his life he became fascinated with Luther himself ... and, in the course of introducing many streams of German thought to intellectuals of the United States, he also wrote much about Luther, and translated Luther's best known hymn into English.

As it happens, because Psalm 46 is part of the Old Testament, the idea of the Trinity is not yet fully developed ... and so the Unitarian minister translated the hymn based on Psalm 46 without feeling the need to edit it too much. However, the Lutheran church around the world has NOT overlooked the fact of what Luther would have thought of a heretic translating his hymn, and so the best-known version is not always the one found in many Lutheran hymnbooks in the United States -- they tend to do a composite of other available English translations from 1868 onward, or use newer ones!

Luther might have also been a little grumpy on finding out that the Catholic Church not only has survived, but now includes a version of his hymn in at least one of its hymnbooks today! But, when you have been blessed with gifts as Luther was, you never can tell where your stuff will end up ...

... which brings us to Hive on 2020, and me! This was actually the hardest piano improv I have ever done on a hymn, because Luther predates Bach, and my training only goes back to the middle Baroque period! But, there is an old principle that saved the day: when in doubt, LEAVE THE CHORDS ALONE... so I just stayed with what Luther gave us, and stretched out the rhythm just a bit, and that's it. For this video I combined my piano arrangement with some pictures of "natural fortresses" -- cliffs and mountains that give us that sense of awe and wonder at their strength -- from Pixabay.com. Enjoy!