Introduction Contemplating the Psalms in the daily readings in the liturgy of the Anglican Church has deepened my understanding of contemporary theism. They stand in their own right as source documents of theology. Primarily they are dialogues between the Psalmist and God and between the Psalmist and his hearers about God. These dialogues have influenced the thinking, the spirituality, and the culture of Christians down the ages.
The God of Language Primeval man had no sense of personal identity, as language developed the words in his mind seemed to come to him from outside, he came to see them as the words of God.1 So the notion of God was imbedded in human consciousness from the beginning. Evidences of this innate belief abound in the Bible. For example in the importance given to the place of dreams that over and over again are thought of as the words of God: ‘That night the Lord appeared to Solomon there in a dream…’ (1 Kings 3:5) Again it is clear that human beings cannot go for long without returning, with longing, to the God that they remember: ‘I will remember what the Lord hath done, and call to mind thy wonders of old time. I will think of all thy works, and my talking shall be of thy doings.’ (Ps 77: 10,11) When the Psalmist speaks to God he has in his mind an image of God and it is this image he addresses. He supposes that there is a God ‘out there’ who knows him and who listens to him, but essentially he is addressing something in his own mind. ‘O Lord my God, in thee have I put my trust: save me from all them that persecute me, and deliver me.’ (Ps 7 :1) The God of History As civilisations developed man’s identity centred on his memory of his past.
The Psalmist’s meditation on the history of the Hebrew tribes is an example of this: ‘Then Israel came into Egypt: and Jacob dwelt in the land of Ham. And the Lord increased his people exceedingly, and made them stronger than their enemies.’ (Ps 105: 23,24) Throughout the Psalms God is present in the vivid memory of their history. This points to an abiding truth. Our image of God is determined by our historical memory. We are what our God has made us. For example the national identity of Wales today cannot be understood apart from the place of faith in the historical experience of the nation, especially of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Psalmist David with musicians: Vespasian Psalter 8th century
Psalmist David with musicians: Vespasian Psalter 8th century image of God; he is simply the Lord – the Giver of Law. The praise and attention given to God is the same as the praise and attention given to the law. ‘Blessed art thou O Lord: O teach me thy statutes’ (v12) ‘For thy testimonies are my delight: and they are my counsellors’ (v24) As we read the psalm it becomes clear that God is the personification of the Law. In the psalm God has no other property, God is what he does and what he does is primarily to pronounce his law. none of these insights into the meaning of the psalms requires belief in a supernatural God The Psalms of Jesus As a pious Jew Jesus had an intimate knowledge of the Psalms and used them regularly in the worship of the synagogue. As he hung on the cross he uttered words from Psalm 22 (v1): ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (Mt 27: 46) Moreover it is clear that his teachings reflect his knowledge of the Psalms and their spiritual meanings. Consider, for example, the parable of the treasure in the field: ‘The kingdom of Heaven is like treasure which a man found buried in a field. He buried it again, and in joy went and sold everything, and bought the field.’ (Mt 13: 44) This is surely a reflection of a verse in Psalm 119: ‘I am as glad of thy word as one that findeth great spoils.’ (Ps 119: 162) The New Covenant We think of God the Father as the personification of the virtues and values in the human mind. Jesus in his life and witness is the exemplification and realisation of these virtues and values, within the context of the life of one who lived in first century Palestine ‘under Pontius Pilate’.
The intimate fellowship Jesus has with his Father is realised in his daily meditation and recitation of the Word of God in the Bible and especially, I think, in the use of the Psalms. He does not take every image of God in the Old Testament, neither does he recognise every moral injunction. He carefully chooses and recreates an image of God –’My Father in Heaven’ – and the moral law – ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ – and offers these as a New Covenant between God and the human race.2 ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood’ (Lk 22: 20) The idea of the covenant is, of course, prominent in the Psalms: ‘The Lord revealeth his secret counsel unto them that fear him, and will shew them his covenant.’ (Ps 25: 13) ‘He sent redemption unto his people, he commanded his covenant for ever, holy is his name and to be held in awe’ (Ps 111: 9) The Liturgy The provision for the recitation of Psalms in the liturgy day by day is deliberate. They must not be regarded as just another Bible Reading but rather as a spiritual exercise enabling us to enter into the mind of Christ. The psalms enable the worshipper to understand and develop the thoughts of Christ himself and indeed to be joined with Christ in his eternal ‘conversation’ with the Father in which he forges the New Covenant from the many disparate images of God in the Old Testament.
Just as St Paul says: ‘Yet we possess the mind of Christ’ (1Cor 2: 16). This is an ongoing and never ending process, for we have the duty to relate our thoughts about God to the challenges of our contemporary situation.
Conclusion The theological non-realist will notice that none of these insights into the meaning of the psalms requires belief in a supernatural God. The God of the Psalms is a human invention, one which has been in the human consciousness from the beginning, but which is open to development and refinement in every age.3 This fact ought not cause us to neglect or discard our study of theology. Rather we should celebrate the idea of God as a creative dimension in human thought. 1. The best explanation of this idea is to be found in Don Cupitt, What is a Story? SCM Press 1991. 2. This idea is expressed rather well by Hans Küng in his Memoirs II: Disputed Truth, p. 302: ‘However, Jesus doesn’t appeal to a new God but to the God of Israel – albeit understood in a new way, not simply as God of pious observers of the law, the “righteous”, but as father of the lost, weak, poor, oppressed, “sinners”. He addresses God in a quite unusual way as his and our “Father” ’. 3. The idea that God is best found within the human mind is, of course, quite traditional and orthodox. The Archbishop of Canterbury uses it frequently. For example in his sermon at Westminster Abbey on Armistice Day 2009: ‘His commitment is to the God who is discovered in the heart of your own endurance and pain – not a solution, not a Father Christmas or a fairy godmother, but simply the one who holds your deepest self and makes it possible for you to look out on the world without loathing and despair.’ The Venerable David S. Lee was the Archdeacon of Llandaff until his retirement in 1997.