A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original article appears below. Brian J. Fraser is Dean of St. Andrew’s Hall and Assistant Professor of Church History at the Vancouver School of Theology, University of British Columbia. He is the author of a new book, The Social Uplifters: Presbyterian Progressives and the Social Gospel in Canada, 1875-1915.
Bless the Lord. O my soul:
and all that is within me.
bless his holy name!
Bless the Lord, O my soul.
and forget not all his benefits,
who forgives all your iniquity,
who heals all your diseases,
who redeems your life from the Pit.
who crowns you with steadfast love
and mercy.
who satisfies you with good as long as you
live so that your youth is renewed like
the eagle’s.
The Lord works vindication and justice for
all who are oppressed.
He made known his ways to Moses,
his acts to the people of Israel.
The Lord is merciful and gracious,
slow to anger and abounding in
steadfast love.
He will not always chide,
nor will he keep his anger for ever.
He does not deal with us according to
our sins, nor requite us according to
our iniquities.
For as the heavens are high above the
earth.
so great is his steadfast love toward
those who fear him:
as far as the east is from the west,
so far does he remove our
transgressions from us.
As a father pities his children.
so the Lord pities those who fear him.
For he knows our frame:
he remembers that we are dust.
As for man, his days are like grass:
he flourishes like a flower of the field:
for the wind passes over it. and it is gone.
and its place knows it no more.
But the steadfast love of the Lord is from
everlasting to everlasting upon those
who fear him.
and his righteousness to children’s children.
to those who keep his covenant and
remember to do his commandments.
The Lord has established his throne in
the heavens,
and his kingdom rules over all.
Bless the Lord, O you his angels,
you mighty ones who do his word,
hearkening to the voice of his word!
Bless the Lord, all his hosts,
his ministers that do his will!
Bless the Lord, all his works!
in all places of his dominion.
Bless the Lord, 0 my soul!
The problem, quite frankly, is that we do not take the Scriptures seriously. The Scriptures as a whole, that is.
Canadian theologian Walter Bryden was right. We are constantly tempted with heresy. Heresy, he went on, is anything that reduces the paradox and mystery of the Gospel to human dimensions, anything that makes the Gospel manageable and comfortable, that domesticates God in Christ as our Lord and Saviour.
We do it all the time. We reduce the Christian faith to dimensions we feel we can handle. We have our favourite passages of Scripture, our favourite books of the Bible, our favourite pastors and theologians within the community of faith — all determined by our tastes, our preferences, and our choices and geared to our needs. We look for custom-designed Christianity, tailored to fit our need for salvation.
The church of Jesus Christ has become infected with such individualism. It is a difficult disease to resist. It is pervasive in the culture, especially in North America. Since the rise of the Enlightenment in Europe, with its stress on the distinctiveness and decisiveness of the individual person, Christianity has been characterized as a matter of value rather than fact and, therefore, relegated to the realm of private choice. My faith is a matter of personal decision and my responsibility to God in Christ consists of bringing others to a similar personal decision. Once that happens, we gather together in a voluntary association of people who have made the same choice. This gathering of like-minded individuals is the Church. The primary mark of human sinfulness — the isolated individual — becomes the foundation for faith.
That fullness is expressed in Psalm 103, a hymn of thanksgiving that John Knox used in the English congregation in Geneva at the end of the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving in the Communion Service. For Knox, the psalm acted as a scriptural warrant for the prayer, a prayer shaped by our gratitude for God’s grace as Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer.
In Psalm 103, then, we find something that the Reformed tradition has always considered central to its interpretation of the witness of Scripture to Christ — the fullness of faith. This is an expression of faith as God has formed it. It speaks to all three dimensions of our vocation as God’s people — the personal, the communal, and the cosmic. Renewal that is faithful to God’s call will not be infected by the individualism of our culture but will be nurtured by the vision of thankful service to God found in this psalm.
Renewal that is faithful to God’s call will not be infected by the individualism of our culture but will be nurtured by the vision of thankful service to God found in this psalm.
The psalm begins with one of the most moving expressions of personal piety in the Scriptures. God is praised for satisfying the deepest of human needs — forgiveness of sin, healing, assurance of eternal life, and lasting love. The joy and energy of youth is constantly renewed in our personal relationship with God. Taken by themselves, verses 1-5 offer what appears to be a rationale for precisely the individualism we have been discussing. But the psalmist and the community that sang this hymn in worship knew nothing of the individual in isolation, apart from the covenant community through which God had given them faith.
The psalm, then, expands from its acknowledgement of the depth of personal piety to express gratitude for the community shaped and directed by God’s mercy and steadfast love. It is a community of the forgiven and the freed. There is no hint of individual moral perfectionism. We are sinful, diseased, bearers of death, dust, and withering grass. It is God who brings vindication and justice, who calls a people out of bondage into the glorious freedom of the children of God. Our ability to keep the covenant and do God’s commandments comes solely from God’s grace and is directed solely to God’s purposes.
And it is to God’s purposes that the worshipping community is drawn by the dramatic climax of the psalm. Just as the individual was not left in isolation, but rooted in the covenant community, so that community is not left in isolation, but given to the world over which God exercises a loving sovereignty, the object of God’s love is the whole of the creation. The primary, though not the only, agent of that love is the covenant community called by God to be a blessing. The vocation of those who have been nurtured in, recalled to, or invited into this community of grace and gratitude is to participate in God’s works.
In the fullness of faith, then, God reconciles human beings, isolated in their individualism, to the community called to serve the Reign of God. In Christ’s act of atonement, the initiative was taken to overcome sin and its consequences, to enable human beings to trust in and be loyal to God in Christ through the power of the Spirit. Faith is the gift of grace that makes possible the response of gratitude that becomes the well-spring of a community whose life is lived in the enjoyment of and to the glory of God. It is God’s will and God’s way, the Reign of God of which Christ is the sign, that determines our faith, not our choice and our desire.