Give a congregation the Bible in its own language and it will want to sing in that language too. What a people sings shapes what a people believes, and the Reformers knew it.

The cultural consequences of the Reformation are the hardest to summarize, because they cut in more than one direction. Organs were smashed and hymnbooks were printed by the tens of thousands. Altarpieces were destroyed and a new kind of painting appeared in ordinary houses. Whole traditions of craft were lost, and whole languages were made. Both halves are the same story.

Three Answers to One Question

Should the church sing, and if so, what? The three great Reformers gave three different answers, and the differences still divide congregations.

Luther embraced the music of his culture. A capable musician who played the lute and the flute, he saw no reason why the devil should keep the good tunes. He wrote hymns, encouraged part-singing, kept the organ, and turned German chorales into a vehicle for doctrine. Ein feste Burg came out of the bleak months after the Diet of Augsburg deadlocked, and it is Psalm 46 set to a tune a blacksmith could whistle.

Zwingli removed music from worship altogether. The irony is worth pausing on, because it is the sharpest in the Reformation. Zwingli was the most accomplished musician of the three, able to play a number of instruments, and at home he used those gifts freely to entertain children. He concluded nonetheless that Scripture nowhere commands sung or instrumental praise, and that what passed for church music in Zurich was refined entertainment with no gospel in it. The organ at the Grossmünster was dismantled. The man who could play best would not have it played in church.

Calvin sought to sanctify it. He took the middle way — W. Stanford Reid calls it a via media between Luther's liberal embrace of contemporary music and Zwingli's elimination of it — permitting singing but restricting it to the words of Scripture, unaccompanied, in the language of the people.¹ The restriction sounds severe. Its practical effect was to put the Psalms into the mouth of every believer in Europe.

The Psalter

Calvin's reasoning was pastoral before it was aesthetic. What people sing in a holy context has an enduring effect on how they act, and worship in all its aspects ought to be intelligible. He wanted everyone present, not only the clergy, to understand and repeat the truths of Scripture — this time in poetic form.

Shortly after settling in Geneva he urged the gifted poet Clément Marot to put the psalms into contemporary French. Marot never finished. Theodore Beza took up the work and pressed it further, even sponsoring a hymn-writing competition after Calvin's death to match the poetry of the Psalter with singable tunes.

The result may have been the largest single printing venture of the sixteenth century. The Genevan Psalter became the international songbook of an expanding Calvinism and went through edition after edition — 27,400 copies in the year 1562 alone.² When Puritan settlers reached North America, one of the consistent best sellers among them was the Bay Psalm Book, which Hall describes as a thinly disguised revision of Calvin's Psalter.

Reid's judgment on what this accomplished is the one worth keeping. To a greater degree than all the fine theological reasoning, he wrote, both the catechism and the Psalter entered into the very warp and weft of the humblest members' lives.³

Battle Hymns

Psalm-singing turned out to be more than devotional. It gave ordinary Protestants a way to confess their faith publicly and in unison, which is why some of their opponents came to regard the singing of psalms as inherently subversive. Reid titled his study of the practice The Battle Hymns of the Lord, and the phrase is not decorative.

The fourteen martyrs of Meaux sang Psalm 79 as they died. Five scholars of Lausanne, burned at Lyon, sang Psalm 9. Others turned to other portions as they went to the stake. Once the psalms were lodged in memory, Reid observed, they fitted every occasion and every form of resistance a persecuted people might need.

That is what happens when a church decides that its songs will be the words of Scripture. The hymnal becomes a resource for dying.

The Word and the Eye

The visual arts are where the Reformation's cultural record is most contested, and where honesty costs the most.

The losses were real and irreversible. Images were removed from the churches of Zurich from 1524, from Geneva after 1535, and across the Low Countries in the Beeldenstorm of 1566. Statues, rood screens, wall paintings, stained glass, and altarpieces that had taken generations to make were broken up in an afternoon. The reasoning was serious — the second commandment, and the observable fact that images were being venerated rather than merely viewed — but a great deal of beauty went into the fire along with the superstition, and nothing replaced it in kind.

What did emerge was a different art with a different home. When the church stopped commissioning altarpieces, patronage shifted to merchants, magistrates, and private households, and the subjects shifted with it. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Luther's friend, gave the German Reformation its visual language in portraits and printed images. Dürer and Holbein worked the same ground. A century later the Dutch Republic produced an extraordinary flowering — landscape, still life, domestic interiors, portraiture, and biblical scenes painted not for a sanctuary but for a room in an ordinary house, where Rembrandt's Scripture paintings hung on the walls of people who read the Bible for themselves.

Whether that flowering is properly credited to Protestant theology or to Dutch commercial wealth is argued by historians and will not be settled here. What is clear is that the Reformation did not abolish the visual; it relocated it, out of the sanctuary and into the world that the doctrine of vocation had just declared holy.

The Making of Languages

The most durable cultural effect was linguistic, and it was almost accidental.

Luther's German Bible did more than any other book to standardize written German out of a scatter of dialects. Tyndale's English New Testament, carried into the Authorized Version, gave English a stock of phrases still in daily use by people who have never opened a Bible. The Genevan Psalter did comparable work for French devotional verse.

The traffic ran into literature as well. The Geneva Bible, with its marginal notes on covenant, vocation, and the duty of orderly resistance to tyranny, was the Bible Shakespeare quoted in the plays of the 1590s, and the Bible the American colonists carried. Milton and Bunyan are unthinkable without it.

A movement that insisted God should be addressed and heard in the language people actually spoke ended up giving several nations their literary language.

Soli Deo Gloria

The clearest single example of the Reformation's cultural fruit is Johann Sebastian Bach. An ardent Lutheran, he wrote at the head of his manuscripts J. J. — Jesu, juva, Jesus, help — and at the end of those he was satisfied with, S. D. G., soli Deo gloria, to God alone be the glory.

Bach heard the glory of God sounding through creation and set out to reflect that beauty in a way that would please both God and man. He is what Luther's answer looks like two centuries on, and he is the reason the argument at Marburg and in Zurich was never merely about taste.

What Was Lost and What Was Gained

An honest ledger has entries on both sides.

Lost. Medieval religious art on a scale that cannot be recovered. A tradition of liturgical polyphony that the Reformed churches set aside for three centuries. In England, the theaters closed in 1642 under a Puritan Parliament. And a suspicion of beauty that has dogged parts of the Reformed world ever since, though it is a caricature of what the Reformers actually taught.

Gained. Congregational singing in the vernacular, which had barely existed and is now the ordinary practice of most of the Christian world. Two national literary languages. An art that could take an ordinary room, a field, or a face as a worthy subject because no part of creation is common. And the conviction, embodied in four letters at the foot of a page of manuscript, that a craft done well is worship.

It is also fair to say that Rome's response produced the Baroque, and that some of the greatest religious art in the West was painted in direct answer to the Reformation. That belongs in the account too. Neither side has a monopoly on beauty, and the Reformation's contribution was less a style than a conviction: that the enjoyment of what God has made is one way of enjoying God.

Further Reading