His great work in hymnody is that he took both the psalm and the hymn from the clergy, put them into the vernacular in metrical form, with popular tunes, and restored them to the people. He added to the function of the hymn as worship those of instruction, meditation, and exhortation. He added an entirely new dimension to the value of the hymn, making it a means of creating a religious atmosphere for the whole life of the Christian—personal, family, community. He made the German people a singing people and laid the foundations for their later musical pre-eminence. As Dr. Benson says, “He took it [the hymn] out of the liturgies and put it into the people’s hearts and homes. He revived, that is to say, Paul’s conception of hymnody as a spiritual function.”[2]
Luther’s hymns are the root out of which grew all our Protestant hymnody. They are like Ambrose’s in their plainness but, owing to their popular models, are superior in their metrical variety and in their cheerfulness. They are purposely cheerful: “When we sing, both heart and mind should be cheerful and merry.” They had also a more definite evangelical content, both objective and subjective, more personal experience, more exhortation, thus immensely widening the horizon of the hymn. Much of this was doubtless due to the Hussite influence.
Luther anticipated Isaac Watts in demanding that the psalm should be transformed into a hymn, retaining its important subject matter, but excluding “certain forms of expression and employing other suitable ones.”
The most important characteristic of the hymns of Luther and his associates was the burden of biblical truth. “What I wish is to make German hymns for this people, that the Word of God may dwell in their hearts by means of song also,” gives us his ideal and his practical purpose.
Luther’s hymns bear the characteristics of their writer. They were straightforward, clear, and unpretentious, full of force and strong of conviction. He was no poet. He was not conscious of literary impulses. His diction often is more forcible than elegant. Indeed, he was a peasant within whose horizon the elegant did not appear. Dr. Philip Schaff says of him: “He had an extraordinary faculty of expressing profound thought in the clearest language. In this gift he is not surpassed by any uninspired writer; and herein lies the secret of his power.... His style is racy, forcible, and idiomatic.”
Lord Selborne, an English hymnologist, remarks on Luther’s hymns, “Homely and sometimes rugged in form, and for the most part objective in tone, they are full of fire, manly simplicity, and strong faith.”
Luther wrote thirty-eight hymns. Twelve of them were based on Latin hymns, among others, “Veni, Redemptor gentium,” “Veni, Creator Spiritus,” “O Lux beata Trinitas,” and “Te Deum Laudamus”; four were rewritten pre-Reformation hymns; seven were versions of Latin psalms; six were paraphrases of other portions of Scripture, such as the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer; nine were original hymns.
Nine collections were issued by Luther, beginning with the “Achtlieder Buch,” the first evangelical hymnbook in the German language, issued in 1524. It contained but eight hymns, four by Luther, three by Paul Speratus, court chaplain at Koenigsberg, and one of unknown authorship. Later in the year it was increased to twenty-five hymns, bringing fourteen new hymns by Luther; it was called the “Erfurt Enchiridion.” During this year, 1524, he wrote twenty-one of his thirty-eight hymns. Five years later, 1529, he issued another hymnbook containing fifty-four hymns. The issue of 1553, seven years after his death, contained one hundred and thirty-one hymns. Three of these nine issues had prefaces, as noteworthy as those of Watts to his several books of psalms and hymns in formulating the principles of the new Christian hymnody.
Luther’s masterpiece, “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott” (“A mighty fortress is our God”), is based on the forty-sixth Psalm. It is one of the greatest hymns in the whole Christian hymnody, great in itself, great in its influence on the Protestantism of northern Europe. Ranke, the noted church historian, says: “It is the production of the moment in which Luther, engaged in a conflict with a world of foes, sought strength in a consciousness that he was defending a divine cause, which could never perish.” Carlyle recognized its majesty, “a sound of Alpine avalanches, or the first murmurs of earthquakes.” Calling up the inspiration it brought to the Protestant armies, German and Swedish, in the religious wars after the Reformation, Heine characterized it as “the Marseillaise of the Reformation.” It has been recognized as the national hymn of Protestant Germany.
A number of translations into English have been made. Carlyle successfully reproduces its rugged strength in his version, but for congregational use the translation of Rev. Frederick H. Hedge, made in 1853, is more practicable.