The summer of 1847 was a nightmare for Albertus VanRaalte, leader of the Dutch immigrants who had recently founded the colony now known as Holland, Michigan. The colo­nists had never seen rain like they saw that summer. So many people were dying they could not build coffins fast enough, and when they did have coffins available, many of the people were too weak to bury their dead. However, if you happened to be visiting this little settlement on Sunday, you would have heard a distinct sound. Rather than the wailing of despair you would have heard a congregation singing Psalms. In a clearing made in the forest, sitting on rough-hewn logs, under the open sky, whether that sky brought rain or sunshine, these men, women, and children worshiped God from His inspired song book, and gained strength for the week ahead in so doing.

Psalm-singing, congregational Psalm-singing, was the heritage of the Dutch Reformed in America. Going all the way back to the sixteenth-century Reformation, the Reformed churches had been Psalm-singing churches. In the Middle Ages the singing was done by the profes­sionals while the congregation was for the most part silent. The Reformation was a return to congregational singing. Calvin and the other Reformers understood that worship was the covenant in action. God was meeting with His people, and the people must respond to their God especially in the worship of song.

The formal principle of that great Reformation had been sola scriptura, the Bible alone as the source of special revelation. Thus, when Calvin and the others re-formed worship, the principle according to which they re-formed it was the Bible alone also for worship. God’s Word must govern how we worship and what we do in worship, and it must be the con­tent of worship, Calvin said. Thus, the heart of the service was to be an exposition of the Word of God. The response to the Word of God was praise on the lips of the people, praise that was found already in the inspired Word of God, now made the peoples’ own by the power of the Spirit. This conviction led Calvin especially to restore the singing of the Psalms to public corporate worship. Calvin composed tunes and put the Psalms into versifications for singing, collecting them in 1562 in what was known as the Genevan Psalter. So much was Psalm-singing a part of the life of the Reformation churches that if the Roman Catholic man on the street knew nothing else colony now known as Holland, Michigan. The colo­nists had never seen rain like they saw that summer. So many people were dying they could not build coffins fast enough, and when they did have coffins available, many of the people were too weak to bury their dead. However, if you happened to be visiting this little settlement on Sunday, you would have heard a distinct sound. Rather than the wailing of despair you would have heard a congregation singing Psalms. In a clearing made in the forest, sitting on rough-hewn logs, under the open sky, whether that sky brought rain or sunshine, these men, women, and children worshiped God from His inspired song book, and gained strength for the week ahead in so doing.

Psalm-singing, congregational Psalm-singing, was the heritage of the Dutch Reformed in America. Going all the way back to the sixteenth-century Reformation, the Reformed churches had been Psalm-singing churches. In the Middle Ages the singing was done by the profes­sionals while the congregation was for the most part silent. The Reformation was a return to congregational singing. Calvin and the other Reformers understood that worship was the covenant in action. God was meeting with His people, and the people must respond to their God especially in the worship of song.

The formal principle of that great Reformation had been sola scriptura, the Bible alone as the source of special revelation. Thus, when Calvin and the others re-formed worship, the principle according to which they re-formed it was the Bible alone also for worship. God’s Word must govern how we worship and what we do in worship, and it must be the con­tent of worship, Calvin said. Thus, the heart of the service was to be an exposition of the Word of God. The response to the Word of God was praise on the lips of the people, praise that was found already in the inspired Word of God, now made the peoples’ own by the power of the Spirit. This conviction led Calvin especially to restore the singing of the Psalms to public corporate worship. Calvin composed tunes and put the Psalms into versifications for singing, collecting them in 1562 in what was known as the Genevan Psalter. So much was Psalm-singing a part of the life of the Reformation churches that if the Roman Catholic man on the street knew nothing else about the Protestants in town, he knew at least this, they were Psalm-singers.

Calvin’s Genevan Psalter was translated into Dutch already in 1566, and the Dutch Reformed churches carried not only the singing of Psalms but the Refor­mation principles undergirding the practice into their land and into the next century. However, in the 1600s there were many in the Netherlands who wanted to sing hymns in congregational worship. Controversy erupted and things did not settle down until the great Synod of Dordt made a pronouncement on the issue in 1618-1619. In the church order established by Dordt, the principle of Psalm-singing was maintained. “Only the 150 Psalms of David” were to be sung, Article 69 said. Yet the Synod allowed for a few exceptions, mostly hymns recorded in the New Testament (Song of Mary, etc.). The Synod did not take, therefore, an exclusive psalmody stance. It did not advocate the notion that the regulative principle demanded exclusive psalmody. However, Dordt did understand that the principle of sola scriptura recovered in the Reformation had to be maintained, as much as possible in worship too, for the life and health of the church.

After Dordt, there was continued struggle to main­tain Psalm-singing in the Reformed congregations of the Netherlands. For two centuries some clamored for hymns, and others called the church to maintain the de­cisions of the great Synod. Finally, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the desire for hymns prevailed in the state church. Nonetheless, those who wanted to maintain Dordt’s emphasis on Psalm-singing had the freedom to do so for the most part—that is, until 1816.1

In 1816 the state had complete control of the church in the Netherlands. The state-run Synod of 1816 demanded that every minister in the Dutch Reformed Church select at least one—but preferably more—hymns from the newly-fashioned hymnal. This hymnal included 192 hymns alongside the Genevan psalms. This tyrannical mandate was clearly a far cry from the vision of the Synod of Dordt. Some members of the church refused to sing when this happened and walked out of the church while hymns were being sung. Some ministers refused to obey the mandate and were disci­plined for their refusal.

This all led to the secession of 1834 in the Neth­erlands, known as the Afscheiding. The Afscheiding was a movement in which many left the state church in order to reform the church according to the principles of the sixteenth-century Reformation and the Synod of Dordt. Though there were many signs of apostasy in the state church at this time, mandated hymn singing beyond what was approved at Dordt became one of the lightning-rod issues around which the seceders rallied. De Cock, one of the main leaders of the secession, wrote vehemently against the singing of hymns. Van Velzen, another central leader of the secession of 1834, was suspended from his ministry in the state church precisely because of his opposition to the mandate to sing hymns.

When Van Raalte and his band of Dutch immi­grants settled in Holland, Michigan twelve years later, their purpose was to carry on the principles of Dordt restored in the Afscheiding of 1834. The seceders of 1834 had faced persecution for their cause, and many had fled to other parts of the world where there was Dutch influence. Van Raalte urged immigration to America. There, land was cheap and the worshipers could maintain their heritage in freedom. Many of the seceders of 1834 responded to Van Raalte’s call. Thus, if you were walking through the trees of Hol­land, Michigan in the summer of 1847 you would have heard a congregation singing the Psalms with vigor, thankful to escape the tyranny of the state church in the Netherlands, thankful to be able to maintain the religion of Dordt and of the Afscheiding without fear. If you were an American visitor whose religious songs would have been only revivalist hymns, it would have been a surprise. If you were a Dutch visitor who had recently made the journey to the new land to escape religious tyranny, it would have been a familiar and sweet sound.

Nonetheless, the struggle to maintain Psalm-singing was not over. The small group in West Michigan, desir­ing monetary and brotherly support in their struggle to maintain a colony, eventually decided to join with a group of Dutch Reformed who had settled on the East Coast of the United States. These latter were emigrants to America not from the secession church of 1834, but rather from the state church that had per­secuted the seceders.2 This group on the East Coast was not like the churches of the Afscheiding. They had already admitted 800 hymns into their worship, which hymns were pushing Psalm-singing out of their services. They also had choirs silencing congregational singing altogether. An elder from the Dutch Reformed West Michigan churches named Gijsbert Haan knew this firsthand, for he had spent some time on the East Coast with these churches. By 1857 Haan and four churches from West Michigan decided to leave the Van Raalte group and form their own group, later named the Christian Reformed Church. One of the main reasons for doing so was the fact that Van Raalte and the rest of the churches in West Michigan had forsaken their heri­tage and joined a denomination (later the RCA) that was not convicted about Psalm-singing as the fathers of Dordt had been.3 The very reason they had come to America was to maintain the religion of Dordt without compromise and without persecution. And now the churches in Holland, Michigan had willingly submitted themselves to the same compromises from which they had fled.

Why the fight for Psalm-singing throughout his­tory, and why a reformation to restore Psalm-singing in 1857? First of all, because of the Psalms themselves. They are the Word of God. They put God’s inspired expressions of anguish, trust, praise, into the mouths of God’s people. As Calvin wrote, when we sing the Psalms, “we are assured that God puts the words in our mouth, as if he himself were singing through us to exalt his glory.”4 God has inspired a book of songs for His church to sing. Surely the church must sing them!

And we can see the benefits of God’s inspired songs over the tendencies of many non-inspired songs. The Psalms are rich theologically and do not suffer the threat of leading the church into spiritual fluff. They contain the expression of every emotion the child of God experiences (not just the happy ones as some hymns are prone to do). They are the Spirit’s own expressions of our grief and anguish and trust and conviction. As such they resonate deeply with the soul of the child of God, for the Spirit knows the hearts of God’s people better than they know them themselves.

The singing of Psalms binds us to the church of all ages. An important point to consider, a point that was in the mind of the reformers of 1857 too, is the long heritage of the orthodox church’s conviction regarding Psalm-singing. A return to convictions concerning Psalm-singing in 1857 was a return to the convictions regarding Psalm-singing in 1834, which was a return to the convictions regarding Psalm-singing in 1618-19, which was a return to the convictions regarding Psalm singing in the Great Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which was a return to the con­victions regarding Psalm-singing of the apostolic and early church, which was a carrying on of the convic­tions regarding Psalm-singing in the Jewish synagogue where Jesus worshiped, which was a carrying on of the Psalm-singing of the worship of Old Testament Israel.

The second reason for a return in 1857 to ecclesi­astical convictions regarding Psalm-singing was that throughout history the introduction of hymns had been used as a vehicle to carry false teaching into the church. False doctrine is not a necessary consequence of the introduction of hymns, but it is certainly a re­peated pattern, a pattern of which Haan and others were very much aware.

The group that started the Christian Reformed Church in 1857 knew that at the time before the Synod of Dordt the clamor for hymns in worship came especially from the Remonstrants, who used those hymns to teach their errant theology. The men who started the Christian Reformed Church knew that Article 69 of the Church Order of Dordt was written in part because of the renewed conviction regarding Psalm-singing that came from that experience with the Remonstrants and their hymns.

These men in Holland, Michigan in 1857 knew that at the time of the Afscheiding one of the reasons their fathers De Cock and Van Velzen spoke and wrote so strongly against hymns was that hymns were again be­ing used as a means to smuggle Arminianism into every corner of the Netherlands. 5 They knew that maintain­ing the singing of God’s inspired Word prevented that. The men who formed the Christian Reformed Church read De Cock’s pamphlet attacking hymns as “a concoc­tion of siren love songs fit to draw the Reformed believ­ers away from the saving doctrine,”6 and they saw that indeed hymns were being used that way.

In 1840, six years after the Afscheiding in the Netherlands, a German minister who had joined the seceders in the Netherlands went rogue. He began promoting hymn-singing along with his refusal to uphold Dordt’s condemnation of Arminianism. One of the delegates to the Synod in the Netherlands that sustained the dismissal of this minister from the min­istry was Gijsbert Haan. 7 This is of course the same Gijsbert Haan who led the formation of the Christian Reformed Church seventeen years later in 1857. Haan had seen with his own eyes at that Synod the connec­tion that he had been taught by Afscheiding ministers, that hymn singing is often a vehicle for smuggling false doctrine into the church.

And so, when Haan later traveled to the East­ern United States and saw in the Dutch Reformed Churches there not only hymn-singing but also elders and ministers filled with Arminian theology,8 Haan undoubtedly made the connection again and was gravely concerned. When he came back to West Michigan and found Van Raalte wanting to join hands with those very same compromising churches on the East Coast he had just visited, Haan could not but call the im­migrant churches to separate. They must hold fast to the emphasis on Psalm-singing that had always been in the history of the Reformed church, an emphasis that historically had prevented theological decay.

Not only in the world but also in the church, history tends to repeat itself. The Christian Reformed Church, unfortunately, has ecclesiastically left behind Dordt’s, the Afscheiding’s, and their own call for Psalm-singing. We must learn from this history, lest we repeat the er­rors of the past. Although Elijah had a wrong attitude when he said them, his words were true enough and bear repeating, “I am not better than my fathers.”

Let us use the Psalms as God’s inspired song-book given to His church, love them, improve our versifications of them if need be, so that they may be loved and used for generations. Though Psalm-singing is in the minor­ity now as far as the broader church is concerned, let us understand that when we sing Psalms on Sunday and throughout the week, we are privileged to be a part of a long history of the church that has struggled to maintain the glorious practice of singing the Word of God.

1 Some particular synods mandated at least one hymn per Sunday even before 1816.

2 These specific people were already in America before the 1800s, that is, before the state church had become thoroughly corrupt. By the 1830s, however, they had begun to compromise.

3 Joint Committee of the Christian Reformed Church and Reformed Church in America. Classis Holland Minutes 1848-1858 (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1950), 242. The consistory of Graafschap, the main congregation that seceded, gives here as its first reason for separating, “the col­lection of 800 hymns introduced contrary to the Church Order of Dordt.”

4 Preface to the Genevan Psalter.

5 Bruins, Elton J., and Robert P. Swierenga. Family Quarrels in the Dutch Reformed Churches of the 19th Century (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999), 12. The Historical Series of the Reformed Church in America.

6 Bruins and Swierenga, Family Quarrels, 19.

7 Brinks, H. J. “Another Look at 1857, the Birth of the CRC.” Origins IV.1 (1986): 30-31. Web. 11 July 2012. http://www.calvin.edu/hh/origins/Spring86.pdf.

8 Kromminga, D. H. The Christian Reformed Tradition From the Reformation to the Present (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1943), 108.