The Lamb's New Song: Apocalypse in Early British Hymnody

"The Lamb's New Song" argues that the Book of Revelation is the primary model for the Christ-centered liturgy of early Dissenting hymnbooks. In particular, the depiction of heavenly worship in Revelation, in which the slain Lamb is exalted to the throne of God and then sung a new song, is fundamental to the theology and symbolic vocabulary of the early British hymn. Dissenting writers in the 1690s drew on the Apocalypse to challenge the hegemony of the psalter in congregational worship, replacing the recital of scriptural psalms with the creation of new hymns to Christ. The essay features the work of Richard Davis, a controversial Independent minister whose Hymns Composed on Various Subjects (1694) anticipates Watts ground-breaking volume Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707). Both writers foreground the christological drama at the heart of Revelation, in which the crucified and enthroned Lamb brings access to God, whose presence is made real during the public enactment of the hymn. The essay also challenges the influential theory of Stephen Marini, whose "Hymnody as History" (2002) posits an unbridgeable spiritual distance between the divine and human realms as a defining feature of eighteenth-century Anglophone hymns, a claim that fails to account for their central apocalyptic features. Putting early British hymnography in dialogue with New Testament studies can help show that British hymnists engaged with scriptural texts not simply as sources of doctrine and devotion but as fonts of inspiration and creativity.

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