My name is Joshua Johnson. I'm the founder of the Student Theological Society, a student organization here at the seminary. The Student Theological Society was organized to foster student debates at first, just discussions, having presentations. And over time, we decided to try something a little bit more ambitious. It was actually kind of an accident. I remember getting an email, my student email, was from Dr. Proutot, and he was responding to an article by Dr. T. David Gordon. And I read the articles, and I was really impressed by both men and their precision with their use of scripture, with their well-reasoned arguments. And so I said, well, maybe I should just shoot them an email and see if they'd like to debate. And well, sure enough, much to my surprise, they agreed and agreed willingly. And it has been a wonderful process getting to know these men through our correspondence. And I am excited for this debate. And I am confident that it's going to be done in a gracious and humble manner as we study God's truth together. I'd like to give a special thanks to the seminary for letting us use the facility and have this. It's been wonderful to be able to work with the seminary and have an event like this. I'd also like to thank all my helpers. They all got free admission. They helped with all sorts of things, from moving the chairs to the tables to just helping me get set up. And I just want to give a special thanks to them. I'd also like to thank the debaters for participating in this and helping the Student Theological Society and help foster discussion on this important topic of worship. I'd also like to thank everyone here who's decided to attend and contribute money to this event. A portion of that money will be going to the Denny Bruteau Scholarship Fund here at the seminary. And so thank you very much for doing that. It will benefit students who come to this fine institution. I am the moderator of this debate. My role is pretty simple. I just basically keep time, wave my fingers at people when they're getting a little close to the edge. keep men under control. I think someone told me the other day, like I think, that the debaters are probably going to have to keep you under control, Josh. But I think tonight there's going to be a very limited role for me, but I'm pleased to be able to do it. Take a brief look at your itinerary or your program, whatever you want to call it. We're going to be breaking this up into two parts so you can stretch your legs. Part one, we're going to have, of course, these openings, the opening presentations by both debaters and their initial rebuttals. Afterwards, we will have a 10-minute intermission to stretch our legs and go to the bathroom and do what we need to do. After that 10 minutes, we're going to come back And we're going to have the cross-examination begin. After the cross-examination, we'll have the final closing arguments slash rebuttals by each debater. And then following that, there will be a time for the audience to have a Q&A to ask the debaters various questions regarding the content of the discussion. And lastly, for some people, this might be the best part of the whole thing. We'll get to have some coffee and donuts afterwards in a time of fellowship and discussion. Well, thank you all for coming, and I hope you enjoy this time of discussion in God's Word. I would like now to ask Dr. Gordon to come up and give his opening presentation. The discussion we're having tonight is indeed an in-house discussion. A slightly inelegant expression, of course, because it conjures up the alternative, which I suppose would be an outhouse discussion. But it is indeed an in-house discussion because we are people who believe that God regulates his own worship. And not everyone believes that. Not everyone believes that we can only worship God in the way that he is appointed. And to believe that makes you an ally on a very narrow spectrum of people who don't ordinarily believe that. So Dr. Puto and I actually do enthusiastically believe in the regulative principle of worship. And in fact, I think both of us have commended it and promoted it in our published writings through the years. That's not only an important ground in common, but it goes beyond that also. In the present moment, there are many people who, especially when we get to those aspects of the Christian worship and liturgy that deal with music, approach it merely as a consumer. And they don't even get to the question of the regulative principle or not. For them, the point is they can't take anything seriously if it's musical. It's just a matter of taste. And so when I wrote Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns, my primary concern was people who just will not take music seriously. And so when I have a colleague who not only takes that aspect of liturgy seriously, but also does so within the context of a commitment to the regulative principle of worship, we have far more in common than we have that distinguishes us. And so it is indeed a very friendly in-house conversation. My students, at least one of whom Dalton Bowser is with, were surprised several weeks ago when I indicated I'd be here, and not because of the topic, but because they know of my almost total disdain for debate. Whatever value it may once have had in the Western world, it has almost none now. Because, if Neil Postman is correct, we have been amusing ourselves to death for quite a while. and unwittingly, like radon gas, that has permeated us to the point that we tend to regard ourselves as amusees, people to be passively amused by other contestants and entertainers. And so there may have been some value to debate at one point as a vehicle for truth. My fear now is most people who attend them just want to know, quote, who won. And so I concede defeat from the outset because I know nothing about it. And if I did know nothing about it, I would do nothing about it. That is to say, I don't think it does much good. But I do hope that two people who care about reformed worship may say something along the lines that may be useful at some point. I think debate is difficult not only because of an amusement culture and its expectations of it, but also because of what Larger Catechism 145 says. Dr. Nicole at Gordon-Conwell always warned the students about the special challenges of polemical theology, especially in light of what the Westminster Divine said about Larger Catechism 145. Everything Dr. Nicole said about polemical theology is, I think, if anything, doubly true of debate. And so if you allow me several points of ellipsis between here, it's not the whole answer. Relax, not the whole answer. Then just listen to some of these things and imagine yourself in polemical or debate theology of facing this duty. The sins forbidden in the ninth commandment are all prejudicing the truth, outfacing and overbearing the truth, concealing the truth, speaking the truth unseasonably or to a malicious end. or perverting it to a wrong meaning, or in doubtful and equivocal expressions to the prejudice of truth, scoffing, reviling, rash, harsh, and partial censuring, misconstructing intentions, words, and actions. Tough enough to sort of know what you think your view is, and to compare it charitably to an alternative view. But to avoid all of that in the process, I think, may be beyond my level of sanctification. And so I really only assented to do this for one perfectly reasonable reason, and that is I love Jerry O'Neill so much. that he's probably one of the nicest, most life-affirming gentle Christian men I've ever known. And so when someone from his institution asked me to do it, my response was essentially, for Jerry, I'll do anything but steal. And so I'm even willing to do something for which I'm utterly unqualified, and something that I think is a bad idea, just to try to return. Jerry's been so cooperative with Grove City College just to try to return some degree of his cooperation. So let me just say a provisional comment and then make a few comments and explain my methodology. I will submit to the moderator's timing, but to very little else. That is to say, I reserve the right that many tennis players exercise, which then, when they are either up three games in a set or down three games in a set, that it can be either. They simply sit there sometimes and let several serves go by and make either a half-hearted or no attempt even to return it. waiting for something that interests them more. And I reserve the right to do that, and probably will exercise the right on occasion. So let me suggest something about how my view, the view of hymnody versus exclusive psalmody, distinguishes itself from that. The exclusive psalmist position, as you know, consists of two parts. Arguing that certain texts teach us that it's our duty to sing canonical psalms, an argument that I regard as being unnecessarily made. Everyone believes that. It also, however, consists of another view, and that is there are no texts that teach that we are to sing God's praise or thanks other than texts that require that we do so in the canonical psalms language. And so those who believe in singing hymns, we wouldn't object necessarily if on a given Sunday we sang two or three psalms and one or two or three hymns. We also think, however, that there are many scriptural reasons for our coming to the conclusion that the scriptures routinely commend our singing God's thanks and praise without restricting that commendation to the words of the canonical psalms. And it is only that point that I will address. And so I have six very brief considerations, each of which I think, of course, is, in some sense, general to indicate it. First, of course, we always set the question in its historic context. I teach humanities at Grove City College. We always set everything in a historical context. And historically, we just have to say, almost no one has believed in exclusive psalmody. Now, I know in this room you do, but Lutherans do not believe in exclusive psalmody. Greek Orthodox do not believe in exclusive psalmody. Roman Catholics do not believe in exclusive psalmody. Obviously John Calvin didn't, because in his Strasbourg liturgy they always sang the Decalogue, the Apostles' Creed, and the Nuke Demetus. And so it's an extremely rare position in terms of the Church's history, and therefore I feel less onus to demonstrate the adequacy of my position than someone who might diverge from that historic Christian tradition. How did Calvin miss such a thing, we might ask. And the Psalter itself, as you know, grew historically. Psalm 90 is attributed to Moses, right? A prayer of Moses, the man of God. And then at least Psalm 137 is post-exilic. And so the psalm itself grows historically, and the pattern of the psalms, totally apart from what it expressly says, the pattern of the psalms suggests that when God does new and mighty acts of deliverance, we respond with words of thanks and praise to him, some spoken and some sung. I mention this not because anyone disputes it. We all know this is the case. The Psalms did not just appear all 150 of them at one time. They appeared over the course of time. That's a conceded point. But I mention it because I think that every creative act that's dynamic, that has a beginning, middle, and end, every creative act that's dynamic trains us in our expectations. The opening measures of a symphonic movement train us to listen to the subsequent measures. They establish certainly a time signature, a key signature, and a certain tone, a certain mood, and sometimes even a musical motif that will come back around again and again into several subsequent movements. And so the way a created work begins and moves teaches us to expect certain things. And of course sometimes we're pleasantly surprised when it does not satisfy our expectations. We say, oh, I was wrong. I was expecting this and didn't get it. That's fine. And what I would suggest is the Psalter expects us to celebrate things as large as the deliverance from the Egyptians. to things as, in my judgment, less consequential as the return from captivity. He said, well, the Jews thought return from captivity was wonderful. I said, well, it was a ragtag group of disobedient Israelites who had justly been exiled from their country, from their repeated many generations of disobedience to Yahweh. who, when they were returned, immediately married with the women of the land and did more acts of disobedience. And so I regard it as a fairly inconsequential event. And yet even it is sung about. Even it is sung about. And so my ears were trained to say, gee, they will celebrate some really big things and some less big things. And so when Gethsemane comes along and Golgotha comes along and an empty tune comes along, you see, I'm expecting someone to sing about those things. And so I'm doing so not merely because of what the scriptures expressly say, but because the pattern that I observe in them is that as God does new works and deliverance, they sing new songs of thanks and praise. And so that's just one of the general principles that most hymn singers mention. A second consideration in that line, in addition to the historical one, the Psalter commands us to sing about God's works, and about his deliverance, and about his mighty deeds, all of which require that we may raise some estimation of what constitutes a work of God or a mighty deed. I won't read all of those, but it is good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to thy name, O Most High. Come, let us sing to the Lord. Let us make a joyful noise. It doesn't say that in Hebrews. It says make a loud noise to the rock of our salvation. Sing praises to the Lord who dwells in Zion. Tell among the peoples his deeds. Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth. We could go on at this ad nauseum. This altar commends and commands many times our praising and thanking God for what he's done without restricting that expression to the words of canonical Psalms. Now, we could use words of canonical Psalms. My point is they command us to sing his praise. And if there were no canonical Psalter, I think we could still do it. I think we would still have the capacity to do so. And so those commands, as someone who believes in the regulative principle of worship, command me to sing praise to God heartily for his works and for his deeds. And so were there no New Testament itself, and if there were no Colossians 3, Ephesians 5, Acts 2, or other kinds of passages, 1 Corinthians 14, we have this repeated recurring theme throughout the earlier covenant, where when God does a new work of deliverance, the people are expected to sing thanks and praise for him. And then a point that many of us think is a considerable part of the conversation, perhaps you'll want to follow up, or Dr. Prouto will. And that is that prayer and praise are almost interchangeable in the Bible. Now, I speak here both from looking at the Greek text and as a media ecologist. To the best of our knowledge, what you and I call singing in the Old Testament among the Jews was probably canting, or at the most, chanting. And at the very most, canticle. It was certainly not the kind of Western music that we've had since the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries. That is to say, the distinction between speaking and canting is merely a matter of rhythm. And then between chanting, not much difference. Canticle will tend to have maybe two pitches that you vary, but not much more, possibly three. And then eventually have much more musical distinction that we're accustomed. When you and I talk about prayer and singing praise, they are very different categorically. In the ancient world, they were not. And that's why, for instance, in the holy scriptures, the terms can be used interchangeably. Psalm 90 is called in the Septuagint a pros eucate teis mosu eis. It is a prayer of Moses, the man of God. And many of the other psalms are called that way. Psalm 42, by day the Lord commands his steadfast love and at night his song, O day. is with me, a prayer, prosuche, to the God of my life." The preface of Psalm 102 is a prayer of one inflicted, prosuche, in the Greek text and so forth. And of course at the end of Psalm 72, the second division of the Psalter comes to a stop and it says, the prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended. They perfectly easily and casually refer to the Psalms as prayers because they address God. And the fact that they may or may not do it in cant, or what we might call melody, is comparatively less consequential for them than it is for us. And so some of us think that's what's happening in Acts 16.25, that around midnight, Paul and Silas, hymned God, Hymn God, Prostrate you culminate. Pray. And some English texts, of course, at that point say prayed and hymned, but others may rightly take the participle as a dependent clause describing the nature of their hymning. They hymned praying to God, because for them it wasn't that big a difference. Calvin and many others you know in Acts 2.42, took Prasukhais there as a reference to the hymns, the prayers both spoken and sung. They devoted themselves to apostolic teaching, to prayers, to the breaking of bread, and to the collection. And they took the prayers there to refer to both spoken prayer and sung prayer, following the example of the Psalter, where the word Prasukhe could be used either for things we would call sung, or for things that are spoken. Similarly, in 1 Corinthians 14, Paul says, what then shall I do? I will pray with the mind. I will pray with the spirit. I will sing with the mind. I will sing with the spirit. It's though the same criteria that govern prayer govern singing. Pray with the mind. Pray with the spirit. Sing with the mind. Sing with the spirit. That is to say, the distinction that you and I commonly make at our current moment in the development of the English language that prayer is a very different thing than singing praise is not a distinction that I find in the Holy Scriptures. And you see the consequence of that for our current discussion. It is incumbent upon the exclusive psalmist argument to permit us to pray in words of our own invention, but not to sing in words of our own invention. To make a very important categorical distinction between how we sing and how we pray, my suggestion for your consideration is that distinction is not found in Holy Scripture, that the terms prayer and hymn and song are used virtually interchangeably throughout the Old Testament. I have a printout of all of each of those terms as they appear, and perhaps that will come up at points in Q&A. In fact, we sometimes raise the argument ad absurdum. We only do it gently, and I hope charitably. Would it be all right for an RPNA minister to say, I greet thee whom I sure redeem her heart, in a prayer, but not to sing, I greet thee whom I sure redeem her heart. Now that's a problem, I think, for one tradition. It's not as much for others. because I will sing with the mind and sing with the spirit, and I'll pray with the mind and pray with the spirit. I'm not so sure that's quite as easy for the RPC in it. And of course, as you know because you're accustomed to hearing this, the entire straining of the biblical narrative regarding worship pushes us to our earthly worship as a foretaste of heavenly and eschatological worship, a point I think unmistakably made in Hebrews 12. You have not come, the Christian assembly, to Mount Zion. But you've come to the spirits of just men, made perfect to Jesus and so forth, the mediator and so forth. So in everything else the Holy Scriptures teach us to look forward to our final and everlasting worship as the pattern of our current and therefore the songs of the revelation are in that sense instructive to us because they not only are not canonical psalms, they are songs of free human composition that are in fact expressly Christological. So in a moment, I'll say at some point, if not in questions, I'll get to, in my concluding marks, Colossians 3 and Ephesians 5, where I think Colossians 3, on two grounds, actually requires us to sing richly of the work of Christ, to have the word of Christ richly dwelling in us. and that his adjective spiritual, an adjective that does not appear once in the entire Greek Old Testament, is the first century term that Christians used for Christians. Since in the first century, it was only un-Christians that referred to us as Christians. So if you look at your New Testament, you'll find it's people outside of the church who refer to followers of Christ as Christians. I think they refer to themselves as spiritual, pneumatikoi. So Paul says to the Galatians, you, who are spiritual, restore such a man. and that that was there. So when he says, let the word of Christ dwell in you, as you sing spiritual songs, he's making a double effort to indicate that we need to praise God for his works in Christ, just as we prayed him for delivering Israelites from Egyptians and Babylonians. Maybe I'll get a chance to make that point a little clearer afterwards. Now, considering the time it takes me to get back to my chair and the time it takes Dr. Putro to get up here, we'll have to start off. We have a minute left on our time. Wow, thank you for coming. Thank you, Dr. Gordon, for your presentation and thank you for coming. In 2010, the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals published a book of mine called, So Pastor, What's Your Point? And they sent a copy to Dr. Gordon, and he wrote a very nice review of that text. And I've been quite appreciative of that. In fact, one of his former students who worked for a time here at the seminary and now is a pastor in the Reformed Presbyterian Church said, that's good. It's tough to get a good word like that out of Dr. Gordon. I have been quite appreciative of that. He told me when we were coming into the seminary that he's recommended the book several times. I want to give you another book. Do I have to review this? No, you don't, but you may want to. This is a book published here by the seminary that I call Public Worship 101. Part of it has to do with the theology of worship and the elements of worship. And then also a discussion of exclusive psalmody and acapella psalmody. So I'd like you to have that. One review coming up. I'd like to do two things as time permits. One is to talk a little bit about an approach to psalmody that I think is neglected. And I've called it the subjective element. And I've really gotten that idea from Gerhardus Voss. Voss says this in part with regard to the use of the psalms. And this comes from his Eschatology of the Psalter. He says, the deeper fundamental character of the Psalter consists in this, that it voices the subjective response to the objective doings of God for and among his people. And so Voss's idea here is that the principal objective of the Psalter is to help us in our responding to the great deeds of God. He says the subjective responsiveness is the specific quality of these songs. And it seems to me that that part of the misunderstanding, and I'll put it this way, of psalmody and the place of psalmody in the church is our neglect to understand this subjective element. As prophecy is objective, Voss says, being the address of Jehovah to Israel in word and act, So the Psalter is subjective, being the answer of Israel to divine speech. And so he leads us in this direction of what I've called the subjective element. He follows Calvin in this. In Calvin's introduction to his commentary to the Psalms, Calvin says in part, I have been accustomed to call this book, I think not inappropriately, an anatomy of all parts of the soul. For there is not an emotion of which anyone can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror. or rather the Holy Spirit has here drawn to life all the griefs, sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes, cares, perplexities, in short, all the distracting emotions with which the mind of men are want to be agitated. In other words, the Psalter as Calvin sees it is a guide to the expression of our emotions, a divine guide to the expression of our emotions. In this, Calvin is following Athanasius who wrote much earlier and just a couple of excerpts. This is from a letter to Marcellinus concerning the Psalms. Athanasius says, with regard to the Psalms and the Psalter, it has this particular marvel of its own, that within it are represented and portrayed in all their great variety and movements, in all their great variety, the movements of the human soul. It is like a picture in which you see yourself portrayed and seeing may understand and consequently form yourself upon the pattern given. In other words, all the emotions that an individual might express are set forth in the Psalter as a divine guide for the expression, the subjective expression of our emotions. A little bit later, Athanasius says, you find depicted in it all the movements of your soul, all its changes, its ups and downs, its failures and recoveries. And then in a sermon, that Gerhardus Laws preached at Princeton. I'm sorry I don't have the date of that sermon, but it's found in his book, Grace and Glory. Well, it's a book put together by Manner of Truth. And this sermon, Songs from the Soul, is in an earlier copy, in a later copy printed by banner of truth. This particular sermon is not included. At any rate, Voss begins the sermon in this way, and listen carefully to what he says. The Psalter is of all books of the Bible that book which gives expression to the experimental side of religion. Hence the Psalter has been at all times that part of Scripture to which believers have most readily turned and upon which they have chiefly depended for the nourishment of their inner religious life. Our Lord Himself, who had a perfect religious experience, found his inner life portrayed in the Psalter and in some of the highest moments of his ministry borrowed from it the language in which his soul spoke to God, thus recognizing that a more perfect language for communion with God cannot be framed. And when I read that last sentence, I was rather stunned, truthfully, at the position Voss was taking. But it grows out of what I read earlier from Calvin and Athanasius. And part of Voss's point, then, is that although the Psalter grows out of a circumstance which is typological in its fashion, you would think then that the Psalms wouldn't be applicable to our lives today. But as Voss has it, it's just the opposite. Because he would say that depravity is the same, sin operates in the same way, the Spirit of Grace operates in the same way today as it did in former times, and because all of this is true, Voss says for this very reason the Psalms reflect the experimental religion of the heart which is unvarying at all times and under all circumstances." And he adds, we ought not to wonder at this. And so a part of my argument for the exclusive use of Psalms comes from this idea of the subjective responsiveness of subjective responsiveness being part of the design of the Psalter and God's design to train us in the proper use of our emotions. Very important in our culture today, when we see emotional life being pushed in all sorts of directions and bent out of whack, we could say. So that's the first side, and I think that Part of our resistance to exclusive psalmody is our lack of understanding of this subjective element, as I've called it. Now, Dr. Gordon wants to speak to Ephesians 5, 19, and Colossians 3, 16. And I'm interested in that. So we need to give him time to do that. the moderator is looking at me. So I'll start that discussion with a little bit of a discussion of Colossians 3.16, because here is a text that I think does command us to use the 150 Psalms, the canonical Psalms, in the worship of God in the New Testament church. And so if you want to look at a Bible or look at your Bible, I'm using the English Standard Version. And it reads this way in the English Standard Version. Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God." And the basic command is, let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly. Now, the word you here is in the plural. And part of what you need to understand here is that this text is not a text that is given to us for our use as individuals in our prayer closet. This is a text that does indeed have to do with public worship. And Charles Hodge, when he speaks about Ephesians 5.19, says that that text affirms the fact that sacred song is a part of public worship. And, of course, Colossians 3.16 is parallel here. Colossians 3.16 comes in this letter to the Colossians, which is written to the saints at Colossae, written to the church at Colossae. And it's meant for the people of God in the corporate setting. I say this because The people of God in Colossae did not go to their homes and go to their computers and look up theapostlepaul.com to read this letter and this injunction individually. Rather, it's much more likely that they were gathered in assembly and together they heard the letter read to them as they were together in sacred assembly. This passage that we're looking at, Colossians 3.16, comes in this context. If you examine the earlier passages, you find a second person plural predominates the third chapter of Colossians and earlier portions of the letter. And so Paul says, let the word of Christ dwell in you. And I would say that this is not simply the words about Christ, but this is the word that has been given to us by Christ. As Peter says in 1 Peter, the prophets of old sought to understand what the Spirit of Christ in them was revealing to them." You see, this is the Word that has been given to us by Christ. And part of the prophetic Word is the Psalter. And to let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly involves imbibing the Word of God and letting that Word of God in your heart and allowing it to simmer in there and to do its work. Now, how do you do this? Paul sets forth three participles in Colossians 3.16 which describe how it is that you let the Word of Christ dwell within you, teaching and admonishing one another, and then singing. You see the participles, the little I-N-G words. What does Paul mean by teaching and admonishing? Well, if you look back, if you have your Bible there and you look back at Colossians 1.28, you'll see that the Apostle Paul speaks about preaching Christ or proclaiming Christ. And what does proclaiming Christ involve? Proclaiming Christ involves teaching and admonishing, or teaching and warning. This is the idea. And so Paul is talking about preaching, which is the activity of public worship. And then he talks about singing. Now it's quite striking, you see, part of the argument against exclusive psalmody is that preaching and prayer cannot be regulated in a different way than singing. But you see in Colossians 3.16 it appears that the Apostle is telling us that the content of preaching may be scriptural, that is, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom. But if the rendering in the English Standard Version is correct, our singing is confined to singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. And so the definition of preaching or the content of preaching is restricted more than the content of preaching. Preaching must be scriptural. We would not deny that that's the case. Singing. Singing is, as I say, restricted more, and Paul restricts it to psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. And of course the classic argument here is that psalms and hymns and spiritual songs are a reference to the psalms of the Old Testament. This is the classic argument. I'm given the two minute sign. I won't be able to develop that, but that is the argument, because on one hand the titles of the individual Psalms reflect this, and the words Psalms and Hymns and Songs are used in the Old Testament to refer to the Psalms that David instituted in the public worship of God. And so just a brief look at Colossians 3.16, which I think helps us along the way. And as I say, I am interested in what Dr. Gordon does have to say about that particular text. I'm not supposed to give away much of my time concurring, but this is where I get the chance to demonstrate my contempt for debate. By doing so, I entirely concur that Colossians 3 is addressing what the corporate group does in assembly together, and I think that's exactly right. You're not tall enough to hear me. Sorry about that. There's all these big people between you and I. I'll do a little better, perhaps. I was concurring that Colossians 3 does address the corporate assembly of what believers do together. And I would add additional reason for that as a media ecologist. Manuscripts were extremely expensive in the ancient world. The notion that the average Christian could have had a copy of Paul's letters and sung these things at home is just, I think, implausible. They were very, very expensive to have owned in those days. And so I don't think it's at all likely that he's referring to what individual Christians did, but what Christians did when they were in assembly with one another. So a couple of small points about that, however, one that does allow me to go where you would perhaps like me to go. One is that many of us think that the imperative governs all three participles. So the imperative, let dwell. Let dwell in you. The Word of Christ, richly, let dwell in you, governs all three participles, and that the three participles are what some grammarians call exegetic. They describe what it means for the Word of Christ to dwell richly in you. It means to teach, it means to admonish, and it means to sing psalms, hymns, spiritual songs. And as we will see at some point, perhaps, I do not think those are references to canonical songs. But all three of those are actually what it means to let the Word of Christ dwell in you, in your teaching, in your admonishing, and in your singing. The Word of Christ should dwell in you. But I think that the Word of Christ is actually analogous to other Pauline expressions where the matter is not limited, I would say, to the word that comes from Christ, but is in fact the word about Christ. Analogous, we might say, to 1 Corinthians 1.18, let the word of the cross. He refers to the word of the cross being followed. The genitive following, logos, there is probably a word about the cross. And so there are a number of places where the apostolic message is referred to in patterns that are somewhat similar to that, where I think that that's what's being said. I mentioned earlier pneumatikos, spiritual, and I want to come back to that. The adjective there, psalms, hymns, and spiritual psalms. The adjective used there appears 26 times in the New Testament. It does not appear ever in the Greek translation of the Old Testament. The adjective does not exist prior to Pentecost in Jewish Christian writings. It appears after Pentecost because the realities of the Ascended Christ pouring out his Spirit upon the Church are so great a fulfillment of the eschatological hope of the Old Testament that longs for the rejuvenating work of the Spirit that everything that is done by the Ascended Christ is essentially spiritual. He even called a remarkable juxtaposition in 1 Corinthians 15 when he says, the first Adam became a living soul and the last Adam became Pneuma zoopoion, life-giving spirit. Almost confusing two parts of the Godhead, because so much of what the Ascended Christ does is become Pentecostally the life-giving spirit, that he as last Adam can be referred to as life-giving spirit. Those who enjoy union with him, therefore, are called pneumaticoi. They are those who are spiritual. Of the 26 occurrences of the adjective spiritual in the New Testament, once it appears to contrast the material with the immaterial. And that's probably how we would use it in American English. We talk about the physical and the spiritual, I suppose. And I think that may be happening in Ephesians 6, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. It probably means immaterial forces, non-material, not physical forces. And in two places, it could be referring to God's being the originator of a thing, something that comes from God. We know that the law is spiritual. Maybe that means the law comes from God in its origin. But in almost all of the other texts, the term seems to be a reference for distinctly post-Pentecost experiences of knowing God through the ascended Christ. And so they did not have the word that you and I have, Christian. We call ourselves Christian. In the New Testament, the adjective Christian is the designation of believers from those who are outside of the family of faith. And in Antioch, the disciples were first called Christians, Acts 11.26. Those around them called them, oh, they must be these Christ followers, we'll call them Christianoi. We'll call them that. Agrippa said to Paul, in a short time would you persuade me to be a Christian? This is Agrippa's language for a follower of Christ. First Peter, if someone suffers as a Christian, right, well, you're suffering as a Christian because someone persecutes you. as a Christian. So I would suggest that the adjective Christian, that we commonly use now, was not used in the time of the apostles to describe Christians. What adjective was used? Mnemonicoi. That's a term that is routinely used for those realities that we have in Christ. The Gentiles have come to share in spiritual blessings and so forth. That kind of language is used throughout Paul's ministry as the ministry through the Spirit, not this way but that way and so forth. It's routinely used that way. The Galatians are referred to as you who are spiritual. So what I'm suggesting then is that in two ways Colossians 3.16 makes it clear that in our Christian assemblies, all of our verbal acts are to be self-consciously gospel acts. It is the word of Christ that should dwell richly in us, in our teaching, admonishing, and singing, and in our spiritual songs, songs that celebrate Pentecostal reality, the realities that come after the ascension of Christ. Now I know that we, you and I, can read the Psalter in a richly typological fashion so that we see the Son of David afterwards through the lens. And we hope to hear good preaching on that. Bruce Backenboe will do one later, I'm sure, for us, a nice sermon on Psalm 2, and he will point out to us how Christ is found there. However, when our Jewish friends in the synagogues over here in Squirrel Hill after Shula on Saturday morning, reflect on Psalm 2, and we were there to hear their homily, not one of us would leave and say, wow, the word of Christ was really dwelling richly in him. That is to say, if you do not impose a Christian interpretation on the psalm and read it without interpretation, the rabbis managed to read it in such a way that if we congratulated them after and said, wow, buddy, that was some really rich word of Christ, he'd say, whoa, just a minute, I wasn't looking for that. a little Yahweh, a little Moses, but not a whole lot of this Christ business, right? And so, he'd probably dismiss you at that point as some meshugan and gentile and send you on your way. And so, I suggest that Paul very self-consciously uses two expressions, word of Christ and spiritual, to make it clear that the linguistic acts of teaching, admonishing and singing are to be expressly Christian acts, because if we could celebrate things like the deliverance from Babylonian captivity, we shall surely celebrate equally verbally deliverance from sin and from guilt in the death and resurrection of Christ. And so I think that what Paul is doing there is commanding that we do those kinds of things. Perhaps later this evening, There will be a chance to point out the use of psalmos, ode, and humnos in the Greek Old Testament to indicate that it is never the case that in its majority use it refers to a canonical psalm. The closest is psalmos, which is used about 42 times for canonical psalms, but it's used 91 times. So there's 50 times where it's used for something else. Hymnos is rarely used for canonical psalms in the titles. And there are two things, aes totellos and sunesos, that are more frequently used for psalm titles than either hymnos or ode. And so the notion that those three taken together are a terminus technicus, that means canonical psalms, would have been very surprising to someone in the first century, because there's no evidence that that was done before. And further, when people in the New Testament did wish to refer to the canonical Psalms, how did the apostles do it? They said, as it is written in the book of the Psalms. There is a way in the New Testament to refer to the canonical Psalter, and it appears three times, in the book of the Psalms. And Luke records that in Acts. Luke traveled with Paul. Paul surely would have known from Luke's influence on Paul that there was a way of referring to the canonical Psalms if he wanted to do it. You could have also said the Psalms are Psalms of David. You could have said the Psalms are Psalms of Solomon. There was a New Testament way of referring to them. merely used in ordinary Greek words. Kosalmos is an ordinary Greek word. Humnos is an ordinary Greek word. Ode is an ordinary Greek word. They all appear in classical lexical that don't even cover the New Testament because they were used by Greeks also. The use of those terms merely means common conventional ways of talking about the human act of singing and the occurrence of the three together, if I have a chance to show you that evidence later, does not necessarily suggest a mere reference to the canonical psalms. Thank you, Mr. Moderator, for giving me that extra thing. This is another 10-minute part, I guess. Okay. So I broke open the box on Colossians 3.16. Thank you, sir. The language in Colossians 3.16 that's given in the English versions, Psalms and Hymns and Spiritual Songs, in the original language is a figure of speech called asyndeton, that is, without conjunctions. Original Greek simply reads Psalms, Hymns, Songs, Spiritual. And grammatically, this would be words that are held in conjunction and speak about one thing. And so there are not three different things to which the words are referring in this case. In Ephesians 5.19, the language actually is psalms and hymns and songs, spiritual, with the conjunction. And the figure of speech there is hendiatris, Hendiatrus is three words connected by and which refer to one thing. An example of this would be Jesus. Jesus' words, I am the way and the truth and the life. Jesus there is not speaking about three different things. The way and then his life, and then truth that he preaches. But these three words speak about, connected by end, speak about one thing. And so Jesus is speaking about the true and living way to the Father. And that's the emphasis of the text in John. In Ephesians 5, The idea is that there's one thing about which the Apostle Paul is speaking, and of course the difference would be, do these words, these three words, actually go back to the Old Testament and the Septuagint? Here's what Warfield says with regard to the word spiritual. And back to Colossians 3.16, if I understand the grammar correctly, The adjective spiritual coming at the end of the ascendant time refers to the whole package, in other words, psalms, hymns, songs that are each spiritual, that they do come from God. And this is what Dr. Gordon was alluding to with the idea of spiritual. In other words, in Corinthians we have spiritual bodies or bodies that have been given to us by the Spirit would be the idea. And so these are songs that we would argue that are given to us by the Spirit. Warfield says of the 25 instances, I perked up my ears, Dr. Gordon said 26. Of the 25 instances in which the word occurs in the New Testament, in no single case does it sink even as low as in its reference as the human spirit, and in 24 of them is derived from Prima, the Holy Ghost. In this sense, in the sense of belonging to or determined by the Holy Spirit. The New Testament usage is uniform. This was Warfield's judgment. And so, the argument would be, okay, then these are songs, Psalms, hymns, and songs. that are spiritual, that are given to us by the Spirit. And we would argue then in the particular way that they are inspired by God. Not inspired in the sense that I heard a young lady who I sang a special years ago at a community service in Sterling, Kansas, when she stood up and said, as David was inspired to write his psalms, I was inspired to write the song that I'm about to sing to you. I thought to myself, oops. Not on the level of scripture. I don't think we would say that that's the case. And so I think, again, we have to be careful as to how we use that terminology. And then this idea, too, of singing about Christ. And those of us who are in Reformed Presbyterian circles would say, we do sing about Christ. We regularly sing about Christ. And yes, it is, if you want to put it this way, with the understanding that has been given to us by the Spirit through the Gospel. And this is the biblical perspective. The New Testament quotes the Psalter 82 times in various contexts to accentuate the depth of human depravity in Romans 3. It quotes Psalm 51.4 and 14.1 through 3. to add Psalm 5, Psalm 10, Psalm 36, and Psalm 140, Paul, to preach about human depravity. Paul turns to the subject of justification in Psalm 32, and Psalm 117 speaks about the gospel going to the nations. We speak about the crucifixion of Christ in Psalm 22. We speak about the resurrection of Christ in Psalm 16. We speak about Christ's opposition in Psalm 2. We speak about the ascension of Christ and His heavenly reign in Psalm 110. We speak about Christ's ascension in Psalm 68. We speak about the Lord coming again in Psalm 118, and so it goes, you see. We do sing about Christ, and it's quite significant, it seems to me, that when the Apostle Paul in Philippians, for example, says to us that every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, he's quoting from a passage in Isaiah that has to do with Yahweh. And Yahweh is presented in the New Testament as the Son of God incarnate. Jesus Christ is Lord and we are to confess Him as such. And so when you sing, the Lord is my shepherd, about whom are you singing? I would submit to you that you are singing about the Lord Jesus Christ. This is how the Psalter comes to us in the New Testament, you see. It's break time. With that, we'll take a brief 10 minute intermission. Thank you. Please find your seats. Thank you. All right, Dr. Gordon, you have the floor to examine Dr. Prouto. Dr. Prouto, I'm going to let a few of these tennisers go by. I won't use my whole ten minutes and ask me questions. Just one or two. On Ascendaton, I agree, by the way, that it's quite common in Greek for you to be able to use two or three words to describe the same thing, whether it's Hendiadis or Tridiadis and so forth kind of a thing. Just want to know if you think that the fact that the three words appear in Ascendaton necessitates that they be a reference to the canonical Psalms, or is it also possible that they're a reference to three different categories of music that are simply placed together to refer qualitatively? So do you see that as an open and shut case, or a place where the greater weight of the opinion leans one way than it does the other? I would say the greater weight of the opinion weighs in the direction of the canonical Psalms. And it's not just that we have a synodon here. But it's how the language, I would say, is used in the Septuagint and in other references in the Old Testament, where the idea of song, for example, when David instituted song in the tabernacle in 1 Chronicles 16. The idea of song there is, it seems, in context a reference to the Psalms because you have an inclusio in 1 Chronicles 16 where the writer speaks about the institution, David's institution, at the beginning of the chapter and at the end of the chapter, and then the example of selected psalm portions that are given in the middle of the chapter. So the idea of songs there appears clearly to be a reference to the Psalter, since the Psalter is quoted there. And you have the same idea in other texts, it seems. So I would say the weight goes to, it's not just the fact that it's the figure of speech there. And then a point that we all agree with, you cited Voss especially, to a lesser degree Calvin, I think you and I and probably everyone in this room agrees that every good even hymn writer that we've ever known, even for those who don't use them in worship, I think we all agree that all great hymn writers have read the Psalms and have drunk deeply of the Psalms. and their hymns attempt, in a more overtly Christian way, to manifest the same realities of the Psalter. So, I resonate with what Voss said. However, if Calvin compared, did not Voss use language, hard to find a more perfect guide to our subjective reaction to God's work, something like that. I just want to toss that and see if you want to, and you don't have to if you don't want to. So just toss the tennis ball out there. concurred that they were a perfect guide. Why would he have employed the New Demetist, the Creed, and the Decalogue in the Strasbourg Liturgy? Great question. I'm not sure I can answer that. It's obvious that those New Testament songs, if you want to characterize them this way, were included in Calvin's liturgy and he wanted to use them and particularly the Decalogue, I think for the purpose of memorizing the Decalogue, that that was probably Calvin's idea there because he held the law in great esteem, as we know, and wanted the people to understand the law. Outside of that, I think it's a great question. So in possibly, you know, when you say, could we find a better, a more perfect guide, sometimes you use that language, perfect, maybe not with a capital P. But with a small P, hard to imagine, humanly speaking, a better guy. But possibly a little here and there, and maybe Calvin had a small P kind of understanding of the same thing, boss, more of a capital P. That's possible. And by the way, I don't know if the RPA does this, because I don't know if you're permitted to, but in the current edition of the Red Trinity Hymnal, you know, the musical setting of the decalogue there is the Geneva musical setting. That's why it's so difficult for people to sing. Because it's an old Renaissance melody. A very, very odd kind of a thing. And we say, why did they choose that difficult melody? The answer is, it's the Geneva melody that Calvin used. And so they just put it into English meter. Oh yeah, a third one, and that is this. Let's concede that it's possible that the Psalms hymns and Psalms spiritual is a reference to the Old Testament canonical Psalms. I'll try to demonstrate later why I'm not persuaded. But, do you care to answer my mention to the three times that Luke says, the book of the Psalms. Would that not have been an easier, less courageable, less debatable way Paul to have referred to the Psalms had he wanted to? Or am I the only one that feels a little weight there? It would seem to me that in the Gospels, Luke's reference is referring to the Psalms, it's not necessary for him to narrow the idea as closely as it appears, at least I would argue the case, as Paul's interest implies in Colossians 3.16, that in the Gospels the Old Testament quotations are given to us in several different ways. And the term fulfilled is used in several different ways. And so it's a little hard for us sometimes to distinguish how the texts are used. But at any rate, I think Luke's interest there is simply to refer to the Psalter. This is what is given to us in the Old Testament. Whereas in the case of Colossians 3.16, it appears to me at least that that Paul's interest is to narrow the scope of our singing. And he does so purposefully, you see. And so that's his idea. And I would submit then that the reason he does this is the power of music, which we would properly understand and agree about, and the necessity, therefore, to narrow the scope of our singing and give certain parameters to the church so that the church is not off doing, quote, its own thing, but really concentrating on letting this word of Christ dwell richly within them, so that the image of Christ really begins to be built in them. And again, it seems to me that this is where Voss is going with his idea of subjective response. And then the final one, because it flows right out of that. In terms of this God's objective work and our subjective response to the citations you made from Voss and others, Do you grant any weight that it might have been useful if we had had some such biblical text dealing with some aspect of the person and work of Christ overtly? A biblical guide that actually speaks as overtly about the work of Christ as the Psalms speak overtly about Babylonian captivity and only implicitly about Christ. So I would argue that the Psalms do not speak only implicitly about Christ, but that the Psalms do speak directly about Christ, and the witness would be that our Lord himself and the Apostles preach Christ from the Old Testament and preach Christ from the Psalms. Jesus on the Emmaus Road. He spoke to the disciples all the things concerning himself from the Psalms and the Prophets and Moses. So I would say that no, it's not just implicit reference, but explicit reference. Mr. Moderator, I'm done with my questions. Thank you, sir. I have notes in this box. Well, we're going to proceed then to Dr. Proutot's examination of Dr. Gordon. Dr. Gordon, you may take the stand. You may take the witness stand. Your Honor, I never saw the woman before in my life. I'm interested in your talking a little bit more about the fact that you hold that the Israelites, as you wrote in a recent article, were not exclusive psalm singers. Yes, some of you are familiar that I wrote a little thing, Israelites were not exclusive song singers, nor are we. And Dr. Puto is referring to that particular essay. In that essay, I suggested that if you look at the historical books of the Old Testament, you'll find a number of times where There's the recording of some song of praise, we think especially of the song of Deborah, the song of Moses and so forth, the song of the sea, that are never found in the canonical Psalter, and yet the Israelites did sing them. And the narrator seems to suggest when he narrates that they did so, that he approves of the fact that they sang them. So it appears that there were many things they sang that, as it were, made it into the psalter. Other things they sang that were not placed in the psalter. And so what I suggest is that the psalter was always a growing revision the way we revise our hymnals, or the way, for instance, the RP&A, what, six years ago or seven, completed the revision of the RP&A psalter from the old Brown version to the new one. that the process was never final, the process was always ongoing. So that's all I suggest is that it doesn't appear to me that they would have stopped composing new hymns until Yahweh stopped new acts of creation or deliverance. So your argument, if I understand what you're saying, Your argument, at least in part, rests on the fact that the Israelites, in response to great acts of God, the Exodus, and Exodus 15. And the conquest of the land, the Song of Dabra. Etc. Those kinds of songs militate against the fact that the Israelites were... Right. I'm correct in my thinking there. Yeah, that's right. My reason is that they wouldn't have closed their hymnal until they closed their canon. Enlighten us on that idea just a little bit. That is to say, one of the wonderful things about Voss's observation is the Psalter provides for us the right subjective response to God's objective acts. That's what's going on existentially with him. That's what's going on. And so as long as God is doing unusual acts, not his more ordinary acts of providence, but his special acts of delivering his people from their enemies and so forth, I would have expected, as long as there's an ongoing record of his doing such things, we would expect that they would respond to that ongoing record with devotional expressions of thanksgiving and praise for those activities. And so that if God stopped acting, they would have no reason to compose new ones, perhaps, but if he were to continue such acts, that they would have continued to sing about them. Okay. Then I take it that you would draw no distinction between occasional times of God's people gathering, and I would use the term occasional with reference to the gathering of God's people after they crossed the Red Sea and Miriam led them in worship. It was on that occasion that they would worship God. And you mentioned Deborah. and there are other occasions, this kind of occasional worship and the regular stated worship of God's people in the temple. but you're not making any distinction between those two. I'm open to distinction because at least our standards make that distinction in chapter 21 on the regular versus the occasional elements of worship. So baptism we can't do every week if we don't have a candidate for baptism. So we call that an occasional element of worship. And the other things we call regular elements of worship. So I have no problem theologically with that distinction. But what I see in Israel is that throughout her life, as important moments come along, and this is all the way over to later in the, I think Habakkuk we have one, for instance, all the way through, they seem to compose devotional compositions that grow out of their subjective response to God's objective act. And so what we then see in the canon is the collecting of what they regard to be as a representative group of those. I'm drawing the distinction between certain occasions where God's people gathered and sang praise to God. And the formal stated worship that was designed by God in the temple. Versus more special occasions like the inauguration of a governor or something like that. Correct, correct. Or like a 4th of July celebration. And it was in the temple in the stated worship of God where David initiated the use of the Psalms and then later in 2nd Chronicles, so I'll just get your reaction to this. Later in 2nd Chronicles, when Hezekiah revived the true worship of God, in accordance with David, this is 2nd Chronicles 29-30, it says, and Hezekiah the king and the officials commanded the Levites to sing praises to the Lord with the words of David and Asaph the seer." Oh, yeah, that's very helpful. And it seems, just before you respond, it seems that what Hezekiah is doing is narrowing again, the song which is permissible in the temple services. And this is why I'm drawing the distinction between the temple services, which are highly regulated, and the occasional settings. Let me have the reference. 2 Chronicles 29.30. And earlier text speaks about Hezekiah reviving the worship in accordance with Yeah, that helps. That's much clearer than I might have thought the question was. Here's the analogy. There's two possibilities here. One possibility, as you suggest, is that they are at this point issuing sort of an ongoing directive that, let's say, from this moment on, the Levites are to sing praises to the Lord with the words of David and Asaph, the seer, and perhaps no others. And that's entirely possible. And the temple service. Right. I also think there's two other possibilities. And that is that when the Levites, who are but a type of the coming work of Christ, when their work gives way to the mediation of Christ and the people of God, not just one twelfth of the people of God, but all the people of God come there, that just as our general life is not as highly regulated as the life of the Levites was, because they were much more regulated than the other eleven tribes, it's quite possible that our worship is less precisely regulated than theirs was. We don't have the stuff on our hems of our garments and so forth. But more important, I think, is this. A command to do a thing does not necessarily imply negatively that they not do anything else. Last Sunday night, I was filling the pulpit. At my size, I was trying to fill the pulpit at a church in Grove City. And when I finished with the sermon and the prayer, I instructed the congregation to stand and sing hymn number 230. Thou who was rich beyond all splendor, all for love's sake becamest poor. Now, in instructing them to sing that hymn on that occasion, I don't know that I was instructing them not to sing anything else. So the other question I have here is, here we have a candid record that they commanded the Levites to do this, right? But I'm not sure logically it means that their intention was that they never do anything else. Just not sure that that's implicit in it, any more than that my selecting one hymn to be sung on that occasion necessarily meant that that was the only one out of 700 hymns in there that they could sing. They might could have sung others by other people. Two minutes? Huh. We were behind. We were behind. You see, I would say just in responding to that, to me that's counterintuitive as far as the reading of the text is concerned. Yeah, yeah. Okay, I'm done. Dr. Gordon, it is your time for rebuttal and closing. Let me just say a few words that I think pertain to the matter of the language of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs that we've each alluded to. And I'll probably post this at some point if you're interested. And if your Bible searching program doesn't pull Greek and Hebrew up easily, I can do that for you. But let me suggest that when you look at each of those three terms as they are used in the Old Testament, Psalmos appears 92 times. 41 times it appears as a title or partial title of a canonical psalm. 51 times it does not. And so it sometimes is used as a title of a canonical psalm, sometimes not. Humnos appears 32 times, five times as a title to a canonical psalm, and 27 times not as a title to a canonical psalm. Ode, song in our psalms spiritual, appears 85 times in the Greek Old Testament, 15 times in the title of psalms, and 70 times elsewhere. In addition to the fact that those terms are used frequently not in the titles of psalms, there are other expressions that are also used to designate canonical psalms that do not show up in Colossians 3.19. Aes dotelos appears 56 times as a psalm title. Now psalmos only appears 41 times as a psalm title. So the most frequent way of titling a psalm in the Greek Old Testament is estotelos. And then sunesios appears 18 times as a title to a psalm. So, Odia 5, Humnos 15, this term appears 18. So there's two terms used as titles of psalms in the Greek Old Testament, more frequently than two of the three terms that Paul uses here as titles of psalms, and yet Paul does not use them. Now to me what that means is all five or six of these kinds of terms were in a state of flux at this point and had not yet become fixed as terms that designate only canonical Psalms. And so in addition to my understanding of what the word of Christ means and what pneumatikos, the adjective spiritual, means is also the fact that I do not regard the three terms that Paul happens to select as an attentional ascendanton to refer to canonical psalms. Had I done so, I would have taken the three most common titles for psalms, estotelos, 50 sometimes, psalmos, 42, and then sunesios, 18. Those would have been the three that I did. So two of the three most frequent terms that refer to canonical psalms in the Greek Old Testament are not used in Colossians 3.19. And one of the ones that he uses is only used five times out of 150 to refer to a canonical psalm. Only twice in the 150 canonical psalms are all three terms used. Because, as you know, in some of the titles, the title's nearly as long as a Puritan book. It'll call things four, five, six, seven things. And so there are two psalms in the Greek Old Testament where psalmos and humnos and ode appear, but only two out of 150. And I would simply say two out of 150 is not a fixed enough amount of usage to then designate the thing as a terminus technicus, which is sort of a coded way of saying canonical Psalms. I would still prefer that we use Luke's language. And by the way, I wasn't clear earlier, Dr. Pruder, it's actually Luke's usage in Acts where he calls it the Book of Psalms. That's where those references appear, not in Luke. So I just suggest that it is not clear at all to me that by the time that Paul writes Colossians 3, that those three terms, which are sometimes used for titles were code speech that meant canonical psalms. There were other words used more frequently as titles of psalms than them, and had that been what Paul wished to convey, he would have taken the three most frequently appearing titles and ranked them in that order, and that would have made it clear to people that that's what he's doing. So that's the only thing. I think we've covered most of the areas where thoughtful people have to wrestle with both aspects of this part of the regulative principle tradition. But I did want to give you those kind of numbers out there for those of you who like that. And if I don't post it on my web page and you want to see those all printed out, if you email me, it's just tdgordon at gcc.edu, I'm happy to send you that information. Because some of your search programs don't permit you to search Greek or Hebrew words, only English words. And so what I've done is I've printed the English text, but as the result of the search of the Greek words. So even if your Greek's a little rusty, you'd still be able to read the texts and follow fine. Mine's worse than rusty, but at my age, it was once sharp. And so even when it's rusty, it's pretty good. If you're rusty, brother, I'm moving much more slowly. Professor Gordon, referring to the psalm titles and tois telos, used in the Septuagint as one of the psalm titles. Unto the end is the idea of the psalm title. And if you have a Bible there and you want to look at Psalm 4 and the title, Psalm 4 begins with, for the choir director on stringed instruments, a psalm of David. And it's the words for the choir director that are translated in the Septuagint, eis totelos. Yes, some translations of Choir Master and some Choir Director. Correct. And apparently the translators of the Septuagint were looking at the Psalms eschatologically. This seems to be part of the emphasis. And the title then in this part is not telling us the form of what is being written. And in one of his articles, Dr. Gordon points out the use of the term form in the church, which I think is helpful. In other words, we use a certain form when we utter the Lord's Prayer or repeat the Lord's Prayer, and we use certain forms in baptisms and church membership, etc. The idea in the title that it's a psalm is indicating to us the form. I would say. And so I think you have to be careful in not mixing apples and oranges is part of what I'm saying. In part, the title is telling us the emphasis of the psalm or the direction the psalm is going or for whom it is written or by whom it is to be used, etc. And then it's telling us that it's a psalm or a song or a hymn. giving us two different things. And so I think to say that the idea of estotelos utilized more frequently than the terminology psalm or song or hymn is a little misleading in this regard. This takes us, I think, to the idea of the Psalter being eschatological in its emphasis, and you get this immediately, don't you, in the very first Psalm. How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stand in the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord. And in his law he meditates day and night. He will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water which yields its fruit in its season. Its leaf does not wither, and whatever he does prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind drives away. Therefore, the wicked will not stand in the judgment." Boom! All of a sudden, we're to the judgment and the idea of judgment. So, the beginning of the Psalter gives us an eschatological slant immediately. And it appears that this is part of the idea in the titles to which Professor Gordon was referring, you see, that the Septuagint writers saw the Psalter as eschatological. Now, I would submit that the New Testament writers under the divine guidance of the Holy Spirit saw the Psalter as eschatological also. And for this reason they freely quoted the Psalter with reference to Christ and the beginning of the age to come, you see, and other matters that have to do with that which is yet to come, the judgment which is to come. And so the Psalter itself is eschatological and gives us this perspective. Now, there's another aspect here that we didn't touch upon and I think would be fun for us to discuss, and that is typology. And the idea being here is that, no, I don't want to sing about types of Christ. I want to sing about the reality. Well, again, I would submit that in the Psalter we do sing about the reality, Christ himself. We also do sing about types and shadows. But this is not uncommon. Walter Kaiser has a very helpful little book which he calls Back to the Future. And in that little book he explains, I think rightly, that the only way that we can speak about the future is by utilizing things, symbols, ideas from the past or from the present, and this is how the Bible works. That the people of Israel were only able to speak about the future utilizing that which was in their past or that which was in their present. And since we are not yet in the future, it's a little bit hard for us to define explicitly that future. And we can say, well, we'll look at the book of Revelation. Okay, good. Many symbols. Much typology. How does the book of Revelation speak to us about the future? By using symbols and types from Israel's past. This is the only way that it could be done. And it's quite striking. I don't know if you've read Dr. Gordon's little book, Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns. I think it's a helpful book. And in one place where he talks about poetry having staying power, and old hymns having staying power because they're used over the years, I say amen and I put in my margin, think about the songs. They have staying power. They have staying power. And this is part of the genius of the book, you see. And even in modern hymns, we sing about, O Lamb of God. Well, what is that? It's a type. It's a type. And unless the type is explained, then the people don't understand the hymn, you see. So we're not carried away from the whole idea of types and shadows and symbols. if we move to modern hymnody away from the ancient Psalter, which in the words of Voss again, no better words can be framed for our use in our approach to God. And I didn't get a chance to say this in the interaction, but I don't think Voss is using hyperbole there. I think he does mean what he says in that instance. Time? Okay, thank you very much.