ABSTRACT
It seems to me that the biblical faith and life expressed in the psalms and in the Reformed tradition is authentic personal faith and life only by membership in the covenant community, which is antecedent to the individual, and in which only does the individual find real meaning and hope. Touched on here is a basic problem now in church and world: atomism and anomie. Related thereto is the tension between the prophetic and the aesthetic. Do you suppose we would be better off if we, like our forebears, sang in our corporate worship only the psalms and other texts of biblical revelation in the most accurate, if not literal, renderings possible and made use of other, individual, human, artistic compositions on other occasions?
