I’ve been leading a study of Psalms and their translations into hymns for Women at the Well. Since the most recent session followed Reformation Sunday, we studied Psalm 46 and how it inspired and influenced Martin Luther to write the words for our Reformation hymn, A Mighty Fortress.
I’ve been at Lord of Life for over seven years now, and I still struggle with the words in our hymnal because they are different from any other church I’ve served before:
A mighty fortress is our God, A sword and shield victorious.
Instead of:
A mighty fortress is our God, A bulwark never failing.
I love a little sleuthing about music history and I’ve had a great audience for our Bible study, so I decided to dig in to find some answers. This is totally academic geekery - it’s the kind of thing I get excited about.
I went through our previous four hymnals to get a feel for what we’ve done before and found that our current hymnal and the previous one (the 1978 Lutheran Book of Worship, or “the green hymnal”) use the same words. The red hymnal before that, published in 1958, used the “bulwarks” translation that I’m more familiar with.
When I opened the Common Service Book and Hymnal from 1918, I found that we were doing yet another translation back then:
A mighty fortress is our God, A trusty shield and weapon.
Huh … this sounds a lot more like our sword and shield victorious. It turns out this translation was the translation common to Lutheran churches starting in 1868, and is a very faithful translation of Luther’s original German.
The other translation - the one about the bulwark - was written at about the same time, but by Frederick Hedges, who was much more romantic and poetic. Instead of trying to translate it literally, he made a beautiful and clearly long-lasting hymn.
If you’re curious how Psalm 46 and any version of this text come together to remind us of the Reformation, I’ll leave you with this:
The 46th Psalm was written in thanksgiving to God for the saving of Jerusalem from the warfare of opposing nations. We sing Mighty Fortress to praise God for staying with us as we reform God’s church and ourselves, and for preserving God’s Word against outside forces.
Reforming with you,
John Johns