The beauty of the gospel is that it is a living thing, a person. It is not dead words and idle tongue wagging phrases and doctrine. We are to participate in the gospel, to live Christ's life creating things of beauty and bringing hope to a darkened world. The gospel is found in hymns and paintings, in poems and dancing. The gospel is the joy of the Lord, undignified worship of the Almighty Creator. There is no need to choose between the beauty of a hymn and the beauty of Christ if the hymn is well constructed, as it is Christ's beauty that provides the pleasing aesthetic of a true hymn. We are admonished regularly in Scripture to sing spiritual songs, because songs capture joy in a way that sermons and lectures never will.
Indeed. The singing of psalms, hymns and spiritual songs is commanded of us in the New Testament.
But going a step further, the Scriptures were until relatively recently, sung:
The early church, and the Orthodox Churches to this day, always sang the Gospel, that is to say, chanted it, as well as the Epistles, and the Jews always chanted the Old Testament (and still do; the practice is called Cantillation, and different melodies are used for the Torah and Haftarah, and among the Haftarah, for the Psalms, for the Five Scrolls (Esther, The Song of Songs, Lamentations, Proverbs and Job), and for other books in the Tanakh. So the early Church inherited this practice, and you still see Scripture lessons intoned in the Traditional Latin Mass, the ancient Gallican-derived Mozarabic and Ambrosian Rites, the Eastern Orthodox liturgy, and the Coptic, Syriac, Armenian and Ethiopian Orthodox liturgies, and I think the Assyrian Church of the East, to some extent, and also the Maronite Catholics.
Also if we go back to the fourth century, we find the Metrical Homily, which was a sermon intended to be sung, which was the preferred form of St. Ephrem the Syrian, a Deacon known as “The Harp of the Spirit.” His metrical homilies are still sung in the Assyrian, Syriac and Maronite churches, and the Assyrian church and the Syriac Orthodox church each have their own contender for the “Flute of the Spirit”, Mar Narsai, and St. Jacob of Sarugh, who is my preference; his metrical homily Haw Nurone, composed around the year 500, is commonly used as the Communion Hymn, sung by the deacons, subdeacons and psaltis while the laity partake of the Eucharist at the end of their Holy Qurbana (Eucharistic Liturgy).
The idea of a church service without music dates to the tenth century, when Roman Rite priests were no longer required to chant the Low Mass in monotone, but instead began celebrating it in silence. Then, with the Protestant Reformation, the Anglican Communion introduced the Said Service, in which the entire liturgy was read aloud, including the Psalms and Canticles. This has not become the prevailing form, but the practice of reading the scriptures in a normal voice, which dates from that time on a widescale congregational level (as opposed to some Monastic uses, where that was done previously) emerged at that time.
Now, we live in a world where there is an enforced dichotomy in most churches between the sung and spoken parts of the service. Scripture is no longer chanted but read. Even the Psalms and Litanies are now, in most Protestant churches, read responsorially rather than sung or chanted, despite the availability of many good metrical Psalters, like the Psalter published by the Reformed Presbyterian Church in North America. They use it, with the Psalms set to various chorales, because their denomination is one of several that believes in a capella exclusive Psalmody, which I do not, to be very clear, however, their Psalter is useful in my opinion, because it lets a congregation accustomed to singing hymns congregationally using the Chorale style common to traditional Protestant hymns, like those of Martin Luther and Charles Wesley, sing the Psalms. The variation in wording vs. how they are rendered in the Biblical text could be illuminating and lead the congregation to realize new things about the Psalms.
There is also the Coverdale Psalter, which is used by Anglicans because it is easier to chant than the Book of Psalms in the King James Version, and which is used in a modified form by Russian Orthodox parishes worshipping English (the Jordanville Psalter, which corrects it against the Septuagint).
