Are the Psalms Coherent?

Most of us have a favorite Psalm the way we have a favorite song. The psalms have been a great source of comfort, a balm to weary souls since the time of ancient Israel. But if you crack open the Psalms at random, chances are you will not open to a pleasant song of praise, but a harsh (even vindictive) song of imprecation. The Psalms of complaint make up a third of the entire psalter.

In other words, your chances of flipping to “The Lord is my shepherd” is much slimmer than finding lines like this: “Happy is the one who snatches up the babies of his enemies and dashes their heads against the rocks.”

The range of mood between the Psalms is vast. And this brings a question: If the Psalms are this varied how do they all hold together? Are the Psalms really one book or are they just a collection of many types of prayers and songs?

Is there any sense in which the book of Psalms works as a whole?

Orientation—Disorientation—New Orientation

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann (RIP) argues that there is a spiritual coherence to the book of Psalms. He suggests that the Psalms can be understood as a movement through three stages:

* Psalms of Orientation: If you are oriented you have balance. These Psalms express a faith in God and creation. There is an obvious equilibrium to the world. God’s creation operates on clear-cut rules that yield clear-cut results. Most of us will have experienced seasons in our life that are like this. (See Psalms 1, 37, 104.)

* Psalms of Disorientation: But there are also seasons where things aren’t working. If you are disoriented you have lost your balance and your bearing. The Psalms of disorientation are songs of anguish, hurt, alienation, and suffering. And these songs are often marked by language that is exaggerated, harsh, accusatory, and even vindictive. (See Psalms 13, 22, 88, 109.)

* New Orientation: And then in the midst of that darkness,l many of us will have experienced the surprise of healing and other unexpected gifts. Joy breaks through the despair; new light breaks through the darkness. And this is a genuinely new orientation, not just a restoration of the old orientation. You see things differently than you did before the pain and suffering. (See Psalms 30, 34, 40, 150.)

We are really just talking about two movements here. The first is a move (downward) from orientation into disorientation. The old way of thinking about things isn’t working anymore. This is where we find ourselves in what the Psalms often call “the pit.”

The second movement is a move (upward) from disorientation into a new orientation. In the midst of the darkness we are surprised by a new gift from God and given a new way to make sense of the world on the other side of the pit.

Brueggemann points out that Christians should recognize the double movement of crucifixion and resurrection here. That is not by accident. The Psalms are a baptism.

Now, it has been hard for us to see this shape of the psalms in all their honesty because, as Brueggemann argues, we live in a culture of denial. We don’t want to deal with the darkness so we deny its existence or power. We numb ourselves in many different ways so that we don’t have to confront disorientation and the reality that we are in the pit.

The Pit

Chris Green, building on Brueggemann’s schema, says that the pit is a situation of alienation, isolation, suffering and grief. Green suggests that a movement down into the pit is always characterized by alienation and disempowerment.  The deeper you fall into the pit the deeper the experience of disempowerment becomes.

The primary problem Scripture identifies with being in the pit is a surprising one: people in the pit do not praise God. The pit is a place where you experience a loss of voice. Your voice is taken from you because of your pain, suffering, alienation. It’s like getting the wind perpetually knocked out of you.

Ps. 115:17 “The dead do not praise the Lord, nor do any who go down into silence.”

Isa. 38:18 “For Sheol cannot thank you; death cannot praise you; those who go down to the Pit cannot hope for your faithfulness.”

Ps. 88:3–6, 10–13 “For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol. I am counted among those who go down to the Pit; I am like those who have no help, like those forsaken among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand. You have put me in the depths of the Pit, in the regions dark and deep. Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the shades rise up to praise you? Is your steadfast love declared in the grave or your faithfulness in Abaddon? Are your wonders known in the darkness or your saving help in the land of forgetfulness? But I, O Lord, cry out to you; in the morning my prayer comes before you.”

To be in the pit is to be the walking dead. You are alive but you are deadened, cut off from your community, from yourself, and from God.

All of this is bound up with the central issue, though: a loss of voice. The deeper you fall into the pit the more difficult it becomes to pray, the more voiceless you become.

There might only be room enough for a cry or a complaint. But there is no praise or thanksgiving. This fall into the pit can happen very suddenly (a diagnosis from the doctor, the death of a loved one) or it can happen over time. You might not even realize how far down into the pit you’ve fallen because of how slow your fall has been. And because we are all unique there are many different reasons that we find ourselves in the pit. Just because what has affected you deeply would not affect others as deeply does not mean that they are not in the pit.

Green suggests that the reason a loss of voice is so dangerous is that when you lose your ability to speak up and give voice to your pain, you can get to a place where you cannot distinguish yourself from your pain anymore. You and your pain become identical. There is a collapse of your pain into yourself. The ability to distinguish yourself from your pain gets harder and harder the deeper into the pit you fall.

The antidote is precisely what the psalter give us in the Psalms of disorientation. The psalmists are people in the pit crying out to God. Sometimes they speak in very mean and angry ways. But they are still speaking! They haven’t completely lost their voice yet. Yes there is complaint, but a complaint is still speech of some sort.

Green puts it like this: “Before you completely collapse into your pain, the last coal that still has some fire in it is your ability to complain.” 

As long as you still have the ability to complain there is hope because you still have some part of your voice left. The most dangerous place to be is when you can no longer speak about your pain at all.

Green argues that the Psalms show us the way out of the pit and we can roughly categorize them in steps:

First, you have to find your voice again. If you can find your voice, you can begin to distinguish yourself from your pain. You can hold it at a distance, away from yourself. You are not your pain. Even a complaint is still a distinguishing of yourself from your suffering. The complaint is a coal that is about to be snuffed out, but if you bring it to God he can breath on it and restore the flame.

Second, we have to move from complaint to being able to name your pain correctly. What happened to you? Who caused this? Why are you here in the pit? The moment you can correctly name your pain you are already on your way out. This is intimately tied up with the human vocation God gives to Adam in the Garden of Eden. He gives him the power to name and distinguish things in the world around him. One way of describing the human vocation is becoming more and more precise with how we name things and distinguish this from that.

Third, once the naming has begun and it becomes more and more accurate, the naming turns to praise. The naming flowers into praise and thanksgiving because you start to recognize the truth of God in what has happened to you. You meet God in the pit. You realize he has been with you this whole time, sustaining you, promising to bring you through. Being able to more accurately tell the story is the beginning of praise. Gratitude grows.

And now the small ember of complaint has grown into a robust flame. You’ve gotten your voice back. Praise brings you into God’s truth about the world.

On the other side of the pit is the knowledge that even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death you are with me.

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