Morris, John D. How Firm a Foundation in Scripture and Song. Green Forrest, Arkansas: Master Books, 1999.
252 pages.
This book is a set of daily devotionals that are one page long each. Each week of devotions is built around a hymn, where the hymn texts are looked at with a particular emphasis on the theology of the text.
The ups
First, the devotionals are excellent. Morris deals with full-on theology and does so with the sorts of explanations young people in family devotions could grasp quite reasonably. This is how “devotionals” are supposed to be done!
Second, the theology is, for the most part, spot on. And most of the concerns are the matters of imprecision rather than erroneous position.
Third, this book is accessible enough to be used in family devotions where the family can learn the hymn for the week and then go through the devotionals each day. The book even includes the printed score and a recorded demo of each hymn. This book could also be used in a bible study setting.
The downs
First, Morris, a well-known creation scientist, is neither a theologian nor a hymnologist. He is, however, a believer and does an admirable job in both of these areas all things considered. Still, there are quite a number of serious concerns with the hymnological and historic elements of the book including the perpetuation of longstanding misconceptions, errors of fact, and misunderstanding of key hymnological issues. In fact, the reader would do well to assume anything related to the hymn histories is suspect, unfortunately. Still, this book doesn’t claim to be about hymn stories and what it does claim to do, it generally does well. That said, there are some fairly unfortunate handlings of Scripture which, again, seem to be based on insufficient theological training rather than any carelessness on the part of the author.
Second, it is not particularly impressive to see him apologising for the Calvinism of the hymn-writers while perpetuating the slanderous notion that Calvinists don’t believe in evangelism. This reflects, I suspect, the ignorance of the theological environment in which he wrote.
Conclusion
This is a good book that managed to surprise me with a depth of theological discussion not normally found in works dealing with hymn texts. I heartily recommend it to you for your devotional benefit.
Grace to you.
