We believe God in the highest throne
The hymn We believe God in the highest throne wrote Rudolf Alexander Schröder in 1937 as a paraphrase of the creed . The melody assigned to the text in the hymn books today was composed by Christian Lahusen in 1948. The song is one of the two alternative hymns to the creed in the Evangelical Hymn book under Liturgical Chants (No. 184). In the praise of God it is classified under The Triune God - Father, Son and Holy Spirit (No. 355).
shape
The lyrics consist of five stanzas of four four -part , iambic , male rhyming lines with the rhyme scheme [aabb]. It is the form of the old church Latin hymn , as it is almost exclusively encountered in Ambrosius of Milan and his successors ( Ambrosian hymn strophe ) .
content
The text is designed as a summary of the basic Christian beliefs as they are formulated in the Nicene and the Apostles' Creed with ecumenical validity. The three articles of faith Father - Son - Holy Spirit are paced twice, once in the first two, the other time in the third, fourth and fifth stanzas. Lines I / 1 and III / 1 + 2 refer to the Father, lines I / 2–4, III / 3 + 4 and IV / 1–4 to the Son, and lines II / 1– to the Holy Spirit. 4 and V / 1-4.
The Father is predicted as the all-ruler ("in the highest throne") and as the creator of light .
As in Nicene, eternal birth “before time” and participation in the divine omnipotence is predicated of the Son. The incarnation is, with no mention of Mary , present tense as accepting our need circumscribed, it follows the history of suffering and death of Jesus - with repeated emphasis that it was "our" cross and death - the descent of Christ into the underworld , his resurrection and Exaltation and his return to the Last Judgment .
The Holy Spirit is described in verse 2, deviating from the templates, with statements from the Gospel of John (15.26 LUT ; 3.8 LUT ) and the letter to the Romans (8.26 LUT ), in verse 5, according to the templates, as the author of the Church , the forgiveness of sins and the eternal vision of God. The conclusion is the Amen .
interpretation
To write a strictly doctrinal, timeless confessional song in 1937 meant the negation of the salvation-historical interpretation of the Third Reich propagated by the German Christians and the affirmation of the sixfold "We reject the wrong doctrine ..." of the Barmer Theological Declaration of 1934.
The emphasis on the vicarious suffering of Christ for us in verse 3 and the comforting and straightening up in verse 2 has a specifically Lutheran accent.
melody
Christian Lahusen's melody is unique due to its complete rhythmic uniformity - it consists exclusively of halves - as well as the identity of the first with the second line, inspired by the parallelism of the statements about the father and the son. These peculiarities, together with the key of C minor and the numerous large interval steps, give it something monumental and confessional.
A rhythmically and harmonically more bulky alternative melody by Paul Ernst Ruppel from 1967 ( Gotteslob (1975) No. 276) did not succeed.
literature
- Alexander Völker : 184 - We believe God in the highest throne . In: Gerhard Hahn , Jürgen Henkys (Hrsg.): Liederkunde zum Evangelisches Gesangbuch . No. 6 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2003, ISBN 3-525-50330-X , p. 72–77 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
Web links
- EG 184: We believe God in the highest throne (Ecumenical Penance and Reconciliation Service, St. Michaelis, Hildesheim, March 11, 2017) on YouTube .