As I was reading from A Survey of Christian Hymnody, I was fascinated by the contexts in which hymns were written. For example, during the Thirty Years' War, hymns "reflected a changing emphasis from the predominantly objective emphasis of earlier hymns to a more subjective one." These hymns reflected the people's reliance upon God for comfort and consolation with expressions of devotion and self-consciousness. Every period produced different expressions and content that reflected the times of the culture and it seems that all the expressions represent a different quality of the Christian life.
My questions are...what is the value of singing historical texts? and what is the value in teaching the historical contexts?
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I think Lewis might help us here. In the discarded image Lewis writes:
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