Celebrating the Psalms

N.T. Wright may be a New Testament scholar, but he makes it a point to read five Psalms a day because he believes the Psalms belong at the center of Christian worship and Christian thought. He makes his point in The Case for the Psalms (2013), and anyone who reads it will likely be swayed toward that same opinion.

We may assume the Psalms to be a random assortment of Hebrew poetry not unlike an anthology of notable American poetry or British poetry. Having read all 150 of them so many times, Wright thinks differently. He views them as deliberately ordered with common themes running through them.

The themes he focuses on in his book are time, space and matter, and he writes about how God connects with mankind through each.

About time, for example, Wright says, "This is what poetry and music themselves are there to do: to link the present to the past, to say, 'Remember,' to say, 'Blessed be God,' even when the tide is running strongly in the wrong direction."

As for space, Wright traces in the Psalms the Hebrews' evolving understanding of where God dwells, from a holy place, to the Temple, to all mankind, the soul of each human being.

"Matter matters," the author tells us. The Psalms celebrate not just God but God's whole creation.

Wrights quotes at length from many of the Psalms, and in the most personal chapter of his book describes how particular Psalms have spoken to him in significant ways through his life.