Relocating To Elfland

For some time, I have been thinking about starting a series of posts on the Psalter. I think it was in the summer of 2007 that I first read Stephen Dempster’s Dominion and Dynasy: A Theology of the Hebrew Bible. His section on the Psalms (pp. 194–202) opened up a whole new world to me regarding the eschatology and structure of the Psalter. (See also Geerhardus Vos, “Eschatology of the Psalter,” in The Princeton Theological Review, available here.)

What intrigues me about Dempster’s reflections is that they lift the Psalter, and Christian use of the Psalter, above the plane of individual devotional piety. Certainly the Psalms often express the soul of the individual saint; they give us language to pour out our hearts before God in the secret place. But there is, as Vos says, a “second face” of the Psalter: it speaks not just in the prayer closet but also in “the open places of a tumultuous world.” There is a deep historical awareness in the Psalms, a deep sense of where the currents of redemptive history are going; and it “goes without saying that what can be prayed and sung . . . in theatro mundi was never meant for exclusive use in the oratory of the pious soul.”

In following posts, I will attempt (following Dempster) to work through the overarching structure of the Psalter, and also spend some time on “the gateway to the Psalter” – Psalms 1 and 2.