How Can I Tell Whether a Hymn Is Teaching Law or Gospel?

Three questions will do most of the work, and you can ask them of any hymn in any book without knowing a thing about its author.

Who is the subject of the verbs? Not who the hymn is about — who is actually doing things in the sentences. In A Mighty Fortress, God acts and the singer is defended. In a great many nineteenth-century hymns, the singer acts and God waits to see whether he will.

What does the hymn ask you to supply? Every hymn asks for something — praise, thanks, attention, trust — and that is fine. The question is narrower: does the hymn make what you supply into the hinge on which your salvation turns?

Where does the hymn locate assurance? When you wake at two in the morning unable to feel anything, what does this hymn point you at? A promise attached to something outside you, that happened to you and can be named and dated? Or an experience inside you, that you must remember correctly and keep having?

Two cautions. First, this is not a machine for sorting hymns into good and bad piles; used that way it will make you a worse Christian than you were, and it will replace one kind of self-inspection with another. It is a way of hearing what you are singing. Second, the test says nothing about vintage. Chorales fail it and gospel hymns pass it. What is being measured is substance.