Why Do Lutheran Hymnals Include Revival and Gospel Hymns?

Usually because someone decided to, and said so.

The Ambassador Hymnal for Lutheran Worship is a clear case. Its preface opens with a line from the AFLC’s Declaration of Faith of 1962 — hymn books should be such as will give honor to the Word of God and the Sacraments — and then lists the committee’s criteria. Hymns had to uphold the supremacy of Scripture. They had to be in keeping with a Lutheran understanding of the Sacraments. They had to be singable by ordinary people. And the selection as a whole had to represent the breadth of the Lutheran church, in its chorale tradition and in its use of the best of “gospel” hymnody — the quotation marks are the committee’s own.

That is a deliberate pastoral choice by people who knew their congregations, and in a church body shaped by the Haugean movement it is not a surprising one. The warm and the confessional have been kept in the same room here for a long time.

It also means the fairest way to evaluate what ended up in the book is to hold it against the standard the compilers themselves printed. That is not an attack on a hymnal. It is taking its editors at their word.

One thing that will not survive the exercise is the assumption that the imported material is all American and all recent. The pietist stream reached Scandinavian-American Lutheranism from Europe as well, a century before Moody, and some of the hymns in these sections that most clearly refuse decision theology were written by Pietists — while some that most clearly teach it are set to folk tunes the immigrants brought with them.