The Psalter (1928 BCP)
The Psalter (1928 BCP) is the Prayer Book form of the Psalms appointed for use in the 1928 American Book of Common Prayer. It gives the Church the Psalms as common prayer: praise, lament, penitence, thanksgiving, royal hope, wisdom, and trust in God are placed on the lips of the congregation in the Daily Office and other services.
The 1928 Psalter is not merely a collection of devotional poems. It is one of the chief engines of Anglican formation. Morning and Evening Prayer turn the Psalms into the Church's regular speech before God, so that Scripture is not only read and preached but prayed, sung, memorized, and carried into daily life.
Place in the Prayer Book
The Psalter stands at the heart of the Daily Office. The 1928 BCP appoints Psalms across the month, with portions assigned to morning and evening use. This monthly pattern lets the Church pray the whole range of biblical devotion rather than selecting only familiar or comfortable passages.
The opening of the Psalter gives the whole book a moral and spiritual frame:
BLESSED is the man that hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners.
Psalm 1 places blessedness in the way of the righteous and delight in the law of the Lord. This is a fitting doorway into Prayer Book Psalmody: the Psalms train desire, judgment, memory, repentance, and hope.
Psalms in the Daily Office
Morning and Evening Prayer make the Psalter a public discipline. The Psalms are not an ornamental prelude to the lessons. They are themselves inspired Scripture, appointed for prayer before the lessons and canticles.
The Venite, drawn from Psalm 95, shows the Office's movement from invitation to worship into the hearing of God's voice:
O come, let us sing unto the LORD; let us heartily rejoice in the strength of our salvation.
Because the Psalms are prayed in course, the congregation learns to bring every condition of the soul before God: confidence, fear, gratitude, guilt, anger, sorrow, deliverance, and adoration. The Prayer Book therefore prevents a thin devotional life. It teaches Christians to pray with the whole Bible, not only with moods already comfortable to them.
Penitence and Mercy
The Psalter gives Anglican worship some of its strongest language of repentance. Psalm 51 is central to Prayer Book penitence because it names sin honestly and asks for cleansing by mercy rather than self-justification.
Have mercy upon me, O God, after thy great goodness; according to the multitude of thy mercies do away mine offences.
This penitential grammar appears throughout the 1928 BCP. The General Confession in Morning and Evening Prayer, the Litany, the Ash Wednesday office, and the Communion confession all belong to the same spiritual world: sin is real, mercy is greater, and the forgiven people of God are called to amendment of life.
Christological Reading
Anglican use of the Psalter is also Christological. The Psalms are the prayers of Israel, the prayers of Christ, and the prayers of Christ's Body, the Church. This is why psalms of kingship, suffering, vindication, and praise are heard in relation to the Lord's passion, resurrection, ascension, and reign.
The New Testament itself reads the Psalms this way. St. Paul exhorts the Church:
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns.
The Psalter therefore forms doctrine as well as devotion. It teaches the Church to speak of creation, covenant, sin, judgment, mercy, Messiah, sacrifice, temple, nations, and final praise in the language of Scripture.
Pastoral and Sacramental Use
The Psalms are woven through many Prayer Book offices beyond the ordinary Daily Office. Burial, visitation, penitential prayer, and public thanksgiving all draw naturally on Psalmody. Psalm 23, for example, gives pastoral confidence in God's shepherding care:
The LORD is my shepherd; therefore can I lack nothing.
In worship and pastoral care, this matters deeply. The Psalms give words when private speech is too thin: grief is given lament, fear is given trust, guilt is given confession, and joy is given praise. The Prayer Book does not ask Christians to invent a spiritual vocabulary from scratch; it hands them the inspired language of the Church.
Theological Interpretation
Classical Anglican theology receives the Psalter as Holy Scripture, and therefore under the authority of God rather than as merely ecclesiastical poetry. The Psalms are prayed within the Church, but their authority comes from their place in the biblical canon.
High Church and Tractarian readers have often stressed the Psalter's catholic and choir tradition: the Church sings with Israel, with Christ, and with the saints. Reformed and Reformed Episcopal readers can affirm the same practice because the Psalms are God's own Word and because common prayer is strongest when it is most saturated with Scripture.
The 1928 BCP's use of the Psalter also guards Anglican worship from becoming sentimental. Some psalms are severe, some are penitential, some are full of judgment, and some are sheer praise. Praying them in order disciplines the Church to receive all of Scripture's speech about God and the human condition.
Use in Worship and Teaching
For clergy and catechists, the Psalter should be taught as a school of prayer. A parish can begin with the monthly cycle, then show how individual psalms function in Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, Burial, penitence, and thanksgiving.
A simple teaching pattern is to ask:
- What does this psalm teach the Church to say to God?
- What does it reveal about Christ and his kingdom?
- How does its use in the Prayer Book shape repentance, faith, hope, or praise?
This keeps the Psalter from being treated as background material. In the 1928 BCP it is one of the primary ways Scripture becomes the daily prayer of the Church.
See Also
- Book of Common Prayer (1928)
- Daily Office (1928 BCP)
- Morning Prayer (1928 BCP)
- Evening Prayer (1928 BCP)
- Psalms in Morning Prayer (1928 BCP)
- Venite (1928 BCP)
- Psalm 23 (1928 BCP)
- Psalm 51 (1928 BCP)
- Daily Office Lectionary (1928 BCP)