Reading the Psalms Theologically provides an interesting and encouraging advanced taste of editorial criticism, doing so with vigor and an apparent love for the Psalms. The overall thrust is that the Psalter does point to Christ, which should lead believers to reverence and awe of God.

Reading The Psalms Theologically (Studies in Scripture and Biblical Theology), edited by David M. Howard Jr. and Andrew J. Schmutzer. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Academic, 2023, 344 pages, $29.99.

Reading most books out of order would be a disaster. Encyclopedias and collections of essays aside, if I was to randomly rearrange the chapters of a story like Pilgrim’s Progress and have you read it for the first time, you would understandably struggle. The ordering of things communicates something—in the Westminster Confession of Faith, for example, effectual calling (ch. 10) comes before justification (ch. 11), matching and expressing our theological understanding of their logical ordering.

Yet curiously, readers of the Bible often skip over the intentional ordering of certain biblical books—the Psalms being chief among them, perhaps because it seems more to us like an encyclopedia than a narrative. Here the book Reading the Psalms Theologically helps readers to see the intentional ordering of the “chapters” of the book of Psalms and its significance. Reading the Psalms Theologically introduces readers to “editorial criticism,” wherein study of the final form of the psalter reveals the theological intention of the editor(s) (4). “Editorial criticism” could be described as a form of “canonical criticism,” associated with Brevard Childs and Christopher Seitz, which evangelicals can embrace to the degree that it reacts against the anti-supernaturalistic presuppositions of much modern biblical criticism by suggesting that we read the biblical books as the sacred Scriptures of the church.^[1]

While Christians today are rightly cautious of anything with the term “criticism” in it, we should remember that this is essentially the same work that O. Palmer Robertson engaged in through his own The Flow of the Psalms: Discovering Their Structure and Theology.^[2] In other words, editorial criticism, at its best, is reminding us that someone, by God’s inspiration, collected the Psalms (individually inspired at their composition) and put them in an order. Reading The Psalms Theologically asks why the Psalms were put in the order they were and what we can learn from that order.

This is a popular new way of looking at God’s Word, and thus pastors should be aware of it (if even to reject it). For example, another new Lexham title is Text and Paratext: Book Order, Title, and Divisions as Keys to Biblical Interpretation.^[3] One more example is Don Collett’s intriguing proposal that Hosea has a signal position among the minor prophets (“The Twelve”), wherein

Hosea’s marriage to Gomer is intended to be a living parable of the Lord’s covenantal marriage with Israel….Hosea is not only the first prophet through whom the Lord spoke in the Twelve but also…the word the Lord speaks to Hosea is the founding agent or agency by which the witness of the Twelve is established.^[4]

The first chapter, “Reading the Psalter as a Unified Book: Recent Trends,” sets the table nicely, describing the state of Psalms scholarship. Here we are told that notable scholars like Roland Murphy, John Goldingay, Norman Whybray, and Tremper Longman have been skeptical of the editorial criticism approach to the Psalms (24). Nevertheless, lamenting that “traditionally, most readers have approached the Psalter atomistically, looking only at individual psalms, assuming that they are included in the work in random fashion,” (31) the authors of the first chapter suggest there is indeed an intentional ordering to the Psalms. Again, this should set theological conservatives at ease: what we are after is the author’s intention as presented to us in the words of Scripture and its order. Explicitly we are told (and it is worth quoting at length because of the importance of this point),

We understand the entire Bible to be “God-breathed” (or “inspired by God”), as Paul puts it in 2 Timothy 3:16, and so another question arises in a collection such as the Psalter as to where, exactly, the locus of inspiration is to be found—in other words, what stage(s) of a text that came together over time is/are inspired? Only the original writing? Only the final form? Something in between? We affirm that the Spirit inspired the writing of the very words of individual psalms when they were originally written. We base this on Jesus’ words in Matthew 22:41–45 (NIV), where he states that David, “speaking by the Spirit,” uttered the words from Psalm 110:1. That is, when Psalm 110 was first written, this was done through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. But we also affirm that the Spirit superintended the process that finally resulted in the collection that we call ‘the book of Psalms.’ ^(32)[5]

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