The contributors over at Reformation 21 must really have a bee in their bonnets about Exclusive Psalmody, with Aaron Denlinger (who?) laying into it just a few months after Mark Jones (refuted here, here and here) started the trend.
As Sean McDonald (RPCNA) notes (paraphrasing Trueman):
“What world are these guys coming from, when they think that exclusive psalmody is dangerous enough to the church that they devote actual time and energy to attacking it? How many people are going to read such an article, and simply be confirmed in their views/practices of omitting any Psalms at all from their worship services?”
For those wanting a refutation of yet more ahistorical clutching at straws, there’s a handy thread on Facebook. Various contributors point out that Denlinger’s argument is an old one which has been refuted time and time again in the past. For example, Chris Coldwell of Naphtali Press writes:
“This is OLD news; the Scottish Antiquary David Hay Fleming destroyed similar ideas of Scottish hymn singing advanced by Bonar over a 100 years ago. Hymn singing advocates were rare. Robert Boyd who wrote a massive theology based upon the book of Ephesians in Latin proves that only psalms were sung; he bemoans that fact. He lived during the period in question. See DHF’s Hymnology of the Scottish Reformation.”
[available to buy here and download here]. Originally published in the Original Secession Magazine in 1884 (searchable Google stub here, quite a few issues of the OS magazine are on archive.org but seemingly not this one) – SS]
Someone else provides a very helpful link to an article in the Princeton Theological Review (1912, Vol 10, no. 1) by Louis F. Benson on The Development of the English Hymn. Benson writes that the very fact that the inclusion of hymns went unchallenged did not mean that they were sung in church:
“The probablities seem to point in a direction precisely opposite. They suggest that the addition of hymns was made so easily simply because their use in church worship was not proposed, and because the singing of spiritual songs by the people or their use as means for instructing the young was acceptable to all. That no one of these hymns was ever used in any Scottish church cannot be affirmed, but if so there is no record of it. But that the appendix of hymns did not constitute a church hymn book, and that the hymns were not used continuously or generally can be affirmed with confidence and proved by reference to successive editions of the Psalter itself”
As another Facebook commenter notes:
“The problem is that the anti-EP side continually resurrect bad arguments that have been addressed and refuted many times before. Not to say there aren’t some good arguments on their side, but the person who has thought carefully enough about the issue to make them is rare.”