Written by Martin Rinckart in 1642, better known as the author of “Now Thank We All Our God,” this hymn began life as two much larger poems built on the Song of Solomon, one of twenty-eight stanzas and another of twenty-one, meditating on the spiritual marriage between Christ and His Bride, the Church. In 1655 an anonymous editor expanded the shorter poem still further, to thirty-one stanzas, recasting it as a memorial for a government official named Johan Scheffer and shifting its imagery toward the apocalyptic visions of Revelation 21. Not until 1698, when the Pietist hymnal Geistreiches Gesang-Buch pared the sprawling memorial text down to four stanzas, did the hymn take the form we sing today, a compact meditation on the Trinity that strips away nearly all of its original end-times language. The English translation comes from the 1941 Lutheran Hymnal, which opened each stanza with the Hebrew “Hallelujah”; modern hymnals changed this to the New Testament “Alleluia,” a revision that, without anyone realizing it at the time, actually restored Rinckart’s own original 1642 wording.
Sung at Our Saviour
2025