From the Dedication Anniversary primer: Closing Hymn: “Holy God, We Praise Thy Name” (LSB 940) Known as the German Te Deum, this is a Roman Catholic priest’s paraphrase of the oldest sung confession in the Western church. Ignaz Franz (1719–90) printed Großer Gott, wir loben dich in a catechism songbook at Sagan in 1768, and about 1774 it appeared in the hymnal published at Vienna by order of the Empress Maria Theresa, which is where our tune first shows up. The translator’s road was odd: Clarence Walworth was raised Presbyterian, was drawn through the Episcopal Church by the Oxford Movement while studying law, became a Roman priest in 1845, and met the German text during his training in Belgium; his 1853 English version now crosses every confessional line. Behind it stands the Te Deum itself, which an eighth-century legend says Ambrose and Augustine improvised in alternation at Augustine’s Baptism in 387. Luther doubted the story but saw no harm in believing it, made his own German version, and thought so highly of the canticle that he called it the third creed, beside the Apostles’ and the Athanasian.
Sung at Our Saviour
2026