Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Time Out #34: I Walk in Danger all the Way

Please check out this week's Time Out broadcast featuring the hymn, I Walk in Danger all the Way.

Hear Southern Lutheran Kantor at the organ and Layman Dan with his golden pipes.

I will be leaving a comment about this particular hymn over in the post's comment section either tomorrow or Thursday.

Turn up the volume on this one once the music starts playing.  The lower range of the organ can be heard better with the volume turned up.

Please note that Southern Lutheran Kantor improvises the accompaniment to each verse of the hymn, taking into consideration what the hymn is saying at any given time.  This is called "text painting," and Kantor does excellent improvisations on this broadcast.

A Multitude of Mighty Fortresses: Definitions, Part III: bulwark?!

BULWARK: I have no idea what this means.

In the Lutheran tradition we have a ton of words that we use that we assume people know, especially in the liturgy.  Words like Salutary, Nunc Dimittis, Absolution and Collect (this has nothing to do with the gathering offerings, and you place the emphasis on the first syllable).

For example, The Lutheran Hymnal (1941) contains the phrase, "It is truly meet, right and salutary..."

Lutheran Worship (1982) and Lutheran Service Book (2006) changed it up a little to read, "It is truly good, right and salutary..."

On Sunday, someone asked me what salutary meant.  After a brief brainstorm I came up with "beneficial - it's good for us!"

"Are you sure?" I was asked.

I bring all this up because we who have retained lots of big words over the years have not used "bulwark" in our hymnal.

I will leave it up to the readers to explain it.  This may take awhile, because I have all of two readers, and they belong to my tradition!

What I do have, though, is some TABLE TALK RADIO points that I have accumulated.  Yes, this is the Table Talk Radio ... everyone's favorite Lutheran radio program featuring theology within a game show format.

Yes, folks, that's Table Talk Radio ... where the points are like papal primacy to a Lutheran ... they are both good things for him to write about but he has to question the authority of both the points and the pope.

I will give 10 Table Talk Radio points to the person who can tell us all what a "bulwark" is in plain, simple terms.  Please use your own words and not something you found on wikipedia.

There are 10 bonus points on the line if you can provide a link to a photo of one.

I only have around 700 points total, so I must ration them out carefully.