Soldiers of Christ, Arise

Charles Wesley, 1749

When Saint Paul thought about preaching, living the life of faith, and standing up against the principalities and powers of the world, he had in mind the soldier, not on horseback, not on a ship, but on foot. There’s a certain phrase he uses that repays some careful consideration: panoplion Theou, well translated as “the full armor of God.” That’s what panoply means: the full armor that infantrymen, in Greek hoplitai, would carry, especially the very large round shield, the hoplon, which the soldier would carry in his left hand to protect his fellow citizen on the left, while in his right hand he bore the spear or sword. I don’t know what the Greeks did with left-handed guys like me. In any case, the Greek infantryman was usually not a professional soldier. He was a citizen who could afford the equipment; and they fought in tight phalanxes, which allowed them often to stand up against much larger forces. It’s how the Spartans held off the mighty Persian army for seven days at Thermopylae. On land, the distance of warriors actively engaged in battle was limited to the length of a bow-shot. Even that is a form of pretty direct confrontation. So too with fighting for the faith, which Paul had to do all the time, having often endured the scourge and the prison, having been beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, endangered by his own countrymen, by the Gentiles, in the city, in the wasteland, on the sea, and among false-hearted brethren, “in wearingess and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness.”

Yet we never feel, from Saint Paul, that there’s a gray sky overhead. The faith wells up in him like an inexhaustible spring. For him, it is exhilarating to fight, girt with that full armor of God, against all odds, and who would have thought that the great Roman Empire would end up bending the knee to Christ? That exhilaration, inspired by several of Paul’s letters, animates our Hymn of the Week, “Soldiers of Christ, Arise,” written by the greatest of all English hymnodists, Charles Wesley. You will know him from many of the best-loved English hymns: “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” “Alleluia, Sing to Jesus,” “Christ the Lord is Risen Today,” “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” "Lo, He Comes with Clouds Descending," and countless more. Well, not exactly countless: he wrote some 6,500 hymns. Here is a stanza I find in one of the least of those 6,500, published in only one hymnal:

O King of saints! come down
In dazzling majesty,
Thy suffering witnesses to crown
Who bear the cross with thee.

That’s pretty solid, don’t you think? But there we have what baseball players call “the sweet spot” on the bat — about three-quarters of the way from the trademark to the end. Wesley’s father Samuel was a poet. Young Charles had the benefit of a classical education at Oxford, when that meant you had to be steeped in ancient Greek and Latin poetry, and he was a part of the most energetic religious movement in England, the “Methodist” movement, bringing the word of God to people where they lived and worked, often in the open air — an especially effective way, at that time, to appeal to huge numbers of people at once, often workmen, such as the colliers of Wales. What more would you need? Immersion in music would help. And the Wesley family was most musical. Sarah Wesley, Charles’ wife, played the harpsichord at home — Handel was her favorite — and by the age of three, Charles Junior was playing the organ, and his brother Samuel, “the English Mozart” as he was called, was also known as a child prodigy. So then: all the energy of preaching the faith; a classical education; poetry and music in the family; even your more famous brother, the indefatigable John Wesley, wrote many hymns, such as the vigorous “And Can It Be?”.

There are two melodies most often associated with “Soldiers of Christ, Arise.” One of them is DIADEMATA, the melody for Crown Him with Many Crowns, in which case you’d be singing two of Wesley’s stanzas for a single verse of the hymn. That’s a terrific and triumphant melody, but I prefer the lively English march SILVER STREET, for one stanza at a time. It’s certainly what you’d call a masculine melody, and upbeat, with bold march-like intervals, hardly any minor chords (only 2 out of 26), and with unison for the first line of each stanza, and a dotted whole note for a count of six and the end of that first line. Not only should you sing it without power; you can’t sing it at all without it. You feel what the words mean, feel it in your chest and lungs and blood. All is confidence, even if, as Saint Paul says, “we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter,” for “in all these things we are more than conquerors, through him that loved us.”

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Soldiers of Christ, arise,
And put your armor on,
Strong in the strength which God supplies
Through his eternal Son.

Strong in the Lord of hosts,
And in his mighty power:
Who in the strength of Jesus trusts
Is more than conqueror.

Stand then in his great might,
With all his strength endued,
And take, to arm you for the fight,
The panoply of God.

From strength to strength go on,
Wrestle, and fight, and pray:
Tread all the powers of darkness down,
And win the well-fought day.

Leave no unguarded place,
No weakness of the soul;
Take every virtue, every grace,
And fortify the whole.

That, having all things done,
And all your conflicts past,
Ye may o'ercome, through Christ alone,
And stand complete at last.

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