Daily Inspiration Quote by Kenneth Scott Latourette

A Protestant church historian calling the Psalms “the anthology of the hymns of Israel” is doing two quiet things at once: pinning the text to a specific people, and then pointing out how thoroughly it escaped its original frame. Latourette’s phrasing refuses the lazy shorthand that treats the Psalms as generic “devotional poetry.” He names Israel, which makes Christian use of the Psalms feel less like ownership and more like inheritance-with-strings-attached.

The intent is ecumenical, but it’s not sentimental. Writing in a mid-20th-century academy still allergic to anything that smelled like “sectarian” history, Latourette’s formulation sounds like a bid for accuracy: Christians didn’t compose these songs; they adopted them. That single verb, “used,” is doing heavy lifting. It sidesteps arguments about whether Christians have a right to interpret Israel’s prayers as their own, and instead notes a sociological fact: the Psalms remain a live liturgical technology, a shared script for grief, praise, anger, and repair.

The subtext is also corrective. In many Christian settings, the Old Testament is treated as prologue, valuable mainly for foreshadowing. Latourette insists the Psalms are not museum pieces or mere prediction; they’re reusable, sung and recited across centuries because their voice is porous enough to carry new communities without losing the trace of the first one.

Context matters here: after the shocks of two world wars and amid a rethinking of Christian-Jewish relations, “still used” reads like a small, careful bridge. It acknowledges continuity without erasing the asymmetry in power and interpretation that has historically come with that borrowing.