During his exegesis of Psalm 110, Vaillancourt rightly pointed to the uniqueness of the psalm in which YHWH addresses David’s Lord. Given the psalm’s central use in trinitarian theology in the early centuries of the Church and its insight into an intra-trinitarian conversation (between the Father and Son), I wish he spent a bit of time pointing to the possible implications. Like Jesus’s baptism or transfiguration, this is one of the few places where we hear two persons of the Godhead communicating to one another. That seems significant. My complaint, however, could be accused of evincing the now tired observation that biblical studies and theology often don’t get along. But that’s not true of Vaillancourt’s work. Generally, Vaillancourt weaves together Scripture and theology skillfully and insightfully. But for that very reason, Vaillancourt could have spent a paragraph or two on the trinitarian implications. Even without this discussion, I have to concede that his interpretation of Psalm 110 is one of the clearest and (possibly) the best explanation of Psalm 110 that I have ever read.

I expected to read a well-written and useful introduction to the Psalms when I picked up Treasuring the Psalms by Ian Vaillancourt. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the book exceeded my expectations. Going beyond typical introductory books, it provides deep insight into the canonical shape of the Psalter and its theological meaning. And more than that, Vaillancourt does so while also reaching his target audience of college and seminary students as well as church groups.
A success of Treasuring the Psalms is that Vaillancourt possesses the skill of writing a book that is accessible both to academic and non-academic audiences. The book is structured in three parts: “The Story: Reading the Psalms Canonically”, “The Savior: reading the Psalms Christologically”, and “The Soul: Reading the Psalms Personally Corporately.” Across twelve chapters, along with an introduction and conclusion, it is full of biblical insight. I could give this book to a small group in a church or assign it in a classroom. One way that it appeals to both church and academic groups is by highlighting key words in the Psalms and providing both a transliteration and the Hebrew word itself in parenthesis. If a reader knows Hebrew, it’s great; if not, it’s easy to move on because the book does not assume you need to. As the author explains, “This way, those who work with Hebrew will be able to identify the words with greater clarity, and those who are not will be able to skip over them. A knowledge of Hebrew is not required in order to understand this book” (x).
As someone who not only has his Ph.D in the Psalms but has also himself taught on the Psalms in a classroom setting, I found myself learning new things, or at least sharpening my understanding of matters that I already knew. Vaillancourt has a particular gift of bringing technical details down to a common-sense level. Examples include how he explains the difference between individual psalms and their place in Psalter through a story about Joey Ramone of The Ramones. As Joey, whose real name is Jeffrey Ross Hyman, lay dying in a hospital, he listened to U2’s song “In a Little While.” Originally, the song was about a hangover. But Joey heard it as Gospel—“In a little while / This hurt will hurt no more / I’ll be home, love”). This even changed Bono’s interpretation of his own song! Now Bono, of U2, can only sing this song “through Joey Ramone’s ears” (17).
Applied to the psalms, something similar happens. Moses wrote Psalm 90 nearly 1,000 years before the last psalms were written after the exile, such as Psalm 137. But when we consider these individual psalms together in the collection of the Psalter they each take on “new depth” (19). This may remind us of how worship songs are put together for Sunday mornings; while each song was not crafted with each other in mind, the organizer of the worship service places them together for the sake of a unified worship service (19).
I relay these analogies to show how ably Vaillancourt illustrates how individual psalms and the final form of the Psalter work together.
Read More
Related Posts:

This is the essence of the social construction of reality: objective facts can matter less than intersubjective consensus. Since other people’s perceptions are an objective fact, you had best conform to their expectations—no matter how radical or irrational they might be.

America’s major institutions have gone woke the same way that someone goes bankrupt: slowly, then all at once. How is it that so many of us have had the experience of being in a diversity-training session divided into racially segregated “affinity groups” or reading yet another sackcloth-and-ashes statement from management and thinking: They can’t possibly believe this, right? Any answer should begin with the dominant theory from the sociology of organizations: neo-institutionalism and isomorphism. The theory explains that organizations go beyond their core competencies to imitate market leaders and to meet the demands of their trading partners, the regulatory state, and key employees.
Based on his study of a Stone Age culture in New Guinea, Bronisław Malinowski argued that when people face uncertainty, they turn to magic to propitiate the capricious spirits responsible for their incomprehensible misfortune. Being ever-so-sophisticated people who attended business school, corporate executives don’t hire shamans to replenish fisheries or to avoid a storm. Instead, they bring in consultants to help the firm embrace best practices. But as Charles Fain Lehman explains, John Meyer and Brian Rowan’s 1977 paper in the American Journal of Sociology, “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” argues that this distinction is a farce—that much behavior as practiced by modern corporations, NGOs, and government agencies is not about technical efficacy that rationally orients means to ends but ritual, vaguely intended to elicit good fortune by achieving legitimacy with the firm’s “environment.”
Following Meyer and Rowan was Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell’s “The Iron Cage Revisited,” published in 1983 in the American Sociological Review. DiMaggio and Powell fleshed out the theory with three specific pathways for why organizations adopt similar practices—or, in their language, become isomorphic.
Consider, first, coercive isomorphism—when an organization adopts practices because the state or its trading partners demand that it do so. As Frank Dobbin and John Sutton noted in the American Journal of Sociology in 1998, affirmative action began as a response to executive orders that applied not to all firms but specifically to federal contractors. However, since most large firms sell, or aspire to sell, something to the federal government, this mandate applies to much of the economy. Similarly, most federal higher-education policy takes the form of putting strings on federal money. A college can ignore those Department of Education “Dear Colleague” letters if it is willing to forgo access to federally subsidized student loans and NIH grants, but that’s an expensive declaration of autonomy. And as Richard Hanania has argued, civil rights legislation is enforced through torts with the presumption that imbalances are malicious, giving organizations a vague but powerful mandate to err strenuously on the side of avoiding anything that might validate that presumption.
Read More

Christianity compromised God’s biblical antithesis in the name of national unity.  If we were a Christian nation, we might have a hope for survival, even with variations in language and race.  However, like those who sought a humanistic unity at the Tower of Babel, we are doing the same thing as they did, and we are seeing the judgment of God in our own day.  With the passage of laws legalizing abortion and homosexual marriage, the American people have declared war against the God of the Bible.  Judgment follows the rejection of blessing. We no longer live in a post-Christian age but rather in an Anti-Christian age.

There is a great divide in the United States over the Israel-Hamas war in the Middle East.  Most Americans are surprised at the size of the pro-Palestinian sentiment as seen in large public demonstrations, and now resulting in actual physical violence. The Middle East has been literally imported to the United States, and madness is raising its ugly head.  The reason for this division in the United States is that we no longer have a Christian consensus.  We have shifted from a Christian Nation rooted in the truth of the Bible to a Polytheistic Empire rooted in Marxist ideology.
The United States was once a Christian Nation.  Regardless of your view on Christian Nationalism, it cannot be denied that even though we bear little resemblance to a Christian Nation today, we have been living off that capital for many years.  The Bible provided a reference point for both personal and civil law.  Christianity was the seedbed for national unity.
Christianity has dominated the landscape of this country since its beginnings.  Contrary to the United States Constitution, nine of the original thirteen colonies required a religious test for officeholders which reflected a recognition of the Christian Faith.  The States created the Union.  The Union did not create the States. With the loss of State sovereignty in the Civil War, with the rise of the power of the federal government, and with a federal Constitution not demanding a religious test, the shift to a Polytheistic Empire began. Today, we now have Muslims occupying legislative positions in our national government. This would have been unthinkable to most Americans just a half-century ago. I know because I was there over a half-century ago.
A Polytheistic Empire is a country where a multiplicity of nations adhering to a variety of religions seek to live in peace, all under the same roof—in the name of Democracy.  It is believed that Muslims, Jews, and Christians can live together in peace within the same borders.  We have been told that this is possible because Democracy will keep us united. In Democracy the ballot box is the common sacrament among the various religions.  It is the glue that holds us together. The problem is that all this verbiage is a big lie!  Democracy might be possible in a Christian Nation, but in a Marxist regime it becomes a weapon to impose Marxist equality on everyone.
The Bible is clear that nations are defined by a common religion (Ps. 33:12), a common border (Acts 17:26), a common language (Acts 2:6), and a common patriarch (or ancestry) (Rms. 9:3). The Japanese understand this.  The Chinese understand this.  The Russians, the Germans, the French, and the English once understood this.  In recent years western Europe thought they could mix Christianity and Islam within their own borders, but they are beginning to reverse that movement.  It has proved to be catastrophic.
The Biden Administration is an agent of this new political thought.  Open borders are now somehow supposed to be a means of ushering in this new utopia.  As White Christians are marginalized, color becomes the mark of God’s election. Victimhood is now the evidence of holiness, and laws must be reenacted to punish the oppressors to reflect this new Marxist social order.
The problem is that no nation has ever existed since Adam and Eve as a Polytheistic Empire with a multiplicity of nations existing peaceably within the same borders. Empires have existed by exercising raw power over various other nations—each living within their own national boundaries, even with their own religions. However, a Polytheistic Empire with a multiplicity of nations living within the same geographical boundaries is not possible.  It is as insane as creating a zoo where all the animals are put together in the same cage.  As a result, the melting pot we were promised in the typical yellow schoolhouse has become a boiling pot.
Do not forget that America is a new experiment in the history of nations.  We have only been around for a few hundred years—a very short time as compared to the thousands of years since Adam and Eve.  For at least a hundred years or so, we have ignored the biblical definition of a nation and sought by our own hubris to create a utopia based on the inherent goodness of man and the compatibility of all religions. We are like the young teenager who thinks he is wiser than those who came before him—you know the pitch—that the hope of the future is in the hands of our young people. But with time, like most of us, they find out they were just fools.
Christianity compromised God’s biblical antithesis in the name of national unity.  If we were a Christian nation, we might have a hope for survival, even with variations in language and race.  However, like those who sought a humanistic unity at the Tower of Babel, we are doing the same thing as they did, and we are seeing the judgment of God in our own day.  With the passage of laws legalizing abortion and homosexual marriage, the American people have declared war against the God of the Bible.  Judgment follows the rejection of blessing. We no longer live in a post-Christian age but rather in an Anti-Christian age.
Most of you who read this article will not be affected by this shift to a Polytheistic Empire.  However, you are watching it happen.  Decay happens gradually over time. You probably are alarmed, but not too much.  You have accumulated wealth and life is good.  It is your children and grandchildren who will have to pay the price for the error of our way. They will have to live with the fruit of our mistakes.
As a postmillennialist I believe before Christ returns that all the nations shall be converted through the preaching of the gospel.  For now, it is obvious that we have made a grave mistake in this country.  We failed to understand the basic definition of a nation. However, future generations will learn from our failures, and the day will come when God’s people shall see the glory of the Lord cover the earth as the water covers the sea.
Larry E. Ball is a retired minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is now a CPA. He lives in Kingsport, Tenn.
Related Posts: