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Peter Day of Southport kindly sent me a CD of the funeral service for
Dr Ralph Martin, which I greatly appreciated and found very moving. The hymns
and readings had been chosen by Ralph: two hymns – ‘Sweet is the work, my God,
my King’ and ‘Now the day is over’. Unsurprisingly one of the readings was
Philippians 2:5-11. I looked to see if I still have the printed copy of his
thesis on that passage, Carmen Christi,
but I couldn’t find it; when I retired I got rid of quite a number of books and
I guess that must have been one of them. Apparently one of his sayings was, ‘A
sermon doesn’t have to be eternal to be immortal’! True enough!
One book of his
which I still have is The Spirit and the
Congregation on 1 Corinthians 12-15. I can’t remember now all it says but I
know I found it very helpful in one or two places. In the book of studies
entitled Christ the Lord, presented
to Donald Guthrie on his retirement, Ralph wrote on the New Testament hymns. As
he draws towards his conclusion he says: ‘This way of viewing the relation of
Christology to Jesus’ work suggests that it was in worship that the decisive
step was made of setting the exalted Christ on a level with God as the
recipient of the church’s praise. Hymnology and Christology thus merged in the
worship of our Lord, soon to be hailed after the close of the New Testament
canon as worthy of hymns “as to God” (Pliny’s report of Bithynian Christians at
Sunday worship, AD112).’
