God as Divine Tuner in Puritan Literature

In one of the most historically known hymns, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” one reads a famous hymn line: “Tune my heart to sing thy grace.” Robert Robinson wrote this hymn in 1757 shortly after his conversion to Methodism. The idea of God acting as the divine tuner of the human heart or soul, however, was already robustly propagated in the seventeenth century by many Puritan preachers and writers. Richard Sibbes in The Soules Conflict (1635) describes the soul of a believer as one that needs to be “set in tune” and “an instrument in tune fit to be moved to any duty.” In Pneumatologia: Or A Discourse Concerning the Holy Spirit (1674), John Owen likens those who have received divine revelations to “Musical Instruments variously tuned.” Richard Baxter in Poetical Fragments (1681) speaks of God as the tuner who “tune[s] up our dull and drooping Souls to such joyful praises” and, in “A Psalm of Praise,” he refers to his soul singing to God “with a well-tuned heart.”

This paper examines a range of such Puritan examples that interpret God as the divine tuner, situating them within the context of seventeenth-century Puritan theology of sympathy, rooted in a Calvinist understanding of fellow-feeling, and its connection to eighteenth-century culture of sensibility and sentimentalism which remains vastly overlooked. Although historians have argued Methodism was a religious parallel to the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility, scholars have increasingly recognized such a reading can seem simplistic and overgeneralized. On the other hand, recent scholarship, with the work of Abram C. Van Engen being a notable example, has demonstrated that Puritan sympathy served as a precursor to eighteenth-century sentimentalism, thereby destabilizing the tradition to locate the history of sentimentalism and sympathy to seventeenth-century Latitudinarian preaching. In light of these observations, God as the divine tuner who tunes human souls and hearts emerges as a musical and didactic picture that helped elucidate the sympathetic relationship between God and humans from theological perspectives.