Can we pray vengeance prayers?
While German bombers raided southern England, the Church of England raided Psalm 58.1 In early July of 1917, the Lower House of the Canterbury Convocation passed liturgical reform to update the church’s psalter. That update excised from the psalter several individual verses calling for God’s judgment on the wicked, and the one psalm to be removed entirely was Psalm 58. This edit came just days after German Gotha planes had killed hundreds, including women and children, in London and the southeast of England. The bishops headed off using these psalms as reprisal refrains against the Germans by removing them from the psalter. Among the prayers removed were : “O God, break the teeth in their mouths” (Ps 58:6) and “Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime, like the stillborn child that never sees the sun” (Ps 58:8). In justification of this psalter edit, one writer said that these imprecatory psalms include, “wild screams of barbaric rage in which reason, morality, respect for ...