By Dr. George Muenich
In the new ELW, the Psalms have been critically altered in many instances. Of the one hundred and fifty Psalms, ninety-nine are re-written and don’t even come close to an acceptable translation, let alone paraphrase of the original. They are neither acceptable English, nor do they retain any honoring of the original language. Eighteen of the Psalms are questionable, and only thirty-three are more-or-less acceptable.
There are ninety-nine non-Psalms, shifting and changing words an tenses such that they are new writings due to various avoidances of pronouns in reference to God. They thus fall into a language which is not English, and which violates the original language. If they really wanted to avoid "masculine" pronouns, thus creating paraphrases, they should have played around with the metric Psalters of the Calvinists, and "de-sexed" them, because metric Psalms are at best paraphrases, albeit sometimes quite good devotional literature/poetry in their own right. This falls into a place where on could say that this tampers with Scripture. Revelation 22:18-19 can properly be understood to apply to the whole Bible, and frankly even want the Apocrypha/Deuterocanonicals shouldn’t be messed with; even if they are not canonical Scripture in the sense of the rest of the accepted cannon. The unacceptable Psalms are: 2-4, 9-11, 13, 14, 16, 18-20, 22-25, 27-31, 33-35, 37, 40, 42-44, 46-48, 50, 55, 57, 58, 60, 62-64, 66-69, 72, 73, 75-78, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 91, 93-100, 102-108, 110, 111, 113-121, 123, 125, 127, 128, 130, 132, 135, 136, 138, 142, 144-150
There are eighteen dubious Psalms. These Psalms are mostly due to “Politically Correct” switching of singulars to plurals to avoid "masculine" pronouns. They are: 1, 5, 7, 8, 12, 15, 17, 32, 36, 41, 49, 53, 56, 65, 109, 112, 126, 137
There are thirty-three more or less acceptable Psalms in the new hymnal. They are: 6 , 21, 26, 38, 39, 45, 51, 52, 54, 59, 61, 70, 71, 74, 79, 80, 83, 86, 88-90, 92, 101, 122, 124, 129, 131, 133, 134, 139-141, 143