Few hymns have crossed as many centuries and languages as “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty.” Behind it stands a young German who, according to accounts from his time, walked into a church almost to mock the preacher and left transformed.
Joachim Neander was born in Bremen in 1650, the son of a Latin teacher. The family surname, originally Neumann, had been changed by his grandfather to the Greek form Neander, a common fashion among scholars of that era.
He studied theology in Bremen between 1666 and 1670, without much personal conviction, until he heard a sermon by pastor Theodor Undereyk that deeply affected him. From then on, he pursued his faith with growing seriousness.
Between 1671 and 1673 he worked as a tutor for young people from wealthy families, first in Heidelberg and then in Frankfurt. During this time in Frankfurt, he took part in prayer meetings led by Philipp Jakob Spener and Johann Jakob Schütz, names that would become touchstones of the German Pietist movement.
In 1674 he became headmaster of the Reformed Latin school in Düsseldorf, a post that combined teaching and preaching. In the years that followed, he began withdrawing frequently to the valley of the Düssel River, among crags and caves, where he wrote and sang his hymns.
His personal zeal, however, led him to excesses: he organized prayer meetings apart from those of the church, withdrew from the Lord’s Supper because he considered the other members unworthy, and altered the school calendar on his own. The Düsseldorf church council removed him from his post in 1676 and forbade him to preach, until he signed a public retraction in February 1677.
Reinstated, Neander moved in 1679 to Bremen as assistant pastor of St. Martini Church, the city where he had studied as a young man. There, however, he lived only a short time: he died of tuberculosis on May 31, 1680, at the age of thirty.
That same year his collection of hymns was published, gathering around sixty compositions, many with their own melodies. Among them is “Lobe den Herren,” inspired by Psalms 103 and 150, known today in English as “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty.”
The valley where he walked and prayed later took his name, Neandertal, and there, centuries later, the fossils of Neanderthal man were discovered. More than this curiosity, his legacy lives on every time a congregation, in any language, lifts his invitation to bless the Lord with all one’s soul.
