Holy God, we praise Your name;
Lord of all, we bow before You;
All on earth Your scepter claim,
All in heaven above adore You;
Infinite Your vast domain,
Everlasting is Your reign.
Public domain hymn text (1774). Words by Ignaz Franz.
The Story Behind the Hymn
This hymn's German text, 'Grosser Gott, wir loben dich,' was written by Ignaz Franz, a Roman Catholic priest working in Silesia (then part of Prussia, now largely in Poland), first published in 1774 as part of a German Catholic hymnal Franz helped compile, at a period when the Catholic Church was beginning to encourage congregational singing in the vernacular German language rather than exclusively in Latin.
Franz's text is a close paraphrase of the ancient Latin 'Te Deum laudamus' ('We praise Thee, O God'), a hymn of praise traditionally attributed, though almost certainly incorrectly, to the fourth-century theologians Ambrose and Augustine, and used for many centuries throughout Western Christianity, both Catholic and later Protestant, as a formal hymn of thanksgiving sung on occasions of major religious or civic celebration.
The tune commonly paired with Franz's German text is an older traditional Austrian or German melody, itself already in use for other religious purposes before being specifically attached to this particular text, giving the hymn a musical setting considerably predating Franz's own eighteenth-century German words.
The hymn crossed from its original Catholic German-language context into widespread English-language Protestant use only later, through various nineteenth and twentieth-century English translations, becoming in the process one of relatively few hymns in this collection to have originated specifically within Roman Catholic rather than Protestant congregational worship before crossing denominational lines into the broader English-speaking hymn tradition represented throughout most of the rest of this hymnal.
