Resonant Witness

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The Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Liturgical Studies

Series, edited by John D. Witvliet, is designed to promote reflection on the his-

tory, theology, and practice of Christian worship and to stimulate worship re-

newal in Christian congregations. Contributions include writings by pastoral

worship leaders from a wide range of communities and scholars from a wide

range of disciplines. The ultimate goal of these contributions is to nurtureworship practices that are spiritually vital and theologically rooted.

Published

The Pastor as Minor Poet

M. Craig Barnes

Touching the Altar: The Old Testament and Christian Worship

Carol M. Bechtel, EditorResonant Witness: Conversations between Music and Theology

Jeremy S. Begbie and Steven R. Guthrie, Editors

God Against Religion: Rethinking Christian Theology through Worship

Matthew Myer Boulton

Inclusive yet Discerning: Navigating Worship Artfully

Frank Burch Brown

What Language Shall I Borrow? The Bible and Christian WorshipRonald P. Byars

A Primer on Worship

William Dyrness

Christian Worship Worldwide: Expanding Horizons, Deepening Practices

Charles E. Farhadian

Gather into One: Praying and Singing Globally

C. Michael HawnThe Substance of Things Seen: Art, Faith, and the Christian Community

Robin M. Jensen



Our Worship

Abraham Kuyper, Edited by Harry Boonstra

Wonderful Words of Life:Hymns in American Protestant History and Theology

Richard J. Mouw and Mark A. Noll, Editors

Discerning the Spirits:

A Guide to Thinking about Christian Worship Today

Cornelius Plantinga Jr. and Sue A. Rozeboom

Voicing God’s Psalms

Calvin Seerveld

My Only Comfort: Death, Deliverance, and Discipleship

in the Music of Bach

Calvin R. Stapert

A New Song for an Old World: Musical Thought in the Early Church

Calvin R. Stapert

An Architecture of Immanence: Architecture for Worship and Ministry Today

Mark A. Torgerson

A More Profound Alleluia: Theology and Worship in Harmony Leanne Van Dyk, Editor

Christian Worship in Reformed Churches Past and Present

Lukas Vischer, Editor

The Biblical Psalms in Christian Worship:

A Brief Introduction and Guide to Resources

John D. Witvliet



Resonant Witness

Conversations between Music and Theology

Edited by

Jeremy S. Begbie & Steven R. Guthrie

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.



© 2011 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.All rights reserved

Published 2011 by

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /

P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

Printed in the United States of America

17 16 15 14 13 12 11 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Resonant witness: conversations between music and theology /

edited by Jeremy S. Begbie & Steven R. Guthrie.

p. cm. — (The Calvin Institute of Christian Worship liturgical studies)

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-8028-6277-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Music — Religious aspects. I. Begbie, Jeremy. II. Guthrie, Steven R., 1967-

ML3921.R47 2011

261.5¢78 — dc22

2010027779

www.eerdmans.com



Contents

acknowledgments viii

Introduction 1

Jeremy S. Begbie and Steven R. Guthrie

Part One: Music and Cosmos

1. Augustine and the Art of Music 27

Carol Harrison

2. Material: Philip the Chancellor

and the Reception of Aristotle’s Physics 46

Nancy van Deusen

3. “So Faith Comes from What Is Heard”:

The Relationship between Music and God’s Word

in the First Two Centuries of German Lutheranism 65

Joyce Irwin

4. Created Beauty: The Witness of J. S. Bach 83

Jeremy S. Begbie

v



5. On Music, Mathematics, and Theology:

Pythagoras, the Mind, and Human Agency 109

John Paul Ito

Part Two: Music and Culture

6. Music as the Mouthpiece of Theology 137

Daniel K. L. Chua

7. The Shock of the Positive: Olivier Messiaen,

St. Francis, and Redemption through Modernity 162Robert Sholl

8. Quasi Una Sonata: Modernism, Postmodernism,

Religion, and Music 190

Catherine Pickstock

Part Three: Music and Theology

9. The Integration of Music and Theology

in the Vocal Compositions of J. S. Bach 215

Richard J. Plantinga

10. “Parables” and “Polyphony”: The Resonance

of Music as Witness in the Theology of

Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer 240

David J. R. S. Moseley

11. Musical Time and Eschatology 271

Alastair Borthwick, Trevor Hart, and Anthony Monti

12. Improvising Texts, Improvising Communities:

Jazz, Interpretation, Heterophony, and the Ekkl 3 sia 295

Bruce Ellis Benson

vi

contents



Part Four: Music and Worship

13. Faithful Feelings: Music and Emotion in Worship 323

Jeremy S. Begbie

14. Music for the Love Feast: Hildegard of Bingen

and the Song of Songs 355

Margot Fassler

15. The Wisdom of Song 382

Steven R. Guthrie

16. The Truth Shall Set You Free: Song, Struggle,

and Solidarity in South Africa 408

C. Michael Hawn

17. The Singing of Jesus 434

Michael O’Connor

Afterword 454

John D. Witvliet

contributors 464

glossary of musical terms 471

index 481

vii

Contents



Acknowledgments

The editors and authors are profoundly grateful for the sponsorship of the

Calvin Institute of Christian Worship at Calvin College, Michigan — with-

out their support, this project would never have seen the light of day. In par-

ticular, we owe a debt of thanks to its director, Dr. John Witvliet, for his en-

couragement and his Afterword to the volume. Our thanks also go to DonaMcCullagh for her meticulous attention to the numerous tasks that have

come her way in the production of this volume: editing, proofreading, per-

missions, and the production of the glossary. We are all very much in her

debt.

“Created Beauty: The Witness of J. S. Bach,” by Jeremy Begbie is adapted

from The Beauty of God, edited by Daniel J. Treier, Mark Husbands and

Roger Lundin. © 2007 by Daniel J. Treier, Mark Husbands and Roger

Lundin. Used with permission of InterVarsity Press, PO Box 1400, Downers

Grove, IL 60515. ivpress.com.

“Music for the Love Feast: Hildegard of Bingen and the Song of Songs”

by Margot Fassler was originally published in Women’s Voices Across Musical

Worlds, edited by Jane A. Bernstein (Boston: Northeastern University Press,

2004). © University Press of New England, Hanover, NH. Reprinted with

permission.

viii



Introduction

Jeremy S. Begbie and Steven R. Guthrie

“It is better to get a headache from exercises in canons, fugues and

counterpoint than from confuting the Kantian confutation of the

evidence for the existence of God. Enough of your theological spin-

sterhood!”1

So the music teacher, Wendell Kretschmar, attempts to lure Adrian

Leverkühn away from theology into the study of music. For Leverkühn, the

main character of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, it seems these two cannot

be pursued side by side. He writes to Kretschmar: “you consider [me] as

‘gifted’ for music and summon me to you and to its service, instead of leav-

ing me humbly to tarry with God and theology.”2 To study the things of God

is to refuse the study of music; to pursue music is to abandon theology. In-

deed, Adrian’s tuition in music will mean not only leaving seminary, but ul-

timately entering the realm of the demonic.3

1

1. Thomas Mann, Dr. Faustus: The life of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn as told

by a friend, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), p. 135.

2. Mann, Dr. Faustus, p. 134.

3. Mann would later write: “It is a grave error on the part of legend and story not to

connect Faust with music. He should have been musical, he should have been a musician.

Music is a demonic realm; Kierkegaard, a great Christian, proved that most convincingly in

his painfully enthusiastic essay on Mozart’s Don Juan. Music is Christian art with a negative

prefix. Music is calculated order and chaos-breeding irrationality at once, rich in conjuring,

incantatory gestures, in magic of numbers, the most unrealistic and yet the most impas-



Or might it be that these two areas of study are not so fully set against

one another? At one point Leverkühn concedes that his native “Lutheran-

ism” even “sees in theology and music neighbouring spheres and close of

kin.”4

Certainly, in Western culture the dialogue between music and theology

has often been lively and intense — a fact to which Mann’s novel bears dra-

matic witness. Not only has music been ubiquitous, it also has had a persis-

tent and virtually irrepressible place in the Christian church, pre-eminently

in worship. To this day the vast majority of Christians sing or play instru -

ments as part of their corporate encounter with God. This has provoked

many, including some of the finest Christian thinkers in history, to explore

how music might relate to Christianity’s central convictions, to the shapeand substance of the faith of Israel which climaxes in the person of Jesus

Christ. The longest-lasting and most developed stream of thought in this re-

gard stretches from Augustine and Boethius to the late Middle Ages, situat-

ing musical sounds amid a grand and highly distinctive vision of a divinely

permeated cosmos. The emergence of modernity occasioned several fresh

efforts to interweave theology and music — Leverkühn has already drawn

our attention to the Lutherans, who offered a variety of ways of coming to

terms with music theologically. A number of Enlightenment philosophersincorporated musical phenomena into the theological worldviews they be-

lieved appropriate to scientific discoveries.5 Similarly, some of the

nineteenth-century Romantics offered extended panegyrics of instrumental

music, in effect, re-working and re-forming the grand medieval vision.6

For the last hundred years, however, the theological landscape has more

closely reflected the pessimism of Leverkühn and Kretschmar. While no seri-

ous theologian to our knowledge has advocated a necessary connection be-

tween music and the demonic, relatively few have attempted any thorough

2

jer emy s. begbie and steven r . guthr ie

sioned of arts, mystical and abstract. If Faust is to be the representative of the German soul,

he would have to be musical, for the relation of the German to the world is abstract and

mystical, that is, musical – the relation of a professor with a touch of demonism.” Thomas

Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” The Yale Review 35, no. 2 (1946): 227. As cited in Carroll

E. Reed, “Thomas Mann and the Faust Tradition,” The Journal of English and Germanic Phi-

lology 51, no. 1 (Jan. 1952): 20.

4. Mann, Dr. Faustus, p. 131.

5. Paul Henry Lang, “The Enlightenment and Music,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 1, no.

1 (Autumn 1967): 93-108.

6. Daniel K. L. Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1999), chs. 20-22.



integration of the theological and the musical.7 Although we have witnessed

a recent renewal of interest in theology and the arts in Europe and North

America, the lion’s share of attention has been given to the visual and liter-

ary arts. There are various reasons for this, among them the difficulty of us-

ing words to speak about something that so quickly eludes language (“In the

face of music, the wonders of language are also its frustrations” [George

Steiner]8). There are also acute problems that arise from recognizing that

“representation” and “reference” do not seem intrinsic to the way music op-

erates — how can music be “meaningful” when it is so abstract, so semanti-

cally fluid?

Nevertheless, recent signs of fresh activity at the music-theology inter-

face suggest that the difficulties are not insuperable,9 and we hope that this

3

Introduction

7. As far as major figures are concerned, the most obvious exceptions are the Congrega-

tionalist theologian P. T. Forsyth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth, and Joseph Ratzinger.

See also Albert Blackwell, The Sacred in Music (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 1999);

Christopher R. Campling, The Food of Love: Reflections on Music and Faith (London: SCM,

1997); William Edgar, Taking Note of Music (London: SPCK, 1986); Alfred John Pike, A

Theology of Music (Toledo: Gregorian Institute, 1953). A few theological studies of com-

posers have been offered: e.g., Jaroslav J. Pelikan, Bach among the Theologians (Philadel-

phia: Fortress Press, 1986); Hans Küng, Mozart: Traces of Transcendence (London: SCM,1992); Harold M. Best, Music Through the Eyes of Faith (San Francisco: Harper, 1993).

There have been forays into theology by musicologists: e.g., Wilfrid H. Mellers, Bach and

the Dance of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Beethoven and the Voice of God

(London: Faber, 1983); Eric T. Chafe, Tonal Allegory in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach (Berke-

ley: University of California Press, 1991); Analyzing Bach Cantatas (Oxford: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 2000). With regard to the potential of music to enrich theology, see Hans

Urs von Balthasar, Truth Is Symphonic: Aspects of Christian Pluralism (San Francisco:

Ignatius Press, 1987). See also Jon Michael Spencer, Theological Music: Introduction to

Theomusicology (London: Greenwood Press, 1991); Theomusicology (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 1994).

8. George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life (London: Phoenix, 1997), p. 65.

9. See, e.g., Jeremy S. Begbie, Theology, Music and Time (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 2000); Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Grand

Rapids, MI: Baker, 2007); Leo Black, Franz Schubert: Music and Belief (Woodbridge, Suffolk:

Boydell Press, 2003); David S. Cunningham, These Three Are One: The Practice of Trinitarian

Theology, Challenges in Contemporary Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), pp.

127-64; Mark Hijleh, The Music of Jesus: From Composition to Koinonia (San Jose, New York,

Lincoln, and Shanghai: Writers Club Press, 2001); Heidi Epstein, Melting the Venusberg: A

Feminist Theology of Music (London: Continuum, 2005); Ann Pederson, God, Creation and

All That Jazz: A Process of Composition and Improvisation (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2001);

A. R. Peacocke and Ann Pederson, The Music of Creation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,

2006); Don E. Saliers, Music and Theology (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007).



volume will serve to carry forward such initiatives, stimulating fresh and

fruitful interactions. Against the testimony of Adrian Leverkühn, the convic-

tion of the authors and editors of this volume is that the study of theology

and the study of music need not, and should not, be kept apart; that there is

an enormous amount to gain from conversations between those who seek to

explore and articulate the content and shape of Christian truth, and those

who inhabit the world of Beethoven and Bruckner, Corinne Bailey Rae and

Keith Jarrett.

Resonant Witness has arisen out of just such conversations among theo-

logians, musicologists,10 and philosophers with an interest in either or both

fields. In 2002, a “Music and Theology Colloquium” was established as the

result of a collaboration between the research project “Theology Throughthe Arts” at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and the Calvin Institute

of Christian Worship at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was

chaired by Jeremy Begbie, and its participants, drawn largely from the

United Kingdom and the United States, gathered for two residential meet-

ings in Ely, Cambridgeshire. All but four of the essays in this volume arose

directly out of these meetings and were revised through subsequent one-to-

one discussions and email correspondence. This kind of extended exchange

is time-consuming and demanding, but critical, we believe, for the successand fruitfulness of any multidisciplinary enterprise.

The aim of the Colloquium, and this book as a whole, is to demonstrate

the fruitfulness of theology for music, and the fruitfulness of music for theology,

with a view to encouraging sustained engagements between musicians and

theologians in the future. We make no claim to be comprehensive. Many

types of music, many historical periods, many doctrinal and philosophical

issues, and many practical matters concerning music are not addressed. And

there are types of music-theology dialogue not undertaken here, or even

mentioned. The collection sets forth only a range of possibilities, a sample of

different forms of engagement; no more.

4


10. In the English-speaking world, the term “musicology” can have different usages,

and its definition is a much-debated issue. It is often used in a fairly narrow sense to refer to

the history of (primarily Western) music. Here we use the term in the much wider sense of

“the scholarly study of music.”



Music in Action

To set the scene, it is worth saying something briefly about the terms “music”

and “theology,” about what shapes and conditions our use of these words in

the essays that follow.

Although the word “music” may appear unproblematic, a moment’s re-

flection reveals it to be highly multivalent. Not only are there are many forms

of “music” worldwide, but even within a single category (such as “modern

Western music”) quite different activities and entities can be distinguished.

In many scholarly circles, it has become a commonplace to urge that music is

best conceived fundamentally in terms of embodied practices (rather than in

terms of objects or theoretical disciplines), the primary practices beingmusic-making and music-hearing. To pick up Christopher Small’s expression,

we should speak more of “musicking” than “music.”11 This seems a wise line

to follow, given that the “products” of music (sound-patterns, pieces, works,

scores) and its second-order disciplines are all dependent on the more basic

practices of making and hearing music. For theology to come to terms with

music, then, first and foremost means coming to terms with these actions or

practices. (It is no accident that most of the contributors to this volume are

keen music practitioners of one sort or another.)“Music-making” we can understand as the intentional production of

temporally organized patterns of pitched sounds, and “music-hearing” as

the perception of temporally organized patterns of pitched sounds as “mu-

sic” (“perception” covering everything from concentrated, attentive listening

to unfocused, tacit awareness). (It may be that a distinct phase of “compos-

ing” precedes music-making, but this is certainly not always so: for most of

human history, composing has been concurrent with music-making, and

besides, many contemporary composers work at an instrument.)

Music-making gives rise to various objects or entities, first and foremost

“temporally organized patterns of pitched sounds”; in other words, musical

sound-patterns. This is the primary “text” of musical activity (“text” being

understood here in the broad sense of the product of music-making, includ-

ing a “form” such as the canon, or the blues). It may be that this text devel-

ops and solidifies into a particular “work,” a “piece of music,” often inscribed

as a written “score,” but this is not always so (works and scores are relatively

recent phenomena in musical history).

5

Introduction

11. Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover:

University Press of New England, 1998).



What emerges, then, is a threefold pattern — music-making/text/

music-hearing12 — a pattern that is met often in cultural studies (trans-

ferred to the persons involved, it works out as author/text/reader, producer/

product/consumer, and so on). When we are dealing with what we call “mu-

sic,” even when concentrating on one of these elements, we need to be alert

to this threefold pattern. Much scholarship has been hampered by ignoring

or over-stressing one or more of the elements at the expense of others.

It is also important to be alert to the fact that these practices are socially

and culturally embedded: the way we make and hear music is shaped by our

relations to others — our social setting, all the way from one-to-one rela-

tionships to very large groupings.13 And because of this, making and hearing

music are shaped by the meaningful patterns and products that we fashionas we relate to others and the natural world — in other words, by “culture”

(social institutions, images, books, customs, etc.).14 Further, musical prac-

tices are politically entrenched: they are inevitably mixed up with the power

relations that are necessary for social organization.

“Reading” Music — Resisting Reductionism

One of the perennial temptations in writing about music is what might be

loosely termed “reductionism.” One may, for instance, attend to only one

type or aspect of musical practice (or musical text) without due regard for

its relation to others. Or one may allow one discipline of inquiry to domi-

nate so strongly that other legitimate modes are ignored, excluded, or per-

haps subsumed under the master discipline.

To cite one example of reductionism, it has become routine in many ac-

ademic music departments to stress that musical practices and products are

socially, culturally, and politically conditioned — against the notion that

6


12. See Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music (Prince-

ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Nattiez speaks of the “poietic”and “esthesic” pro-

cesses, and of “producer,” “trace,” and “receiver” (p. 17).

13. See Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Work of Making a Work of Music,” in What Is Mu-

sic? An Introduction to the Philosophy of Music, ed. P. J. Alperson (University Park: Pennsylva-

nia State University Press, 1987), pp. 109-12 for detailed discussion of the concept of “social

practices,” following Alasdair MacIntyre.

14. For a helpful survey of shifts in musicology toward seeing music chiefly as a human

activity embedded in society and culture, see C. Michael Hawn, Gather into One: Praying

and Singing Globally (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 21-30.



music can exist in an a-temporal, “other-worldly” sphere, divorced from the

strong and messy currents of human designs and interests. (This has been

the predominant concern of the so-called “New Musicology,” a largely

Anglo-American movement emerging in the mid-1980s.)15 However, prob-

lems arise if it is suggested that music can be exhaustively accounted for in

these terms. We can lose sight of the fact that the temporally organized

sound-patterns of music have their own distinct integrity and are not infi-

nitely variable in their potential effects. They interact with features of our

bodily make-up that are universally shared. It is one thing to say that music-

making and music-hearing are humanly shaped, socially conditioned activi-

ties, intertwined with matrices of human relations and intentions; it is quite

another to say that their significance for us is explicable solely in such terms.An approach that is both multidisciplinary and multileveled is to be pre-

ferred — a “thick description” — and this volume is a modest contribution

toward this end. An anti-reductionist reading of music will be multi-

disciplinary in that it recognizes that the multifaceted nature of “music” re-

quires a variety of perspectives to do it justice. There are the disciplines of

theoretical reflection that immediately surround music — musicology, in

other words, which includes historical musicology (the history of music),

music theory and analysis (of texts), ethnomusicology (the anthropology of music), performance practice and research, and acoustics (the science of

sound and hearing). These disciplines, all of which are deployed to some ex-

tent in this book, employ their own discourses.16 Further, there will be other,

less proximate disciplines — such as physiology, psychology, sociology, aes-

thetics, semiotics, film studies, cultural studies, and so forth — that may also

prove relevant. In fact, in the last twenty years or so, a wide variety of strate-

gies, tools, and methodologies for the study of music has emerged, together

with a sense that such variety is to be welcomed.17

Closely related to this, a thick description of music will be multileveled.

7

Introduction

15. See, e.g., Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cam-

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); L. Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern

Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Alastair Williams, Constructing

Musicology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); Pieter C. Van den Toorn, Music, Politics, and the

Academy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

16. We should perhaps note that the disciplines and discourses, though they reflect on

musical practices, are themselves practices, and have themselves become the object of disci-

plines and discourses.

17. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everest, “Preface,” in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook

and Mark Everest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. xi-xii.



Musical practices, like any cultural reality, require explanations at different

levels of complexity. When a violinist performs a concerto, we can describe

what happens in terms of neurophysiology, but also in terms of the inten-

tions of the performer, the society she lives in, the cultural values associated

with the style, and so on. We can view this in terms of levels of ever wider ex-

planation, each level drawing upon levels below it and opening up to higher

levels.18

The essayists in this volume assume (and in some cases argue) that the-

ology, with the levels of description it offers, has a legitimate place at the

musicological round table without compromising the integrity of the partic-

ular responsibilities required by its truth-claims. The ultimate purposes and

grounding of musical endeavor can hardly be dismissed as a non-question,nor theology be written off when it attempts to supply the beginnings of an

answer. Indeed, numerous writers have contended that particular features of

music-making and hearing, and the sound-patterns they involve, are able,

even when no such intent is present, to intimate or gesture toward that infi-

nite life which generates, upholds, and redeems all things, the life of the tri-

une God made known in Jesus Christ. In fact, even in the arena of musicol-

ogy, a sense of the “openness” of all levels of explanation to the theological

can emerge quite naturally. Recently, two distinguished musicologists, re-viewing a huge range of writing in their field, observed that in much of it we

can discern the

same underlying concerns: what are we doing when we analyse or contex-

tualise music, and why are we doing it? What kind of truth can analysis or

historical musicology reveal, and how might it relate to other kinds of

truth about music? Should we be speaking of truth at all? Or does the act

of engaging in analysis or the writing of history lock us into a predeter-

mined epistemological stance?19

The status of truth-claims — whether viewed in terms of epistemology

or otherwise — while traditionally an issue of concern among (at least

8


18. A much-discussed and highly fruitful way of regarding scientific inquiry is to see it

as involving a conception of (a) reality as “stratified,” as a “universe of levels,” each operating

under the influence of the levels above, and (b) explanation as similarly stratified, each level

“knowing its limits” and opening up to the levels above. See Roy Bhaskar, Scientific Realism

and Human Emancipation (London: Verso Press, 1986), p. 253; Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Di-

mension (New York: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 29-32, 37.

19. Cook and Everest, “Preface,” p. xi.



some) philosophers, is one in which theologians are bound to have an inter-

est and with which they can engage fruitfully, given the Christian commit-

ment to the “givenness” of a material order which precedes all knowing, and

to a Creator who graciously intends interactive relations of knowing with

that order.

Theology in Action

What, then, of theology? In our discussions, we have made no attempt to set-

tle on a definition that would command unanimous agreement. We come

from a wide variety of traditions and viewpoints, and the major Christianfigures discussed in the chapters do not share a single theology. On the other

hand, it is fair to say we adopt as normative the broad perspective of Chris-

tian trinitarian orthodoxy, grounded in Scripture and classically expressed

in the church’s ecumenical creeds. At its heart, this entails being oriented to-

ward, and being invited to share in, the gracious self-communication of the

God of Jesus Christ. It finds its focus in the gospel — the announcement that

in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the triune Creator, the God of Is-

rael, has acted decisively to reconcile the world to himself. The gospel findsits outworking in a reconciled people gathered by the Holy Spirit to share

God’s life and make known what God has done in Christ, a people of wor-

ship and mission, called to live in and for the sake of the world as a foretaste

of the world to come. This gospel is testified to and mediated first and fore-

most through the Scriptures, writings that are themselves the outcome of

God’s reconciling work. Christian theology can thus be understood as the

disciplined thinking and rethinking of this gospel, and as such, one dimen-

sion of the intellectual participation in the divine life that God has made

possible.

Theology for Music

We seek to demonstrate the fruitfulness of theology for music, and vice

versa. As far as the former is concerned — “what can theology do for mu-

sic?” — all of the chapters in one way or another attempt to show ways in

which the thinking and rethinking of the gospel can enable a richer descrip-tion and deeper understanding of music. Two broad forms of this can be dis-

tinguished. (a) We may take particular instances of music-making, music-

9

Introduction

Resonant Witness

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Transcript of Resonant Witness