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Integrative Studies Lecture - March 21, 2000 (8PM Recital Hall)

Please note:  This lecture contained three important musical excerpts when originally presented.  A cassette tape of the actual lecture, complete with music, can be ordered by contacting the School of Music office at Houghton College.

I would like to thank the IS Collegium for this opportunity to explore with you some issues of theology, faith, music, and the cultus, the culture, the practice of Christian community.

I.  Jesus as composer

I almost titled this presentation  "Composing Music:  WWJD?".  Then I realized that the tense was wrong.  Jesus is the greatest composer alive.  Jesus IS the greatest composer alive.  You might immediately object that, so far as we know, Jesus has never written a note of music, neither in heaven nor as a human being.  But the notion of Jesus as composer transcends that question.  Three ideas from contemporary Christian philosopher/theologians can help us see a bigger picture.

In a recent article on aesthetic vision and Christian higher education, James Spiegel draws upon the work of G.W. Liebniz, George Berkeley, Jonanthan Edwards, and Abraham Kuyper to suggest that the world can succesfully be viewed as an aesthetic phenomenon.  The very first thing we learn about God in the Bible is that He is creative, and, soon after, that humanity is made in His image, implying that human beings are also inherently creative.  A bit further on, in Exodus 31:1-11, we learn that God gives special artistic gifts to some for the purpose of doing His will (in this case, building the tabernacle for worship), and that these gifts are linked with the work of the Holy Spirit.  As a side note, consider that not all uses of art are worship-related in the Old Testament story; for example, God clearly uses David's skill as a singer, poet, and harpist as part of His plan in the political history of Israel.  Spiegel concludes that all knowledge can thus be seen as aesthetically related:  either part of God's direct creative handiwork and the resultant relationships (i.e., nature and human interaction), part of human reflection of that same creative nature (i.e., arts and crafts), or part of the study of God the Creative Being Himself (i.e., theology and philosophy).  Whether or not one agrees with this final analysis, the overarching concept of God as Creative force seems well-supported by Scripture and theological tradition.

One of the objections to most theologies of art, including the preceding one, is that their Biblical support tends to seem located entirely in Old Testament ideas and practices.  Here, the work of Cambridge University's Jeremy Begbie can help.  In his book "Voicing Creation's Praise" Begbie argues for a more Christocentric theology of art and music by highlighting the importance of Jesus' place in both the initial and the continuing work of Creation.  There seems to be abundant evidence that Jesus was and is active in the processes of both Creation and Redemption, particularly in relation to humanity, but also of the whole created order:  Consider Gen. 1:26 "Let us make man in our image", John 1:3 "Through him (that is, the Word, that is, Christ) all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made", and I Cor. 8:6 "yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live".  And in a most deliciously paradoxical and comprehensive passage, Col. 1:15-20, Paul states "He (Christ) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.  For by him all things were created:  things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.  He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.  And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.  For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross."  Begbie's work is complex, defying easy reduction.  Nevertheless, I have attempted to draft five statements which I think begin to articulate Begbie's Christocentric theology of continuing creation, and, by extension, of human creativity:  1) Creation out of nothing is an act of God's love, the same love of Christ.  We cannot create out of nothing, and therefore our creativity cannot be as loving as that of God.  But we can understand that the creative act can be and should be an act of love.  2) The Incarnate Christ is the link to God's continual commitment to His creation, an ongoing covenant.  Thus, all Creation, even human creativity, is convenental.  3) Creation is ordered, but it is a dynamic order, governed by the living Christ, rather than a rigid clock-work kind of unchanging order.  Disorder (that is, sin) is the necessary danger of God's allowed freedom in His creation.  Begbie speaks of a "non-order", a spontaneous, unpredictable, creative element in any living order which is under the masterful, loving eye of Christ.  Disorder is the price God has allowed for this freedom in His creation, a price He Himself paid on the cross.  Certainly, we are to be about the work of redeeming disorder, but not at the expense of allowing the Law to rule, rather than the living Christ.  It is this creative "non-order", inherent in all art and music, that allows them to give us glimpses into the non-propositional, the non-logical (at least in the limited human meanings of those terms).  4) In Christ, all things are transformed; not just humanity, but the universe.  Redemption in Christ is transformation, not merely human justification.  The same love which precipitated Creation also precipitates and governs this transformative redemption in Christ.  "Behold, I am making all things new" (Rev. 21:5):  Not a regression but a new creation.  5) The human Incarnation of Christ is critical to understanding creation, dynamic order, and transformative redemption.  Christ is the lord of creation precisely because He is fully human as well as fully divine. In "Streams of Living Water" Richard J. Foster points out that works of art are inherently Incarnational, that is, they "[make] present and visible the realm of the invisible spirit", and "demonstrate the presence of God."  It is worth pointing out that Begbie's Christocentric theology of art rejects much of traditional Modern thought about a statically ordered universe in favor of a dynamic, relational, Incarnational model in which the living Christ is Lord.  This non-Modern (or perhaps even Postmodern) approach is very much in line with the work of Middleton and Walsh, who suggest that the breakdown of Modernity creates an opportunity for the Church to redefine Western worldviews in distinctly Biblical but also untraditionally dynamic ways.  In short, the times seem right for these refreshing and yet deeply orthodox theological ideas.

The final idea in this conception of Jesus as composer comes from Dallas Willard.  Using Colossians 2:2-3 ( "...Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.") and Luke 2:52 ("And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.") as points of departure, Willard argues persuasively for the notion that Jesus was (and is) the most intelligent person who ever lived.  In a recent article entitled "Jesus the Logician", Willard makes this case and then goes on to define intelligence in a broader way:  "We need to understand that Jesus is a thinker, that this is not a dirty word but an essential work, and that his other attributes do not preclude thought, but only ensure that he is the greatest thinker of the human race: "the most intelligent person who ever lived on earth". ... Often, it seems to me, we see and hear his deeds and words, but we don't think of him as one who knew how to do what he did or who really had logical insight into the things he said.  We don't automatically think of him as a very competent person. He multiplied the loaves and fishes and walked on water, for example -- but, perhaps, he didn't know how to do it, he just used mindless incantations or prayers.  Or he taught on how to be a really good person, but he did not have moral insight and understanding.  He just mindlessly rattled off words that were piped into him and through him.  Really?  This approach to Jesus may be because we think that knowledge is human, while he was divine.  Logic means works, while he is grace.  Did we forget something there?  Possibly that he also is human?  Or that grace is not opposed to effort, but to earning?  But human thought is evil, we are told.  How could he think human thought, have human knowledge?  So we distance him from ourselves, perhaps intending to elevate him, and we elevate him right out of relevance to our actual lives -- especially as they involve the use of our minds.  That is why the idea of Jesus as logical, of Jesus the logician, is shocking.  And of course that extends to Jesus the scientist, researcher, scholar, artist, literary person.  He just doesn't "fit" in those areas.  Today it is easier to think of Jesus as a "TV evangelist" than as an author, teacher or artist in the contemporary context.  But now really! -- if he were divine, would he be dumb, logically challenged, uninformed in any area?  Would he not instead be the greatest of artists or speakers?  Paul was only being consistent when he told the Colossians "all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are concealed in him" (2:3).  Except for what?".

So then, the way I read all this together is that Jesus gains the singular distinction of being the greatest composer alive without ever having physically written a note, because all the notes that have ever been written or might ever be written are the product of His unique and superior Incarnational place in Creation.  Nevertheless, we might get some idea of how Jesus would actually write music by looking at how He communicated in general.  It is a well-known but still striking fact that Jesus chose to communicate much of His message through the medium of parables.  Now, we don't know whether these parables are "true" in the strictest sense of the word, yet we do know that they contain God's truth in a way that He apparently finds acceptable.  Jesus told parables precisely because they communicate truth in a way that propositions seem unable to.  Indeed, it is the creativity of the parables, the juxtapositions, layers, paradoxes, reversals, and syntheses that seem to best capture the enormity of Jesus' message.  By speaking of so many important things in parables, Jesus teaches us that sometimes murky creativity is the best, perhaps the only, way to get at aspects of the truth.  It is not hard to imagine, then, music written by Jesus which would have this same quality, and which would transmit aspects of truth that even words could not; in short, music invested with purely mystical, spiritual power rather than the power of discourse.  This is not to dismiss music which is more analogous to discourse, more logical, such as fugues, sonata forms, etc., since Scripture makes it clear that Jesus is also the pre-eminent logician, debater, and philosopher.  In fact, I suspect the music of Jesus, typically far beyond our limited understanding, would manage to be a perfect synthesis of transcendant ambiguity and simple clarity.  This illusive and synergistic synthesis is something a Christian composer, seeking to be like Jesus the composer, can strive for, realizing nonetheless that it will never be achieved until we hear the music of heaven, which is to say, the music of Jesus.

II. Music as koinonia

It seems impossible to deny that the ministry of Jesus on earth is a ministry of loving, serving, healing, and saving.  Part of what Jesus does in loving is also challenging.  These aspects are deeply relational, and, by extension, deeply communal.  The Church is, after all, called the Body of Christ.  This speaks not only of deep intimacy with Jesus, but also among believers.  The music of Jesus would seem to be a music of intimate communication, of sharing, of service.  In the only New Testament passage to speak directly and meaningfully about music, Paul says this:  "Be filled with the Spirit.  Speak to one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.  Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ."  And then, amazingly in this context:  "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ."  That these final words follow on the heels of the musical statements is no coincidence.  C.S. Lewis, in one of his rare comments on music and worship, points out that the worshipping angels in Isaiah 6 are crying "Holy, holy, holy" TO ONE ANOTHER.  In other words, our worship is directed to God alone, but it is also a testimony to each other, and, consequently, to the world.  What are we saying about God to each other and to the watching world in our musical worship?  To return to Paul's comment, I am suggesting that the music of Jesus is a communicative and communitarian music, and that it involves mutual submission.  I struggle with what this means.  To date, my best understanding is that I, as a Christian composer must submit to my Christian listeners, but also that my Christian listeners must submit to me, or rather, to Jesus in me.  That is to say, the intent of my composing should be to participate in Jesus' ministry of loving, serving, healing, challenging, and saving listeners, and the intent of Christian listeners should be to open their hearts to my calling and participation in that ministry.  This would be true musical fellowship.  And, indeed, the transcendent nature of creativity lends itself to a transcendent level of shared intimacy in the Body of Christ;  mutual musical submission as koinonia.  This is the music Jesus is composing.

Nearly five hundred years ago, Martin Luther created dynamic congregational worship songs using popular musical materials, which is essentially what is happening with the worship choruses of today. Here is one of his most famous choruses, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God", in its original form (play excerpt).  Some two hundred years later, J.S. Bach wrote highly sophisticated art music for worship based on the Lutheran congregational songs embraced by his parishioners, music of such high artistic quality that it endures to this day.  As you listen to Bach's treatment of "A Mighty Fortress", bear in mind that the congregants would have sung the chorus in its more straightforward form, but would also have worshipped by praying, listening to, and meditating on the words and music during the "performance" in church (play excerpt).  Because of the speed of communication in our time, it has taken two decades, instead of two centuries, for contemporary worship choruses to become an integral part of mainstream Christian worship practice.  It is time for Christian composers to embrace this music as a shared basis for creating a dynamic, worshipful, and challenging contemporary artistic offering.

I would now like to invite you to participate in an act of Christian musical koinonia.  You as a community have chosen the worship song "Shout to the Lord" as one shared expression of your devotion to Christ.  I have applied my compositional sensibilities to the music of this song in an attempt to produce an even richer shared expression of our life together in Jesus.  We will sing the song together twice, after which I invite you to pray and meditate on the text and its layers of meaning while I continue to play.  As I signal the end of this time of musical meditation, we will sing the chorus together once again.  For the next few minutes, let us submit to one another musically out of reverence for Christ.

(music)

III.  Musical priests and prophets

I need hardly point out that not all listeners will be believers.  This fact does not invalidate the Christian composer's role in the ministry of Jesus.  But it can shift the emphasis from what we might call a more "priestly" function to a more "prophetic" one.  To be sure, prophecy, that is, proclaiming the truth even when many cannot or will not listen to it, has a place in both the Church and the non-believing world.  We are taught today that music is merely a matter of preference.  But prophecy is not a matter of human preference, and neither, for that matter, are priestly duties.  We have lost sight in our time of the idea that Christian artists can be priests and prophets through their art.  When we listen to the words of Jesus, we hear a great love, but we also often hear a great challenge.  Jesus is our High Priest and our ultimate Prophet.  We are to submit to each other out of reverence for Him.  But, typically, we do not submit.  We do not want to hear the music of Christian prophets, nor even, sometimes, of composer-priests.  And often the composer who has been given the task of musical prophecy will not submit to the very real needs of his or her congregation.  This is the essential rift between serious Christian composers and Christian listeners today:  we refuse to submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.  His ongoing word to the Church is anything but a matter of preference, but we have reduced it to that.  And the proof is in the pudding:  we will often reject His word to us in any form, whether artistic or intellectual or worshipful, simply because we do not prefer to hear it, or, conversely, because we insist on delivering it in a manner which deliberately invites resistance.  But it is a two-way street.  This mutual submission will be successful only to the extent that it is truly mutual.  Pandering to preferences is not mutual submission.  Neither is speaking in musical languages that listeners have absolutely no hope of interpreting, as Paul implies in I Cor. 14.  But neither is rejecting musical prophecy simply because it sounds strange and new on first hearing.

Certainly, listeners who are not Christian believers may find the work of Christian composers inexplicable as well.  That is to say, the role of the Christian composer in the wider world is most likely to be prophetic rather than priestly.  To the unspiritual person, the things of the Spirit are foolishness.  But I am focussing here on music as koinonia.  Even the so-called "secular" work of the Christian composer must flow from his or her place in the Body of Christ.  And until the Church discovers (or perhaps rediscovers) this artistic vision, we will have little hope with the non-believing world.  Indeed, our recent strategy has simply been to co-opt, to cooperate with, the musical thinking of the wider world.  And since we find this rather easy, we also find that we are becoming more and more like the world in every other way.  It has taken me a long time to accept the radical idea that God will use whatever efforts we put forth, even if He does not prefer our methods.  But He would rather we did things in the true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent and praiseworthy way.  Taking a stand for excellence within the koinonia of mutual submission on artistic issues would be indicative of the will to take a loving stand on every issue in this world.  Simply put, it would strengthen our witness to the power of Christ.  We have become culturally irrelevant because we have become cultural followers rather than leaders.  We must be about learning to perform the music Jesus is composing, rather than the music we think the world wants to hear.  In the name of Jesus, we must reinstate and support the ministry of musical priests and musical prophets from within our own ranks.  And this extends far beyond the limited world of Christian worship services.  As one of my colleagues is fond of saying, we Christians must be about the broader business of culture-building.  After all, Bach not only wrote complex, artistic, and now widely heralded music for worship services, but also for myriad concerts and celebrations completely outside the scope of church life.  The difference between the excellent Christian composer and the excellent non-Christian composer, both of whom often write music for use inside and outside of sanctuaries, is simply that the life and work of the Christian is a witness to the source of the excellence.  In the one case God is acknowledged, and in the other He is not.  Even though the music of the Christian composer can only further the direct ministry of Jesus through the work and will of the Holy Spirit, it can still in and of itself reinforce the notion of creative Incarnation to both the believer and the non-believer. Like the words of Jesus Himself, this music is available to minister to those who are ready to listen.

IV.  Following Jesus, the expert of all

Now, I realize that all this sermonizing sounds rather dire.  You did not attend this presentation in order to be browbeaten.  So ask yourself this question:  what part of the Body of Christ am I?  Are you a foot?  A nose?  An eye?  Paul makes clear to us in Romans 12 and 1 Cor. 12 that the Body will not operate as well if one of the parts is ignored, and that it will not function at all unless Jesus is acknowledged as Lord of all its parts.  The eye must submit to the nose for the sake of smelling, and the nose must submit to the foot for the sake of standing.  This notion of mutual submission applies to all the callings of Jesus, the Great composer.  Whatever tune He has notated for you must be successfully integrated into the composition.  Or, if you are a scientist you might say that Jesus has given you particular experiments to perform with specific equipment in His lab.  Should the rest of the Body reject your work because they cannot understand your equations? Jesus is the master scientist, and if He has given you a scientific task to perform for the sake of His research project you must do it with full confidence in His scientific leadership.  What I am trying to say is that we must all develop Christocentric theologies of the disciplines Jesus has called us to, because He is the expert in all of them, and we are His body.  And we must mutually respect our places within His university.

What kind of music is Jesus composing?  A masterful, complex, challenging and yet uplifting and nurturing symphonic song in which each believer has a critically important melodic or harmonic or rhythmic part; a music in which we are all soloists, and yet which none of us can perform properly without listening and hearing all the others; a music for all of us and for all times and places.  I can't compose like Jesus, and neither could Bach, but Bach kept trying, and I pray that Jesus will give me the grace, the humility, and the will to do the same.

Bibliography:

James S. Spiegel.  "Towards a New Aesthetic Vision for the Christian Liberal Arts College". Christian Scholar's Review, XXVII: 3 (Spring 1999), pp.466-475.

Exodus 31:1-11

Jeremy Begbie. Voicing Creation's Praise:  Towards a Theology of the Arts. (Edinburgh:  T&T Clark, 1991).

Gen 1:26, John 1:3, I Cor. 8:6, Col. 1:15-20

Richard J. Foster.  Streams of Living Water. (New York:  HarperCollins, 1998), pp. 235-272.

Rev. 21:5

J. Richard Middleton and Brian J. Walsh.  Truth is Stranger Than It Used to Be. (Downers Grove, Illinois:  Inter-Varsity Press, 1995)

Dallas Willard.  Jesus the Logician.  Christian Scholar's Review, XXVII: 4 (Summer 1999), pp.605-614.

Col 2:2-3, Luke 2:52

Is 6

1 Cor. 14

Rom 12, 1 Cor. 12
 
 
 
 

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