A Peculiar Orthodoxy: Reflections on Theology and the Arts

© 2018 by Jeremy S. Begbie

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Publishing Group

PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

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Ebook edition created 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-1452-9

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

In memory of Roger Lundin,

scholar, friend, and teacher extraordinaire

Contents

Cover    i

Title Page    ii

Copyright Page    iii

Dedication    iv

Introduction    v

1. Created Beauty: The Witness of J. S. Bach    1

2. Beauty, Sentimentality, and the Arts    25

3. Faithful Feelings: Music and Emotion in Worship    49

4. Openness and Specificity: A Conversation with David Brown on Theology and Classical Music    79

5. Confidence and Anxiety in Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius    93

6. The Holy Spirit at Work in the Arts: Learning from George Herbert    113

7. Natural Theology and Music    129

8. Room of One’s Own? Music, Space, and Freedom    145

9. The Future of Theology amid the Arts: Some Reformed Reflections    181

Index    209

Back Cover    217

Introduction

One of the more encouraging signs in theological writing over the last thirty years or so has been a flourishing of activity at the interface of theology and the arts. When I first began working at this frontier in the early 1980s, although it was not hard to find material on poetry, music, and painting with overtly Christian subject matter, in many theological quarters that was about as far as the interest went. A few philosophically minded writers went out of their way to show how a Christian perception of the world might shape and in turn be shaped by our engagement with the arts. But this kind of activity tended to be confined to relatively small and isolated pockets. The majority of theologians in the United States and Europe tended to see the arts as a peripheral and specialist interest. There was little cross-disciplinary conversation, little recognition that the arts presented serious and fruitful territory for theological research, little in the way of college courses and programs, and very little of theological depth to help Christian laypeople come to terms with whatever art surrounded them day by day. And the resources for Christians who were making art on the ground—molding clay, stringing notes together, spinning words into verse—were scarce.

Things are dramatically different today. College courses abound, institutes and doctoral programs flourish, parachurch organizations prosper, and literature pours out in myriad forms: monographs, journals, magazines, websites, and social media. Admittedly, funding to support the best of this activity is often meager, but there can be little doubt that, like the confluence of two rivers, Christian theology and the arts are together generating a bubbling ferment that shows no signs of abating. And much of this spans a wide ecclesiastical spectrum—Protestant, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox—generating cross-traditional conversation of a kind not witnessed to date. Here we should not forget the dogged persistence of those who over many decades have kept the arts firmly on the radar of church and academy, amid what was often a climate of indifference (in some cases hostility). To the likes of Nicholas Wolterstorff, Calvin Seerveld, Jane and John Dillenberger, Wilson Yates, Frank Burch Brown, Sandra Bowden, Richard Viladesau, Greg Wolfe, Mako Fujimura, William Dyrness, and others, we owe an incalculable debt.

This burgeoning activity is surely in large part to be welcomed, auguring well for the future health of both theology and the arts. If I had reservations about the present-day scene, they would not concern the liveliness of the field or its seriousness or depth. My misgivings would rather involve the theological resources being drawn upon. I welcome the sheer range and variety of ecclesial traditions currently being deployed, but what often seems to be lacking is the sustained exercise of what some have called a scriptural imagination—a sustained immersion in biblical texts that enables us to perceive and live in the world in a way that is faithful to Scripture’s theological coherence, and this together with an attention to the classic creedal traditions that seek to convey and foster such an imagination.1 The reasons for this lack are many and varied. Undoubtedly one of them is that the Bible’s overt references to the arts are few and far between, and the early church’s patterns of belief were established with relatively little sustained reflection on the arts. In this light it is hardly surprising that many have turned to extrabiblical and extracreedal sources for the most promising primary sources of theological wisdom—an ancient metaphysical tradition perhaps, or a particular strand of modern or late modern philosophy. Others may put their confidence in a contemporary cultural movement or expression. Indeed, the tables can be turned here: some writers tell us that the arts themselves deliver theological wisdom that will make us question key elements in the biblical orthodoxy of yesteryear. The artist is typically an awkward customer, goading pastor and professor with questions they would rather ignore, questions that may well strike at the root of the faith once delivered.

While fully appreciating the motivations and concerns underlying these convictions, I have come to believe that the most profoundly awkward and in the long run most life-giving questions that arise from a Christian engagement with the arts will be provoked through engaging the often strange and puzzling texts the church recognizes as its canon and from the creedal confessions that seek to be faithful to its testimony. It is this stubborn peculiarity of biblically based orthodoxy—centering on the embodiment of the world’s Creator in a crucified king, and a God who is perplexingly threefold—that seems to be all too easily screened out or sanitized by those exploring the resonances between faith and the arts today. And it is worth emphasizing that in using peculiar in my title I have in mind both a strangeness (he had a peculiar look in his eye) and a distinctiveness (she had that look peculiar to academics). That is, I am keen to encourage an awareness not only of the odd and puzzling character of orthodoxy but also of how unique and unparalleled it is, and thus also an awareness of the danger both of muting its witness and of trying to turn it into something it is not.

Orthodoxy, of course, necessarily deals with doctrine, and like orthodoxy, talk of doctrine may well raise hackles. Doctrine, it will be protested, is about tidying things up, things that need to be left open. In the church’s deadening passion for control and conformity, for accurate propositions that supposedly give us a final hold on truth, mystery is dissolved, open-minded inquiry suppressed, conversation closed down. The arts move in a radically different world, so we are told, breathing a much fresher and healthier air. Here we will find openness, allusiveness, ambiguity, a resistance to that stifling pursuit of certainty that has plagued so much of the church’s history. Indeed, at their best, the arts can help liberate the church from its misguided reliance on doctrinal correctness.

This kind of sentiment is more than understandable. The arts do indeed rely heavily on allusiveness for much of their potency. And few will need reminding of the ways in which the church has exploited Christian dogma in oppressive ways (the very term dogma easily suggests as much), ways that do indeed encourage hegemony, flatten irresolvable paradoxes, inhibit discussion, exclude much-needed voices, and—not least—asphyxiate the arts. At the same time, we need to question some of the assumptions behind this kind of resistance to doctrine. In particular, there is the notion that language—including propositional language—strives by its very nature to close in on its subject, like a shark seeking to seize its prey in one bite, the notion that language is necessarily an attempt to enclose, grasp, and control. Undoubtedly formulating doctrine always involves specifying and delineating. But if it is undertaken according to the Scriptures—that is, if it is open to the redeeming activity of the God of Israel and Jesus Christ—and if it is conceived as direction for our fitting participation in the ongoing drama of redemption,2 then it will, potentially at least, be a vehicle of liberation. Among other things, it will ensure that the gospel’s mystery remains mystery, that its ambiguities persist as ambiguous. Doctrine is at its most orthodox when it enables the skandalon of the gospel to be heard more clearly as just that, good news—and good news precisely because of and through its stubborn refusal to be domesticated and controlled. Doctrine’s prime ministry to the artist is to direct our eyes and ears to that skandalon above all, and the artist’s ministry to the doctrinal theologian is perhaps above all to remind him or her that no formal or technical language can ever encompass or contain its subject matter, least of all language about God.

This book is a modest attempt to explore the fruits of the church’s peculiar orthodoxy in the arena of the arts and in so doing recover a fresh confidence in its power. It has arisen through the encouragement of friends who suggested that I gather some scattered pieces of writing into one volume to make them more widely available. They span roughly ten years, and I have arranged them in chronological order.3 I did consider updating the older ones substantially—with expansions, qualifications, and references to more recent scholarship—but with that kind of enterprise it is hard to know when to stop. So I decided to let each piece stand much as it first appeared. Each is for a particular time and occasion and should be read in that light.

I am very aware, despite what I have just said, that there is little detailed exegesis of particular scriptural texts in what follows. To be sure, much of the material depends on close readings of biblical material and on the labors of a host of biblical scholars from whom I have benefited over the years.4 But a great deal more needs to be done along these lines. To that end, my Redeeming Transcendence in the Arts: Bearing Witness to the Triune God (Eerdmans, 2018) contains far more exegetical material, and I hope to extend this approach in future writings. The essays in the present volume are oriented in a preliminary way to that long-term task.

As far as recurring motifs and emphases are concerned, it is probably wise to leave it to others to point them out. But at least two key currents of thought are worth highlighting. First, it will be obvious that I believe the confession of the triunity of God cannot be treated as a merely intellectual nicety or an optional luxury, as icing on a prebaked methodological cake. That the God of Israel and Jesus Christ possess a threefold life will configure and reconfigure every dimension of Christian faith. And when unleashed in the arts, a trinitarian imagination will provoke a freshness and abundance of possibilities that in many places we are only just beginning to discover. Second, the reader will also notice an orientation to the Creator’s particular and concrete historical engagement with the created world, climaxing in the new creation forged in Jesus Christ. In the incarnate, crucified, risen, and ascended Son, we are given a material promise of a future to this world, a future even now being realized by the Spirit among us and whose final splendor we can only barely imagine. In the artistic arena, the ramifications of this physically rooted hope are inexhaustible.

Because of these and other theological orientations, I have found myself less than enthusiastic about some of the more common default terms and habits of mind that shape many contemporary theological approaches to the arts. For example, I believe that the concept of beauty needs very careful handling if we are not to distort the way the arts actually operate in practice, and if we are to avoid being captive to intellectual schemes that cannot accommodate a narrative that culminates in a crucifixion and resurrection. (Chapters 1 and 2 in particular speak to this matter.) I am impressed with the wisdom that has come from associating the arts with the so-called transcendentals, but I am less impressed when a particular metaphysics is adopted that centers on, say, the beauty-truth-goodness triad and is then used without justification to set the entire stage for theological adventures in the arts. I am fascinated by the variety of senses associated with the terms aesthetic and aesthetics, but I begin to ask questions when the arts are fastened on to one of them without any argument, and theologized accordingly. I welcome the way that the visual arts have recently been given much theological attention, but I become anxious when it is covertly assumed that what are distinctively visual casts of mind are equally applicable to all the arts.

Finally, some heartfelt acknowledgments are in order. I am immensely grateful to the scores of friends, colleagues, and scholars, past and present, who have helped shape the content of this book—there are too many to cite by name. But I should single out several whose recent influence has been especially important to me: Richard Bauckham, David Ford, Malcolm Guite, David Bentley Hart, Trevor Hart, Richard Hays, Roger Lundin (sadly missed), James MacMillan, Suzanne McDonald, W. David O. Taylor, Alan Torrance, Rowan Williams, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Tom Wright. My warm thanks go also to my able research assistant, Alice Soulieux-Evans, for taking care of so many of the necessary detailed tasks; to Bob Hosack of Baker Books for his consistent support and advice; to Dan and Hillary Train for their seemingly boundless wisdom and support; and, as always, to my patient and long-suffering wife, Rachel.

1. See, e.g., L. Gregory Jones and James J. Buckley, Theology and Scriptural Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); C. Kavin Rowe, The Formation of Scriptural Imagination, Faith and Leadership (2013), https://www.faithandleadership.com/features/articles/c-kavin-rowe-the-formation-scriptural-imagination.

2. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Into the Great ‘Beyond’: A Theologian’s Response to the Marshall Plan, in Beyond the Bible: Moving from Scripture to Theology, ed. I. Howard Marshall and Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 81–95, here 94.

3. The original version of chap. 1 was written to precede chap. 2, but here I am using a slightly revised, and thus later, version of it.

4. It is worth noting that I am much encouraged by the movement known as the theological interpretation of Scripture. See, e.g., J. Todd Billings, The Word of God for the People of God: An Entryway to the Theological Interpretation of Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010); Daniel J. Treier, Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Recovering a Christian Practice (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008); Bard East, The Hermeneutics of Theological Interpretation: Holy Scripture, Biblical Scholarship and Historical Criticism, International Journal of Systematic Theology 19, no. 1 (2017): 30–52. It is unfortunate that this stream of writing seems to have had little influence so far in the theology-arts world.

1

Created Beauty

The Witness of J. S. Bach

When speaking with others about the arts in a theological setting, I have found that the topic of beauty tends to make an appearance very early in the discussion. There is little point in wishing this were not so, but we have every reason to ask about why the concept is invoked and about how it is informed (and re-formed) by the Christian faith. In this essay I attempt to sketch what I see as the main contours of a theology of beauty and relate them to the music of J. S. Bach. Crucial, I argue, is an orientation to the self-identification of the Christian God as triune. This means being wary of adopting concepts of beauty that, however ancient and venerated, turn on very different axes than those implicated in what has been played out in Jesus Christ, the one in whom and through whom all things are created (Col. 1:16). This essay should be read along with the next (they originally appeared together, arising from a conference at Wheaton College).

Among the millions of words spoken and written about J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations of 1741, few are as intriguing as those of the musicologist Peter Williams when he stands back from this dazzling tour de force and reflects:

I think myself that it feels special because, whatever antecedent this or that feature has, its beauty is both original—seldom like anything else, even in Bach—and at the same time comprehensible, intelligible, coherent, based on simple, truthful harmonies.1

Most of what I want to say in this essay is suggested by that observation (even though Williams himself would probably demur at the theological slant I shall be giving to his words). The matter he brings to the surface is the interplay between two types of beauty: on the one hand, the beauty that is in some sense already there in the nature of things (the beauty of truthful harmonies), and on the other, the beauty human beings make (the original beauty of a piece like the Goldberg). Put more theologically, there is the beauty directly given to the world by God and that which we are invited to fashion as God’s creatures. Taking our cue from Williams, the question we shall pursue in this essay is, how might an engagement with Bach’s music, especially as considered in its time and place, assist us in gaining a clearer theological perception and understanding of these two senses of created beauty and of the relation between them?

Theological Bearings

We shall turn to Bach in due course. The first task, however, is to say something about the concept of beauty itself, to clarify what we might intend by this fluid and much-contested notion and, in particular, what might be entailed in a specifically theological perspective on it. With limited space, I cannot attempt anything approaching a comprehensive theology of the beautiful, but we do at least need to gain some theological bearings—that is, to highlight key features of the theological landscape that are especially relevant to a responsible Christian account of beauty and the ways in which such an account is shaped by them.

Our primary orientation will not be to an experience of the beautiful, nor to an aesthetics, but to the quite specific God attested in Scripture—the gracious, reconciling, self-revealing God of Jesus Christ. If an account of beauty is to be theo-logical in Christian terms, its logos, or rationale, will take its shape primarily from the being and acts of this theos. Crassly obvious as this may seem, even a casual survey of religious treatments and theologies of beauty over the last thirty years will frequently show a marked lack of attention to the identity of the deity or deities being presumed. Difficulties are compounded if the de facto basic allegiance is to some prior and fixed conception of beauty, especially if it relies on a metaphysical scheme whose consonance with the testimony of Scripture is anything but clear. If we are to think of the phenomenon of beauty, at least initially, in terms of the main strands that inform the so-called great theory (and I see no compelling reason not to do so)—in other words, proportion and consonance of parts, brightness or resplendence, perfection or integrity, and affording pleasure upon contemplation2—then these strands need to be constantly re-formed and transformed, purged and purified by a repeated return to the saving self-disclosure of Scripture’s God.

Needless to say, this approach will sound to some like an appeal for a sectarian retreat into a Christian ghetto, an isolationist fideism that rules out conversation with all but Christians. Nothing of the sort is intended. The point is not to close down dialogue about beauty with those outside or on the edges of the Christian tradition or with the vast corpus of philosophical writings on beauty. The issue is at root about the norms shaping our language. If a conversation about beauty is to be fruitful, one cannot but care about the criteria governing the deployment of such a historically loaded and polysemous word—for how can speech bear fruit if it has ceased to care about its primary responsibilities? And to care about these criteria, for the Christian at any rate, is ultimately to care about the God to whom the church turns for the shaping of all its words.

A Christian account of beauty, then, will be oriented to a particular God. Let me press the matter. According to the Christian tradition, this God has identified himself as irreducibly trinitarian. The deity celebrated in Christian faith is not an undifferentiated monad or blank Presence but a triunity of inexhaustible love and life, active and present to the world as triune and never more intensively than in the saving life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If, then, we are to speak of God as primordially beautiful—however we may want to qualify this—then strenuous care must be taken to ensure it is this God of whom we speak.3 If we speak of divine proportion and consonance, can these be any other than the proportion and consonance of this Triune God? If we speak of divine brightness, integrity, or perfection, can these be any other than the brightness, integrity, and perfection of the trinitarian life? Everything depends here on refusing all a priori abstractions and maintaining a resolute focus on the saving economy of God in Jesus Christ. Divine beauty is discovered not in the first instance by reference to a doctrine (still less to a philosophy of beauty) but by strict attention to a movement in history enacted for us—supremely the story of Jesus Christ the incarnate Son, living in the Father’s presence in the power of the Spirit. Trinitarian beauty has, so to speak, been performed for us.4

To begin to unfold the implications of this notion: if beauty is to be ascribed primordially to the Triune God, and the life of God is constituted by the dynamism of outgoing love, then primordial beauty is the beauty of this ecstatic love for the other. God’s beauty is not static structure but the dynamism of love. The proportion and consonance of God, his brightness or radiance, his perfection and his affording pleasure upon contemplation are all to be understood in the light of the endless self-donation of Father to Son and Son to Father in the ecstatic momentum of the Spirit. Hence we find Hans Urs von Balthasar insisting that we must go to the economy of salvation to discover God’s beauty (and thus the ultimate measure of all beauty) since the incarnation, death, and raising of Jesus display God’s love in its clearest and most decisive form; here, above all, we witness the mutual self-surrendering love of the Father and Son in the Spirit for the healing of the world.5 This linking of beauty with outgoing love requires giving a full and crucial place to the Holy Spirit in connection with beauty. Insofar as the Spirit is the personal unity of the mutual outgoingness of Father and Son, the impulse toward self-sharing in God’s life, we might well describe the Spirit as the beautifier in God.6

Giving the trinitarian character of God its formal and material due means that we will resist the temptation to drive apart beauty and the infinite, something that is very much a mark of modernity and postmodernity. Here we can sympathize somewhat with John Milbank and others who lament what they see as the modern rupture of beauty and the sublime, evident especially since the eighteenth century.7 As understood in the tradition represented by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the experience of the sublime is an awareness of being overwhelmed by something uncontainable, beyond our grasp. In Kant this is either mainly mathematical, when we are overwhelmed by size and are confronted with the limits of our sense perception (such as we might experience under a starry sky or when suddenly faced with a mountain massif), or dynamical, when we are overwhelmed by a power that makes us acutely aware of our own finitude and physical vulnerability (such as we might feel in a raging storm).8 On this reading, it should be stressed, the sublime is unrepresentable to the senses and the imagination, and as such can provoke not only awe and wonderment but also unease and even terror. Beauty, by contrast, is radically tied to the ordering of the mind. The experience of beauty, for Kant, is the experience of the cognitive faculties of the imagination and the understanding engaging in free play.9 The Milbankian argument is that, in its approach to beauty and sublimity, the logic of postmodernism is essentially Kantian.10 Beauty is downplayed (even annihilated) as formed, tame, ordered, and controllable, affecting us through harmony and proportion, whereas the sublime is extolled as formless, untamable, indeterminate, and uncontrollable. Transposed into theology, infinite divine transcendence is understood in terms of negation: "Modernity and postmodernity tend strictly to substitute sublimity for transcendence. This means that all that persists of transcendence is sheer unknowability or its quality of non-representability and non-depictability."11 As such, the sublime is a formless divine presence,12 devoid of love or goodness, and thus potentially oppressive.13 In response to these lines of thinking, it is insisted that the sublime should never have been divorced from beauty in the first place, that beauty should be associated with infinity, but that since this infinity is none other than the infinity of the Trinity, this beauty is not formless or shapeless or wholly unrepresentable, but the formful beauty of intratrinitarian love revealed in Jesus Christ, and as such can never be oppressive or dehumanizing but only life-enhancing. To quote Rusty Reno, We are not overpowered by God as a sublime truth; we are romanced by God as pure beauty.14

Keeping in mind this primary orientation to the Triune God, whose own life is primordially beautiful, we can now turn more specifically to created beauty—and at this stage we will concentrate on created beauty in the first of our two senses, the beauty of the world as created by God.

First, a theological account of created beauty will speak of creation as testifying to God’s beauty but in its own distinctive ways. Much here turns on doing full justice to a double grain in Scripture’s witness: the Creator’s faithful commitment to the cosmos he has made, and his commitment to the cosmos in its otherness. Creation testifies to God’s beauty, but in its own ways, or perhaps better, God testifies to his own beauty through creation’s own beauty.

Let us consider each side of this in turn, beginning with God’s irreversible dedication to all that he has fashioned, a dedication grounded in the intratrinitarian love, the love that moves the sun and the other stars (Dante). Basic to this is the Creator’s commitment to physical matter, something that blazes forth above all in the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus. This means spurning any gnosticism that devalues created beauty (including that of the body) on the grounds, say, of its physicality or out of a mistaken belief in the inherent formlessness of matter. We will resist treating physical beauty as something through which we ascend to immaterial beauty if this means leaving creation’s physicality behind as supposedly lacking reality or essential goodness in the sight of God. Creation’s beauty is not, so to speak, something that lives in a land beyond the sensual or behind the material particular or beneath the surface or wherever—to which we must travel. Creation’s beauty is just that, the beauty of creation. The beauty of a coral reef is its endless variety, its comedy of color and patterned relations; its beautiful forms are the forms of its matter.

No less important, however, is acknowledging God’s commitment to the flourishing of the world as other than God, this otherness arising from and testifying to the otherness of the trinitarian persons.15 Creation is indeed charged with divine beauty because the Creator is at work through his Spirit bringing things to their proper end in relation to the Father through the Son. But it is charged in its own creaturely ways, according to its own rationality and ordering processes.

There is therefore no need to deny a priori that the beauty of creation can correspond to God’s beauty, reflect and bear witness to it, but care is needed if we are to do justice to creation’s integrity. Special caution is needed if we find ourselves thinking along Platonic lines: of God as the Form of beauty in which beautiful particular things participate. If we attempt to discern creaturely signs of God’s beauty in creation, we should be careful not to do so on the basis of some presumed necessity that created beauty resemble God’s beauty or resemble it in particular ways, but only on the basis of what God has actually warranted us to affirm by virtue of his particular and gracious acts, climaxing in Jesus Christ. The naïveté of assuming we may simply read off God’s beauty from creation is most obvious when we are confronted with creation’s corruptions and distortions (however we are to account for these), and when we forget that our perception of creation as reflecting God’s beauty depends on the work of the Holy Spirit.

For these reasons, if we are to speak of creation’s beauty participating in God’s beauty (on the grounds of creation as a whole participating in God), we will do so with some hesitation, despite the popularity of this language in some circles.16 John Webster has drawn attention to the hazards of the participation metaphor, especially insofar as it is allowed to carry inappropriate Platonic overtones; for instance, that we will overlook the irreducible Creator-creature distinction and the asymmetry of the God-world relation, that we will fail to understand God’s ways with the world through the lens of the particular saving acts of God in the history of Israel and Jesus Christ,