Beauty, Goodness, and Art

MODERN REFORMATION VOL.30 | NO.3 | MAY-JUNE 2021 | $6.95

Beauty, Goodness, and Art

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Join Michael Horton and the Modern Reformation team for a special weekend experience as we delve deeply into the topic of justification. Registered participants will receive materials to read and prepare in advance. Our guests will spend the weekend listening to stimulating lectures and engaging in lively conversation, challenging them to grow in their understanding of the doctrine of justification, and encouraging them to live in the light of what God has done for them in Christ.

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FEATURES 20

Theology and Beauty: An Enquiry

BY BO HELMICH

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Music and Loneliness

BY STEVEN R. GUTHRIE

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Getting Off the Trolley: Jazz Formation for Modern Ethics B Y DAV I D M . W I L M I N G T O N

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Listening to The Scream B Y DA N I E L A . S I E D E L L

COVER ILLUSTRATION BY REFAEL IDAN SUISSA

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MODERN REFORMATION WEB-EXCLUSIVE ARTICLES. F R E E , D A I LY A R T I C L E S F R O M T O P W R I T E R S .

Every week, MR curates new articles on issues of theology and culture. We hand select scholars, pastors, and cultural critics whose expertise, knowledge, and wisdom provide astute, insightful, and timely articles, reviews, works of literature, and poetry for the MR community.

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DEPARTMENTS

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B I B L E S T U DY

R E F O R M AT I O N RESOURCES

How to Tell When Enough Is Enough

BY ALLEN C. GUELZO

Templum Musicum: The Musical Synopsis of Johann Heinrich Alsted T R A N S L AT E D B Y JOHN BIRCHENSHA

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On Theology: Herman Bavinck’s Academic Orations Bruce R. Pass, editor and translator REVIEWED BY G R E G O R Y PA R K E R J R .

Oxford Handbook of Reformed Theology Edited by Michael Allen and Scott R. Swain REVIEWED BY R. M. HURD

57 BOOK REVIEWS GLOBAL THEOLOGICAL FORUM

More than a Prophet? Jesus’ Self-Characterization in the Fourth Gospel

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A Peculiar Orthodoxy: Reflections on Theology and the Arts

By Jeremy S. Begbie REVIEWED BY J O N AT H A N L A N D R Y C R U S E

B A C K PA G E

BY ARREN BENNET

Jack

The Divine Artist

L AW R E N C E

By Marilynne Robinson

BY MICHAEL HORTON

REVIEWED BY PAT R I C I A A N D E R S

MODERN REFORMATION Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Editorial Director Eric Landry Executive Editor Joshua Schendel Managing Editor Patricia Anders Marketing Director Michele Tedrick

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LETTER from the EDITOR

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lexander Solzhenitsyn began his 1970 Nobel lecture with a striking image, saying that we moderns hold art as a “puzzled savage” holds some newfound but obscure object, not knowing whence it came or able to dream of its higher function. We misuse it for wealth, for pleasure, for power. We use it “for all the passing needs of politics and narrow-minded social ends.” Still, for all our misuse, says Solzhenitsyn, “art is not defiled by our efforts, neither does it thereby depart from its true nature, but on each occasion and in each application it gives to us a part of its secret inner light.” That inner light most often goes under the moniker of “Beauty.”

And “Beauty,” he says, repeating a line from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, “will save the world.”

As Christians, we have a surface-level reason to object. Of course, “Beauty” won’t save the world. Yet, there is a deeper-level reason to affirm Dostoevsky’s hopeful remark. The Christian tradition has a history of understanding God as Beauty itself. That is, Beauty is God considered under the aspect of the Good and the True. It is, therefore, true that “Beauty will save the world.”

If this Christian tradition is correct, then our contemplation of beauty manifest in art isn’t simply our contemplation of a form of entertainment—there’s something richly theological about it. In this issue of Modern Reformation, we excavate some of those theological gold nuggets

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that lie under the surface of art’s cultural crust.

In our first feature, Bo Helmich explores the nature of Beauty from a Protestant perspective, showing just how significant it is for doing theology. He then asks a very Solzhenitsyn-like question: How might a renewal of Beauty in theology be brought about?

Recently, many fascinating works on the relation of music and theology have been published. It is this theme that our second and third features discuss. Steve Guthrie offers a theological interpretation of music, while noting its application to the current epidemic of loneliness. And David Wilmington argues that jazz offers a unique analogy for thinking about ethics, particularly in our post-Kantian and postmodern context.

Francis Schaeffer used to say that the Christian community tends to look at modern art with a snicker when there is reason for tears—meaning that contemporary art often provides for us a window into the depths of human despair, and that is no laughing matter.

In our fourth feature, Daniel Siedell similarly admonishes us, taking as his particular example Edvard Munch’s famous painting, The Scream. This work, as with much modern art, ought to be viewed as a visual lament. Seen with the eyes of faith, though, Siedell reminds us, lament does not have the last word.

As you take up this issue dedicated to the arts, we pray you will look anew at the multitude of creative gifts God has provided to his people, and by them gain some glimpse of the beauty of the Lord (Ps. 27:4).

JOSHUA SCHENDEL exec utive editor

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PART THREE OF A FIVE-PART SERIES

How to Tell When Enough Is Enough

by Allen C. Guelzo

f we can tell anything about him from the brief epistle that bears his name, Jude was not one of those people who always walks on the sunny side of life. His letter hoists the danger pennant for the Christians to whom he’s writing at the very beginning and keeps it flying. He had wanted to write about something more endearing— “about the salvation we share in common”—but the situation has forced him instead “to ask you to contend for the faith which has been

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delivered to all of you as saints” (vv. 3–4). The moment is a dire one, and he is writing out of necessity because there are people making a mess of the church as bad as that of the naysayers during the Exodus, the fallen angels, and Sodom and Gomorrah.

This bothers Jude so much that he doesn’t just want to have his say and be done with it.

He repeats it over and over again, as we vividly see in verses 8–13, which become a grocery list of every corrupt novelty the people “who have crept into your fellowship” have introduced.

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THE INFILTRATORS His first concern, however, is with the “creepers-in” themselves and on this point, he pulls no punches. They are “filthy dreamers”—people who, whatever their public profession, “defile the flesh.” The word Jude uses for “defile” is an odd one: it describes someone who has lost all 1 self-control, like an obsessive-compulsive. It’s actually related to a word we use today to speak of a stink-filled swamp: miasma. Jude doesn’t say exactly what filth it is they’re dreaming about, or with what they defile themselves; but since he mentioned Sodom and Gomorrah, it’s a safe guess it has something to do with sexual obsessions: incest, pedophilia, “swinging” between partners, and so on. The result is that they have the moral aroma about them of a sewer.

They also “reject” authority. They actually believe that their off-the-charts sexual behavior is something unremarkable, something that ought to be free from criticism. And when the church leaders step in to reprove or correct, their response is to throw it right back in the leaders’ faces. They don’t just disagree with the leadership of the church; Jude’s word here

They also “reject” authority. . . . And when the church leaders step in to reprove or correct, their response is to throw it right back in the leaders’ faces.

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is “nullify.” “Who are you to judge me?” they reply when confronted. “You’re no better than I am. Aren’t you a sinner, too?” This, of course, is true—and that’s why it ends up paralyzing us.

What we often miss is that it’s a truth being said by the wrong person, being manipulated so that evil gets a free pass.

Above all, these infiltrators even heap abuse (literally, they “blaspheme”) the “glorious ones.”

It’s not automatically clear who these glorious ones are. Jude might be simply speaking of the leadership of the church, but more likely he means the angels, since he immediately invokes the example of the archangel Michael. Jude says here that when Michael was arguing with the prince of the fallen angels, Satan, he wouldn’t use 2 abusive or blasphemous language against him.

Picture the comparison: an archangel is more respectful of the stature of the prince of hell than these blasphemers are of the angels (v. 9).

Jude was evidently the reader of one or perhaps two texts that circulated in his day (but have long since been lost to us) on the death of Moses. The one scriptural account of Moses’ death (Deut. 34) merely notes that no one knows where Moses is buried (no one was with him at the time he died), and many early Christian preachers believed that, in effect, God buried 3 him himself. But the stories Jude knew embroidered the account of Moses’ death to include an attempt by Satan to claim Moses’ body for himself. After all, Satan reasons, bodies are merely material substance, and he has title to all material things, while God gets to keep the spiritual things. This story got some popular currency among a number of other early Christian writers. From what Jude says, and from the pieces we can pull together, the incident runs like this: When Moses died on the mountain, the archangel Michael was sent to remove the body. But the Devil, wishing to deceive, resisted and said: The body is mine, since I am the master of matter. And he heard from the angel: The Lord rebuke you, that is, the 4 Lord of spirits and of all flesh.

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The point Jude is trying to make here is that even an archangel takes his cap off when Satan speaks. “The Lord rebuke you,” Michael said. He didn’t try to rebuke the devil on his own authority. As much as he had no love for Satan and was fighting over jurisdiction with Satan, he still respected the fact that once upon a time Satan was preeminent among the angels, and that gives even the archangel Michael no authority with which to trash-talk him. So, Jude reasons, if even an archangel won’t sneer at Satan, what should you conclude about the spiritual character of people who tell anyone who questions their behavior to mind their own business?

What are these people like? Jude now resumes his catalogue of unflattering descriptions of those “who have crept into your fellowship.”

They “speak evil of whatever they don’t understand” (v. 10); and whatever of right and wrong they do understand just by instinct, they find a way to corrupt. They are, in other words, people who think they know everything already, and 5 so they are intellectually arrogant. They “walk in the way of Cain” (v. 11)—which is to say, they pretend to be brothers to you, but turn out to be cruel and deceptive about their cruelty.

They abandon themselves to “Balaam’s error” (v. 11) since like Balaam (Num. 22–23), they will sing any song you pay them to sing, because money means more to them than truth. They will “perish in Korah’s rebellion”—referring to Korah of the family of the priests and Levites during the Exodus, who staged a short-lived rebellion against Moses. Like Korah, these are people who always have to have the top billing, always have to be in charge, and always need to be No. 1 to get the credit. They are like “waterless clouds” with all the substance of water vapor, or late autumn trees with no real life or sap in them (v. 12), or like “raging waves of the sea” without permanence, just washing back and forth, or (lastly) like “wandering stars who are doomed to darkness” that don’t offer anybody any real direction or illumination (v. 13).

This is quite an indictment. There seems to be almost nothing these people “who have

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[These “creepers-in”] defile, they reject, they blaspheme. They don’t know any restraint, and they won’t take anyone’s advice.

crept into your fellowship” are not guilty of.

But if we look back over this list, we can boil down the basic nature of these “creepers-in” to two characteristics. First, they have no respect (that’s really what the first three parts of this list are saying). They defile, they reject, they blaspheme. They don’t know any restraint, and they won’t take anyone’s advice. They are the superannuated prom queens and the practition­ ers of one thing who imagine they’re experts on everything. There’s almost a sociopathic quality to their behavior. They have a single goal: their own way.

Second, they have no real substance. These are people who like to assert themselves, but not because they have a message we need to hear.

It’s because they have a message they like to hear themselves saying, which allows them to believe that everyone else is a clown or a tramp and that they’re the only nice ones in the room.

They may like to advertise themselves as prophets, as rebels without a cause; but the only thing they’ve really got is a snarky tongue, a bad attitude, and a basic contempt for anyone who’s not 6 part of their inner circle.

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They have, in fact, substituted that inner circle for the church itself. There may be a welldefined structure to life in the church involving pastors, elders, or teachers, but these people have no time for that. They create their own alternative caucus—a group of those who are really in-the-know—and they offer a delicious sense of superiority over those poor, silly souls who think church is for worship, adoration, and love of God.

BLEMISHED LOVE FEASTS When you put it in these terms, these “creepers-in” sound nasty and ill-mannered but not necessarily threatening. You therefore may be wondering whether Jude has gone a bit off the spar in the energy with which he pursues this inner circle. But Jude may have some wisdom in his anxiety that we have missed. The truth is that temptation, sin, and evil rarely come to us dressed in their full uniform of thunder and screeching bats. They come much more often when a handful of unscrupulous egotists induce us to disregard good things or to do bad things— not because we’ll enjoy the badness, but because we really passionately desire to be on the inside with them rather than on the outside. After all, not too many people ease themselves into shoplifting, drugs, or promiscuity because they anticipate liking these things. There isn’t, really, much in them to like. We allow ourselves to be sucked into them, because we don’t want to be left out of the club, out of the smart set, out of the inside. I also think that this is why Jude pauses in verse 12 to explain why he thinks these “creepers-in” really are such a threat. These people are “blemishes on your love feasts”—literally, on your collective worship.

We often think that in church the worst offense must be theological in nature—that what angers God is people not thinking the right theological or biblical thoughts, and that our task is to measure people by how perfectly they check off each doctrinal box. Mind you, I don’t think

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right theology unimportant (or I wouldn’t be writing this), but it’s not an end in itself. The ultimate offense of wrong belief, wrong practice, and wrong intention is not that it doesn’t get the correct grade, but that it destroys the beauty of the picture.

God has made us to be mirrors of his own image. What grieves him when we sin is not that we gave the wrong answer, but that we destroyed the beauty of that image. Just so, says Jude, what makes the crime of the “creepers-in” so repulsive is not simply that they think incorrectly, but that they are an aesthetic and moral blemish on the face of what is otherwise supposed to be the church, the bride of Jesus Christ. There is a point in the life of every church when we are compelled to say that enough is enough, that there are behaviors and ideas that are destructive and un-Christian and have to be expelled—not because we get greater scores on the final exam for theological accuracy, but because those behaviors and ideas are ugly in a place that is supposed to be beautiful.

And where is the ugliness of the “creepers-in” at its ugliest? Surprisingly, in how they speak.

ALLEN C. GUELZO (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is senior research scholar in the Council of the Humanities and director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in the James Madison Program at Princeton University.

1. W. F. Arndt and F. W. Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 487.

2. Norman Hillyer, New International Biblical Commentary: 1 and 2 Peter, Jude (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1992), 248.

3. Peter Chrysologus, “Sermon 83,” ed. G. E. Ganss, Saint Peter Chrysologus, Selected Sermons, and Saint Valerian, Homilies (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1953), 133.

4. Charles Bigg, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude (1901; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), 331; Richard Bauckham, Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 261.

5. George Lawrence Lawlor, The Epistle of Jude (Nutley, NJ: P&R, 1972), 81.

6. Gerald Bray, James, 1–2 Peter, 1–3 John, Jude, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament, Vol. 11 (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2000), 253.

7. William Jenkyn, An Exposition of the Epistle of Jude (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1853), 265.

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More than a Prophet?

Jesus’ Self-Characterization in the Fourth Gospel

by Arren Bennet Lawrence

hroughout the Four Gospels, Jesus is chara cteriz e d as a prophet (Matt 21:11, 45; Mark 6:1–4, 15; 8:27–28; Luke 7:15; 9:8; 13:35; 24:19; John 4:14). Jesus himself did not object to others’ claims that he 1 is a prophet. Although prophetic office was not common in the time of Jesus, in many instances he was also characterized as more than a prophet. As Andreas Köstenberger says, “We also glimpse Jesus’ deity in the supernatural 2 insight he shows throughout John’s Gospel.”

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In this article, we will identify the ways Jesus characterized himself as divine in the Gospel of John.

By “characterization,” I simply mean the way 3 a character is characterized in literature. The process of characters characterizing themselves 4 is called “self-characterization.” More than the other Gospels, John uses many self-characterizations to characterize Jesus Christ. In a few instances, Jesus describes who he is by using ἐγὼ εἰμί (“I am”). He describes himself with phrases such as “Son of God,” “Son of Man,” and so on.

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Or, as in John 2:19 when Jews ask for a sign, Jesus describes himself this way: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”

There are three places in John’s Gospel in particular where Jesus’ self-characterization reveals his divinity. We’ll take them here in turn.

equal with God”—indicates the authorial characterization of Jesus as divine. In this episode, therefore, the author characterizes Jesus as divine with three kinds of characterizations: Jesus himself, the actions of the Jews, and the author’s narrative insight.

SELF-CHARACTERIZATION IN JOHN 5:1–18

SELF-CHARACTERIZATION IN JOHN 8:53–59

In John 5:1–18, the story is told of the healing of the person who had been disabled for thirtyeight years. Jesus healed him, but he healed him on a Sabbath; and when the Jews became aware of this incident, they questioned Jesus. In verse 17, Jesus said, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” When the Jews heard this, they sought to kill him “all the more because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.” William Hendriksen says the Jews “immediately understood that Jesus claimed for himself deity in the highest possible 5 sense of that term.”

Three important kinds of characterizations are involved here. By equating his work with the Father’s work in 5:17, Jesus equated himself with God. In 5:18, the actions of the Jews seeking to kill him indicate their perception of Jesus’ claim to divinity. In addition, the author, by revealing that the Jews intended to kill Jesus—“he was even calling God his own Father, making himself

In a conversation that begins in John 8:48, Jesus’ interlocutors ask him in verse 53, “Are you greater than our father Abraham who died? And the prophets died! Who do you make yourself out to be?” These questions demand clarifications that would eventually characterize Jesus. In answering these questions, Jesus does not give a direct, immediate answer. He first talks about his relationship with the Father (vv. 54–55), saying that his Father glorifies him. While the whole universe is expected to glorify the Father, here Jesus claims that the Father glorifies him.

In verse 55, Jesus stresses that he knows God the Father intimately. This intimate relationship of Jesus and the Father itself could subtly imply the divinity of Jesus Christ.

In verse 56 and following, the subtlety becomes explicit, however, when Jesus says, “Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.” When the Jews reply that Jesus is not even fifty years old and question how he could have seen Abraham, Jesus

“Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.” When the Jews reply that Jesus is not even fifty years old . . . , Jesus makes a startling statement: “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.”

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makes a startling statement: “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am” (v. 58). Here, Jesus indisputably claims his preexistence. If Jesus was merely human, he could not have met Abraham. If he had met Abraham, then he could not be merely human. The Jews understood this clearly. “So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple” (v. 59).

Köstenberger writes, “The very fact that the Jews sought to stone Jesus for blasphemy proves that they understood Jesus’ claim to deity very 6 well indeed.” D. A. Carson further states, “The desire to execute Jesus sprang from the perception that he was claiming equality or oneness 7 with God.” Here again, Jesus’ self-characterization emphasizes his divinity.

SELF-CHARACTERIZATION IN JOHN 10:30–33 At the time of the Feast of D e dication (Hanukkah) when Jesus was in the temple, in the colonnade of Solomon (10:22–23), the Jews gathered and enquired whether he was the Christ. Jesus answered that he had already told them, but they had not believed (vv. 25–26).

Then, in verse 29, he speaks of his relationship with the Father: “My Father, who has given my sheep to me, is greater than all and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.” As Craig Keener suggests, Jesus’ claim that no one could snatch his sheep could again be a somewhat veiled reference to Jesus’ deity because of its allusion to Psalm 95:7, where God’s people 8 are characterized as his sheep. The veil is again lifted in John 10:30 when Jesus says, “I and the Father are one.” The verse is an important selfcharacterization of Jesus. As Kö s tenberger observes, “For Jesus to be One with the Father yet distinct from him amounts to a claim to 9 deity.” In verse 30, John not only establishes the equality of Jesus with the Father but also attests to the unity of Jesus with the Father.

Keener says, “In this context, Jesus’ unity with

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In verse 30, John not only establishes the equality of Jesus with the Father but also attests to the unity of Jesus with the Father.

the Father . . . reaffirms his divinity.”10 When the Jews enquired about Jesus’ messiahship, 11 they got more than they asked for: his divinity.

Again, John confirms Jesus’ self-characterization as divine through the actions of the Jews. They rightly understood the significance of Jesus’ claim, considered it as blasphemy and with a concurring authorial characterization, as he depicts the Jews taking up stones to kill Jesus. Therefore, in all the three passages that describe the Jews’ attempts to kill Jesus, Jesus’ characterization of divinity is embedded and exemplified.

THE “I AM” SAYINGS In Jesus the God-man, Darrell Bock argues that in the Gospel of John the key to gaining an understanding of Jesus is primarily found 12 in the ways Jesus refers to himself. This selfportrayal of Jesus finds a pinnacle in John’s use of “I am.” Though the first-person personal pronoun reference “I am” is a common feature in any language, in Greek the use of ἐγὼ εἰμί is significant, because in many instances it’s an added feature, not an essential one. In Greek,

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the author could communicate the personal pronoun in the verb itself, so the additional personal pronoun is often added for a certain emphasis. It’s notable, then, that John uses ἐγὼ εἰμί frequently. There are seven “I am” sayings that come with a predicate.

1. “I am the bread.” (6:35) 2. “I am the light.” (8:12) 3. “I am the door.” (10:7) 4. “I am the shepherd.” (10:11) 5. “I am the resurrection and the life.” (11:25) 6. “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” (14:6) 7. “I am the true vine.” (15:1)

In the LXX, ἐγὼ εἰμί is the translation of the tetragrammaton, the holy name of the God of the Hebrew Bible (Exod. 3:14–15; 41:4; 43:10–13, 25; 45:18; 51:12; 52:6; Isa. 40:66). Therefore, as Rodney Whitacre writes, the “‘I am’ sayings affirm Jesus’ deity and point to the divine life 13 he offers.” Likewise, Carson notes that because the “‘I am’ phrase does not appear to be a normal Greek expression at all,” Jesus’ application of such a phrase to himself “is tantamount to a 14 claim to deity.”

Apart from these uses of “I am,” Jesus also uses ἐγὼ εἰμί in a few other instances when ἐγὼ εἰμί does not follow any description or predicate. In 18:4–6, for example, when the soldiers in the garden ask whether Jesus is the Jesus of Nazareth, his response of ἐγὼ εἰμί may not itself indicate divinity. But the soldiers’ response to Jesus’ self-characterization is significant: they draw back and fall to the ground. Why? It seems the soldiers take Jesus’ self-characterization as 15 a self-revelation of divinity.

moreover, is emphasized in John’s account not only by the words of Jesus concerning himself, but also by the witness of the Jews to the meaning of Jesus’ words—that is, how they reacted to his claims that he was, indeed, more than a prophet. Still more, in several of the accounts we are also privy to the narrator’s insight, by which he gives a third level of confirmation to Jesus’ self-characterization as divine.

When we come, therefore, to the words of the apostle John, we come not simply to a historical figure who was. We come to ἐγὼ εἰμί, the one who is.

ARREN BENNET LAWRENCE (PhD, Asia Graduate School of

Theology) is assistant regional secretary of the Asia Theology Association. He is the author of Legalistic Nomism: A Socio-Rhetorical Reading of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (ISPCK, 2015), Comparative Characterization in the Sermon on the Mount: Characterization of the Ideal Disciple (Wipf & Stock, 2017), and Approaches to the New Testament (SAIACS Press, 2018).

1. See Frank W. Young, “Jesus the Prophet: A Re-examination,” JBL 4 (1949): 285–99.

2. Andreas Köstenberger, John, BECNT (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 58.

3. Adele Berlin states that characterization is not just about how a character is presented by the author, but also how it helps a reader to reconstruct the character. Adele Berlin, Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1994), 34. See also Arren Bennet Lawrence, Comparative Characterization in the Sermon on the Mount (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2017); and Mark Allen Powell, What Is Narrative Criticism? A New Approach to the Bible (London: SPCK, 1993), 52.

4. Leland Ryken, How to Read the Bible as Literature (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 1984), 38.

5. William Hendriksen, The Gospel According to John: New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002),190.

6. Köstenberger, John, 147.

7. D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 395.

8. Craig Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010), 825.

9. Köstenberger, John, 312.

CONCLUSION By looking closely at several of Jesus’ self-characterizations in the Gospel of John, it’s evident Jesus thought of himself as more than a prophet: he characterized himself as divine. This,

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10. Keener, The Gospel of John, 825.

11. See Leon Morris, The Gospel according to John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971), 465.

12. Darrell Bock, Jesus the God-Man: The Unity and Diversity of the Gospel Portrayals (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016), 66.

13. Rodney A. Whitacre, John, IVP New Testament Commentary (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1999), 38.

14. Carson, The Gospel According to John, 343–44.

15. Köstenberger, John, 26.

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R eformation resources

Templum Musicum: The Musical Synopsis of Johann Heinrich Alsted translated by John Birchensha

ohann Heinrich Alsted (1588– 1638) was a professor of philosophy and theology at Herborn and, late in his life, at the University of Weissenburg. He was also a deputy to the Synod of Dort. More a compiler and codifier, his writings range very widely, including a philosophical encyclopedia and large theological treatises, but also writings engaging astrology, alchemy, and Lullism. In 1620, Alsted published his Cursus philosophici

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encyclopaedia, which went through two subsequent revisions (1630 and 1649). The following is a transcription of a portion of book XX of that work, which was translated by John 1 Birchensha under the title Templum Musicum.

The portions transcribed here come from the first three chapters of Birchensha’s 1664 translation, and page references refer to the same.

Some minor spelling and grammatical updates have been implemented in order to assist in the reading of the text.

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R eformation resources

Templum Musicum, or, The musical synopsis of the learned and famous Johannes Henricus Alstedius . . .

Faithfully translated out of the Latin by John Birchensha London, Printed by Will. Godbid for Peter Dring . . . 1664

CHAPTER 1. OF THE SUBJECT OF MUSIC [PAGE 3] 2 3. The subject of operation in music are things sacred and liberal, by which it appears that the usefulness of it is very great.

Things sacred, as the Psalms and Songs in the Bible, and of other things wholly Divine.

3 Things liberal, as pathetical matters in things Philosophical, and which doth altogether concern the common life of man. For music doth penetrate [p. 4] the interiors of the mind, it moves [the] affections, promotes contemplation, expels sorrow, dissolves bad humours, exhilarates the animal spirits: and so is beneficial to the life of men in general, to the pious for devotion, to the contemplative life for science, to the solitary for recreation, to the domestic and public life for moderation 4 of mind, to the healt[hy for] the temperament of their Body, and to the [ ]5 for delight, as excellently says that famous Musician Lippius 6 in his Musical Synopsis.

Hence it is that the Devil hates music liberal, and on the contrary is delighted with filthy music and illiberal, which he uses as his vehicle, by which he slides himself into the minds of men, who take pleasure in such diabolical music.

On the contrary, the holy angels are delighted with music liberal, not because corporal harmony doth affect them, but because all harmony, especially that which is conjoined with the affection of a pious will, is grateful to those chaste spirits. Hence it is, that the heroes, holy men,

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and lovers of virtue of all times, have magnified music: as appears by these Scriptures: Exod. 15.

Judg. 5.1. 1 Sam. 16.23. 2 Sam. 6 5. 2 Kings 3.15.

1 Chron. 23.5. Judith 16.1, 2, & c. Syrach 23.5, 6, & 39.20. & 44.5. Matth. 26.30. Luke 1.46. & 2.13.

Eph. 5.18, 19. Col. 3.16. Apoc. 5.9. & 14.2.

CHAPTER 2: OF THE PRINCIPLES OF COGNITION IN MUSIC [PAGE 6] 2. The theoretical Principles which Music uses, or is built upon, are either remote or proximate.

The remote are such as are taken from the 7 Metaphysics and Physics. And indeed from the Metaphysics, there are taken principles of unity, goodness, pulchritude [beauty], perfection, order, opposition, quantity, quality, and the like. And from the Physics, those that treat of the quantity, quality, motion, place, and time of a natural Body: also of air, and sound, and of its propagation, multiplication, differences, and perception: and lastly of affections, as love, joy, sorrow, and the like.

The proximate principles are axioms, assumptions, questions, theorems, problems, and 8 consectaries mathematical; and those partly arithmetical, partly geometrical: but chiefly arithmetical; especially those which concern the proprieties [p. 7] of simple numbers, and also their proportion; viz. dupla, tripla, sesqui9 altera, and the like. . . .

Heroes, holy men, and lovers of virtue of all times, have magnified music.

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3. Practical Principles which Music uses are chiefly taken from the Ethics, Economics, Politics, and Poetics.

From the Ethics are taken principles of virtue and moral beatitude; from the Economics [are taken principles] of actions [p. 9] domestic; from Politics principles of virtue and civil beatitude; and from Poetics principles concerning rhyme and verse, which have such affinity with music, that by some music is divided into harmonical, rhythmical, and metrical.

CHAPTER 3. OF THE EFFICIENT AND END OF AN HARMONICAL SONG [PAGE 10] 1. God is the author and maintainer of all harmony.

[H]armony is order and tends to unity; for God is the author and maintainer of all order, and the greatest unity. Furthermore, God is the chief and unspeakable joy, therefore they who rightly rejoice come nigher unto God. Hence the Rabbins say, the Holy Ghost doth sing by reason of joy. And Philosophers say, that the soul of a wise man doth always rejoice; for joy as it is pure harmony cannot but be excited and maintained by musical harmony [p. 10].

2. The exemplary cause of harmonical music is that music which is called mundane.

This is discerned in the order, disposition, and admirable proportion which doth occur in the celestial, and subcelestial region; partly among the stars, partly among the elements, partly among all things compounded of the elements; and lastly, among all those things which are compared one with another: of which music and harmony we have spoken in 10 our Physics. This harmony being such and so great, when ancient men did diligently consider it, they supposed that there was the like proportion not only in numbers and lines, but also in the voice; especially when they did discern that proportion in the various sound of various bodies.

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3. Music receives his greatest perfection from the end.

That perfection not only depends upon matter and form, but also upon the end we have for11 merly shown in our Metaphysics and Logics.

In music certainly this is most manifest: for unless it be referred to the glory of God, and the pious recreation of man, it cannot but equivocally be called music. Hence it is apparent that those simple men who abuse vocal and instrumental music to [p. 11] nourish the pleasures of this world, whilst they sing songs highly 12 obscene, are nothing less than musicians. For although the form of a song occur there, yet the 13 end which perfects the instrument, is not there discerned. Therefore, in such music there is the first perfection but not the ultimate; which necessarily is required in an instrument, because the virtue thereof is placed in the use.

1. See Christopher D. S. Field and Benjamin Wardhaugh, eds., John Birchensha: Writings on Music (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 75–84.

2. Alsted earlier said that the “subject of operation” of music is “the matter to which harmonical music may be applied.” That is, Alsted in this section is speaking of the various uses of music.

3. That is, matters that pertain to the affections, or we might say roughly, the emotional drives of human beings.

4. The text is corrupted here.

5. The text is corrupted here.

6. Johannes Lippius, Synopsis Musicae novae (Argentoratum, 1612).

Translated as Synopsis of New Music, trans. Benito V. Rivera (Colorado Springs: Colorado Music Press, 1977).

7. Here and in the following references made in point “3,” Alsted is referring to these as sciences, or academic disciplines. Because this treatment of music was originally an entry in a philosophical encyclopedia, Cursus philosophici encyclopaedia, mentioning these sciences would point readers to look up their respective entries.

8. That is, mathematical consequences.

9. The remainder of this section consists of Alsted enumerating various kinds of proportions, which he lays down as “axioms.” His main purpose in listing these various notions of mathematical proportions is to demonstrate that music can be understood because it is ordered. In coming to know music as a science, then, one is able to map that order by means of mathematic principles.

10. In the entry on “physics” found in this Cursus philosophici encyclopaedia.

11. Again, in the entry on “metaphysics” and “logics” found in this Cursus philosophici encyclopaedia.

12. Alsted’s point here, which comes across contrariwise in this translation, is that those who abuse music in order to “nourish the pleasures of this world,” and do not direct it toward the ultimate end of glorifying God, are not true musicians in the fullest sense. Much the same as a good work, when not done for the glory of God, is not good in the fullest sense.

13. Alsted is not here speaking of a musical instrument, but of a human agent.

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THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE.

Challenging the Alternative Gospels of Our Time

WHAT ARE THE POPULAR BELIEFS and assumptions of our increasingly secular culture? What do most people believe about God and the afterlife, or concepts such as virtue, shame, and identity? And how do these alternative views differ from the beliefs of the historic Christian faith? In this special collection, we’ll explore some of the ways the beliefs of our contemporary culture can be seen as counterfeit gospels.

How are churches in our day responding to these challenges? Are they equipping the saints to be able to distinguish truth from error, or have they too been taken captive by secular philosophies based on human tradition and the spirit of this age (Col. 2:8)?

White Horse Inn exists to equip Christians to better understand not only what they believe, but also why they believe it. And to do this, we need your help.

For a donation of $50 or more, we’ll send you this special collection titled “The Spirit of the Age,” which features 18 extended-length White Horse Inn episodes and 5 articles from Modern Reformation magazine. And we’ve also included a special bonus lecture

by Michael Horton called, “Discipleship in a Selfie Age.”

GET THIS DIGITAL COLLECTION FOR A DONATION OF $50 OR MORE. WHI is more than a radio show. Your donation supports all of the work at White Horse, Inc.—home to WHI radio, MR magazine, Core radio, Core Bible studies, and the Global Theological Initiative.

“WHAT A GREAT AND ENCOURAGING SHOW. I GREW UP IN A GOOD BIBLE–BASED CHURCH LEARNING THE ‘SOLAS’ AND AS AN ADULT GOT CAUGHT UP IN NEW AGE CHRISTIANITY. THIS PODCAST HAS HELPED ME GET BACK TO MY TRUE CHRISTIAN ROOTS.” — WH I LI STEN ER

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“ BEHOLD, I AM MAKING ALL THINGS NEW.” N O W AVA I L A B L E .

Although the book of Revelation is for the everyday Christian, it can be daunting and difficult. We commissioned this study in order to help bring clarity to the Bible’s final book. Written by pastor and scholar Dennis Johnson, the Revelation Bible study will help lift your eyes to the Lamb who was slain for our redemption, reorienting you to the wonderful hope we have in our conquering King.

C O R E C H R I S T I A N I T Y. C O M / R E V E L A T I O N

V O L . 3 0 | N O. 3

FEATURES

THERE IS NO SPOT IN THE UNIVERSE WHEREIN YOU CANNOT DISCERN AT LEAST SOME SPARKS OF [GOD’S] GLORY. YOU CANNOT IN ONE GLANCE SURVEY THIS . . . VAST AND BEAUTIFUL . . . UNIVERSE . . .

WITHOUT BEING COMPLETELY OVERWHELMED BY THE BOUNDLESS FORCE OF ITS BRIGHTNESS.” J O H N CA LV I N

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THEOLOGY AND BEAUTY: AN ENQUIRY

MUSIC AND LONELINESS

GETTING OFF THE TROLLEY: JAZZ FORMATION FOR MODERN ETHICS

LISTENING TO THE SCREAM

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I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y R E FA E L I DA N S U I S S A

THEOLOGY AND BEAUTY: AN ENQUIRY

BY B O H E L M I C H

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he word beauty refers to attractiveness, to the pleasing aspect of what is seen or heard. Its range of uses in Christian theology is potentially very broad. “How beautiful upon the mountains / are the feet of him who brings good news, / who publishes peace, who brings good news of 1 happiness” (Isa. 52:7). The evangelists’ feet are not beautiful on their own, but for the sake of the message they bring. There is a quality to the gospel message that brings joy and freedom to those 2 who hear it.

“How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts! / My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord; / my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God” (Ps. 84:1–2). Solomon’s temple—and by extension, the city of Jerusalem as a whole—symbolizes the spiritual longing of God’s people, a longing with clear missional and eschatological dimensions. Mount Zion is “beautiful in elevation” and “the joy of all the earth” (Ps. 48:2). John will reinterpret this sacred geography in the book of Revelation. Like its earthly model, the New Jerusalem is a city of surpassing beauty: “the city was pure gold, clear as glass” (Rev. 21:18b). But such is the immediacy of God’s presence; no temple is needed. The city is illuminated from the inside out, and the glory of God provides the light.

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To get a clearer sense of why beauty matters for theology, as a thought experiment, let’s subtract from the Bible all such aesthetically charged details. Let’s dispense with the skill of the craftsman, Bezalel, in the making of the tabernacle (Exod. 25–31). Costly fabrics, precious gems, extravagant details in strict accordance with the pattern shown to Moses on the mountain—let’s say that all of this is of no account. And let’s dismiss the bridegroom’s fulsome praise for his bride—“lovely as Jerusalem, awesome as an army with banners” (Song 6:4)—as excessive and unnecessary. Above all, let’s omit references to the beauty of a God who is mighty to save, such as this from Isaiah: “In that day the Lord of hosts will be a crown of glory, / and a diadem of beauty, to the remnant of his people, / and a spirit of justice to him who sits in judgment, / and strength to those who turn back the battle at the gate” (Isa. 28:5–6).

In the context of American culture, beauty tends to function at the level of decoration, of a prettiness that’s merely “skin deep.” The word itself conjures up images of fashion, cosmetics, and interior design, not—most emphatically not— the world of Christian belief: aesthetics has to do with the surface of things, as opposed to their substance. But this isn’t in keeping with the biblical witness. In the passage above Isaiah places beauty in a constellation with glory, justice, and strength.

The “diadem of beauty” is a radiant, visible expression of God’s own self-gift. To leave this out would be to limit our knowledge of God. It would be difficult to argue that beauty is a central concept in Scripture; it’s not on par with steadfast love, say, or redemption from sin.

Still, the sheer number of relevant texts should keep us from dismissing beauty as a secular or Hellenistic distraction.

If anything, argues David Lyle Jeffrey, we have seriously underestimated beauty’s importance in the Bible, especially the Old Testament. He writes, God is not simply a projection from the ephemeral nature of beauty. Beauty, and the desire it awakens in us for a wholeness we do not possess, offers nonetheless a primal

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intuition of the existence of a transcendent Source of all that is beautiful.3 A theology that takes no account of beauty has clearly overlooked something essential to the Christian faith.

The prevalence of beauty in Scripture presents a challenge to Protestants, who have long been criticized for treating beauty with indifference, suspicion, and hostility. That critique goes something like this: in their zeal to curb the excesses of medieval Catholicism, the Reformers disparaged those areas of life in which beauty plays a vital role. Liturgy, art, nature, culture, the lives of the saints—all of it came to be viewed as idolatrous or “worldly” in the pejorative sense of the term.

None of it was deemed necessary for salvation.

Over time (so the story goes), the mindset of reverence that characterized the medieval church gave way to hidebound religiosity. In the sphere of doctrine, rational exposition replaced figurative reading. In ethics, duty took the place of delight.

Worship shifted from ceremony and festival to a mixture of didactic hymns and lengthy sermons.

And in all of this, Protestantism accented the mind over the body, the health of our souls over the use of our senses.

Like most stereotypes, this one contains an element of truth. Yet the full story is more surprising, complicated, and hopeful than one might suspect. The story is surprising, because those who think of beauty in terms of the conflict between Catholic and Protestant doctrine are drawing the line in the wrong place. The story is complicated because Protestants (the Reformed in particular) have made valuable contributions to a theological understanding of beauty. And the story is hopeful, finally, because theologians from diverse traditions are now broadly in agreement on the need for beauty to play a renewed role within Christian theology.

We must ask why such a renewal is necessary, and how best to bring it about.

WHERE TO DRAW THE LINE The Swiss Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs

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von Balthasar has been credited with sparking the revival of interest in beauty as a theological category. Over the course of a seven-volume theological aesthetics, he ambitiously set out to make beauty the “first word” of Christian theology, rather than a postscript or an after4 thought. Born in 1905, Balthasar would have had childhood memories of World War I; educated largely in France and Germany, he also had a front-row seat for the social and political unrest that led to World War II. His writing reflects a lifetime of brooding over the causes and consequences of Europe’s catastrophic twentieth century.

Balthasar’s idea of beauty is informed by a deep knowledge of European art and culture, but its basic shape derives from Christian

WHEREAS TRUTH IS OFTEN DIFFICULT TO DETERMINE AND GOODNESS DIFFICULT TO PRACTICE, BEAUTY SHINES OUT FREELY, GRATUITOUSLY, WITH A CEASELESS ATTRACTIVE POWER. MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

Platonism. This tradition regards beauty as one of the transcendental qualities of being— on par with truth, goodness, and unity. Beauty differs from these, however, in that it is both a spiritual and a sensory phenomenon. Whereas truth is often difficult to determine and goodness difficult to practice, beauty shines out freely, gratuitously, with a ceaseless attractive power. When we see or hear something beautiful, we experience a charge of unexpected delight. We find ourselves wanting to love, share, and praise the person or thing in question. We may even be reminded, albeit indirectly, of the goodness of God’s creation and the extravagance of God’s care.

Encounters with beauty are, in a certain sense, timeless and universal; everyone can think of a sunrise that moved them to tears or a song that cast a spell of palpable joy.

Anyone who has fallen in love knows how beauty makes the beloved uniquely desirable.

Yet such encounters cut against the grain of the modern world, which typically appears to us as fragmented, disordered, and vulnerable to strife. Balthasar notes that, as compared to earlier eras in the church’s life, truth now no longer seems attractive or self-evident. Doing the right thing for its own sake can no longer be taken for granted. Nihilism has become strangely plausible, as faith recedes to the realm of private feelings, or becomes subordinate to some ideological agenda. For all intents and purposes, transcendental Beauty has been cut off from her “sisters,” Truth and 5 Goodness. Although Balthasar’s work was published in 1961, much of his analysis retains a prescient quality.

From a Protestant vantage point, however, it’s not the details of Balthasar’s theology that matter but the tone and tenor of his theological approach. Three elements call for special notice. First, Balthasar invites theologians to change how they view their subject matter.

What is needed is an aesthetic sensibility— a spiritual habit of fixing one’s attention patiently, expectantly, on God’s revelation in all of its mysterious splendor and complexity. As he puts it,

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We must return to the primary contemplation of what is really said, really presented to us, really meant. Regardless of how distasteful this may be to some, we must stress that, in the Christian realm, such contemplation exactly corresponds to the aesthetic contemplation that steadily and patiently beholds those forms which either nature or 6 art offers to its view.

Balthasar is not recommending nature or art as an alternative source of revelation. Rather, he’s highlighting the resemblance between a certain kind of aesthetic experience (“contemplation”) and the receptive posture a theologian ought to adopt. He is also implicitly criticizing those theologians (primarily, his fellow Roman Catholics) who were, at the time, more interested in shoring up the church’s defenses against modernity than in fathoming the riches of Scripture and tradition.

A second feature is devotion to the craft of theology. If one sees and becomes enraptured by the beauty of what God has said and done, then that experience ought to make a difference to our theological writing, teaching, and preaching. As Balthasar says, “A theology of beauty may be elaborated only in a beautiful manner. The particular nature of one’s subject-matter must be reflected first of all in the particular nature 7 of one’s method.” We can read this as a plea for some kind of correspondence, however slight, between the artfulness of God’s economy and our commentary on it. Balthasar reminds us of the old idea that theology is the Queen of the Sciences, not for its own sake but on account of the majesty of theology’s subject matter.

And third, we should take note of Balthasar’s unusually open-ended practice of theological discourse. His theological aesthetics incorporates multiple views and voices, not just of the traditional heavyweights (Irenaeus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas), but of spiritual writers, mystics, poets, and novelists. He engages charitably with a wide range of Roman Catholics—but also with Eastern Orthodox and Protestant thinkers. Fittingly, Balthasar was the first Catholic scholar to reckon seriously with the theology of

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IF ONE SEES AND BECOMES ENRAPTURED BY THE BEAUTY OF WHAT GOD HAS SAID AND DONE, THEN THAT EXPERIENCE OUGHT TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE TO OUR THEOLOGICAL WRITING, TEACHING, AND PREACHING.

Karl Barth. In fact, he praises Barth’s account of the beauty of God as a “decisive breakthrough” and a model of the sort of revelation-centered theology he felt was missing from Catholic 8 circles. Balthasar wanted to abandon the cutand-dried textbook method that had dominated Catholic theological education for generations.

He aimed to resurrect a style of theology reminiscent of the patristic and medieval periods: more rigorously exegetical, ecumenical, philosophical, and imaginative.

While there are aspects of Balthasar’s theology that are problematic when viewed from a Reformed standpoint, his reflections on the place of beauty in theology deserve careful

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consideration. In particular, Balthasar helps us see why any simple account of the relation between beauty and theology is likely to be wrong. Insights into the nature of beauty may come from anywhere, even the unlikely corners of Christendom. In what follows, I offer a survey of two such insights, drawing on significant voices in the Protestant tradition.

PROMISE AND PERIL The year 1590 marked the first publication of The Faerie Queene, by the English poet Edmund Spenser. Best remembered as a source for the story of “St. George and the Dragon,” Spenser’s poem is a chivalric romance; it tells an exciting story of knights in armor, damsels in distress, and horrible monsters. Besides being a skilled poet, Spenser was a committed Protestant. He had to be: sharing the queen’s faith would have been a prerequisite for a career in the service of her government, which Spenser pursued in colonial Ireland. How does his Protestant faith inform his vision as a poet?

Perhaps the first thing to be said is that the poem itself is a work of astonishing beauty.

No prior English poet had written in such a richly allegorical style on such an epic scale (some 35,000 lines). Using a densely rhymed stanza form of his own design, Spenser constantly modulates between moral, political, and theological layers of meaning—all without veering from the central plotline. If measure, shape, and order are the formal hallmarks of beauty (this was Augustine’s working definition), then beauty is integral to the poem’s design and construction. No one averse to the aesthetic power of language could have carried off such a feat.

Moving from form to content, we notice in Book I (“Of Holiness”) that Spenser plays on two distinct types of beauty. On the one hand, the poet presents us with images of lasting, eternal beauty: the titular Faerie Queene (who seldom appears) and the heavenly City (glimpsed briefly, from afar). These images are not incidental to the plot, for the Redcrosse

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knight must loyally serve his sovereign, en route to his future home. Yet encounters between the hero and these eternal forms occur only at rare intervals. On the other hand, the poet also gives us numerous scenes in which a false image of beauty suffices to fool an unwary character, who then suffers harm as a result. Instances of worldly beauty may promise happiness, but they prove perilous to those who lack the virtue of discernment.

A superb example of this theme occurs when the hero, Redcrosse, visits the gaudily painted house of Pride. It is, we read, A stately Pallace built of squared bricke, Which cunningly was without morter laid, Whose wals were high, but nothing strong, nor thick And golden foile all over them displaid, That purest skye with brightnesse they dismaid: High lifted up were many loftie towres, And goodly galleries far over laid, Full of faire windowes, and delightful bowres: And on the top a Diall told the timely 9 howres.

We recognize the house as the archetype of worldly beauty. Flimsily constructed and built on sand instead of rock, it nevertheless catches the eye.

The main thing that happens here is combat.

Distracted by the beauty of Pride’s false queen, Lucifera, the chivalrous Redcrosse rushes impulsively into battle against an evil warrior named Sansfoy (“Faithless”). Badly injured in the fight, Redcrosse escapes only by fleeing for his life: the Faery knight Departed thence, albee his woundes wyde 10 Not throughly heald, unready were to ryde.

Redcrosse’s disastrous visit to the house of Pride shows how Spenser is willing to subvert the chivalric ideal for moral and theological

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reasons. If a woman’s beauty is the conventional motive for heroic action (e.g., Lancelot and Guinevere), then Pride has a way of debilitating even the most earnest and talented knight.

Redcrosse’s besetting problem is that he cannot distinguish true beauty from false, and up until the very end of the poem, his efforts to act rightly are tragically misguided.

Spenser’s treatment of beauty in Book I of The Faerie Queene reflects a deeply held Protestant conviction—namely, that sin pervades every part of creaturely existence. Our powers of judgment have been damaged by the Fall. As Martin Luther explains in his Heidelberg Disputation of 1518: “The works of man, though they always look splendid and have the appearance of being very good, are yet in all probability mortal 11 sins.” Luther then goes on to cite the passage in Matthew where Jesus describes the religious leaders as white-washed sepulchers. They “outwardly appear beautiful,” Luther notes, “but in fact within are full of the bones of the dead and 12 every uncleanness.” As in Spenser’s poem, beauty is not necessarily a reliable guide to what is true and good.

Now, Luther and Spenser are obviously writing in very different genres and in different historical contexts, and they wrestle with somewhat different questions. For Luther, the issue at Heidelberg was how we are to be saved if our good works aren’t what they appear and our faculty of perceiving the good has been hopelessly broken. For Spenser, the accent falls not on justification but on sanctification. How is it possible to become holy in a world with so many deceptions and corrupting influences?

The poem is an attempt at an answer. What these writers share is a conviction that our aesthetic engagement with the world is fraught with peril.

Both raise the question (albeit in different ways) of whether our perceptions can be trusted. As in fairy tales where the wicked queen is preternaturally lovely, much depends on our ability to see beyond the surface of things, separating reality from illusion.

Luther’s thinking on such matters is obviously rich and difficult to summarize, but in the Heidelberg Disputation he stresses our need to

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embrace the cross of Christ. This means consciously turning away from the evidence of our senses, on the assumption that the world’s glory and the glory of God are fundamentally at odds. “He is not worth calling a theologian who seeks to interpret the invisible things of God on the basis of the things that have been 13 created.” A certain skepticism of creation is in order. Becoming a theologian is a process of learning to judge rightly, of calling things by 14 their proper names.

Judging by the amount of trouble the Redcrosse knight gets himself into, Spenser is more sanguine about the plodding nature of the Christian life. Holiness, discernment, a properly ordered love of the beautiful—such virtues are not gained by retreating from the battle, but by pressing onward and learning, however painfully, from the mistakes we’re sure to make along the way. The narrative of Book I suggests that growth in holiness is not a personal achievement but a work of grace, aided by others in the wider community of faith. Redcrosse must repeatedly receive aid from unlikely sources, at regular intervals, in hostile enemy territory.

BEAUTY AND GLORY Arguably, the most important, positive contribution Protestants have made to a theological understanding of beauty is in the constellation of created beauty with divine glory. The pairing of these concepts has deep roots in the Reformed tradition, as when John Calvin invites his readers to view the awe-inducing beauty of nature as a mirror in which they may behold something of the majesty and power of the invisible God. Wherever you cast your eyes, Calvin writes, there is no spot in the universe wherein you cannot discern at least some sparks of his glory. You cannot in one glance survey this most vast and beautiful system of the universe, in its wide expanse, without being completely overwhelmed by the boundless 15 force of its brightness.

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“THERE IS AN INFINITE FULLNESS OF ALL POSSIBLE GOOD IN GOD,” [JONATHAN EDWARDS] WRITES, “A FULLNESS OF EVERY PERFECTION, OF ALL EXCELLENCY AND BEAUTY, AND OF INFINITE HAPPINESS.”

Elsewhere, Calvin marvels that God should provide what humanity needs to survive in a way that seems lovingly calibrated to bring about humanity’s delight and joy.

Has the Lord clothed the flowers with the great beauty that greets our eyes, the sweetness of smell that is wafted upon our nostrils, and yet will it be unlawful for our eyes to be affected by that beauty, or our sense of smell by the sweetness of that odor? What? Did he not so distinguish colors as to make some more lovely than others? What? Did he not endow gold and silver, ivory and marble, with a loveliness that renders them more precious than

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other metals or stones? Did he not, in short, render many things attractive to us, apart 16 from their necessary use?

One inference to be drawn from Calvin’s comments is that human beings are free to enjoy and celebrate the beauty they find in creation, for this beauty reflects the goodness of God. There is nothing inherently wrong with sensory pleasures. God has placed humanity in a world that is tailor-made to give delight.

Later Reformed theologians followed Calvin by learning to see the intricate order and harmony of creation as clear and compelling evidence for God’s majesty and benevolence.

Jonathan Edwards speaks of a resemblance or “great suitableness” obtained between objects perceived by our senses and the character 17 of the unseen God. Nature’s greatest beauties are often hidden in ways beyond human understanding; they yield pleasure without our necessarily knowing why. Most characteristically, Edwards traces the beauty of creation back to the beauty of God. “There is an infinite fullness of all possible good in God,” he writes, “a fullness of every perfection, of all excellency and 18 beauty, and of infinite happiness.” Buoyed by an expansive and hopeful eschatology, Edwards revels in the idea that the “conscious celebration of God’s beauty is the end toward which the 19 whole of creation is drawn.”

Just at this point, however, some thinkers in the Reformed tradition have determined to tack in the opposite direction. John Owen maintains that there is really no comparison between the forms of beauty we encounter in this life and the glory of our incarnate Savior.

He notes how some of his fellow divines have risen “to a sedulous meditation on the works of creation and providence. Hence many excellent discourses on that subject.” Nevertheless, he is not persuaded.

But in all these things there is no glory in comparison to what is proposed to us in the mysterious constitution of the person of Christ. The sun has not glory, the moon and stars no beauty, the order and influence

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of the heavenly bodies have no excellency, in comparison to it.20 Even more sharply drawn is Owen’s criticism of religious art, described as a “cursed invention” and a diversion from the “due con21 templation” believers ought to cultivate. The portrait of Christ we are given in Scripture, seen in a glass darkly, is the only image of Jesus worth attending to. It’s more than sufficient, and those who look elsewhere are either carnally minded or sadly unacquainted with the joy of meditating on the glory of Christ.

Here would I live; here would I die; here would I dwell in my thoughts and affections, to the withering and consumption of all the painted beauties of this world, to the crucifying all things below until they become to me a dead and deformed thing, in no way 22 meet for affectionate embraces.

As Owen sees things, eternal beauty is so far beyond our imagination and experience that any attempt to capture this beauty in religious art is not only doomed to failure but also dangerous because it always tends toward idolatry.

This brings us, finally, to the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth, whose theological account of beauty had such a powerful effect on the young Hans Urs von Balthasar. Barth agrees with Calvin and Edwards that “glory” is the right biblical concept in play. Unlike them, Barth locates beauty in the doctrine of God, not in the doctrine of creation. He is much closer to Owen on this score. Owing perhaps to an earlier controversy with Emil Brunner, Barth is reluctant to acknowledge any continuity between created forms of beauty and the beauty of God. Musing on the closing section of the Lord’s Prayer (“Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever”), Barth asks a deceptively simple question: “Is [glory] a knowledge or revelation which in the last resort is a mere 23 object—without shape or form?” Obviously it can’t be, if we are to talk seriously about God becoming present to his own creation.

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When the glory of God appears in the Bible— at Sinai, for example, or on the Mount of Transfiguration—something happens that is powerfully visible and auditory. God’s presence becomes known in a distinctive and unforgettable way.

The threefold form of prayer’s doxology suggests that more is involved than mere power. Of course, glory includes power, but the language of “kingdom” and “glory” beckons toward a more expansive understanding. How ought we to speak of that added dimension? This is Barth’s question. Is it faithful to Scripture to speak about the glory of God only in terms of fear and trembling, and not also in more positive terms of love and adoration, joy and delight? So it is here, prompted by the Lord’s Prayer, that Barth opts to reintroduce beauty into the center of Protestant theology. “The concept which lies ready to our hand here, and which may serve legitimately to describe the element in the idea 24 of glory that we still lack, is that of beauty.” For Barth, beauty answers the question of how the glory of God enlightens us, attracts us, and wins us to God’s cause.

[God] has [glory] as a fact and a power in such a way that He acts as the One who gives pleasure, creates desire and rewards with enjoyment. And He does it because . . . He is the One who is pleasant, desirable, full of enjoyment, because first and last He alone is that which is pleasant, desirable and full of enjoyment. God loves us as the One who is worthy of love as God. This is what we mean when we say that God 25 is beautiful.

BEAUTY EVER ANCIENT, EVER NEW I began this essay by asking two questions.

Why is a renewal of beauty in theology necessary? And how might it be brought about? It turns out the first question is easier to answer than the second. It should be clear to any serious student of the Bible that beauty is an important theme. Not absolutely central, perhaps, not a

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stand-alone topic of investigation, but nonetheless important. This fact suggests that theology ought in some way to take account of beauty. Too much of the biblical witness would otherwise be muted, distorted, or passed over in silence.

When we look to the Christian past for models, however, we discover something interesting. There has never been a consensus among theologians as to how we ought to speak about beauty. The common thread is a certain sensibility—think of it as a heightened attention to the aesthetics of revelation—not a confessional identity, and not a commitment to place beauty here or there among the classic doctrines of the faith. Such choices, of course, are hardly arbitrary; they reflect what a given writer takes to be most fitting or needful in their own time and place.

Some theologians, like Balthasar, speak of beauty out of what amounts to a missional concern. They look around and see a culture scarred by the acids of modernity. They hold out the

promise of beauty as a healing balm. Others, like Spenser and Luther, are taken up with the problem of seeing beauty clearly in a fallen world.

Yes, we “walk by faith, not by sight”— but this doesn’t excuse us from the duty of learning to see differently, more truthfully, calling things by their proper names. The signal contribution of Reformed theologians has been at the nexus of beauty and glory, celebrating the concurrence of God’s provident care with God’s presence in creation. At work here is an exuberant faith that defies every stereotype of Protestants as joyless, legalistic, and otherworldly. It is a strange feature of the Reformed tradition that even what strike us as dissenting voices (Owen, Barth) are in their own way pressing us to continue with a difficult but vital conversation. As they are faithful to their calling, future theologians will do likewise.

BO HELMICH (ThD, Duke University) is a writer and theologian

from western Colorado. He lives on Hood Canal in Washington.

1. All Scripture references are drawn from the English Standard Version.

2. Mark Mattes, Martin Luther’s Theology of Beauty: A Reappraisal (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), 184.

3. David Lyle Jeffrey, In the Beauty of Holiness: Art and the Bible in Western Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 27.

4. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord I: Seeing the Form (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 18.

5. Balthasar, Glory, 18–19.

6. Balthasar, Glory, 32 (italics original).

7. Balthasar, Glory, 39.

8. Balthasar, Glory, 56. For a fuller discussion of the relationship between these two theologians, see D. Stephen Long, Saving Karl Barth: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Preoccupation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014).

9. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book One, ed. Carol V. Kaske (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), I.4.4.

10. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, I.5.45.

11. Martin Luther, “The Heidelberg Disputation 1518,” Luther: Early Theological Works, ed. and trans. James Atkinson, vol. XVI, Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962), 276–77.

12. Luther, “Heidelberg,” 282, cf. Matt. 23:27. Intriguingly, Spenser makes use of similar imagery in the house of Pride episode. Queen Lucifera drives off in a cart pulled by the seven deadly sins, personified. “And underneath their feet, all scattered lay / Dead sculls and bones of men, whose life had gone astray” (I.4.36).

13. Luther, “Heidelberg,” 290.

14. Luther, “Heidelberg,” 291.

15. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), I.5.1, 52. On the notion of creation as a theater of glory, see Inst. I.5.1 n4 and I.5.8 n27, as well as Susan E. Schreiner, The Theater of His Glory: Nature and the Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).

16. Calvin, Institutes III.10.2.

17. Jonathan Edwards, “The Beauty of the World,” Images or Shadows of Divine Things; Jonathan Edwards: Basic Writings, ed. Ola Elizabeth Winslow (New York: New American Library, 1966), 252.

18. Jonathan Edwards, Dissertation on the End for which God Created the World, chapter I, section II.4.

19. Belden Lane, Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 171.

20. John Owen, The Glory of Christ, ed. Wilbur M. Smith (Chicago: Moody Press, 1952), 81.

21. Owen, Glory, 169.

22. Owen, Glory, 51.

23. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1:650 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957).

24. Barth, CD II/1:650.

25. Barth, CD II/1:651.

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I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y R E FA E L I DA N S U I S S A

MUSIC AND LONELINESS

BY ST EV E N R . G U T H R I E

A

A SONG FOR THE LONELY

lberto Anguzza is a musician, not a medical professional.

Nevertheless, many identified him as a sort of hero in the early days of the global COVID-19 pandemic. While Italy was on strict lockdown, Anguzza, a trumpeter, went out onto the balcony of his apartment in Trapano, Sicily, and offered a plaintive version of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Neighbors congregated on adjacent balconies, and people stopped in the street below. Anguzza’s impromptu solo became one of the early memorable images of the pandemic and was viewed millions of times on YouTube.

(Less commendably, it also inspired a truly horrific multicelebrity performance of the same song, organized by “Wonder Woman” Gal Gadot and recorded over Zoom.) Over the months of isolation and uncertainty, thousands of musicians around the world offered similar sorts of spontaneous performances. Apparently, a number of people sense—like Anguzza, like Gal Gadot and her friends—that music might be a good way of easing the isolation and loneliness so many are experiencing.

If so, that would be a very good thing to know. According to a number of medical professionals, the coronavirus arrived in the midst of another health crisis—what former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called “a 1 loneliness epidemic.” How many lonely people constitute “an epidemic”?

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Estimates of our collective loneliness vary, but even those at the lower end of the scale are worrying. A more conservative number comes from a 2010 survey by AARP, indicating that 35 percent of Americans aged forty-five and older are lone2 ly. That’s significantly higher than, for instance, the percentage of Americans with diabetes (which is 10.5 percent of all Americans according to the 3 CDC). At the higher end of the scale, a widely cited 2019 survey of more than 10,000 workers found that “three in five adults (61%) . . . are lonely.”

Moreover, this represented “a seven percentage4 point increase from 2018.” (Interestingly, while the AARP study surveyed those forty-five and older, this second study found the highest rates of loneliness among young adults.) Other nations have also identified loneliness as a significant problem; and in 2018, the British government appointed its first 5 Minister for Loneliness.

And so we might ask about the intuition that gave rise to that Italian trumpet solo—it’s one that probably resonates with many of us as well.

Is Anguzza right? Is music a meaningful way of easing loneliness and isolation? If so, then why should music (of all things) be a help? It’s possible to dismiss Anguzza and his ilk as providing nothing more than a trivial distraction. We might say that in the face of a serious crisis, they are merely (and quite literally) whistling in the dark. But then, why should we whistle in the dark? Several recent studies have given a psychological account 6 of music and loneliness. Is it possible to give a theological account of this connection as well? In other words, does the Christian revelation concerning God and the world God has made help us make sense of the sort of comfort music might offer to the lonely?

A PNEUMATOLOGY OF SOUND The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. (Gen. 1:2) This is a good place to begin—not quite at the very beginning, but at the second verse of the

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DOES THE CHRISTIAN REVELATION CONCERNING GOD AND THE WORLD GOD HAS MADE HELP US MAKE SENSE OF THE SORT OF COMFORT MUSIC MIGHT OFFER TO THE LONELY?

Bible, with the Spirit of God hovering over the waters. Some translations, like the NRSV, read, “while a wind from God swept over the deep.”

There is a good reason for this. The Hebrew word ruach can mean spirit, or wind, or breath (the same is true of the Greek pneuma and the Latin spiritus). This multiplicity of meanings is not a dilemma for the Old Testament writers but a source of insight. This is the Spirit of God—God’s wind, God’s breath. “Any effort to subdivide rûah into breath, wind, spirit, or Spirit is doomed to abject failure,” writes Old 7 Testament scholar Jack Levison. The Holy Spirit is God moving out over creation, stirring and disrupting, carrying along or drying up, giving life and vitality to all that lives. This multiplicity of meanings is also why this is a good

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place to begin thinking about music. Before considering all the bewildering diversity of Gregorian chant, Wagnerian fanfares, Zeppelinesque guitar solos, African drum ensembles, and maternal lullabies, we might think about sound more broadly—that phenomenon of which all of these are species. When we are thinking about sound, of course, we are most fundamentally thinking about vibration, the movement of air.

In particular, when we think about sound, we can’t help thinking about that movement of air to which we are most intimately related: breath.

The moving of wind and the stirring of breath create sound.

Certainly, this is true of God’s Spirit-Breath.

“In the beginning was the Word,” says John’s Gospel. But it is equally true that in the beginning was God’s Breath. We are used to associating Creation particularly with the next verse—“then God said . . . ” (v. 3)—but speech is always borne by breath. Word and Spirit cannot be separated. The psalm writer acknowledges both in describing what unfolds at the beginning of Genesis: “By the word of God were the heavens made, and the starry host by the breath [ruach] of his mouth” (Ps. 33:6). God creates by his Word (“and God said . . . and God said . . . and God said”); and God creates by his Breath (“then the Lord God . . . breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Gen. 2:7). Throughout the Scriptures, the Spirit carries the word of God. This is the case in Genesis 1 and 2. It is the case in the prophets, who spoke “as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet. 1:21). Above all, it is true in Jesus, the Word of God, who (in the words of the Nicene Creed) “was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary.” Here too, the Word is borne by Breath. This intimate connection of Spirit and Word makes sense, not only in terms of Trinitarian theology (“the external works of the Trinity are undivided”), but also (we could say) acoustically. Breath sounds, as does the wind. Jesus makes just this point in discussing the pneuma with Nicodemus: “You hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from” (John 3:8).

Quite a few things follow on from this, actually. We’ll consider four points. First, the birth

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of Jesus (the Word of God, borne by the Breath of God) reminds us that breath as breath is the bearer of incarnate words. The scriptural image of breath, that is, does not point us in the first instance toward words as ideas or concepts but to sounding words, words spoken or sung. Of course, for most of human history this would hardly be a point worth making. The modern West is almost certainly unique in this regard, that when we think of a “word,” we think first of all of text rather than a voice, a sound, a breath.

But a spoken word indicates not only information but also presence. Walter Ong writes that “sound signals the present use of power, since sound must be in active production in order to exist at all. . . . [Sound] tells us that something 8 is going on.” Breath, as the ongoing action of a living being, says more than, “Here is the thing I have to say.” It also says, “I am with you.” Certainly, this is true of the Divine Breath.

The Holy Spirit is, in Gordon Fee’s apt phrase, 9 “God’s empowering presence.” Jesus promises the Spirit so the disciples will not be “left as orphans” (John 14:18). Rather, the Spirit “will come to you and will be in you” (John 14:17).

Breath is the means by which another journeys out to meet us and, more than that, comes to dwell in us. The Spirit brings what is in God to live in us—life itself, wisdom, understanding, peace, and so on. All these come to us, not as gifts external to the Spirit but as the Spirit’s own presence. Didymus the Blind writes, “The Holy Spirit is the fullness of the gifts of God, and . . . the goods bestowed by God are nothing other 10 than the subsistent Holy Spirit.”

Here is a second thing to note: God’s Breath gives rise to more than just God’s word. Once we inhale, the very biomechanics of respiration dictate that we also must exhale. As we do—whether in the form of a sigh, a shout, or a death rattle—we make our own contribution to the sounding world. God’s breath not only sounds, but it also causes us to sound.

Remarkably, God has chosen to give us life in a way that also, necessarily, gives us a voice. It might not have been this way. God could have created a world in which only God speaks, in which the Divine Breath produces only a Divine

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Sounding. Instead, God has created the world in such a way, by such a means, that it will be populated by creaturely sounds. And so we, like the God in whose image we are made, proceed by our breath. By our breath, we move out beyond ourselves and make ourselves known to one another as living presences. Every new parent knows this. In those first months after my son was born, I regularly woke up with a jolt of panic: Is he breathing? I would tiptoe to the crib, bend over in the darkness, and listen for the reassuring sound of soft, whispering breath.

He is breathing; he is here; he is alive. Breath and its sounding testify to a living presence.

Again, as with God’s Spirit, my breath carries what is in me—my thoughts, desires, sighs, and groans—out beyond me, so it may find its way into you. It’s not too much to say that by our breath we literally touch one another—a fact of which the pandemic has made us newly aware. These opening verses of Genesis sound with a special poignancy in our present moment, when we must guard ourselves from one another’s breath, when the breath that passes between us carries the threat of illness rather than the testimony of life. By the movement of our breath, we are present to one another. Separation, whether by death or by distance, can be described as that state of affairs in which another’s breath can no longer reach us.

Third, the fact that I could recognize the sound of my son while he was only weeks old reminds us that breath is the bearer of more than words. When God’s people were in Egyptian bondage, “God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham” (Exod. 2:24). Our “sighing is not hidden” from God (Ps. 38:9), and indeed, Jesus in his earthly ministry offered up sighs (e.g., Mark 7:34), “loud cries, and tears” (Heb. 5:7). Our breath carries us out into the world in shouts, moans, gasps, laughter, and of course, melodies. These varieties of human sound aren’t simply minor adjuncts to speech. We don’t know of any culture whose people speak but don’t sing. Song comes to us as naturally and universally as speech. Infants do not need

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to be taught to sing. They begin singing spontaneously and moving rhythmically to music at about the same age they begin speaking. So, in giving us breath, God doesn’t simply empower us to produce words. He enables us to sound.

Fourth and finally, just as we see in Genesis 1, throughout the Bible the ruach of God moves not only in human lungs but also across the expanse of creation. There is no other source of life. All that lives, lives by the Breath of God. O Lord, how manifold are your works!

In wisdom have you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. . . .

When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath [ruach], they die and return to their dust.

When you send forth your Spirit [ruach], they are created.

(Ps. 104:24, 29–30) Just as in humanity, here too in the nonhuman creation God’s ruach gives not only life but a voice. The Bible portrays a creation that (much like humanity) moans (Hab. 2:11), cries out (Luke 19:14), groans (Rom. 8:22), proclaims (Ps. 19), shouts (Isa. 55:12), and of course sings (Pss. 65, 66, 69, 96, 103, and elsewhere). We may set these passages aside too quickly, as “mere metaphor,” without really attending to the kind of work the metaphor is doing. We might be tempted, for example, to paraphrase Psalm 19 (“the heavens declare the glory of God”) as something like: “When we look at the sky and the stars, we can see how wonderful and powerful God is.” While that statement is true, the paraphrase shifts agency away from the heavens and toward the human. The stars don’t simply provide the occasion for my reflections; they make their declaration. I am addressed by them.

In the language of Scripture, the creation has a voice. Indeed, at the climax of John’s vision of the Lamb in Revelation 5, he hears the voice of “every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them saying: ‘To him who sits on the throne and

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MUSIC, THEN, IS A WAY OF EXERCISING THE GIFT OF BREATH GIVEN TO US BY GOD—THE GIFT OF PROCEEDING INTO THE WORLD AND TOWARD ONE ANOTHER BY OUR SOUNDING.

to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!’” (Rev. 5:13).

Let’s draw together these threads. Taken together, all of this gives us the rudiments of a theology (or even a pneumatology) of sound: • God has chosen to give us life in a way that also gives us voice.

• By our breath, we are present to one another.

• The breath of God gives rise not only to words but also to sounds.

• The sound-making breath of God gives life and voice to both the human and the nonhuman creation.

To summarize even more briefly: breath, life, and sound are inextricably bound up with one another.

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A SCHOOL FOR SOUND All of this takes us some way toward making theological sense of Signor Anguzza’s balcony performance. We are, as theologian Stanley 11 Grenz says, “created for community.” Yet in this moment, we are unable to touch, unable to be physically present to one another.

Nevertheless, when Anguzza plays, it’s not fanciful to say that those on the neighboring balconies experience his physical presence.

Air from his lungs passes through his instrument and out into the world, the cascading vibrations of air moving outward, touching and entering into the bodies of those within hearing.

Of course, he could have just shouted to them. That also would have been experienced as Alberto’s presence. But if Alberto had shouted, his neighbors (and those of us reflecting on the event later) would probably be talking about what he said, rather than simply the event of his saying it. The specifically sounding dimension of Alberto’s voice—his presence, borne by his breath—would not have been any less important or any less potent. But it might not have been the focus of our attention. Philosopher Kathleen Higgins writes, The physiology of hearing discloses our connection to the larger environment, our sharing that world with other agents, and our capacity for attuning the dynamics of our behavior with them. By conveying these aspects of our relationship to a world and beings beyond ourselves, music helps to develop a sense of securely sharing a world 12 with other people.

Music, then, is a way of exercising the gift of breath given to us by God—the gift of proceeding into the world and toward one another by our sounding. It also trains us to attend to that gift.

It’s a school for attending to one another’s presence and the particular manner in which others are present to us. The church father Athanasius commends the singing of the psalms for just this reason.

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For in the other books, one hears only what one must do and what one must not do. . . .

But in the Book of Psalms, the one who hears . . . also comprehends and is taught 13 in it the emotions of the soul.

While elsewhere in Scripture, We are asked to bless the Lord, and to acknowledge him, . . . in the Psalms we are instructed how one must praise the Lord and by speaking what words we properly 14 confess our faith in him.

Singing, as a particular training in presence, teaches us the proper posture we should adopt when present to another. Athanasius writes in the same letter,

distinctive sound of my voice in this space. The sound of my voice in my office is different from the sound of my voice in my kitchen, or my car, or my shower. My sounding in this space is a way of being in this space, and my sound bears testimony not only to my presence but to the place in which I am present. You could say that when I sing here (I hope my colleagues don’t mind), I hear both myself and my office.

What’s more, the sounds of my office include not only those that I am making but also those I am not making: the neighborhood outside and the people who live there, the way the wind rattles against the window, and (at this moment) the sound of the rain against the glass. None of this would be the case if I were to sufficiently amplify the sounds I make in this space, overwhelming the distinctive acoustical

One who comes in to the presence of a king assumes a certain attitude, both of posture and expression, lest speaking differently he 15 be thrown out as boorish.

When we sing the Psalms, Athanasius says, we learn how to speak in the presence of our king.

SONGS IN A STRANGE LAND Therefore, by our breath we proceed, moving out beyond ourselves. Through the sound carried by our breath, we are present to one another and present with one another in the shared space in which our breath re-sounds. Music is one way in which we give deliberate attention to this way of being present to one another.

If all of this is true, then one of the remarkable features of contemporary society is how often we use sound to separate ourselves from one another. The two artifacts that best characterize our culture’s engagement with the aural environment are the amplifier and the earbud.

By the first, we are able to control and dominate the aural landscape; by the second, we are able to isolate and remove ourselves from it.

I am sitting in my office now. If I speak or sing aloud, I hear not only my voice but the

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character of this room with that of some other room. I could, for instance, put on a recording of a choir singing in a Gothic cathedral and fill this space with a sound that could never be produced in this space. Nor would I experience the particular acoustical situation of my office if I were to put on my noise-canceling headphones.

In both of those instances, music—rather than becoming one way I am in a space and attentive to it—becomes a means of separating myself from a space and choosing what I will and will not hear in it.

The possibility of controlling my sound environment is also closely connected, of course, to the emergence of modern recording technology. It is remarkable to realize that for most of human history—really, until this past century— one could hear music only while in the physical presence of those making the music. I could make a similar point about photos or video. For most of human history, you could see a moving image of a person only if you were in the presence of that person.

The case of music is different though. I see lots of people on film, but it hasn’t become rare or unusual for me to encounter another human being in person. Photos of trees don’t mean we hardly ever see trees firsthand. But something like this is true in the case of music. The overwhelming majority of the music we hear is recorded music, while hearing music in the presence of those making it (again, for most of us) is relatively rare. (A 2018 Nielsen report estimates that 52 percent of Americans went to hear live music “sometime during the course 16 of the year.” Compare this to a 2017 Nielsen report indicating that the average music listener “uses 3.4 devices to engage with music each week, listening to a little more than 5 hours 17 of music per day.” ) Does this matter? It would be easy to make a curmudgeonly sort of argument against earbuds and iPhones and great big speaker systems.

But the truth is, I am grateful for recorded music. I’m grateful that, though I can never see Vladimir Horowitz play piano, go to a stadium where the Beatles are performing, or step into a club where Billy Holiday is singing, I’m still

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able to hear all of these remarkable musicians making music. Likewise, if it weren’t for recording technology, no one outside of Trapano, Sicily, would ever have heard Alberto Anguzza’s version of “Imagine.”

Media is a gift. What must be remembered, though, is that media (Latin meaning middle or intermediate) “goes between” and “comes between.” My guess is that at the end of a year of Zoom classes, Zoom church, Zoom meetings, and Zoom Easter, I don’t need to say a great deal to convince readers of this point. The pandemic has given us all a more profound understanding of what can and can’t be mediated. Technology has been a gift: the media “going between” us.

Yet technology has been wildly unsatisfying: the media “coming between us.”

We can acknowledge this gift, without forgetting the experience to which it points. When we were engaged, my wife and I wrote letters to each other. Those letters were wonderful. Yet when our wedding day arrived, we never gave serious consideration to continuing our relationship by post. Neither would we be celebrating Anguzza in this essay if he had responded to the pandemic by sending his neighbors a Spotify playlist (as thoughtful as that would have been).

So, yes, I think breath and physical presence matters in music. There is a deep musical wisdom in Psalm 137: By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.

On the willows there we hung up our lyres.

For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?

On the face of it, this seems like an ideal circumstance for singing. God’s people are in exile, heartbroken, and far from home. Why not sing one of the old songs, to remind each other of good times and good places? This is, in

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a way, an “earbud” approach—our approach— to music. I change the soundtrack to change the environment, to put myself in a different place, emotionally or imaginatively. But Psalm 137 suggests that for these heartbroken musicians, it wasn’t the music that created the environment, but the environment that created the music. Music was profoundly connected to place. Notice the repetition of the word there: “there we sat down and wept,” “on the willows there we hung up our lyres,” “for there our captors required of us songs.” The problem is that they are there, but these are the songs of Zion!

How then can we sing them in a strange land?

The message isn’t that music is unable to comfort. The message instead is that the comfort of music is bound up with place and presence.

SHARED BREATH “What I get out of music,” wrote guitarist Eric 18 Clapton, “is a feeling that I’m not alone.”

Clapton is right to sense this. Music addresses our loneliness because the procession of our breath mirrors the procession and activity of God’s own Spirit-Breath. This Breath is sent forth by God as his “empowering presence,” sent so we would not be orphans, that his life might live in us. In music, we attend particularly to the breath that proceeds from one to another.

If this is one of the things music does, then this suggests a set of criteria different from what we might ordinarily apply to the music in our churches. As I’ve said, in our culture music is often used as a way of being “somewhere else” and with someone else. In a culture of people who feel exiled, it’s worth thinking instead about how music might help us—not to create some other space, but to be present together in this space. How might music help us, not to “create an environment” but to fully inhabit the environment we are in with one another?

Concretely, that might mean something as simple as allowing the worship band to sound like the people they are and in the place they are, rather than trying to make them sound like a group of professional touring musicians in

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a five-thousand-seat theater. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we shouldn’t care about the quality of music in the church. (Alberto Anguzza is very good trumpet player. If he were awful, his playing might have been a gift his neighbors preferred not to receive.) The point is just that if one of the functions of music is to be present to one another—to be the body of Christ, gathered—then this will motivate different musical decisions than if the purpose of music is simply to achieve a particular aesthetic standard or some general ideal of “musical excellence.”

At a very basic level, all of what we’ve said here points to the extraordinary value of the church and of congregational singing in particular.

The church is in fact one of the few places in our culture where people sing together. Apart from annual performances of “Happy Birthday” and the occasional “Star-Spangled Banner,” it’s likely that church is the only time when the people in our congregations will sing with others. If it is true that song is one of the ways

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we experience others as present with us in place, then the singing of the church is not just filler to pad either side of a sermon, nor is it simply an opportunity for individual emotional expression. Rather, it’s a way of being the church, of being a people together and, as such, an irreplaceable medicine for healing our loneliness.

In the same way, the church is one of the few places where people will hear music played by musicians who are present with them.

Moreover, unlike most concerts or live music events people attend, in church the musicians aren’t with them as performers to be observed but as participants to be joined. Again, this is a remarkable and remarkably powerful gift the church (and almost no other venue or institution in our culture) can offer to a lonely people.

If music is an important way of being together, then we might ask: Is the music in our church oriented toward participation, toward hearing one another’s voices?

Our “pneumatology of sound” suggests one other way of responding “soundingly” to the epidemic of loneliness. Somewhat counterintuitively, one way of overcoming isolation is by cultivating intentional “located” silence.

This is not the silence of noise-canceling headphones, but the silence of attention. As we’ve said, the Ruach of God who hovers over the face of the deep gives life and voice, not only to human beings but to all of creation. As we quiet ourselves, as we silence the others-silencing drone of our individualized soundtracks, we may become aware that our own voices are located within a many-voiced, sounding creation. We can then realize we are not alone. The nonhuman creation speaks and even sings. As Job says (12:7–10), Ask the animals and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you.

Which of all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this?

In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath [ruach] of all mankind.

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STEVEN R. GUTHRIE is professor of Theology/Religion and

the Arts at Belmont University in Nashville. He had a first career in music and continues to perform in the Nashville area. He is the author of Creator Spirit: The Holy Spirit and the Art of Becoming Human and co-editor with Jeremy Begbie of Resonant Witness: Conversations between Music and Theology.

1. Jena McGregor, “This Former Surgeon General Says There’s a ‘Loneliness Epidemic’ and Work Is Partly to Blame,” Washington Post, October 4, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ on-leadership/wp/2017/10/04/this-former-surgeon-general-saystheres-a-loneliness-epidemic-and-work-is-partly-to-blame/.

2. Loneliness among Older Adults: A National Survey of Adults 45+ (Washington, DC: AARP, 2010), https://assets.aarp.org/rgcenter/ general/loneliness_2010.pdf.

3. National Diabetes Statistics Report 2020: Estimates of Diabetes and Its Burden in the United States (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020), https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/pdfs/data/statistics/nationaldiabetes-statistics-report.pdf.

4. “Loneliness and the Workplace,” https://www.cigna.com/static/ www-cigna-com/docs/about-us/newsroom/studies-and-reports/ combatting-loneliness/cigna-2020-loneliness-factsheet.pdf.

5. Tara John, “How the World’s First Loneliness Minister Will Tackle ‘The Sad Reality of Modern Life,’” Time, April 25, 2018, https://time. com/5248016/tracey-crouch-uk-loneliness-minister/.

6. See for instance, Katharina Schäfer, Suvi Saarikallio, and Tuomas Eerola, “Music May Reduce Loneliness and Act as Social Surrogate for a Friend: Evidence from an Experimental Listening Study,” Music & Science 3 (January 2020), https://doi. org/10.1177/2059204320935709.

7. Jack Levison, A Boundless God: The Spirit according to the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020), 18.

8. Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), 112–13.

9. Gordon D. Fee, God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul, repr. ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009).

10. Didymus the Blind, “On the Holy Spirit,” II (12), in Works on the Spirit: Athanasius the Great and Didymus the Blind, trans. Mark DelCogliano, Andrew Radde-Galwitz, and Lewis Ayres (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011), 147.

11. Stanley J. Grenz, Created for Community: Connecting Christian Belief with Christian Living (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1996).

12. Kathleen J. Higgins, The Music between Us: Is Music a Universal Language? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 152.

13. Athanasius, “A Letter to Marcellinus,” Athanasius: The Life of Anthony and the Letter to Marcellinus 28, trans. Robert C. Gregg (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1980), 108.

14. Athanasius, “Letter to Marcellinus,” 109 (my italics).

15. Athanasius, “Letter to Marcellinus,” 112–13.

16. Dan Rys, “Nielsen Releases In-Depth Statistics on Live Music Behavior: 52 Percent of Americans Attend Shows,” Billboard, November 15, 2018, https://www.billboard.com/articles/ business/8485063/nielsen-releases-in-depth-statistics-live-musicbehavior-360-report.

17. “We Listen to Music for More Than 4½ Hours a Day, Nielsen Says,” Marketing Charts, November 13, 2017, https://www.marketingcharts.com/industries/media-and-entertainment-81082.

18. Eric Clapton, Official Tour Program 1998, quoted in Higgins, The Music Between Us, 145.

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I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y R E FA E L I DA N S U I S S A

GETTING OFF THE TROLLEY JAZZ FORMATION FOR MODERN ETHICS

BY DAV I D M . W I L M I N GTO N

M

DIAGNOSIS

odern ethics—in the broad sense of “ethics since Kant,” in the narrow sense of “the notion of ethics that people now living have absorbed,” and in whatever other meaning of the term you might care to adopt—is not doing so well. A diverse chorus of witnesses (including G. K. Chesterton, Franz Kafka, Dorothy Sayers, Philippa Foot, C. S. Lewis, Flannery O’Connor, Milan Kundera, Charles Mingus, Alasdair MacIntyre, Dave Chapelle, Stanley Hauerwas, Wynton Marsalis, Rowan Williams, and Ralph Ellison) has been pointing this out in various contexts for some time now.

One way to describe the problem, which sets up my argument below, is this: modern ethics is a trumpet player who knows only military marching band music and is trying to lead and dominate a set at the most sophisticated jazz club in town. His technique and preparation are good, he can play his music very well, but he is utterly useless to make good music in the actual context into which he has barged (insisting that he has all the answers to make things sound good and work well). Everything his fellow musicians play sounds “off” to him—rhythmically too loose, wandering far from what’s written on the page, playing with an overly flexible idea of which notes are “inside” the harmonic structure, and so on.

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When his fellow musicians and the audience object—with whom and for whom he is supposed to be performing jazz excellently—he can only play his straight, square, and rigidly precise marching music all the louder. He insists that the good of making music will happen only when the other musicians conform to his assumption of what “good music” is, which for him is universally the same: a predictability and prescribe-ability. Sadly, even when the jazz musicians and the jazz audience (a community with famously broad tolerance for variety and risky experimentation) point out that the result would be merely a clamorous unison, the trumpet player suggests that everyone needs to conform even more rigidly; they must alter their expectations, definitions of “good,” and desires, and apply the name “jazz” to whatever noisy or brassy blat he’s been trained to create.

The argument I will make here, in favor of a “jazz model” for ethics, is certainly not a plea that the prescription for our ethical incoherence is to have “more flexibility,” or some other such tired but eagerly adopted (yet empty) slogan.

Being a more flexible military marching band trumpet player does not make good jazz music.

It just makes worse marching band music. Being more flexible in the Kantian approach does not make coherent the inherent misdiagnosis of the problem, because the problem begins before the diagnosis: Kant and his postmodern (and postpostmodern) legacy, even those who claim to be “against ethics” entirely, do not accurately see or hear the kind of creature they’re trying to heal. For a number of philosophical, ideological, and cultural reasons, they’ve adopted a false anthropology. Modern ethics, that is to say, and the politics that flow from it, is addressing the wrong kind of creature.

SYMPTOMS Modern ethics is hopelessly anti-relational, clunky, and rigid music. Far from swinging— the rhythmic recognition and harnessing of the velocity of entropy inherent in human life—the default modern ethic of a vague duty-to-be-nice

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is tin eared and tragically square. By its own account, it is grounded upon nothing for infinitely different people (who only happen to appear accidentally in temporal and spatial proximity to one another) in an inherently meaningless existence. It’s a soulless music.

This clunkiness is now so manifest, however, in both tragic and comic ways, that even our pop culture is able to recognize and to present the problem.

Between May and October 2017, millions of television viewers were treated to at least three different pop-culture treatments of philosopher Philippa Foot’s famous ethical “puzzle”: the “Trolley Problem.” Familiar to anyone who has taken an introductory ethics class since the mid-1980s, and probably familiar to anyone roped into long debates about the ethics of abortion (Foot’s original frame), this hypothetical dilemma factored into episodes of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Orange Is the New 1 Black, and, most spectacularly, The Good Place.

The scenario puts you in the position (as a lone trolley rider/driver) of being forced to choose either to allow an out-of-control trolley to kill five people by continuing on its current

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track or to pull a lever that changes tracks and kills only one person. Variations on the problem change details, such as the number and identity of the people at risk (a random stranger, people you know, a famous artist, an important young scientist, very old and sick people, etc.), and philosophy teachers chart the decisions and interrogate the reasoning behind students’ usually oscillating choices and justifications.

While philosophical and theological ethics students and professors were no doubt pleased to recognize this classic quandary in all three television shows, I suspect that the gruesomely hilarious and literal presentation on The Good Place generated the highest number of text messages and social media posts. Chidi, the professor of ethics in the show, is whisked away from his comfortable classroom chalkboard presentation of the problem and “magically” placed on a real trolley barreling toward seemingly real people. Over and over, whatever choice he makes—including the choice not to act—yields a vivid and disgusting result.

As the show points out repeatedly in a running gag, everyone hates moral philosophy professors (sometimes even, or especially, moral philosophy professors themselves), so there is twisted joy in seeing the annoyingly zealous but indecisive preacher of ethical consequences serially traumatized by experiencing the “real world” horror of a thought experiment made flesh (and entrails).

Although often used in an attempt to clarify the hidden or denied grounds of our reasoning through ethical dilemmas, the Trolley Problem and its vivid television enactment best reveal the incoherence of nearly all modern moral reasoning. Used badly, the problem can lead students and teachers to believe that we form moral or ethical people primarily by posing scores of “ifthen” hypotheticals, isolating data that matters, analyzing the possible results and justifications of different choices, and then choosing the decisions that align with whichever principle we decide to treat as authoritative or governing.

Although Chidi, the poor moral philosopher, realizes that a computer might be able to process all of that fast enough to make a consistent

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and defendable decision in “real time,” human limitations—especially in the kinds of crisis moments favored by this approach—guarantee much less satisfactory and even messy results.

Rather than helping us reach a correct answer, or even a method for trying to determine the “right answer for you,” the Trolley Problem most starkly reveals that we make moral judgments without being able to explain why—or even which details should matter for our judging. It reveals inconsistencies that should challenge our confidence that we know what we’re doing when we make moral claims and decisions. But more important, it reveals that most modern Westerners seem to follow principles and a logic we can barely articulate and whose sources we cannot name. We can’t explain our instincts and intuitions or defend their sources, even when they’re pushing us toward the moral good. And this raises the key point: We are being formed without being conscious and deliberative participants in that formation.

It is this revelation on which I want to focus and build here. A few of the most popular engagements with the Trolley Problem (proposed by philosophical and legal theorists) note that people who respond to the challenge of the dilemmas presented in the problem often feel and argue strongly for their choice of action and strongly against the options they reject.

These same people, however, are rarely able to articulate or clearly defend the basis for such passionately expressed interpretations and prescriptions.

As Yale professor Tamar Gendler notes, philosophers recognize strong evidence of a guiding intuition or subconscious principle governing the reactions and reasoning about 2 moral action. While modern philosophical analyses often move on from this recognition, or explain it by proposing that emotion or heuristic replacements for the real issues have taken over (simplified stand-ins for a rational basis), those working in virtues ethics and theology should insist we focus more on the question of a governing moral intuition or “instinct.”

One way of explaining virtues ethics is to emphasize character as the focus rather than

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the procedures and effects of decision-making.

Where most modern ethics seeks to come up with a process or governing principle that could and should be available to and used by any and every person, regardless of background, education, and so on, virtues ethics centers on the particular person acting. A virtues approach aims to shape or form that person rather than seek a universally applicable set of rules or a flowchart usable by any person from anywhere or nowhere in particular.

Because of the attention given to the person or character being formed, virtues ethics can give an account of the inescapable “intuition” that even modern ethics recognizes as the true ground of moral reasoning and justification.

What seems like instinctual or intuitive (or emotional) bases for making and justifying different decisions in the Trolley Problem is simply the performance of the character. Whatever its genealogy, and regardless of whether or not the moral agent attributes it to “just common sense,” the instinct or intuition reveals the character—which is always more fundamental than the universal flowcharts and decision pro3 cedures of most modern philosophy and ethics.

A PROLEPTIC PRESCRIPTION Moving from the diagnostic to the prescriptive, we can ask how we are to go about training and forming people to have such character.

If the Trolley Problem has helped reveal the incoherence of moral reasoning, and virtues ethics offers a way of forming performers of well-ordered character, then the question of educating, training, and practice in virtues is of paramount importance. The Aristotelian tradition—and its modern proponents such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, and many others—stresses the need to practice the virtues within a community constituted by a common account of the Good, and of the goods that lead toward it.

Even within such a community, however, one can feel overwhelmed considering the need for so many models of basic education: children’s

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catechesis, youth and continuing adult formation, and specialized training for those called primarily to engage people and institutions outside the community.

Wrestling with this question—how do we form people such that their actual personalities and characters simply are virtuous?—made me realize that virtues ethics seeks the training and forming of a performer. Furthermore, the performance imagined by Aristotle, Bonaventure, Aquinas, MacIntyre, and others is most decidedly not that of the hopeless and delusional marching band trumpet player. It is an ethical, moral performance of someone formed in habits of faithful listening, discernment, and courageous, properly-confident-yet-flexiblyrelational action toward the Good—a harmony of skills and sensibilities best experienced in jazz improvisation.

In jazz, one improvises within a constructive and creative framework—the clearly defined harmonic structure and melodic context—that allows for dynamically relational performances among musicians because of the common language and goal of making good music. We can transpose this (simplistically for now) into moral formation by describing it as a training in order to go into all the world, improvising faithfully with everyone you meet within the harmonic structure and “idiom” of the gospel, as learned and practiced in the community of the church (and one’s own church). And, as even The Good Place eventually points out, since the modern sound of ethics is a teeming cacophony of competing claims, sudden assertions of novel principles as inarguably valid and shifting arbitrary standards, it seems improvisation is unavoidable. The question is whether or not one is, or even can be, prepared enough and practically wise enough to improvise and make good music while doing it.

Jazz builds appreciation for attentiveness, listening, and, most profoundly, “taking time.” With that appreciation comes a training and formation in further development of those skills—and this happens even for “mere listeners.” Of course, this is true of listening to and playing concert/classical music; but

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FOR JAZZ, THE PERFORMATIVE CONTEXT INCLUDES THE IMMEDIATE RELATIONSHIPS OF THE PEOPLE WITH WHOM YOU’RE PLAYING.

because of the improvisational nature of jazz, these skills are developed far more. To hear what this sounds like, we must practice hearing the performance of “musical character and ethos” within different contexts—especially if we hope to effect sophisticated and faithful improvisations necessary for contemporary virtuous living. For jazz, the performative context includes the immediate relationships of the people with whom you’re playing—individuals with distinct and formed personalities of their own, formed by similar but not identical parts of the tradition grounding the communal goal at hand (playing good music as defined by the broad but recognizable standards of jazz history). Already, we are straining the modern approach to ethics that proposes a universally, tradition-spanning, and transcendentally grounded duty—a mere formality without “content” we accept without considering any substantive or traditioned claims it might place on the character and application of that duty.

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The best jazz improvisation also entails attention to the context of tradition—a musical “great cloud of witnesses” encompassing a broad list of great musicians and composers.

BRIEF EXEMPLARY EXCURSUS For example, in 1989, jazz trumpeter, composer, band leader, cultural commentator, musical educator, and eventual Pulitzer-Prize winner Wynton Marsalis released an album of Christmas music titled Crescent City Christmas Card. It featured his then-current septet plus guest musicians ranging from New Orleans clarinetist Alvin Batiste to legendary jazz vocalist Jon Hendricks to famed operatic lyric soprano Kathleen Battle. While the album consists almost entirely of “Christmas standards” and doesn’t push many musical boundaries— reflecting the ensemble writing and soloist personalities better developed on the albums Tune in Tomorrow, Blue Interlude, and Citi Movement—hearing familiar and beloved tunes performed with a jazz sensibility can serve as a valuable training tool to develop “ears to hear” what a jazz ethos and character can teach us about forming performers.

The performance of “Winter Wonderland” (available on numerous streaming and video services), although less than three minutes long, offers an excellent “bite-sized” introduction. If you sing along, over the top of the recording, you will recognize a few things immediately. When you first reach the bridge (“In the meadow we can build a snowman”), you directly experience the delayed and syncopated statement of the partial melody. Marsalis begins the notes that correspond to those words two beats late, and he continues that off-kilter delivery (relative to the expectations of the song played “straight” as written and usually sung) for the rest of the song. After repeated listening, you might realize there is only one chorus (i.e., a single time through the form of the song) of actual improvised solo—less than a minute where Marsalis makes up an entirely new melody.

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Throughout the main statements of the song, he uses and plays around with the central defining motif of the song—a series of mostly repeated notes (“Gone away is the bluebird; here to stay is a new bird”) that builds to a long series consisting of four short sequences of repeated notes, each of which descends to the next, lower series of repeated notes (“To face unafraid, the plans that we made, walkin’ in a winter wonderland”).

However, during his improvised solo, which begins at 54 seconds and goes until 1:44, he expands the shape of the melodies by creating tight ascending and descending scale patterns with the occasional leap.

After a few careful repeat listenings, you might also notice the musical conversation going on between Marsalis’s trumpet and Marcus Roberts on piano. The most obvious evidence of this performance of relationality comes when Roberts imitates and completes Marsalis’s phrase at 1:32– 1:39, but experienced listeners and musicians hear constant interplay—rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic—not only between the trumpet and piano but also between the drums and piano, the drums and trumpet, and, via his choice of chord tones to play and emphasize on different beats, the bass and everyone else.

When he finishes the short solo and returns to the main melody, Marsalis intensifies the rhythmic displacement using the repeated note motif. As he creates a disjointed and rhythmically displaced effect by syncopating those repeated notes, starting at 1:44, for example, and especially from 1:56–2:03, we can hear a mild version of the kind of the improvisational and competitive counterpoint Marsalis admires in the Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines duet “Weather Bird,” which he and his older brother, Branford, have performed on such tunes as “Cain and Abel” (on Branford’s album The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born).

PLAYING (AROUND) WITH AND WITHIN THE TUNE While the analogy between jazz and ethics cannot and should not be stretched to claim

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a perfect synchronicity, our ethical, pedagogical, and catechetical imaginations can be inspired (even through such a simple example) to think of the underlying “tune” or composition as the “constant” involved in moral formation—perhaps the basic Christian description or interpretation of a beatitude or virtue.

In this case, we can see that the tune of “Winter Wonderland” is being performed in a context quite different from usual. So, we may imagine someone being called on to perform a virtue, such as temperance or charity, in a context quite different from what he imagined and far removed from any of the contexts in which he learned and practiced the virtue. Can he play that tune with these people in this context? Can he perform that virtue, with elegant sincerity and/or humor and/or passionate intensity and/ or poignant wistfulness—that is, in whatever key or character or time signature most fitting to create good music in that situation?

OUR ETHICAL, PEDAGOGICAL, AND CATECHETICAL IMAGINATIONS CAN BE INSPIRED . . .

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Training and formation in listening to, engaging, appreciating, and internalizing the kind of musical preparation-for-performing opens up the possibilities for understanding and experiencing quite differently all the dynamic relationships into which we are thrown. It accustoms us to a different expectation for an encounter between an individual and others and, most important, for what constitutes a good and constructive or harmonious encounter.

Rather than the Romantic model of the modern and postmodern Kantian flowchart model (the detached and sovereign self, primarily concerned with “self-expression” and unchallenged individual will) or the totalitarian model of that same flowchart (the individual denying and suppressing hive mind), jazz offers an experience of the individual-in-community (a community with a tradition) who is able to express individuality precisely because of the community—a community built around encouraging individual expression through faithful play with the language and sensibilities of the community.

Where the modern ideal of ethics proposes a universal recognition of duty and urges a standard of universalism as a norming concept (the categorical imperative and its descendants), it cannot deliver on its promise in the absence of commonly held goods and substantive beliefs about the duties owed among different people in infinitely variable situations. For jazz, as with virtues ethics, a person formed to have a “faithfully improvisational character” should be able to play and to play well—that is, create good, harmonious music—in almost every context, even unexpected situations among people never imagined.

So, ethics should take note of the kind of training that can form that kind of performer. There is much more to be said about the fittingness of jazz as a model for ethics: the poignancy of a music created like a gumbo out of a seemingly cacophonous recipe of social, racial, political, 4 musical, and theological ingredients. But with our imaginations piqued by this brief analysis of the dynamics of one performance, and with attention to the question of how one forms

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people for such constructive, faithful, individual, and relational performances, we can now turn back to our ethical frame.

DERAILING THE TROLLEY Looking again at the Trolley Problem, we remember that even if we assumed that some version of modern ethics offers the only valid option for a pluralist society, philosophers and sociologists still observe the governing effect of instinct or intuition. So, the issue of training such inclinations is important even for those models. It’s just unacknowledged most of the time.

You and your friends, children, coworkers, church family, fellow citizens, and so on, will be grounded in and guided by something, regardless of your awareness of that something. The current state of mass ignorance about this fact goes a long way toward explaining the pathetic, and perhaps tragic, state of “political discourse”—a label applied to behavior and language that has virtually no substantive relationship to anything that would have been honored with the name “politics” at any prior point in human history.

Slogan-based “public ethics” relies on ignorance of a grounding and guiding logic. The norm is, rather, a muddy-gray slate (rather than a blank slate) in which a branded slogan or a hashtag is waiting to influence a moral agent presented with a decision, especially a dilemma or moment of crisis. The slogan acts as a purely formal stand-in for a “guiding principle” or “fundamental value.” Frequently, #ethics gestures to a complex of assertions that act as a guiding principle, without requiring any awareness of the source or even the articulation of a principle, much less any robust account that could support the truth of the assertions.

In the absence of well-formed characters— characters bolstered by narratives, habits of critical reading and thinking, and a culture of deliberative reasoning—#ethics is insidiously powerful. The pseudo-principles and quasivirtues, which appear to emerge from nowhere,

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need not be supported by any tradition (or even existed longer than the latest news cycle), and accept no accountability to any order—in fact, often claiming to oppose every existing order by exploiting the ever-attractive pose of being a “maverick” or speaking truth to power. It’s ethics-as-branding, rather than a restatement or critical engagement with a reasoned position, propagated precisely so it can be consumed, contained, printable, and easily displayed with honor—quite often on an actual bumper sticker.

ORDER AND HARMONY What jazz can teach us is an extension and elaboration of what Jeremy Begbie has been arguing about music in general for more than two decades now: it offers us a different way of experiencing time, relationship, contingency, and the quiet promptings of the Spirit behind 5 all in-spir-ation. The complexity and sophistication of jazz is not abstract, either in the generally used sense of “difficult to understand because detached from anything familiar” or in the sense that it is abstracted from anything physical, experienced, or concrete. Jazz is music that is complex, because of the layers of relationship being performed right in front of us.

Harmony is the sound of rightly ordered relationship; and in music we experience, with our physical and fleshy senses, the sound of dynamic relationships, even though we may later analyze intellectually the logic of the ratios (relationships described in numbers) at the music theory level. In jazz, we can hear and perform a degree of dynamic relating not possible in any other music, because all aspects of this music are available for some level of play. But this play is possible precisely because there is a structure that secures time, space, and freedom (for which we have been freed) for playing with, playing around, and playing together.

As The Good Place demonstrates, a real-life Trolley Problem moves quickly and the moral philosopher is incapacitated, because he has no time to deliberate about consequences, contractual obligations, utility, or universally

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DEVELOP AND CULTIVATE CHARACTER THAT DESIRES THE VIRTUES, AND ETHICS BECOMES A PERFORMANCE OF A WELL-FORMED PERSON.

applicable duties. Because of all the balancing of goods, costs, relationships, possibilities, and so on, the closer one is to full awareness of all the variables involved in modern ethics, the more incapacitated we become. And, as Chidi shows us, the result is an effectively useless moral agent and an extremely annoying person (“That’s why everyone hates moral philosophers”).

Develop and cultivate character that desires the virtues, and ethics becomes a performance of a well-formed person, rather than an intellectual cost-benefit analysis or flowchart of possibilities, principles, and levels of duty. An ethical formation modeled on performance, like jazz training, won’t help you give a perfect answer to the Trolley Problem, to “Sophie’s Choice,” or any other crisis dilemma. But it can help us see a better way of forming people who might defeat the predetermined “no win” premises by performing other options aimed at the Good. And even more important, we will form people who perform virtues in the relationships and situations they encounter in the 99.99 percent of their lives not spent careening wildly on trolleys.

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And yet, The Good Place gives something like a virtue ethics response to a Trolley Problem situation in another life-or-death dilemma encountered several episodes later. Presented with a trolley-like dilemma, a central character chooses none of the typical modern ethical models; instead, he chooses to sacrifice himself to save his friends. While nothing in the story depicts him as being trained in virtues that shaped his character to become self-sacrificial (his intuition seems to flow from his experiences of friendship), this plot twist is dramatized by an increasingly virtuous character who “performs his formation” in the moment of improvisational crisis. He doesn’t analyze every possibility in terms of a maximum utility (e.g., “Betray my friends to save my own skin?” “Abandon them and pretend I wasn’t involved?”) or by consulting a chart of laws and duties. Rather, if we look at this in terms of virtues ethics, then he has been formed by his community of friends and practicing forms of love to recognize the possibility of sacrificial action; and in that moment of dilemma, this seems to be the obvious action he should take—simply because he’s the kind of person who sacrifices himself for his friends. He performs his formation.

In jazz terms, he reaches a solo break, and rather than mechanically process all of the possible melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic possibilities, his own formation (physical, mental, and relational training) and the relationships with others performing “on stage” with him at that moment prompt that particular performance of his own voice or character. The “bad musical decisions” don’t even appear as options, because they “don’t seem like him” anymore. To do other than the virtuous thing would be to act “out of character” for the virtuous person.

A formation toward improvisational performance of the virtues offers us an ethical diagnosis, a prognosis, and a prescription fitting for the kinds of creatures we are and for the kinds of characters we are called to become.

The virtuous person doesn’t consider stealing a dropped wallet, betraying his friends, or suddenly playing a Mozart-esque melody and rhythm during a Thelonious Monk tune,

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because his properly formed character—aiming as it does to perform various goods constitutive of the Good of virtuous behavior or “good music”—doesn’t suggest them as good options.

He “solves” a dilemma like the Trolley Problem by performing the “no greater love” he has for his friends by laying down his life for them.

Aside from, and possibly despite, any after-the-fact calculus of consequences or overlapping duties, the performer plays a line that’s so perfectly fitting, it isn’t just a moment of beauty shared among friends. The masterful performance of such virtue resonates sympathetically with a greater, always-present Beauty that we hear louder and clearer at such moments—a music that invites us in and wants us to perform more perfect, and thus joyful, versions of ourselves.

DAVID M. WILMINGTON (PhD, Baylor) is assistant academic

dean and humanities teacher at Petra Academy in Bozeman, Montana. In 2019, he delivered The BTS Lectures at the Baptist Theological Seminary of Singapore, and he participated in lectures and panels at Brigham Young University and the SXSW (South by Southwest) Film Festival; and his essay Order and Improvisation in Bonaventure’s Hierarchy: Virtues as Apophatic Practices (Franciscan Institute Press) was published in honor of the 800th anniversary of St. Bonaventure.

1. See Elizabeth Yuko’s argument for why The Good Place offers the most thorough treatment of the underlying ethical issues in “How The Good Place Goes Beyond ‘The Trolley Problem,’” The Atlantic (October 21, 2017), https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/10/ how-the-good-place-goes-beyond-the-trolley-problem/543393/.

2. See the excellent lecture on the Trolley Problem by Tamar Szabó Gendler, the Vincent J. Scully Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, Lecture 14: The Trolley Problem, PHIL 181: Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature, Open Yale Courses, https://oyc. yale.edu/philosophy/phil-181/lecture-14.

3. I use the language of intuition because it is common in the introductory ethics classes where the Trolley Problem is first presented.

A better tradition engages with an innate sense of the good— synderesis—and links this to our creation imago Dei, while also giving a better account (via sin) of why that sense is damaged and confused.

4. Readers familiar with the work of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray will detect their strong influence throughout this essay.

5. See Jeremy S. Begbie, Theology, Music, and Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), as well as his Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), and Music, Modernity, and God: Essays in Listening (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y R E FA E L I DA N S U I S S A

LISTENING TO THE SCREAM

BY DA N I E L A . S I E D E L L

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n my last visit to New York, I went to the Museum of Modern Art to see The Scream, a 36” x 28.9” drawing in pastel by Edvard Munch (1863–1944) on loan from a private collector. It is one of four versions the artist made of the famous subject: a genderless figure, standing on a bridge, holding its hairless head and screaming. The image of the silent scream has entered our popular visual culture, from coffee mugs to Macaulay Culkin’s trademark expression in the movie Home Alone. It hangs on a custom-built display wall in the center of a room amid other drawings, prints, and paintings by the Norwegian artist, where tourists crowd in front of it to pose with their version of the famous gesture.

THE $120 MILLION QUESTION This pastel drawing fetched nearly $120 million, which at that time was the highest price ever paid for a work of art at public auction. The visitors came to gawk at that—to see what $120 million looks like. But The Scream raises a $120 million question: What is up with modern art? What are we to make of it, especially those of us in Reformation traditions? Modern art is strange, intimidating; it puts you on the spot.

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It doesn’t seem to behave how we believe “Art” should. It hangs in art museums throughout the world, but—to be frank—we’re not quite sure how it got there. Even the most creative and progressive culture makers among us are not quite sure what to do with it. As a museum curator and professor of modern art for nearly twenty years, I understand that frustration and confusion. So let’s spend some time thinking about The Scream.

LISTENING AND SEEING Some years ago, an artist friend surprised me by claiming that “a painting often distracts us by what it looks like.” Is it possible that a painting, of all things, can be more than meets the eye?

Although he’s an atheist, my friend, who has devoted his life to painting, echoed an important biblical truth that Luther recovered: our eyes deceive us. We’re easily impressed with visual displays of power, wealth, and beauty, which have given the visual arts one of its primary roles in political and religious regimes since the dawn of recorded history. If our eyes deceive us, then what are we to do in front of a painting?

Let me suggest we follow Luther’s advice and listen. Luther claimed that the ears are the only organs of a Christian. It’s through the ears that we hear God’s promises: his promise to love us, to be with us, to never forsake us, to be for us despite what we see before our eyes and even despite the hiddenness of God—our inability to see him and his presence in the world amid suffering, pain, and injustice.

We, however, like our art as we like our Christianity: visually pleasing. We like it practical, useful, maybe a little therapeutic. We want a Jesus to instruct and encourage us; we want paintings to form virtue in us, elevate us, empower us, even entertain us. We want our Jesus, like our art, to help us succeed. We want tangible, visible results. You and I, if we’re honest with ourselves, gravitate toward a theology that resembles Joel Osteen and art that resembles a Thomas Kinkade painting much more closely than we care to admit. This isn’t

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because we’re ignorant about Reformation theology or a creational worldview. It’s because we’re human. We’re drawn to what looks like piety, improvement, progress, and talent.

We’re drawn, like moths to the light, to what Luther called “theologies of glory.” And because it’s so powerful visually, a painting is one of those cultural artifacts most susceptible to its seductions.

Modern art contradicts most of our assumptions about art. It isn’t about heroes to emulate and challenge us, relaxing scenes with happy trees and quaint cottages to comfort us, outrageous images that entertain or scandalize us, or even expressions of an artist’s “worldview.” Because it pushes against our expectations and assumptions, modern art can offer a fresh way of reflecting on how God is at work in the world through law and gospel in surprising and often scandalous ways, even in the Museum of Modern Art.

WEAK AND VULNERABLE The artist Mark Rothko once said it’s a risky business to send a painting out into the world. And let’s face it: smearing smelly pigment across a scrap of canvas with a brush is a rather strange endeavor. In spite of the fact that they hang in the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art or cost collectors millions of dollars, paintings, even the so-called masterpieces, are weak and vulnerable things, always seemingly subject to destruction, theft, ridicule, misunderstanding, or perhaps worse, neglect.

To devote one’s life to painting pictures is an absurd practice—one that seems to fly in the face of what the world finds important, relevant, or useful. It contradicts both non-Christian and Christian theologies of culture, which are often obsessed with consumption, education, redemption, or transformation—theologies that work hard to make a painting fit into the justifying, and transactional power schemes that shape the world in which both Christians and non-Christians live and breathe and have their being. Paintings exist as contradictions to the conditional engine that drives the world.

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Edvard Munch, 1893, The Scream, oil, tempera and pastel on cardboard, National Gallery of Norway

NATURE AND THE MODERN ARTIST Edvard Munch, like so many modern artists, understood an important theological point: nature is much more than meets the eye. In 1907, Munch wrote in his journal: “Nature is not only that which is visible to the eye. It is also the inner image of the mind. The images upon the 1 reverse of the eye.”

Perhaps it might come as a surprise, but modern artists rediscovered the awesome wonder of nature. One of the reasons Munch despised academic painting—the pictures of nymphs, nudes, angels, and heroes that populated the salons and academies of his day—was because it presented an overly interpreted, explained, and allegorized nature. For Munch, nature was mysterious, brilliantly opaque, dangerously violent, and put insurmountable pressure on body and soul. He perceived in nature something terrible and unrelenting: It demands our life. The modern artist doesn’t “interpret” nature. He wrestles with it. Paul Cézanne, one of the most influential artists in the history of modernism, even admit2 ted, “Nature appears to me so complicated.”

ART AND DEATH Munch once said that art comes from joy and pain. Then he added, “But mostly from pain.”

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This contradicts the theologian of glory in all of us who bristle at weakness and failure as the means by which God is present with us, choosing to scour culture for beauty and power (evidenced in virtue and morality) as the most appropriate vehicle for God, because we can enlist them in our life project. Munch, however, would have none of it.

Munch grows old in his paintings. His eyesight fails, he loses his virility; he experiences the death of loved ones, drifts sleeplessly around his home lonely and afraid, dwelling in the growing isolation and desperation of a modern life in which even the most routine daily tasks have the potential to ignite into violent confrontations with his deepest fears.

Indelibly scarred as a bedridden and sickly child by the death of his oldest sister whom he worshiped, Munch’s work is a confrontation with death and the pain of loss. One of the pictures on display at MoMA is a lithograph of his sister on her deathbed. Munch recounted that, in a burst of energy, she rose from her bed to sit in a chair where she died. Munch kept that chair with him for the rest of his life. Many shocked viewers, presuming that art’s role is to entertain or teach, found Munch’s confrontation with death, illness, and weakness sickening. And it is.

BE OPENED! In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus heals a man born deaf and mute in a manner that recalls the mystery of creation: “And taking him aside from the crowd privately, he put his fingers into his ears, and after spitting touched his tongue. And looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, ‘Ephphatha,’ that is, ‘Be opened’” (Mark 7:33–34).

In 1538, Luther preached a remarkable sermon on this text. For Luther, Christ comes to open our ears so we may be able to hear his word in the world. About this sermon, Oswald Bayer observes that “the whole world is filled with speaking,” but through sin, “the whole 3 world is deaf!” Without Christ’s life-giving word, Ephphatha, we hear nothing but the sound

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of death, the sound of our own anxiety. Bayer continues,

Our ears are our first organs. The world—which existed as brute, unyielding nature—is returned to us as a gift through hearing the promises of God’s word. The world, which pours forth speech (Ps. 19:2), is given to us in all its sensory wonder. What then do we hear in The Scream? Silence.

what it actually is (Heidelberg Disputation, 1518).

Munch shows us that life is defined by suffering, pain, and death. The controversial German philosopher Martin Heidegger once commented that Paul Cézanne’s paintings said one thing: “Life is terrifying.” But Heidegger could also have said as much looking at The Scream.

We do not interpret The Scream. It interprets and interrogates us. It’s not only Munch who, like Melville’s Ahab in Moby-Dick, is “gnawed within and scorched without.” This is your condition and mine. The Scream forces us to recognize that this isn’t merely the product of a neurotic avant-garde artist, but a disclosure of the human condition we work feverishly to cover up, often by going to museums to look at art or to church to listen to sermons.

This vulnerable little pastel, in its hermetically sealed silence, crowded by tourists in a museum in New York, calls a thing what it actually is.

MUNCH AS A THEOLOGIAN OF THE CROSS

A LAMENT

The Scream is deaf and mute. Munch knew his paintings were silent, and it terrified him. For Munch, nature became an echo chamber where his own anxiety in the face of death could only yield a desperate, silent scream. Munch’s paintings force us to confront nature undiluted, “red in tooth and claw.” The Scream is the sound of our response to nature’s brute silence, undisclosed as a gift through God’s word.

Regarding the origins of this work, Munch remembered that as he stood on a pier, he “felt 5 a huge endless scream course through nature.”

This isn’t a nature that can be idealized, improved upon, or completed with a little dose of grace. It needs to be re-created. The Scream gives us what the hiddenness of God in paint sounds like, feels like, and looks like. The Scream doesn’t edify or teach us. It kills us.

Perhaps we reject Munch’s paintings and those of other modern artists not because they look strange or express a “worldview” or “values” at odds with our own, but because they confront us with our own mortality, our own weakness, failure, and impending death. Luther said that the theologian of the cross has the courage to call a thing

And yet it’s tempting to see The Scream, like much of modern art, as a lament. As Bayer observes, a lament asks in the face of suffering and injus6 tice, “Is God keeping his promises?” A lament, however, is only possible when the promises are known.

The Scream can thus be heard as a lament by those who believe the promise. Like all paintings, modern or otherwise, it yearns for a viewer who confesses, “All things were created through him and for him” (Col. 1:15). The Scream is not the last word. But in its articulation of pain and suffering and the embodiment of a nature that must be recreated not merely improved upon, it must be the first word we hear.

The most surprising point in the entire sermon is that Luther, without digressing and in a theologically bold way that is most strange to our ears, takes the Word that Jesus Christ himself speaks in the miracle story and claims it as a Word that every creature speaks to us. For Luther, this means that Jesus Christ is so powerful when he speaks his 4 Word that he discloses the entire world to us.

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DANIEL A. SIEDELL is an art historian and educator. He is the author of God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art. 1. Sue Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

2. Alex Danchev, Cézanne: A Life (New York: Pantheon, 2012).

3. Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 107.

4. Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology, 115.

5. Prideaux, Edvard Munch, 151.

6. Oswald Bayer, Living by Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 69.

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Book Reviews 58

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A Peculiar Orthodoxy: Reflections on Theology and the Arts

Jack

On Theology: Herman Bavinck’s Academic Orations

Oxford Handbook of Reformed Theology

By Marilynne Robinson

Bruce R. Pass, editor and translator

Edited by Michael Allen and Scott R. Swain

REVIEWED BY

REVIEWED BY

REVIEWED BY

Patricia Anders

Gregory Parker Jr.

R. M. Hurd

By Jeremy S. Begbie

REVIEWED BY

Jonathan Landry Cruse

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A Peculiar Orthodoxy: Reflections on Theology and the Arts

By Jeremy S. Begbie Baker Academic, 2018 224 pages (hardcover), $33.00 n our increasingly secular age, we have all but divorced the arts from theological consideration.

It wasn’t long ago that many of the most famous artists in the West were inspired to create out of adoration and exploration of their God and his world. We might forget this is how it’s supposed to be. The God of the Christian Scriptures is the God of art—a Creator who is glorified when others take up the act of creating as well. The gift and skill of artistry comes, like all things, from God himself. We can think of Bezalel and Oholiab, two men filled “with the Spirit of God, with skill, ability and knowledge” in order to bring to life the beauty and intricacy of God’s tabernacle (Exod. 31:1–3, 6).

Today, however, the arts are more often a venue for expressive individualism and not as much for glorifying God. In that sense, A Peculiar Orthodoxy is a welcome curative, as Begbie gets us thinking about the often overlooked intersection between the arts and theology. It’s an important subject to recover, as art can be one of the most effective media for declaring God’s truth, as well as one of the most important venues for studying it. As Begbie notes,

I

It is not only theologians and ecclesiastical councils who lead the way in doctrinal development (through the media of verbal propositions and statements) but also painters, storytellers, and other artists—the works of creative imagination are integral and indispensable to the process. (131–32) Begbie is the right man for the job of recovering a robust theology of the arts. He serves as professor of theology at Duke Divinity School

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and is an accomplished musician himself. He has written and presented extensively on the arts and theology, and in this volume, he brings together some of his best essays on the subject.

Any serious artist or appreciator of the arts would do well to engage with his work.

One of the strands that runs throughout Begbie’s essays, that certainly informs nearly every aspect of his approach to the topic, is the reality of God as triune: 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. . . . That the God of Israel and Jesus Christ possess a threefold life will configure and reconfigure every dimension of Christian faith. 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. (ix) Therefore, Begbie argues that one cannot have a proper conception of beauty, in theological terms, without a proper conception of God as he reveals himself in Scripture. In the opening pages, Begbie writes, “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” (2). Art is “created beauty”—or perhaps better, re-created beauty, as our expressions of beauty are echoes of the “ecstatic love” God has shared and expressed within the relationships of the Trinity for

Begbie gets us thinking about the often overlooked intersection between the arts and theology.

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eternity (4). Grounding the discourse in what has been and always will be true of God gives the subject of the arts the dignity it deserves and perhaps has lost over the centuries. The superb chapter on natural theology and the arts serves this end as well (129–44).

But this “primordial beauty” is not an abstract principle locked away in eternity past. As Begbie points out, it has come home to us in the cross of Christ. In the story of the incarnate Son living the Father’s presence by the Spirit’s power, “Trinitarian beauty has . . . been performed for us” (4). The cross is the other theological reality that seems to undergird Begbie’s approach. In particular, the cross comes into key focus in his essay on sentimentality and beauty. Begbie defines sentimentality here as that which trivializes evil and is emotionally self-indulgent.

The Christian can permit neither, nor does he have to. “A constant remembrance of the cross will prevent the pleasure that rightly attends beauty from sliding into sentimentality, for beauty at its richest has been forged through the starkness and desolation of Good Friday” (44). In other words, our greatest emotional lift comes not by erasing or forgetting evil, but in knowing that evil has been defeated through Christ. The cross and the resurrection embody God’s beautiful plan for the world.

This theme is carried on in a following essay about art and emotionalism, a chapter I found most compelling and particularly relevant to the church, as worshipers can often be caught up in a feeling—and not in faith—in the act of worship, especially by the music. I appreciated the balanced perspective that states: “The greatest danger lies not in emotion per se but in emotion that is not properly directed and/or inappropriate” (61). Thus the protection of the

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abuse of emotion is not to rid it from worship altogether. Far from it! Emotions are God-given and therefore are meant to be God-glorifying as well. In worship, we should exercise Godglorifying emotions. “To ‘grow up’ into Christ is to grow up emotionally as much as anything else” (76). We respond rightly, and maturely, to God in worship when we remember our union to Christ—the full and faithful human, who “embodies and enacts faithful worship.” Our humanity has been taken by Christ into the Father’s presence now, in an act of eternal worship. By the Spirit (again, the Trinitarian contours shine through) in worship, we are brought into conformity to that act of the Son: “Worship is an invitation to be dehumanized as we grow in likeness of Christ” (61). To ensure God and not man is the focal point of worship, those whose privilege and responsibility it is to lead God’s people in corporate worship—pastors, hymn writers, composers, and musicians— must weigh the implications of this chapter as they execute their high calling.

A Peculiar Orthodoxy is not light reading.

It will stretch even those familiar with the categories, both theological and artistic, that Begbie employs throughout the book. But it’s a particularly rewarding read as well. Along the way, readers engage with luminary conversation partners such as J. S. Bach and George Herbert and learn of the potential of the Reformed tradition in particular to recapture a high view of the arts. But the best thing the book offers is the grand and glorifying conception of God: beautiful from and for all eternity.

JONATHAN LANDRY CRUSE pastors Community Presbyte-

rian Church in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is the author of Hymns of Devotion and What Happens When We Worship.

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Jack

By Marilynne Robinson Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020 309 pages (hardcover), $27.00 Ah, look at all the lonely people.”

These opening lyrics to the Beatles’ 1966 song “Eleanor Rigby” came to me while reading Jack, the latest book in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series. This is probably because the title character is so lonely. In fact, all the main characters in these four books are lonely, suffering together and apart in their aloneness. As the Irish poet John O’Donohue writes in Eternal Echoes:

“

Each one of us is alone in the world. It takes great courage to meet the full force of your aloneness. Most of the activity in society is subconsciously designed to quell the voice crying in the wilderness within you. . . . Until you learn to inhabit your aloneness, the lonely distraction and noise of society will seduce you into false belonging, with which you will only become empty and weary. . . . It takes years to bring your mind home.

Robinson introduces us to Jack in her Pulitzer Prizewinning Gilead (the first book of the series), which takes place in a small town in 1956 Iowa. In this story, the big news in Gilead is that Jack Boughton has come home after being away in parts unknown for some twenty years. Told from the perspective of Reverend John Ames, Jack’s godfather after whom Jack is named (John Ames Boughton), this book consists entirely of Ames writing a

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journal about his life for his young son, who was born to him in his old age. Having lost his first wife and baby in childbirth decades earlier, Ames lived alone until Lila (whose touching story we learn from her perspective in Lila) wandered into Gilead. They married and had a son, whom Ames named after his best friend, Robert Boughton (Jack’s father).

Ames has a heart condition and knows he won’t live to see his son grow up, so he writes this journal to share his family history, as well as his theological reflections (which focus on Feuerbach, Calvin, and Barth) and his own personal struggles, which mostly involve how to deal with Jack now that he’s come back after years of estrangement from his family to see his ailing father. The two pastors—Ames, the Congregationalist, and Boughton, the Presbyterian—have been lifelong friends and are now coming to the end together. Since he knows he could die any day, Ames becomes worried when Jack and Lila seem to get on so well and his young son takes to him. Jack is the black sheep of the Boughton household, and Ames doesn’t want him to have anything to do with his family. Through Ames’s journal writing, we learn of Jack’s sordid past history— from Ames’s perspective, of course, and personal bias against Jack.

We don’t find out what’s going on down the street at the Boughton house until we read Home, the second book. This is what I would call a “coquel” as opposed to a “sequel,” because it takes place simultaneously with the events in Gilead, though now from Glory Boughton’s perspective. The youngest daughter of eight children, Glory has returned home to care for her elderly father. Wounded from a failed relationship and now middle-aged, Glory feels doomed to spend

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the rest of her years in the old homestead. Soon, her father will be gone and her siblings—except for Jack—and their families will visit once in a while. “‘Home to stay, Glory! Yes!’ her father said, and her heart sank” (Home, 3).

Like all of Robinson’s Gilead books, the stories unfold solely through the eyes of the main character of each book, which in the fourth book is finally Jack Boughton himself. Although we’d heard a lot about him from John Ames and Glory, we never knew what Jack was feeling or thinking. We could only wonder why he’s the way he is. But in this book from his perspective, we soon realize that even Jack doesn’t know the answer. He is like a dark romantic hero in the vein of Heathcliff from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (or, to update the analogy, Anakin Skywalker in George Lucas’s Star Wars saga). Jack is one of those misunderstood, confused, tortured “bad boys” of literature. Or like Prince Hamlet (who actually plays a small role in Jack), who thought too much and finally made up his mind to act only when it was too late.

On the first page of Jack, we find him walking behind Della who says, “I’m not talking to you,” to which he responds, “I completely understand” (3). At this point, we have no idea what happened between them to anger her or why he’s following behind her like some lost puppy. The next scene takes place a year later in a cemetery. Accidentally locked inside for the night, Della actually seems happy to have Jack for company.

If we’re reading the books in the order in which they were written, then we already know that Della Miles is the true love of Jack’s life.

After years of trying to fit in with his family and deserve his devoted father’s love, Jack doesn’t feel he belongs anywhere or with anyone until he meets Della one rainy afternoon when he gallantly offers her an umbrella. A schoolteacher at a Black school in St. Louis (where most of Jack takes place), Della shares his love of poetry and Shakespeare—as well as his feeling of alienation. In the graveyard, we see Jack’s hope revived as he thinks to himself,

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“Here she was . . . the woman he had recruited into his daydreams to make up for a paucity of meaning and event he sometimes found oppressive.”

So here I am. . . . And here she was, Della, the woman he had recruited into his daydreams to make up for a paucity of meaning and event he sometimes found oppressive.

No harm done. She was safe in his daydreams. Cherished, really. (62–63) By beginning the book with this long scene in the cemetery, Robinson gives us a chance to get to know both Jack and Della—these two lost souls wandering around the graves of the dead in the middle of the night (“Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name”). At one point during their conversation, Della says, “Sometimes I shut myself in my room and throw myself down on my bed and I just let it run through me. All that wrath. In every bone in my body. Then it seems to sort of wear itself out and I can go for a walk or something. But it never goes away.” (65)

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Given the place and time of the story (the Jim Crow era of the South), we can surmise that her anger stems from how she is “kept in her place” by the world around her. Although educated with a respectable job and family, as a Black woman Della still has to be careful to follow all the “rules” laid down by society—such as sitting in the “colored” section of the bus, separated from where Jack sits with the other whites. She must act the part of “the good Christian lady” (65) and never cause any problems or scandal for her family—especially her father, an AME bishop in Memphis who firmly believes in the segregation of Blacks from whites.

Eventually, she bursts out of those oppressive bonds, and in freeing herself loses her job and grieves her family. Della and Jack are soulmates, but they can’t legally live together as husband and wife (interracial marriage wasn’t made legal until 1967 by the Supreme Court, and much later in parts of the Deep South). To do so was to face imprisonment.

This is where Marilynne Robinson’s artistry and mastery of storytelling and writing can overwhelm the reader. Her books seem so subtle—there’s not much action but lots of character development and dialogue—then all of a sudden, you’re hit with the emotion of what’s happening on a much deeper level and we feel what the character feels. I understood Jack and

[Robinson’s] books seem so subtle . . . then all of a sudden, you’re hit with the emotion of what’s happening on a much deeper level.

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Della’s authentic love, and I was angry at such unfair laws made by those who sought to keep control of their own world. Painfully aware of the consequences of being together, Jack and Della pledge their undying love and loyalty as husband and wife. From that point on, they consider themselves truly married and brace themselves for the fallout they know will come from her family, especially her father.

This feeling of empathy for Jack, however, takes us into a dark and uncomfortable place.

He is a tortured soul who dreads eternal damnation, teetering on the edge of the abyss. He desperately wants to know if he’s one of the elect for salvation or if he’s doomed to perdition. As a Presbyterian pastor’s son, Jack was well versed in the doctrine of predestination.

But unsatisfied by this unshakeable uncertainty that had plagued him all his life, he turns to the Congregationalist minister (Ames) for some comfort. There is a conversation—which includes Ames, Boughton, Glory, Lila, and Jack—on the front porch of the Boughton residence about this topic. It must be a crucial scene since Robinson includes it in three of the books, from three different viewpoints (Ames, Glory, and Jack).

Jack knows his father loves him more than any of the other children. And though he grieves at how he constantly breaks his father’s heart, he just can’t seem to stop his hurtful behavior.

When Jack leaves home around 1936 during the Great Depression, he begins to drink heavily and falls on hard times, even landing in prison for a while. It’s almost as if he had to prove to himself that no matter what he did, he knew his father would welcome him back with open arms (the classic prodigal son story). Of course, on a deeper level, he’s really putting God to the test through his self-destructive behavior, which includes serious thoughts of suicide. But then he meets Della, and the world becomes a different place for him. In her eyes and in her arms, he finally finds that love and acceptance he has longed for his whole life—something he could never find at home in Gilead for some reason.

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He knows he doesn’t deserve her love, but he also knows he desperately needs it. And the beautiful part of it all is how much she needs him.

Toward the end of Gilead, John Ames writes in his journal that he feels he’s to blame for why Jack rebelled—or at least seemed to rebel— against his father and the church. He believes it was the “cold baptism” he gave to him as a result of being surprised at the font that the child was to be christened “John Ames Boughton.” All Ames could think was that this wasn’t his son— why should he bear his name? He always felt “a burden of guilt toward that child, that man, my namesake” (Gilead, 188).

It’s in the closing pages of Gilead that we see Jack for the last time, in any of the books, when Ames walks him to the bus stop. Sitting on a public bench, the godfather finally blesses his godson and namesake: “Lord, bless John Ames Boughton, this beloved son and brother and husband and father” (241). Ames knows about Della and their young son Robert (whom Jack also named for his father), but he allows his love for Jack to finally rise to the surface—his love, God’s love, God’s grace. Ames writes: I told him it was an honor to bless him. And that was absolutely true. In fact I’d have gone through seminary and ordination and all the years intervening for that one moment. . . . I said, “We all love you, you know,” and he laughed and said, “You’re all saints.” (Gilead, 242) In Jack, before he arrives in Gilead after his twenty-year absence, as he takes his leave of Della in St. Louis, Jacks thinks to himself: The knowledge of good. That half of the primal catastrophe received too little attention. Guilt and grace met together in the phrase despite all that. . . . He could consider the sweet marriage that made her a conspirator with him, the loyalty that always restored them both, just like grace.

(Jack, 309)

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“The knowledge of good.

That half of the primal catastrophe received too little attention. Guilt and grace met together in the phrase despite all that.”

Judgment and grace. The knowledge of good and evil. The two high wires Jack had been trying to balance on his whole life. Unless Marilynne Robinson provides us with more of the story, we don’t know what happens to Jack once he steps onto that bus at the end of Gilead, bidding farewell to the place of his birth, the “hill of testimony,” the “mound of witness.” He doesn’t stay to wait for his father to die; he couldn’t bear to be there when all his happy siblings and their happy families gathered at the old homestead.

Soon, there would no longer be any earthly father or godfather waiting there to welcome him home, no matter what he did or how long he was gone. I like to think, however, that Jack understood at last how much his heavenly Father loved him, unconditionally, that there was an unending grace that had finally blessed him— and perhaps even Della and their son as well.

PATRICIA ANDERS is managing editor of Modern Reformation.

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On Theology: Herman Bavinck’s Academic Orations Bruce R. Pass, editor and translator Brill, 2020 186 pages (hardcover), $119.00 n Theology: Herman Bavinck’s Academic Orations is a curated selection of four speeches by Herman Bavinck, translated and edited by Bruce Pass. Pass, presently a lecturer in Christian thought and history at Brisbane School of Theology in Australia, completed his PhD in systematic theology under James Eglinton at the University of Edinburgh.

This translation is a significant addition to the growing literature on and by Bavinck in English.

The four speeches range from Bavinck’s early academic days in Kampen to his mature thought in Amsterdam. They were selected for the purpose of providing a significant window into how Bavinck understood the “scope, subject matter, and practice of theology” and how it developed across his lifetime (2).

In Pass’s introduction, the concept of development garners the most attention. The focus on “development” will garner more attention as the field moves beyond an intellectually cleaved Bavinck. Pass notes at least six lines of Bavinck’s development: (1) theology’s approach to secularization, (2) the advent of the principium internum, (3) the parsing of faith’s relationship to theology, (4) movement away from the polemic of “Reformed principles,” (5) the bir th 1 of a Christian worldview, and (6) Bavinck’s critical appropriation of Friedrich 2 Schleiermacher.

Pass does well to draw out the historical proclivities of 3 each speech. They are worthy

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of their own review, just as they were in Dutch newspapers over a century ago. In this review, I will note how Bavinck relates theology to three specific spheres: the academy, the church, and the world. Indeed, here too development can be identified.

THE ACADEMY Bavinck gave his first speech, “The Science of Theology,” on January 10, 1883, at Kampen Theological School. His main claim here is that theology is a “science,” or in particular, a scholarly discipline that belongs among the other sciences. Bavinck defended this approach differently in 1883 than he would later on, partially because his approach to secularization changed (5). In this speech, he first put forth a twofold defense of the religious character of all sciences: “Because it illumines the theological dimension of those disciplines” (8). Then he talked about the scholarly character of religion: “Not only πίστις (faith), but also γνῶσις (knowledge) is a gift of the Holy Spirit” (51). In essence, this defense claimed that all sciences are theological and that theology is scientific.

In 1883, Bavinck argued for theology’s seat at the academic table. But by 1902, he suggested that in order for theology to remain truly theological, it might need to excuse itself (34). In “Religion and Theology,” his third speech given December 17, 1902, Bavinck approached the question of theology’s relationship to the university differently.

Pass right ly guides us to consider this against the backdrop of the Higher Education Act of 1876, which basically turned theology faculties into faculties of religious studies.

In other words, theology now had to labor even harder to be truly theological.

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How did Bavinck identify theology’s relationship to the academy, then, in 1902? He seems to wonder what relationship remains for theology and the academy. The theological encyclopedia (exegetical, historical, dogmatic, and practical parts) of theology could be governed properly only if arranged organically around the revelation of God (137), and the splitting of the encyclopedia between seminaries and universities cut their organic relationship. The loss of the discipline of theology would be a colossal detriment to the academy, for it would have sequestered its animating force. Thus Bavinck’s understanding of the nature, purpose, and task remained stable, but how it related to the university shifted alongside theology’s changing role in the university.

Ultimately, theology is for God, and the end of theology is the glory of God. At the end of the ages, there will only be one science, “knowing all things in God and God in all things.”

THE CHURCH In the first speech, Bavinck kept theology closely attached to the church. In the third part of this speech, he was concerned with the question, “Who is theology for?” To this end, Bavinck put forth two intermediate goals: the church (the concrete) and the academy (the theoretical).

Ultimately, theology is for God, and the end of theology is the glory of God. At the end of the ages, there will only be one science, “knowing all things in God and God in all things” (58). In this speech, Bavinck played with the threefold office of Christ as it relates to the theologian.

Although interestingly and perhaps disappointingly, he fleshed out only the idea of the office of priest and prophet.

A theologian is a priest, who serves God day and night in his temple, a prophet who declares him and always speaks unto the honor of his name, a man of God equipped for every good work. Theology is thus truly religion, a serving of God, a working for his kingdom. It is, as it was often described by our theologians, θεοσέβεια, θεοζωία, θεουργία (divine worship, divine life, divine ritual. (55)

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Bavinck returned to this theme to close “Religion and Theology”: A theologian is someone who dedicates themselves to speaking about God because they speak from and through Him. To practice theology—it is a holy work. It is a priestly service in the house of the Lord.

It is itself religion, a serving of God in His temple, a devotion of heart and mind to the glory of His Name. (141) The theologian is connected closely with the office of priest and the office of prophet.

Bavinck’s only mention of regality belongs to theology itself and Christ the king, unless the reference to “kingdom” above is a veiled reference to the office of king. Theology as queen is Christlike: “she reigns through service” (9).

As it seems, the threefold office of Christ is split between the science and the scientist and between theology and the theologian.

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In turning to his second speech, “The Teaching Office,” we get a slightly different viewpoint. Bavinck delivered this speech on December 6, 1899, in Kampen on the heels of a failed union proposal between Kampen Theological School and the Free University of Amsterdam. This speech was an attempt to defend the failed proposal from another angle.

Where do professors of theology belong: in the church or in the academy?

Just as Bavinck drew out the threefold office of Christ across theology and theologian, we might speak of them separately here while also considering them unified. Where does the theologian belong? We can summarize Bavinck’s view with the following five propositions: (1) like the office of pastor, the theologian’s knowledge as a teacher is a gift of the Holy Spirit (98, 103–4); (2) the pastor is of greater prominence (on account of calling) than the theologian (95); (3) the pastor offers wisdom to the church and the theologian offers knowledge, but both teach the same doctrine (94–95); (4) the theologian does not have an ecclesial office (98, 107); and (5) the theologian must serve the needs of the church (107). Bavinck writes:

For Bavinck, the church can flower without theology, but she grows wild. Theology prunes the dead and cultivates life, but theology wilts without the church.

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The theologian or “The doctor is someone qui ecclesiam verbo veritatis format et instituit (who forms and establishes the church with the word of truth), who has the purpose ut ecclesia vere erudiatur (of correctly teaching the church) and always remembers this one thing: ut ecclesiam reddat sua doctrina doctiorem (to make the church more learned in its own doctrine). The purpose of his activity is also the perfection of the saints and the building up of the body of Christ. (107) How does theology relate to the church? Just as in “The Science of Holy Theology,” the academic character of theology is couched in the more fundamental relationship of theology for the church. As Pass notes, What one sees in the account of the place of theology in the modern university and the place of theological scholarship in the church are the classic contours of NeoCalvinist thought: distinction without separation, freedom in mutual dependence, diversity in unity. (14–15) Theology may have a place in the modern university, but its primary place is in the church: “[she] is the daughter of the church” (103). For Bavinck, the church can flower without theology, but she grows wild. Theology prunes the dead and cultivates life, but theology wilts without the church. Theology is ecclesial and scientific.

The relationship of the theologian and theology to the church does not change; the relationship remains fundamental to Bavinck’s understanding of the task of theology.

THE WORLD Bavinck delivered his fourth and final speech, “Modernism and Or thodoxy,” in central Amsterdam at the Gebouw voor den Werkenden Stand on October 20, 1911. In this speech, he

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Theology is distinct from the world: it is a transcendent path that undergirds all of reality. Indeed, it provides the unity that the world and humanity desire, but this unity makes way for diversity.

articulated neo-Calvinism’s relationship to historic Christianity and modern culture. In essence, this was a response to a book in which neo-Calvinists were charged with being neither “orthodox” nor “modern.” They were said to have taken orthodox terms and filled them with modern content, which kept them from belonging to either. Bavinck’s argument proceeded to first dismantle the terms being used, that both “orthodox” and “modern” were inadequate (156).

Then he posited that both he and Kuyper were simply “Reformed,” and that the organic unityin-diversity of Christian theology was the only true path forward (156–57).

How did Bavinck imagine theology related to the world? Pass notes that this shifted for Bavinck across his corpus. While early Bavinck saw the need for his denomination to “build a dyke,” the later Bavinck saw it as more necessary to present an ecumenical front toward those outside of Christianity (5). Since Bavinck’s approach to secularization is the main thread of development Pass discusses in the introduction, I don’t want to dwell on it much here. But with theology as the queen of the academy and the daughter of the church, I do want to mention how Bavinck illustrated theology’s relationship toward the world: he claimed it was a different path (170): Christian theology, however, allowing itself to be instructed by the Holy Scriptures, took a different and deeper view of reality and it proclaimed, especially in the mouths of Augustine and Calvin, that all difference and inequality among creatures had its

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final cause and deepest ground in the one, wise, and holy will of God Almighty. Thus, there is indeed a unity that holds everything together, but this unity is not to be found within the world itself, by erasing the differences and contrasts. It rests in the hand of Him, who as King of kings reigns over all things. . . . In the rich, multifaceted world, special revelation occupies a place of honor, for it bears its own character, has an independent content, is ruled by its own law, and forms the basis and content of the Christian religion, which is ruled by the law of the Spirit of life in Christ, who sets us free from the law of sin and death. Everything is held together by the almighty, wise and holy, merciful and gracious will of Him, who is our Father in heaven—in heaven, in order that we may not think of His heavenly majesty in an earthly way, and yet our Father, in order we should trust at all times with childlike fear and reliance on Him. (175–76) Thus theology is distinct from the world: it is a transcendent path that undergirds all of reality.

Indeed, it provides the unity that the world and humanity desire, but this unity makes way for diversity. It is a unity-in-diversity that reflects the Triune God. Even here one sees a more ecumenical front. Bavinck and Kuyper in neoCalvinism didn’t offer another path; they offered Christian theology.

In summary, Bavinck perceived theology as having an essential place in the academy. It is the universalwissenshaften (the universal

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science) that facilitates harmony between the sciences and between the head and heart of humanity. Theology, the “theologian,” and the university are all birthed together (74). Theology is the science that directs the sciences toward their proper end—the glory of God. She is a servant queen who doesn’t reign over the other sciences as a tyrant, but rather fulfills her office through Christlike humility. This is because God is the object of inquiry; and like all sciences, theology is defined according to its object.

Preliminary to this scientific calling, however, is theology’s calling to the church. In this dual calling, theology offers a path that undergirds all of reality for the world, science, and humanity.

Bavinck’s reflections on the scope, nature, and practice of theology remain relevant and generative. If imbibed well, his reflections may have an enduring impact on those who practice theology today. Although the expensive price of the translation will be prohibitive for many, it’s my hope this review distilled enough of its salient features to help add it to a reader’s future book budget. Pass’s labor here, as well as his monograph on the development of the central dogma 4 in Bavinck’s theological system, will have an enduring impact on Bavinck studies.

GREGORY PARKER JR. is currently a PhD candidate in sys-

tematic theology at the University of Edinburgh and the co-editor and co-translator with Cameron Clausing of Herman Bavinck’s The Sacrifice of Praise (Hendrickson, 2019) and Guidebook for Instruction in the Christian Religion (Hendrickson, 2022).

1. He later published on the concept of a Christian worldview. See Bavinck, Christian Worldview (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019.

2. This was initiated most recently in Bavinck studies by Cory Brock, and Pass advances the conversation. See Brock, Orthodox Yet Modern: Herman Bavinck’s Use of Friedrich Schleiermacher (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2020).

3. Pass’s introduction may be read in harmony with Eglinton’s new biography of Bavinck. See Eglinton, Bavinck: A Critical Biography (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020).

4. See Bruce Pass, The Heart of Dogmatics: Christology and Christocentrism in Herman Bavinck (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020).

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Oxford Handbook of Reformed Theology Edited by Michael Allen and Scott R. Swain Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020 688 pages (hardcover), $145.00 eformed theology is catholic Protestantism, and catholic Protestantism is Reformed theology. The volume before me serves as a summarized introduction to the question, what is Reformed theology? It provides something of its genesis in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as the deeper roots prior to that time, which have been intentionally mined to develop Reformed theology: its diverse permutations, whether historical/ temporal, social/cultural, geographical/political; some analysis of sample texts that have been in one way or another significant at various points of the maturation of a tradition; and some theological themes or heads of doctrine that have been and remain in focus in the Reformed line of sight (these last essays are intentionally written by contemporaries who themselves have labored in these arenas).

As a broad overview, the handbook serves its purpose and will be a welcome resource. Thanks are due to the contributors, and particularly the two editors, who continue to provide leadership in this part of the theological field. Within the volume itself, to limit down to three essays here, I note the following: Trueman’s on the Reformation context, Sytsma’s on the Enlightenment context, and Davidson’s on Christ.

Because of the limited space in this review, I will refrain from commenting on almost forty essays and tease out instead one important thread worth noting: What is this beast, “Reformed theology”? While it’s fair to expect that most or all of the authors feel this is a question, it’s clear the editors intended it to be not merely a historical question—that is, what Reformed theology has been, except insofar as this informs their principal intention—but what it is now, what it could be, and what it

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should become. This is the problem lurking in the volume. I say it’s a problem, but not because Reformed theology suffers from an identity crisis or needs to take up its contemporary and self-assigned task. The authors in this volume allude to how difficult it is to pin down such a thing as “Reformed theology”; indeed, the diversity is startling.

Attempts have been made here and elsewhere to give important features, thematic foci, discernable streams connected to place or perhaps university setting, and so on. But in many ways, efforts remain frustrated, unless what is Reformed is artificially limited to a confession or series of confessions—where even then the diversity is, once more, startling. Defining Reformed theology is a problem, then, only as a roving commission for a campaign forward— victorious not for Reformed theology, which may come and go as you please, but for Christ and the church that is being saved. It is a commission for theologians today who decide to be and are accepted as theologians of the church in whatever stripe designates it as “Reformed.”

But what is it, then, that makes Reformed theology “Reformed”? I suppose that approaches that attempt to provide a definition by assembling a series of properties have their place, squishy as they may be and too often are, veering even more frequently into annoyingly vapid tropes that, for the record, are identically shared with Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox (among others): for instance, emphasizing Scripture, championing grace, focusing on the greatness or sovereignty of God, and so on.

The platitude that Scripture is the principium cognoscendi is not original to Protestants, nor is it their sole property.

This and others aside, in my opinion, the best way is to return to the older procedure, not least for purposes of

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clarity. Asking what makes theology “Reformed” and probing what constitutes it as such help us look for the difference that contracts the proximate wider genus into something specific.

I believe that Reformed theology is catholic Protestantism and catholic Protestantism is Reformed theology, and the editors point us in this direction (not to mention having written a book called Reformed Catholicity). Scott Swain, co-editor with Michael Allen, says that Reformed theology is a “catholic, Protestant tradition” (2), and various authors throughout the volume play to the same tune: e.g., Cleveland points out that the Reformed “pursuit of catholicity” led them in detailed engagements with their medieval forebears. “The Reformed use of medieval thought in the end represents Reformed catholicity at its finest and most profound” (37). The same goes for Goudriaan’s preceding chapter on the Reformed reception of the fathers. Anchoring themselves in the fathers was one way the Reformed exemplified how they were “a part of the one catholic church in terms of a succession of doctrine” (my italics), if they no longer could point to the “succession of bishops.” “Numerous works were published with the purpose of demonstrating the genuine catholicity of the Reformed faith” (14). “This catholic symphony”—immediately referencing Polanus’s famous Symphonia catholica (1607), among other works making use of that name—“or catholic and orthodox consensus between the Reformed and the early churches was meant to refute the Roman Catholic charge of Protestant innovation” (15).

I should point out that this specifically shows the legitimacy of the Protestants to the rest of the catholic church and anyone else who cared to listen, not necessarily to excise the Roman Catholics. While both sides tried to show concrete ways in which the other

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side had departed from this catholic tradition, in point of fact, these did not pertain to the heart of the catholic faith under the “articles of majesty,” as Luther would call them, but to more peripheral issues—issues more peripheral to the center, which is the catholic faith.

Some of these incidentals were clear and dogmatic; some were differences in understanding what was as far as truth agreed upon; and some, to be frank, were casualties of a shift in philosophical tools used to explicate what the doctrine was at hand. Although this last is often overlooked, in an environment not only of philosophical change but of instability, the sixteenth (and then later seventeenth) century was when the same thing was said in different ways. It was those ways that were disagreed upon or, more often, misunderstood.

The explosion in the seventeenth century of Protestant universities and the very forging therein of the Reformed tradition itself as a theological tradition bears this point out well.

Scores of theologians across the Continent and on the Isles were produced, and they underwent in many ways a compressed catchup on Scholasticism (cf., e.g., Wisse’s chapter on Reformed orthodoxy). What is seen as a consequence? It is precisely this flowering of catholicism, not only in the areas of agreement about God, Christ, and other such, but also disagreement in the very theological places signaled as a reason for leaving (or being cast out). It was these and the same that were carved out more precisely, when before they were wooden blocks chopped out by busy Reformers concerned to make the church holy once again, who were at pains and required to say what was wrong in doctrinal words. It is in these areas where we observe, to put it broadly, understanding and formulations arising far closer to those now on the other side of the freshly blazed (and still lamentable) aisle.

Here is a question of first magnitude I would like to press upon this present volume. It is a question that varies throughout and needs to be resolved for reasons much larger than those

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pertaining to this book. We say Reformed theology is catholic Protestantism. Fair enough.

But what is the specific difference here? Is it “Protestant” under the genus “catholic,” or is it “catholic” under the genus “Protestant”?

It’s clear that some authors in the volume float back and forth between these two options. At points, this is because sometimes “Reformed” is in reference to Roman Catholicism or sometimes to Lutheranism on a point of disagreement. This isn’t inappropriate, and it doesn’t bode well for understanding things clearly. If “Protestant” is the specific difference, then “Reformed” is indexed over against Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy under the head of lively and thrilling catholicism. If “catholic,” then it would seem “Reformed” is meted out over against Lutheran or (Ana)Baptist communions under the banner of this fresh-faced Protestantism. Either of these two makes a different beast entirely.

It’s possible to consider the historical development of the Reformed and decidedly conclude that what Reformed theology is receives its specification under the genus of Protestant, facing the other species of the Protestant tradition: chiefly, the Lutheran. Upon the many and diverse movements initially impelled by a handful of significant individuals (e.g., Luther, Calvin, and so on), the reformation(s) across Europe became unified against the common foe of Rome in protest. So they became, and so they were, Protestants. Later and in increasingly pronounced ways, as Protestantism found its legs, distinct groups further consolidated under a larger communion; these were especially the Lutheran and what became known as the Reformed orthodox (cf. for some of this, see Carl Trueman’s chapter).

But there is something potentially deceitful here: history tells us how it passed, not of what it was made. The historical point of the Reformed genesis should hardly define what Reformed theology is in its maturity. The fact that the Reformed distinguished themselves from Lutherans doesn’t mean they’re made of

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that distinction. The development of a body of doctrine powerful enough to become a body of people is eked out along the lines of a history, yes, but the development of an idea that grips not an individual but a movement, not a movement but a sacred portion of the holy church, is not along the strait of a historical onward march. If the earlier Reformers were carved out—together with the Lutherans—against the Jesuit Bellarmine, then the later Reformed orthodox were cut out of the catholicism of the fathers, largely immediately, and that of the medievals, largely mediated by the Roman Catholics. This period of Reformed orthodoxy was not a regression of Protestantism or a calcification around lamentable central dogmas, but precisely its maturation as a theological tradition, an infant in the early sixteenth century.

Whatever can be seen to define Reformed theology in its infancy is ordered to what defines it in its maturity. Surely, the mature Reformed orthodox (in many ways, still the high watermark for what it is to be Reformed), whatever their parentage and whatever their proximate interlocutors, were concerned not to be “Reformed,” so as not to be Lutheran on the main; and they were not concerned to be “Reformed,” as anything of substance at all, except insofar as this meant being a catholic in the present condition of some protest. Reformed theology falls on one side of a dividing line (the other being Roman Catholic), but it is still intently aimed and driving toward the very center. Its wheels are bent into the line, even if its forward track persists only in parallel and as a step off. What I want for today is for Reformed theology to be this: the thing under the genus of “catholic,” contracted by the specific difference “Protestant.” We must resist the temptation to make Reformed theology as a thing over against Lutheran, or Anglican, or Baptist, and instead fold it out of something much more beautiful.

In other, less principal declarations, Reformed theology will carry its own tune in conversation with its interlocutors, all under the banner of the catholic church. With Roman

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Reformed theology has as its chief joy the privilege of joining the chorus of the church’s praise to God, who is declared to all as with one voice.

Catholics, Reformed theology will remain distinct in how it understands what is (for the most part) identical in dogmatic position. There will be fewer central (and so more uncertain because derivative) dogmatic claims disagreed upon as a result of this difference in systematic understanding. There are of course elements in “Reformed” theology that are distinct or proper to it, but not of its essence; they are distinct, more as a consequence of a discernibly unique space for development, that serve as an “echo chamber” and the opportunity for intensifying certain ideas. These become “markers” of Reformed theology rather than its constituting features, and some will be warts rather than features of a face. Likewise, Reformed theology will remain distinct from, for instance, Lutherans, on issues of sacraments or polity.

But these and others are incidental to itself and of its outer garb, not the stuff of its heart and love of its soul. Reformed theology has as its chief joy the privilege of joining the chorus of the church’s praise to God, who is declared to all as with one voice.

R. M. HURD is a systematic theologian and teaching fellow

with The Davenant Institute.

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05

B AC K PAG E

The Divine Artist

by Michael Horton

ll good gifts—from creation and providence to redemption and the consummation of Christ’s kingdom—come from the Father, in the Son, by the Spirit. The Father is the architect, the Son is the mediator, and the Spirit turns a house into a home.

Tracing the Spirit’s work through the Bible, we’re amazed at the breadth of his operations.

Too often, we tend to confine the Spirit’s work to the church and the application of redemption. Jürgen Moltmann is justified in concluding that in both Roman Catholic and Protestant treatments, the Spirit’s work is often confined to the inner life of believers (Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation, 8).

And Abraham Kuyper complains that too many devotional works are “crude superficialities” that confine “the Spirit’s operations entirely to the elect, beginning only at their regeneration” (Holy Spirit, 44–45).

If we introduce the Holy Spirit too late in the story (that is, the application of redemption), then we miss much of the action, and we can end up with a narrow and even distorted vision of the Spirit’s work—with the new creation focusing instead on the Spirit’s operations in the individual soul, seeming in contrast rather than continuity with the old creation as such.

When we begin with the Spirit’s work in creation, however, then the canvas of his operations widens. The Bible’s second opening verse tells us that the Spirit hovered over the watery chaos. As Calvin interprets, the Spirit’s expansion “over

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the abyss or shapeless matter” demonstrates “not only that the beauty which the world displays is maintained by the invigorating power of the Spirit, but that even before this beauty existed the Spirit was at work cherishing the confused mass” (Inst. 1.13.14–15; my italics).

The Father not only speaks matter and time into being as a royal fiat, but he does so in his Son—the same Son who became incarnate in the world, a creature according to his complete human nature, while remaining the sovereign Lord of nature and history. Furthermore, the Spirit is at work within creation to bring this perfect plan to completion. Unlike pagan creation myths, Genesis represents the chaos (“darkness and void”) of the original matter God brought forth by his speech as good. It’s not a force of evil, a personified monster; rather, it’s a messy artist’s studio that the Spirit turns into a beautiful gallery.

Because he is the Trinity, God not only acts upon this world but also in it and within creatures to bring about his intended goal. Let this vision inspire us as we consider the Divine Artist who never puts down his palette or brushes, even in the darkness and void of this fading evil age.

He is still at work within creation—and within us—so we may “bring forth” splendid fruit for others to see, taste, touch, and enjoy.

MICHAEL HORTON is editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation and the J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido.

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