This is a followup to Dave Nantais’ recent post here at R&T. In Nantais’ article in America magazine on rock and spirituality, and in his recent book Rock-A My Soul, he cites the work of theologian and musician Jeremy Begbie. I, too, have found Begbie’s work original, exhilarating, brilliant. Through many books and articles, and tireless lectures and performances around the world, Begbie creatively connects musicality and musicianly practice to Christian theology. He typically shows how entering thoughtfully into musical experience affords ways of deepening Christian theological claims. In a word, what music wants to do, as music, is testify to God. What first must happen, though, he shows, is an examination of the practical character of music’s happening. For example, Begbie examines the practice of musical improvisation to observe that that type of musical experience is a “thinking in notes and rhythms; not thinking ‘before’ them, or on to them, or through them[,] but thinking in physical sound—notes, melodies, harmonies, meters.”  Begbie argues that jazz improvisation affords its own style of knowing through a relationship that one takes up to other musicians, to the music itself, and to one’s instrument. Improvisation schools one in the skills of collective artistic creation by linking musicality to dialogue with one’s fellow musicians, to give-and-take, to attentive listening to others, to a sense for the importance of graceful timing in relation to others and to the shared artistic work. He likens this to the experience of the church under the influence of the Spirit.

Begbie has basically started a whole kind of theological field out of his own deeply inventive sense for music’s congruity with Christian doctrine. I have not read all of his works, and with that caveat I still raise my one reservation along the way: that what Begbie’s theology selects and interprets as (high) musical knowledge serves to endorse—not depart from or radically correct—prevailing notions of Christian doctrinal orthodoxy. One might object that this is not “his project,” but then there would still be a need for a kind of correlational-style theology like Begbie’s that had a more strongly historical and practice-based sensibility about both Christianity and musical experience. At any rate, here is Professor Begbie in typically (that is, exceptionally) gracious and learned style:

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York