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Music, Emotion and Worship: Is There Anything to Fear?
By Jodi Anderson
Staff Writer
The crowd roars as the spotlights find the contenders entering the arena. In one corner of the ring climb the Arts. Theology flexes in the opposite corner. As each is introduced, half the crowd cheers; the room seems evenly divided. The opponents begin to taunt each other. The tension mounts. Finally, the referee steps into the center of the ring. The bell clangs. The fight is on!
A boxing match may seem like a silly metaphor for the debate about the place of theology in the arts and vice versa. However, it is appropriate, as the two factions tend to square off with very little likelihood of compromise. They batter each other, gaining no ground, ending up bloodied and panting. Can this futility lead anywhere?
Jeremy Begbie doesn’t think so and has made it his mission in life to reconcile theology to arts and arts to theology. In a January Series lecture last Friday and in a seminar the following morning, Begbie, noted author, professor and associate director of the Institute of Theology, Imagination, and the Arts at St. Mary’s College of St. Andrew’s University in Scotland, spoke on different sides of this issue. Each has a need for the other, he argues, and can find a common focal point in the Person of Christ.
Friday’s lecture was entitled “Music, Emotion, and Worship: Is There Anything to Fear?” Begbie set out to answer this question using a dynamic Powerpoint presentation and recorded music. A classically trained pianist, the sometime composer and worship director also utilized a grand piano as a seemingly natural extension of his style, playing pieces of compositions as examples to support his points.
To begin, Begbie listed the common fears of music in Christianity. Because music has the power to influence people’s attitudes and actions, the possibility of manipulation exists. This is a particular concern at Christian rallies, since music is such an integral part of these events.
Christians also fear music’s “hiddenness.” It could easily lead people astray, as the children were in the story of the Pied Piper. A major concern of John Calvin was that music could lead Christians away from the Word. He insisted that music be tempered by words, particularly those of the psalms.
Lastly, Begbie claimed that there is a fear of emotion in and of itself. It is seen as inherently inferior, he said, impeding our grasp of the truth.
Even the very structure of music is under suspicion. It can activate physiological responses, such as making the listener sweat. It evokes expressive bodily behavior; going through the motions brings emotion. In other words, raising hands and jumping up and down brings the feeling of euphoric joy, rather than those actions being a response to the emotion.
Music is a very conscious experience, Begbie continued. Emotion is related to objects of realities, and intentional states of mind, as when a certain praise song reminds you of summer camp or a ballad recalls your first kiss. Music concentrates—or compresses—our emotions. As Tolstoy observed, music is shorthand for our emotions.
Emotions can be either appropriate or inappropriate. Begbie emphasizes that in worship, everything must relate to God. Emotion that is unfaithful to God is bad worship; worship is where we learn not to be adolescent. The chance to mature exists in worship, as through it, Jesus concentrates our emotions and reshapes us.
The peril lies in sentimentality. It is indulging emotional states by ignoring or trivializing evil through misrepresenting reality or God and his Word. This dangerous indulgence avoids costly action, or discipleship, leading us further and further from God, as Calvin feared.
The stakes are high, Begbie concluded. They are no less than who God is and what he’s about. Emotion, and therefore music, is not the problem, only what takes us away from the Triune God. The audience was brought to Heaven’s doorstep as the immensely talented pianist closed with a composition in C#m, deeply contemplative and joyful at the same time. It placed an exclamation point to an already intense topic.
It was almost a delight to get up early on Saturday morning to hear Jeremy Begbie speak again. Not only was the topic interesting, “Theology and the Arts: Why They Need Each Other in the Church Today,” but his wit, complemented by his smooth accent, made being at the FAC by 8 a.m. worth it.
The seminar was divided into two sections. The first was entitled “Why the Arts Need Theology.” Begbie defined theology in general terms as “the disciplined thinking and re-thinking of the Christian Gospel, with a view to nourishing the life of the Church in its worship and mission to the world.” It seeks to be faithful to the Gospel of Christ and remains Christocentric at all times. Theology is also “oriented towards and shares in the dynamic of the self-revelation of the triune God.” As Calvin students well know, it is faith seeking a deeper wisdom, for the sake of embodied, godly living.
“Why do the arts need theology?” Begbie asks. “In order that the arts can be faithful to the Gospel, and embody this Gospel [in] today’s world.”
In this postmodern world, he declares, there is a backlash against the arts. Not too long ago, arts were marginalized. Natural science gave us an objective view to the “real world,” while the arts were considered highly subjective and private. The attitude towards arts eventually reversed; personal expression took precedence over objectivity. Again, there is a shift in attitude, as the arts are regarded with a certain air of suspicion. “The gift for awakening the imagination,” said Graham Clay, “is used to numb the imagination while seemingly stimulating it.”
Still, the world embraces the arts. There is a strong link between them and spirituality, not necessarily Christian. This is evidenced by releases of projects like “The Prayer Cycle” CD, a compilation of spiritually exploratory songs contributed by artists such as Alanis Morissette and Madonna. Begbie says that this surge of interest in the arts should be a wake-up call for the Church to get involved. According to author Robert Wuthnow, “Spirituality (at the least) [is] the quest to know God and to experience the sacred. Art and spirituality very naturally link hands.
Begbie has a five-fold vision, which pivots on “incarnation and Trinity.” The vision is “of the physical world as fundamentally good and ordered, worthy of trust, of our calling as finding and respecting order, and fashioning a new order, of hope, centering on the three days of Easter, of pentecostal polyphony [and] of a cosmos made new.”
Polyphony is many melodies sung or played at the same time. Only God’s pentecostal polyphony can make it possible for us to relate to each other as “other,” to not only embrace them as members of the Church, but to also recognize their individual contributions.
It can be difficult for artists, says Begbie, who are members of a “regularly worshipping body of Christians,” because many “will have no serious interest in the arts at all.” It is time for the Church to stand with its artists and for the artists to cherish the traditions of the Church. E.H. Gombrich said, “Creativity is ‘the gradual modification of a tradition under the pressure of novel demands.’”
After a short break, Jeremy Begbie returned to tackle the topic from the opposite angle. In the section entitled “Why Theology Needs the Arts,” he asks these questions: (1) How can the arts help us think and re-think the Gospel, (2) how can the arts help the thinking that happens “at the turn” from hearing to speaking the Gospel and (3) how can the arts help that movement from discovering to articulating the Gospel for today?
Music teaches us to hope. “Taking hope seriously means taking time seriously.” Playing a dissonant chord and then resolving it, he demonstrated that music relies “on [intense] patterns of tension and resolution more than any other art form.” This cycle of tense and release comes in different type and once you complete a circle, the very same chord played at the end sounds different than when it was played at the beginning. Theology’s parallels are uncanny.
These cycles and patterns cannot be “rushed through or rushed over,” Begbie went on. Music instructs us to wait for God’s time and not try to take control. Nevertheless, it “pulls you forward and pulls you in.” There is a multi-layer of hopefulness to music; every downbeat is an upbeat on another level. In other words, one level’s return is another level’s advance.
In Scripture, “with each fulfillment, hope is intensified [and] each fulfillment anticipates the final fulfillment,” by building on each other. Holy Saturday is the ultimate form of tension. Just as the pauses in a composition are intended to create anticipation in the listener, the silence of Holy Saturday was a rest on a downbeat before the upbeat of Easter Sunday. Just because we can’t see anything happening, said Begbie, doesn’t mean God isn’t working.
“So why does theology need the arts?” asked Begbie. “Because the arts have distinctive capacities, particular powers to advance thinking ‘at the turn’ from hearing to speaking the Gospel, because of [their] integrative power, the challenges of ‘aesthetic vengeance’ and ‘spirituality-through-the-arts’, [and] because Scripture includes ‘art forms.’”
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