From the Newsletter Archives…Steven R. Guthrie: ”The God of In-Between Spaces”
(The Keynote Speaker at the SCSM February 2018 Conference at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Originally printed Spring 2016.)
I have a clear memory of standing next to my parents in the church in which I grew up. I am about eight years old, and we are singing a hymn — although I don’t remember which hymn it is particularly. What I do remember is that the congregation is sounding out some long, sustained “ahhh.” Perhaps it is the “Ahhh-men” at the end of the Doxology; or perhaps it is one of the “ahhhhh-le-lu-ia’s” at the phrase endings of “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today.” What stays with me particularly is the experience of looking around — at my mother’s open mouth; at the song leader behind the pulpit, his Adam’s apple wobbling; at the young and old people standing behind and beside me, all these many mouths hanging loose at the hinges of all these many jaws, the air around me stirring and swelling with a deeply meaningful, wholly inarticulate exhalation of voice — and suddenly being struck by the unutterable strangeness of the whole thing. I thought (although who knows what words, if any, I would have used to articulate this): “What a bizarre and funny and beautiful thing we are all doing right now! How remarkable that a group of human beings would gather in a room and agree to stand and make these particular kinds of sounds with their lungs and throats and mouths!” And stranger still: “How remarkable and how strange that all this breathing and wobbling and ‘ahh-ing’ would move me so deeply!” Years later, I came across a passage in which Shakespeare muses about the mysterious potency of something as simple as a vibrating string: “Is it not strange that sheep’s guts would hale men’s souls from their bodies?” (Much Ado About Nothing, II.3).
On the first day of class, my freshman music theory professor said: “Music Theory is the study of why the things that sound good, sound good.” I thought: “That’s exactly what I want to know!” Largely for that reason and in pursuit of that question, I became a music theory major. I had a wonderful time over the course of my undergraduate education, learning to write chorales and fugues and how to do some basic analysis. But at the end of my college career, I realized that I still hadn’t found my way to the heart of the question I had been asking. Of course, I was interested in why this chord rather than that worked in a particular passage. But beyond that, I continued to wonder: why does anything sound good? Why should there be such a thing as music? How have I been made, and how has the world been made, that a vibrating string or column of air should move me to tears? “Is it not strange that sheep’s guts would hale men’s souls from their bodies?”
At some point it occurred to me that the questions I had been asking were not only musical questions; they also were theological questions. Only a certain kind of created being can experience music, and only in a certain kind of created world. So then, how has God so made the world that it should include music? Or as the musicologist Victor Zuckerkandl once asked: “What must the world be like, what must I be like, if between me and the world the phenomenon of music can occur? How must I consider the world, how must I consider myself, if I am to understand the reality of music?” (Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World, tr. Willard R. Trask [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956], 6).
So I was excited some years later about pursuing these same questions from the perspective of theology. I approached one of my seminary professors about the possibility of undertaking some sort of theological study of music. He puzzled for a little while before suggesting: “Maybe you could explore the theology of various hymn texts? Perhaps from a particular hymn writer or a particular era?” And indeed, as I began exploring the seminary library, I found that the little bit that had been written about theology and music was mostly devoted to theology and texts, albeit ones that had been set to music. Of course, texts of musical works are worth studying. But I had been interested in the music particularly. This wasn’t just because of a personal bias toward instrumental music, or something like that. The music itself — the fact that such a thing as music would be such a significant part of human existence (and of Christian worship particularly) — seemed theologically important.
As I think about these experiences of studying music and studying theology, what I find most interesting are the ways in which these two areas seem to both lean toward and pull away from one another. In many ways it was the study of music that led me to theology. (Or maybe a better way of putting it is to say that the experience of music posed theological questions.) The world — including the world of human artifacts like music — points beyond itself. We are not wrong to experience sound, song, and music as not only delightful, but also meaningful. Theological study, likewise, points beyond itself — or at least it should. The work of the theologian is not meant to be the sequestered exploration of arcane intramural disputes. In Jesus Christ, Colossians 1 declares, all things hold together. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the point from which we make sense of all of reality. The calling of the theologian then is to interpret the world in which we live in light of the gospel.
At the same time, as fields of academic study, both music and theology manifest the powerful impulse to stay within the safety of one’s own disciplinary domain, to avoid venturing too far outside the conceptual language of one’s own academic guild. Of course, to a certain extent this is appropriate and necessary. It’s no virtue to pretend that we are qualified to say everything about everything. It is, however, a virtue to listen and to engage in conversation, even (perhaps especially) with those who work in areas where we have little expertise. We do well not only to immerse ourselves in our own areas of study, but also to point to the trajectory our studies trace, out beyond the boundaries of our own competence. This is what is rather blandly called “interdisciplinary work.” The term, however, suggests something extracurricular and marginal — existing not in the center but in the “in-between” spaces. But the world in which we live is a whole world. Indeed, the original vision of a university (from universitas — “the whole”) was precisely to explore and articulate that wholeness.
As Christians we can say more. The very possibility of this sort of conversation across areas of study is a kind of theological testimony. Reality is not merely the product of the words and concepts by which we describe it. The world to which Christianity testifies is one that precedes, and so is larger than, any of the individual human discourses that attempt to give an account of it. We live in a cosmos, not a chaos; a world in which a single reality can be described in many different timbres and voices. If “in [Christ] all things in heaven and earth were created . . . and in Him all things hold together” (Col. 1:16–17), it makes sense that such connections would suggest themselves to us; that musical realities and theological affirmations would gesture toward one another.
And we can say more still. The God Christians speak of is not a vague, undifferentiated “Divine,” but the God whose name is “Father, Son, and Spirit.” For the Christian, those who study “this-worldly” realities may also speak of God, and those who study God must likewise concern themselves with “this-worldly” realities, precisely because in Jesus Christ, God has concerned himself with this world. Indeed, in Jesus Christ — fully God, fully human — God has bound himself to the created world and has taken the created world into himself. The “in-between” spaces separating God and humanity, heaven and earth, have been drawn together in the person of Jesus Christ. The legitimacy of the connections we regularly make — among physical, cultural, and spiritual realities — are likewise underwritten by a God whose Spirit delights to indwell the dust of the earth (see Genesis 2:7, where the human is given life by being filled with the Breath of God). By the Holy Spirit, God indwells his children, and those children are likewise caught up into the life of God — made sons and daughters of the Most High. God has bound himself to the world, and by the Son and the Spirit has drawn this world into the life of God. In this sort of world, it makes sense to attend to the breath of those singing around us, and to find in it words like “alleluia” and “amen.”
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Suggested Reading from Dr. Guthrie:
Jeremy S. Begbie and Steven R. Guthrie eds., Resonant Witness: Conversations Between Music and Theology (Eerdmans, 2011).
Steven R. Guthrie, Creator Spirit: The Holy Spirit and the Art of Becoming Human (Baker Academic, 2011).
Trevor A. Hart, Making Good: Creation, Creativity, and Artistry (Baylor University Press, 2014).
W. David O. Taylor, For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts (Baker Books, 2010).
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Bio:
Steven Guthrie is Professor of Theology at Belmont University, Nashville, where he is also director of the Religion and Arts program and the Worship Leadership program. He earned his B.Mus. in Music Theory from the University of Michigan, and worked as a musician and minister of music for seven years before going on for graduate study in theology. His doctoral dissertation from the University of St. Andrews was on the theology of music, and he served as postdoctoral fellow and then as a Lecturer at the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts, at the University of St. Andrews. He is author of Creator Spirit: The Holy Spirit and the Art of Becoming Human (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011), and co-editor with Jeremy Begbie of Resonant Witness: Conversations Between Music and Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011). He continues to lead worship at his church, and play music professionally in the Nashville area.
