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Discordant Religion

John Dickson (Studio)

I must admit, I never thought I’d play Justin Bieber on this show … partly because I never thought someone who came up with this…

Justin Bieber chorus

John Dickson (Studio)

… would one day come up with this…

Justin Bieber song

John Dickson (Studio)

That’s Bieber’s song ‘Holy’ – if you hadn’t worked that out. It’s kind of sweet. It’s part love song, to his new wife, and part hymn of praise to the God who makes everything – love, sex, hardship, hope – “holy”. 

Justin Bieber chorus

John Dickson (Studio)

The film clip’s kind of cool, as well. I think I even liked the rap in the middle. Speaking of rap, a similar mainstream conversion seems to have played out with Kanye West …

Kanye West song

John Dickson (Studio)

That’s Selah from Kanye West’s last album Jesus is Lord. It’s not exactly subtle. Bible verses, hallelujahs, intermittent preaching. And, frankly, “Christian Kanye” has met with mixed reviews. But religion and music have gone together, since time immemorial. Sometimes it’s sublime. Sometimes not so much. As we pick up our musical theme from last week, today we’re exploring Discordant Religion … I’m John Dickson, and this is Undeceptions.

Undeceptions theme

John Dickson (Studio)

Music is social, psychological, and mathematical. It also points us to God. That’s what we explored last week with Professors Jeremy Begbie and Kirsty Beilharz. Music embodies the elegant rationality of the world. It’s an audible expression of the rationality built into everything, from the smallest particle to the outer reaches of the cosmos. When we recognise that in music, we are somehow participating in the Mind of God. Well, that’s what loads of intellectuals have said through the centuries. Others, of course, are content to see music as just sound waves in the air which excite neurons in our head to produce sensations of pleasure and beauty (or, in some cases, displeasure). Today, we’re looking at some greyer aspects of music. There’s music that grates with us, masterfully so. There’s music that’s just bad, tacky, trivial. And there’s music that’s so intellectual I had no idea what my two guests were talking about …In fact, I left them talking to each other, and I just smiled and nodded (wait to the very end of the show to hear that!). Jeremy Begbie is Distinguished Professor at Duke University in North Carolina. He’s a world authority on music and its intersection with philosophy and theology. Last episode, he explained how music is the perfect storytelling vehicle, particularly the way its patterns of tension and resolution take us away from home only to bring us back home again. But on social media, when I did a call out for questions to put to Prof Begbie, one muso I know suggested I ask him about dissonance in modern classical music. Is it just bad music?

John Dickson: 
Is the deliberately dissonant music of the 20th century, uh, thinking of Arnold Schoenberg, and so on, a matter of taste, you know, just some people happen to like going down that route or is it a representation of a psychology or a cultural moment?

Jeremy Begbie: 
It’s certainly a representation of a cultural moment. And Schoenburg would have said that. We’re talking about what’s musical atonal music. That is when you don’t have a home and therefore you don’t have an away and you don’t have a return. It feels like you’re always away from home. You don’t have a tonal center, a key, a point, which you come back to. And yes, I think there’s definitely a cultural moment. I think it can be over simplified the connection between that and the culture of the time, but it’s, it surely no accident that, that, that music arose at a time of, of massive and, um, torturous cultural struggle in which the very reality of hoping for something hoping for a return hoping for a consummation or resolution reconciliation that hope was put in question in so many ways, not least after the first world war. So I think what composers have done, particularly in the 20th century, is they’ve explored that realm of a dissonance that, well, it takes a long time to resolve, or perhaps doesn’t fully resolve, but ends with a question mark because I’m not just atonal music, but a lot of 20th century music will not resolve neatly. It will not end in blazing D major chords, it will leave something open. Lots of composers did that before. I mean, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, and they all did that, but it becomes, it becomes a sort of habit in the 20th century and a very interesting one as well. I think the first thing to do with music like that is to say, what’s going on here? Um, in, in the course I teach at Duke and theology music I said, the one question I’m not allowing is do I like it? Uh, that may be an interesting question or appropriate up to a point, but it’s very much the question of our culture that think that you think that’s the only question you can ask. And the only one that’s worth asking, no, the first thing with any kind of music we come across, especially that we don’t like is to say, what’s going on here? What am I to learn? What have I to learn about the culture out of which this came, what this composer is doing and how he might have, and then as Christians say, what can I learn as a Christian from that? What can I learn theologically from that?

John Dickson (Studio)

Kirsty Beiharz is the Professor of Integrative Studies at Sydney’s Excelsior College and the former Professor of Music at Sydney’s Institute of Technology. She says dissonant music often tackles the sorts of stories that are full of uncomfortable lessons.

Kirsty: 
I wanted to touch on Olivia Messiaen the composer, as I said, partly because he’s someone I’ve researched in some detail now, but also because he speaks about not only an emotional response to his music and, um, people might not be familiar with some of his very modernistic works like his meditations on the Holy Trinity, which of course drew me in. But many people have come across his quartet for the end of time. That’s a very famous work that he wrote during internment in the second world war and its first audience was an audience of people who were just other prisoners of war. Some of them were Jewish. Some of them were secular. Like he was a Catholic. Uh, there were workers, just all sorts of people who were bundled together in this internment camp. Um, and he wants to speak a message about eternity and about, uh, his dream of the eschatological kingdom, the future kingdom of God in its perfection, because it’s so much more profound than the times that we live in. It’s devoid of pain and suffering and so on. But what he says, um, in an interview about what he hopes the audience will hear. And I think this is maybe something people sense. So you don’t have to be a faith believer to have this experience, but sometimes you listen to music and not only is it just simply move you emotionally, but there’s a sense of the transcendent, of something extraordinary, something bigger than you, some extra universal experience. And it was invoking that transcendent experience, which he did by inscribing his sense of awe and wonder about God. But he trusted that that would manifest as a transcendent listening experience for someone irrespective of faith or on faith.

Quartet for The End of Time

John Dickson (Studio)

Olivier Messiaen’s music is… not to everyone’s taste. However we respond to it, it underlines the point that music is a kind of language; it can convey meaning. Messiaen wrote his Quartet For The End of Time while being held in a Nazi concentration camp. So, there are points where it deliberately repels us. You can feel that something is wrong with the world in Messiaen’s most discordant movements.

Quartet For The End of Time

John Dickson (Studio)

So music doesn’t just hint at the order of the universe – which is the traditional theme in the philosophy of music – it can also confront us with the disorder, not by making mistakes in the music, but by designing tensions in the notation and melody. It’s surprising that the 20th and 21st centuries have seen the rising popularity of dissonant or atonal music – global violence and global catastrophes have never been more prominent in human history. And 21st-century listeners are far more familiar with dissonance than they think.

Jeremy Begbie: 
One last one last point on that, which I think is particularly interesting is people, when they hear this kind of music, is that there’s an awful dissonant atonal music is that I would never spend money on that. I’d never buy that. Well, actually you do because it’s pervasive in film, music, film, complete commercial of the 20th century and 21st century, uh, use a huge amount of dissonance and unresolved disonance very often. And what they’re often doing of course, is taking you into the drama of the images and the words and such that you really feel that. So we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t think, Oh, we never understand that. Or I think no popular culture understands dissonance extremely well. And the great film composers, and there are many, many great film composers around the globe. They know that, and they know it and they know how to do, how to deal with this kind of music, because they’ve been to school with, with the Schoenbergs and the Bergs and Faber and Stravinsky’s and, um, and the atonal composer of the 20th century, they’ve been to school with them. You see? So they know those techniques.  Sadly, many Christians have not. And they think, Oh, that’s just, that’s just, you know, darkness. And it’s all going, it’s all going to hell. And it’s all terrible. Well, come on now. We need to be much subtler than that.

John Dickson (Studio)

Christians have had some good musical days, of course. Even the most hardened sceptic feels elevated by some of what the Church has produced …

Handel’s Messiah

John Dickson (Studio)

I don’t care who you are; that’s goosebump territory. The Hallelujah Chorus from George Friedrich Handel’s Messiah. It’s testimony to the power of music to convey not just a message, but how to feel about that message. We’re going to play a little more … feel free to picture Producer Kaley here as a Soprano, I’ll stand with the Baritones, and Director Mark, of course, is up the back with his favourite … kettle drum. 

Handel’s Messiah

John Dickson (Studio)

I wanted to ask Jeremy about one of the musical mistakes some Christians have made in their long and winding history. Sometimes they rejected music outright! 

John Dickson: 
Some forms of Christianity ban all music. Uh, many churches tried to ban rock and roll, uh, going back to the early church, many churches, uh, banned instrumentation, and only allowed a voice. How do you account that anti music tradition if music is so important to Christian spirituality,

 

Jeremy Begbie: 
Uh, great question. Various strands, I think going on there, I think one of them is the materiality of music and the fact that it does indeed appeal to the body, the pleasure of music is at least in part the pleasure of the body. It makes it, and because of our physiology, we are attuned to music and music is resonating with us. It resonates in the chambers of our body. It both imitates and works with bodily movements and bodily processes. I mean like heartbeat, for instance, you know, your basic kind of rhythm, you’ll find all over music, um, twos and threes are the kind of commonest rhythms and music that derive from the body and so forth. So I think it’s this materiality that frightens some people and the, and, um, the anxiety there is that the material will pull you into its own life, such that you forget God such, that you forget who created the material world. So I think that’s part of the fear. I think another fear is it sheer emotional power, which is also linked to its bodily involvement. That music can inflame. It can calm it, it can soothe it can console it, it can do all these things. And that’s, that’s, uh, both a wonderful thing, but in the church, many have been frightened of that because emotion, as it were on its own or emotion not directed, ultimately towards God can be a dangerous thing. As, as we all know, I mean, gosh Hitler think of the use of music at his rallies. Um, music can do appalling harm in that way will be used for very harmful ends. Let’s put it that way. So I think those are the, those are the two main things. And both of those derive well that associated with Plato even if they weren’t derived from him. Um, he definitely, those are his fears. I often say mind you, um, if I’m with people who agree with me, in other words, people who are right, is that with people who agree with me, I say, well, hang on a second. Before you dismiss that, that fear of music, hear it. What have you to learn? There’s a kind of base materiality that can never get beyond bodily pleasure that is indeed very dangerous. Of course it is. If all were, I mean, gosh, look at drugs, you know, hard drugs, what are they doing? So there’s a danger, of course there is with emotional, the emotional pull of music. Yes, the emotional pull of music. If it’s, if it’s used for harmful ends. It can be incredibly dangerous. You’re dealing with an amazingly powerful tool. I often …I’m ordained. I’m an ordained clergyman. And I also work a lot with church musicians. And I’ve often thought part of the tussle there is that, is that the poor or vicar or priest or minister or whatever it, these, this musician having the most extraordinary power over a congregation, you know, they just change a few chords or something. And the congregation, the tears are flowing and it poor minister, perhaps a bit unmusical. And, you know, and she doesn’t do it. Doesn’t play the guitar or whatever looks out and say golly, see what they can do. I’ve only got words I can only preach. So I can understand that that kind of tussle. And I think the musician there instead of just sort of, you know, beating his breast and saying, Oh, isn’t that great? I’m so powerful, should say, well, gosh, there’s a huge responsibility here.

 

Kirsty: 
Karl Barth would say, perhaps along the lines that don’t worship the creation worship the creator, make sure you’re not trapped by just the beauty in their setbacks and the objects of creation, because it has no power to save you. There’s no salvific capacity in the creation itself. So he was actually a little bit cautious about human replications of God and Calvin of course, fairly famously said any kind of image or form given to God is incredibly inadequate. So that kind of came out as him saying that music, like painting and idols in the church, was way too trivial, but we need to also think of the historic context in which he made those reactions against churches and a society that was perhaps filled with, um, idols or effigies and misrepresentations. And perhaps people were also being swindled in the way that faith was being represented to them. And it was in that spirit in which he then was making the point that that music probably was too superficial. =

Jeremy Begbie:
Well, he’s a very interesting guy, Calvin, because he recognized the great thing about Galvin. He recognized the good that the emotional power of music can do in his very earliest thinking about music. He basically thought it was something you should allow. If you really got to do that kind of thing, you’ve got to sing fair enough. I’m caricaturing a bit, but he had a big shift and eventually came to sing – virtually he says, you must sing. It is a thing. most expedient, I think is the phrase that he uses. And the scholars wonder what it was that did that. And most are agreed that in part, it was hearing, uh, French refugee congregations singing the Psalms. And he was so moved by that. He found that the words of the Psalms could come alive so much more for him and for the congregation. But he said, no, you’ve got to do this. You’ve got to do this. So you see, even Calvin recognized that music could really do extraordinary things and take you as he put it, make you, he doesn’t put it this way, but make you love God even more deeply can, can warm. I think he talked about warming the heart towards God, even more. And that’s wonderful now. Yeah. Then he went too far. He said, sorry. You can only sing the Psalms. It’s very dangerous. Otherwise. Cause the music is going to grow away and do its own thing. Otherwise you’ve got to harness it to what, to the words of the Psalms and only the, so he got, then he got to sort of narrow minded about it all, I think. So that’s what I’d say. I’d say Johnny, you can see, you can see the power of music. Uh, but just bear in mind music can actually glorify God, even without words, you know, and yes, if the whole service is geared towards the God of Jesus Christ, don’t get over anxious, then allow music to do its own thing in its own way to the glory of God. Sure. That’s what I think. I’d say to him.

John Dickson (Studio)

But even when Christianity has embraced music wholeheartedly, it’s sometimes made a real hash of it. That’s where we head, after this break…

John Dickson (Studio)

One of the best questions people offered up on social media when I said I was interviewing the legendary Jeremy Begbie raises one of the other musical failures of Christianity.  

John Dickson: 
 I want to ask you, we touched on this earlier is modern church music, just too happy to capture the full spectrum of the divine drama.

Jeremy Begbie: 
I think a lot of it is, um, when I say that people think, Oh, you’re attacking so-called contemporary Jewish music. No. Um, yes, I am taught to a point, but it’s right across the board. I think there’s that I would say one of the biggest dangers we’re facing in the church music world is sentimentality and even standard hymns mainly standard hymns resolve their cadences and extraordinary, predictable, and easy going ways. Things are so regular things have to have this beautiful ending for everything. Um, and so yes, I think that I, I think the, um, the way I put it, this, I think the vocabulary, the musical vocabulary in a lot of church music is very, very limited. Now if you read the Bible, of course the, the emotional range is massive and highly nuanced and subtle and diverse. Just the emotional range alone, but so much music in church I find really got about three or four different moods and that’s it. And, and that’s, I think is a great, and again, I mentioned film composers earlier. You see, what’s so interesting about if I say that to some audience, they say, Oh, that’s just, you’re just an elitist. And because it’s, you’re classically trained and all the rest of it. Well, hang on a second. You go to films don’t you? You see, if you think about film music, a great film composer, they they’ve been to school with a lot of other composers. They’ve got an extraordinarily, at least the good ones have a very wide palette of colors of musical colors to choose from. And, and can’t we say, well, huh. You know what I’m saying? We’re Christians. We believe particularly in scripture, you’ve got the full gamut of human experience and all the, the range of dispositions and postures before God, we’ve got all that. We’ve and, and we’ve got a culture that really can understand a lot of types of music for goodness sake. Uh let’s let’s widen the vocabulary. That’s that would be my plea. Now I’m getting to retirement soon. So, hey, it’s over to you, young guys, to fix all that. You know, it’s easy to make these theological points, and we’d email workshops that are going to take that on. I’m glad to say in this country, there are some wonderful groups that I’ve worked with who see this problem through and through most people have seen it. One last thought I’ve seen it with the lyrics. They’ve seen that the lyrics were often extremely narrow in range of possibilities. I think a lot of that’s changing in the songwriting world at the moment. There’s very great movements, not least in Australia, but also in the UK and certainly in the States. But now we need to bring the same kind of thoughts and sensibilities to the music, I think.

John Dickson: 
Well, there’s a challenge for Undeceptions listeners, crew create some musical lament for the church and see, yeah.

Jeremy Begbie: 
That’s yeah. That’s of course, very often the very thing that’s missing and with lament, think with the think of lament worldwide, but it’s a, it’s a universal musical form. You’ll find it in every culture. And much of it relies on the vocal, the vocal size that go naturally with lament. So it speaks very deeply to us, but it’s pretty hard to find in the Western traditionals. It’s not impossible, but it’s, it’s pretty hard to find it to assume you have to be upbeat the whole time, which is, which is just not Christian. It’s just sub Christian it’s sentimental sentimentality.

John Dickson (Studio)  

Hey, quite seriously. If any listeners out there want to try their hand at writing a song of lament, or if you can convince some musos to compose one, let us know, and we’ll showcase it here on the show sometime. Just you and a guitar (or piano) would be fine. Back to Jeremy …

Jeremy Begbie: 
One of the things I think we do have to learn from that is that sadly in the Christian Church, um, we love too often we’ve loved easy resolutions and  quick fixes. And one of the things that kind of music does is remind us that the world is not like that. Of course we live in hope, but we live in a, in a world marred by, by dissonance. And it’s into that world that God comes in Jesus. It’s, it’s that world that crucified the son of God. And if we ever forget that victory, which of course we celebrate comes through crucifixion, um, then, uh, then you know, I think we’ve had it. So this music reminds me of that.

John Dickson (Studio)

When I was doing music full-time – in the 1990s – the biggest Christian songs were all upbeat or beautiful. Plenty of my songs weren’t, but, then again, I never topped the Christian charts! Here’s what Spotify tells me were the top five Christian songs for that decade…Weighing in at number

5: Open the Eyes of My Heart by Paul Baloche. Lovely tune … great sentiment … it’s pretty.

Following up at number 4: Above All by Maranatha!

Great message – Jesus died for me, thinking of my salvation “above all” – but it could be a love song in its sentiment right …

Number 3: Michael W. Smith’s Awesome God

A catchy tune – and I remember churches turning it into an antiphonal thing – but it’s mood is “up” …

Speaking of up …

Here’s no. 2 : Shine Jesus Shine

Buff and I had this at our wedding – it was the 90s, okay!!!

And the number one Christian worship song from the 1990s: Hillsong Worship’s Shout to the Lord.

No one does the Christian power ballad like Hillsong … and this one is probably the most influential Christian song since ‘Amazing Grace’ … I remember singing it in rural China some years back with Chinese pastors. I’ve never written anything even remotely as tuneful as these songs … but my point is: it’s all really just one mode, one mood. It’s positive, it’s reaching forward, it’s celebrating, it’s loving … there’s none of the underside of life – the sadness, the mistakes, the discord, death, loss, brokenness, outrage. Is that because Christianity doesn’t face up to any of those things? Is it just the opiate of the people – helping them cope with life by focusing on an imaginary realm of love and bliss? Well, maybe, sometimes! But the only songbook in the Bible tells a very different story … 

Let’s press pause… I’ve got a five-minute Jesus for you…

There’s one reference in the Bible to Jesus singing. It’s tucked away at the end of the Last Supper scene. Perhaps the significance of that scene … overshadows how the account ends. “When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives” Matt 26:30. As the one who presided at this meal, Jesus himself will have led his disciples in the song. We don’t know what the song was, of course. But Matthew’s language – humneesantees – tells us it was one of the 150 psalms in the biblical book of Psalms. Was it one of the happy worshipful psalms? Possibly. Passover – when this meal took place – was a celebration. Then again, Jesus had put quite a dampner on the night by telling them all he was going to die … and passing them bread and wine saying “this is my body … blood”. And the thing is, many of the individual psalms in the book of Psalms are NOT celebrations. Scholars classify the psalms – Praise, Royal, Wisdom … and roughly 30 of the 150 are classified Psalms of Complaint or Lament.

Psalm 10:1. Why, LORD, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?

Psalm 13:1-2. How long, LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart?

Psalm 22:1-2. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest.

These were all sung by Jews in Jesus’ day, and by Christians after that … and whether or not the song Jesus sang with his disciples was one of praise or lament, within hours of that Last Supper Jesus is yelling out one of these psalms. It’s a lament psalm. It’s actually Psalm 22. In the crucifixion scene we read in Matthew 27, “About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema  sabachthani?”, which means (Matthew explains), “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). Jesus didn’t sing this lament. He screamed it. And thereby endorsed ‘lament’ as profound mode of communication with the Father. Bono (essay on Psalms): “That’s what a lot of the psalms feel like to me, the blues, Man shouting at God – ‘My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me’.” Doesn’t go far enough. Psalm 22 is more than us ‘shouting at God’. It is God’s invitation for us to do so. There are so many lament songs in the Bible because God invites us to come to him with our doubts and complaints – as ourselves, not in some religious opioid state – because it’s precisely in this mode of personal engagement with God, even in the discord and tension, that we might also hear the beautiful melody that promises a resolution, that calls us home. You can press play now.

John Dickson: 
Jeremy, are there musical scores that move you to tears? And if so, can you explain why?

Jeremy Begbie: 
Yes, there are some, but I’m not sure I can give it huge theological justification.

John Dickson: 
I’m happy for an emotional justification.

Jeremy Begbie: 
 In jazz. When I hear Oscar Peterson improvise, I think he’s, he moves me to tears. And I think as I think he’s doing something like what Bach was about, it’s a sheer joy in music making and he’s taking very simple, basically simple ideas. He’s elaborating them in the way that just gets to me. Uh, I’m always moved by the music of Brahms Johanas Brahms. And I think it’s because he combines a kind of extreme sorrow, an extreme joy all at the same time very often. And he does it in a way that’s beautifully formed. It’s not just the kind of emotional vomit it’s, it’s gloriously formed, but all the more moving for being so formed. Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion will always get to me. There’s an aria towards the end, which I find it hard to, to keep a dry eye with itself to Peter’s betrayed Jesus and the Alto sings have mercy on me, Ebaume dich. That’s very hard. You have to be incredibly hard not to be moved by that. The atheist, uh, director, Jonathan Miller has a little YouTube about that. And he said, it gets me every time. In fact, just talking about it, I can feel the tears welling up. And he says, then of course, if I were the crouching clergyman, I would at this point say, it’s getting to you because you’ll get you’re being grabbed by God and taken into the heart of this story. And it is the meaning of life. And then he goes on and says, of course all that’s just ridiculous. So sad. In other words, the music brought him so, so close. So close.

John Dickson: 
I often feel close to tears when I just think about my former career in music. But when I, when music is all that I did, when I think of it now it’s 25 years ago. I, I can almost be brought to tears. It’s just such an interesting thing. Do you mean with joy or regret or of, Um, an ache an ache? It’s like the best friend in my life that I haven’t seen for 20 years. That’s that’s the feeling interesting. Hmm. I should probably get up there.

John Dickson (Studio)

Actually, I have to admit there were a couple of points listening to Jeremy that I really was close to tears – especially all that stuff about the way music can capture the full spectrum of life, the discord and pain, as well as the resolution, the coming home. Honestly, music really affects me. And interviewing Prof Begbie made me realise that even talking about music can affect me. Anyway, back to Jeremy … 

Jeremy Begbie: 
I teach a lot of, no, no, it’s a great, great guy. I very privileged to teach a lot of classes where the typical clientele are those who have been deeply involved in some artistic pursuit before being Christians could be music, theater, dance, whatever, and they’re struggling to come to terms with it in a positive way. So they desperately miss it. They desperately miss being on stage perhaps. Um, but they feel rather guilty for missing it. They, they want some way of coming to terms with it positively. And some of them say, look, I just need, I just needed to get out of that for two or three years before I could begin to kind of reappropriate. And here I come along with all my kind of fancy theological theories about the art, I say, well, that may all be true. I’m not ready for that yet. I just need a bit of space before I can handle that emotionally. I don’t know if that helps somebody, but if anyone’s listening to this, it’s, you know, take time. It’s okay. God will find a way of redeeming that of that. However good. And however bad it was that God won’t waste anything from it. He’ll take it.

John Dickson (Studio)

So music can tell stories and it can teach. It can move us. It can even point to God. Kirsty – Prof Beilharz – found that her own spiritual journey from atheist to Christian led to a greater understanding of the meaning of music – and she was already a professor of music when she embraced Christ.

Kirsty: 
I guess, probably for about the first, uh, 20 to 25 years of my academic career. I was probably what you’d call a skeptic. I think I was still a Christian when I started university, but by about second year when I was starting all the European philosophers and the, um, the secular existentialists that really somehow pulled me away. And I lost that faith, um, when I was starting my first PhD, which was music, not surprisingly, um, in the UK I discovered people in a Buddhist community. It’s not a remotely evangelical of faith or philosophy, but I became quite intellectually intrigued with Buddhism. Uh, it appealed to my reason, I think, and for many, well, two decades, really many years, I sincerely practiced that with the, uh, hope of being somewhere on that path to enlightenment. And it was, um, considerably down the track. I think after, um, a number of, um, things had occurred in my life when probably a person might fall back on faith or religion to question the deeper meaning of life, the purpose in suffering, those kinds of things. Why do people die? Why do people lose their jobs wider? Awful things happen. Those sorts of introspective concerns. Um, and I didn’t find that Buddhism was able to answer those questions. And I also found that, uh, nearly two decades later, I wasn’t any closer to enlightenment. I don’t think after sincerely stunning the scholarly side of Buddhism, as much as I’m trying to practice its various meditation practices and including a musical one, including playing the shakuhachi as a meditation instrument, which is a Japanese bamboo flute. Uh, I still play that instrument, but now I play it for different reasons. Uh, so it left me empty in the respect that I wasn’t capable of my own salvation. And then I did start listening to some talks on God and science, which started to really validate for me the, the satisfying coalescence of science and God, not necessarily of Christianity, but certainly of the existence of God. And that there might be a creative force in a creative mind behind the beauty that we see those sorts of things. Um, and as you know, John, I also really had questions about the historicity of Jesus. Um, maybe your average non-Christian supposes that things like the supernatural rolling away the stone from the front of the tomb or the Ascension of Jesus. Um, the resurrection, the healing miracles just might be some kind of superstitious magic. And, uh, I was probably thinking of myself more rationally minded, more scientific minded in the sense that if I couldn’t be proven, if it wasn’t evidence-based, I thought it might not be true. But courses like The Life Of Jesus and so on proved to me that actually there was every piece of historical evidence and likelihood that those events were correct. 

John Dickson (Studio)

Actually, I remember being in the room when Kirsty was doing her Life of Jesus course – well, it was in my lounge room. Over six Tuesday evening,s guests were meant to make their way through just the Gospel of Luke. I recall Kirsty finishing all four Gospels by week 2. At the end of it, she wrote me a 10-15 page letter with her questions – complete with footnotes! 

So I didn’t have any scientific evidence against God. I didn’t have any historical evidence against God any more. The the tide was changing, but it didn’t mean I’d made an emotional commitment to that. Um, even though my reasoning and, you know, there’s some wonderful other influences, John Lennox, John Polkinghorne, amongst the people whom I read that were greatly influential. Uh, and then I found myself one day, it was back when I was a little fitter and able to run around the Harbor and looking and beholding the sunset and the beautiful nature that I observed. And I, I just wanted to thank someone. I felt this immense feeling of gratitude and that I didn’t have a person to whom I could respond. And then I started to ask myself, hang on, who am I wanting to talk to here? What we would now call prayer. So who am I responding to? What is this creative force? And I think it was very close to that time that my heart really shifted. And it felt like this was probably a six month process I should say. And it felt like I had to surrender some things as well. I felt like I needed to maybe give up some aspirations, maybe give up some pride. Maybe (and this is a common misconception, I think), um, give up control of my life. And there were certain aspects of control of my life I was keen to cling on to. And so that kept me from making a commitment for some time. But eventually when I did, I discover there’s actually a different freedom within Christianity that, uh, comes from from hope and reassurance and having some stable knowledge of what God is like. And so, uh, it’s just different. And then there was also some reasons I think why we respond with music to God that come directly from the Bible. There’s an imperative, which I find really interesting going right back through the old Testament and Psalms and, um, you know, David himself, King David was a great musician and a player of the liar. And he had a band of musicians. He often wrote his Songlines his lyrics, if you will, for a group of musicians or for the, um, the song leader, the music master of his group of musicians, one would assume and there’s references to celebrating with trumpets, horns, cymbals drums, you know, there’s lots of references to music in the Bible, but I think my favorite verses actually in the new Testament, uh, when we’re called to, to sing and praise and to be worshipful, to use music and to make music together, to glorify God. And I think that tells me two things, firstly, that God enjoys. He delights in us using music to worship him and use the creativity he’s given us. Um, and also that there’s something about the making music together, the communion of doing something that actually gathers the community, which is important. So that’s a kind of communion, uh, maybe a very casual kind, but there’s solidarity in there’s something valuable about getting together and singing praise to God together as a group of his people, which you don’t achieve by yourself.

Undeceptions theme

John Dickson (Studio)

Hey, before you go, I thought you’d like to listen to a special ‘easter egg’ with our professors. I knew that Professor Beilharz had a strong appreciation for Professor Begbie’s work. So, I introduced the two of them, and once I’d finished asking questions of Jeremy, I let Kirsty have the last question. I have no idea what the question, or the answer, means … 

Kirsty Beilharz: 
So in the 20th century, in the 21st century, as we’ve heard some of the spiritual classical composers, who’ve emerged with the greatest influence on popularity, I’m thinking people like our repaired, John Tavenner who wrote music for the wedding of Prince Charles or Henryk Goreski have seemingly returned to simplicity and to tonality post the atonal alienation you were thinking of earlier with Schoenberg, uh, and even minimalist tendencies. So my question is, do you think that these are necessary hallmarks for spiritual or transcendent music to have universality of appeal today or to put it another way was Vatican II correct in determining that music for the church, especially liturgical music needs to be accessible?

Jeremy Begbie:
Oh my goodness. There are a lot of thoughts there. I think the post tonal movement, which of course is associated with those composers, but plenty of others as well is very significant because I think the extreme atonal music that was popping up while popular was well known by some in the forties and fifties, 1940s and fifties, um, can be so divorced from anything you can possibly understand, let alone enjoy, uh, eh, that we just have to recognize that as, Hey, this is just perverse after a bit. And then you get this, you get this swing back, of course, to a certain, as you said, a certain kind of simplicity, couple of comments on that. I mean, it’s very significant and I think very important and again, what can we learn from that in a world of buzzing confusion and multiplicity and multiple overwhelming as my colleague, David Ford puts it, um, such music undoubtedly has a very, very important place in ministry. I think of, uh, a cathedral in Seattle that I I’m sure some listeners will will know that where in the Sunday evening. All they do is just sing Complin to plain chant, just a single line of notes, nothing else. It’s absolutely packed out with young people, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of 18-25 year olds that I think is very significant. And I think some of the music that you’re talking about is exercising that role. It’s not necessarily escapist, it’s is trying to say in the midst of this multiple overwhelming here is something I can instantly resonate with. Enter into that. That is very significant. Now then I think one or two qualifications I’ve got into trouble sometimes for being critical, that kind of music, uh, uh, and I think I have to be careful, somewhat like other parent in particular, I think as an extraordinarily subtle comparator who manages to combine a kind of let’s call it a pain and a joy in, in very subtle ways. So it’s not like it’s all, I don’t know, escapist or, um, uh, trying to pretend the world is okay and, or sentimental or anything like that. Um, but he’s doing it in perhaps less obvious ways than certain kinds of 20th century and 21st century composers do it. So I think with each of those composers, we’d need to say, Hey, it’s a lot more subtle that many than many of us have realized now then what’s all that got to do with the Christian faith or theology. I think I I’m with Vatican II – music needs to be accessible, but it needs to do something more than simply confirm you and your likes and dislikes music ought to just have that bit of edge that makes you think or feel differently about the words that you’re singing, if you are singing or, or the theme of the liturgy or whatever it is. So I do believe in music that disturbs us as well as consoles. Why, because the gospel is to and consoling ultimately it’s consoling, but it’s disruptive. Of course it is. And I think music needs to do that. And the kind of music you talk about is not always very strong at the disturbance thing. It can be it’s understandable, but I don’t think it delivers quite the width that we need. Um, let me just put that another way. What makes me anxious about the kind of music you’re talking about is not so much the music itself. It’s what people invest in it. They say this is spiritual music, spiritual music has to be slow. It has to be extremely simple. It has to be very direct and, and somewhat mischievously. I sometimes say to people, okay, open the new Testament. Can you show me any passage that tells me when the Holy spirit comes? We’ve got to slow down. Now, I believe don’t worry. I believe in contemplation. I believe in retreats, I believe in slowing down, but, but that’s not the whole picture. It has an element in the Christian life and the dangers that we want to put all our spiritual eggs, so to speak in the basket of one or two or three composers,