You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A world-renowned scholar and musician helps Christians respond with theological discernment to music.
Theology, Music and Time aims to show how music can enrich and advance theology, extending our wisdom about God and God's ways with the world. Instead of asking: what can theology do for music?, it asks: what can music do for theology? Jeremy Begbie argues that music's engagement with time gives the theologian invaluable resources for understanding how it is that God enables us to live 'peaceably' with time as a dimension of the created world. Without assuming any specialist knowledge of music, he explores a wide range of musical phenomena - rhythm, metre, resolution, repetition, improvisation - and through them opens up some of the central themes of the Christian faith - creation, salvation, eschatology, time and eternity, Eucharist, election and ecclesiology. He shows that music can not only refresh theology with new models, but also release it from damaging habits of thought which have hampered its work in the past.
Theologians and artists reflect here, in a series of essays, on how theology and the arts can be mutually enriching and beneficial. The contributors argue that it is part of theology's "calling" to engage with culture, particularly the arts, and that it is not in fact "true" theology unless it does so. The essays cover such topics as drama, cathedral art, poetry and music; the contributors include Tom Wright, Rowan Williams and David Ford.
World-renowned theologian Jeremy Begbie has been at the forefront of teaching and writing on theology and the arts for more than twenty years. Amid current debates and discussions on the topic, Begbie emphasizes the role of a biblically grounded creedal orthodoxy as he shows how Christian theology and the arts can enrich each other. Throughout the book, Begbie demonstrates the power of classic trinitarian faith to bring illumination, surprise, and delight whenever it engages with the arts.
Resonant Witness gathers together a wide, harmonious chorus of voices from across the musical and theological spectrum to show that music and theology can each learn much from the other and that the majesty and power of both are profoundly amplified when they do. With essays touching on J. S. Bach, Hildegard of Bingen, Martin Luther, Karl Barth, Olivier Messiaen, jazz improvisation, South African freedom songs, and more, this volume encourages musicians and theologians to pursue a more fruitful and sustained engagement with one another. What can theology do for music? Resonant Witness helps answer this question with an essential resource in the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of music and theology. Covering an impressively wide range of musical topics, from cosmos to culture and theology to worship, Jeremy Begbie and Steven Guthrie explore and map new territory with incisive contributions from the very best musicians, theologians, and philosophers. Bennett Zon Durham University This volume represents a burst of cross-disciplinary energy and insight that can be celebrated by musicians and theologians, music-lovers and God-lovers alike. John D. Witvliet (from afterword)
"A fine collection of probing and imaginative discussions on the relation between the Incarnation and the arts." --Nicholas Wolterstorff, Yale Divinity School
How can the arts witness to the transcendence of the Christian God? Many people believe that there is something transcendent about the arts, that they can awaken a profound sense of awe, wonder, and mystery, of something “beyond” this world—even for those who may have no use for conventional forms of Christianity. In this book Jeremy Begbie—a leading voice on theology and the arts—employs a biblical, Trinitarian imagination to show how Christian involvement in the arts can be shaped by the distinctive vision of God’s transcendence opened up in and through Jesus Christ.
Examines areas of overlap between spirituality, human creativity, and the arts with the goal of refining how we speak and think about the Holy Spirit.
"The conversation between music and theology, dormant for too long in recent years, is at last gathering pace. And rightly so. There will always be theologians who will regard music as a somewhat peripheral concern, too trivial to trouble the serious scholar, and in any case almost impossible to engage because of its notorious resistance to words and concepts. But an increasing number are discovering again what many of our forbears realized centuries ago, that the kinship between this pervasive feature of human life and the search for a Christian 'intelligence of faith' is intimate and ineradicable. Maeve Heaney's ambitious, wide-ranging, and energetic book pushes the conversation further fo...