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.

Theology, Music, and Modernity addresses the question: how can the study of music contribute to a theological reading of modernity? It has grown out of the conviction that music has often been ignored in narrations of modernity's theological struggles. Featuring contributions from an international team of distinguished theologians, musicologists, and music theorists, the volume shows how music--and discourse about music--has remarkable powers to bring to light the theological currents that have shaped modern culture. It focuses on the concept of freedom, concentrating on the years 1740-1850, a period when freedom--especially religious and political freedom-became a burning matter of concern in virtually every stratum of Western society. The collection is divided into four sections, each section focusing on a key phenomenon of this period--the rise of the concept of 'revolutionary' freedom; the move of music from church to concert hall; the cry for eschatological justice in the work of black hymn-writer and church leader Richard Allen; and the often fierce tensions between music and language. There is a particular concern to draw on a distinctively 'Scriptural imagination' (especially the theme of New Creation) in order to elicit the key issues at stake, and to suggest constructive ways forward for a contemporary Christian theological engagement with the legacies of modernity today.

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)

Music does not make itself. It is made by people: professionals and amateurs, singers and instrumentalists, composers and publishers, performers and audiences, entrepreneurs and consumers. In turn, making music shapes those who make it—spiritually, emotionally, physically, mentally, socially, politically, economically—for good or ill, harming and healing. This volume considers the social practice of music from a Christian point of view. Using a variety of methodological perspectives, the essays explore the ethical and doctrinal implications of music-making. The reflections are grouped according to the traditional threefold ministry of Christ: prophet, priest, and shepherd: the prophetic role of music, as a means of articulating protest against injustice, offering consolation, and embodying a harmonious order; the pastoral role of music: creating and sustaining community, building peace, fostering harmony with the whole of creation; and the priestly role of music: in service of reconciliation and restoration, for individuals and communities, offering prayers of praise and intercession to God. Using music in priestly, prophetic, and pastoral ways, Christians pray for and rehearse the coming of God’s kingdom—whether in formal worship, social protest, concert performance, interfaith sharing, or peacebuilding. Whereas temperance was of prime importance in relation to the ethics of music from antiquity to the early modern period, justice has become central to contemporary debates. This book seeks to contribute to those debates by means of Christian theological reflection on a wide range of musics: including monastic chant, death metal, protest songs, psalms and worship music, punk rock, musical drama, interfaith choral singing, Sting, and Daft Punk.

The scholar Robin A. Leaver holds a unique place in sacred music scholarship because of his training in both music and theology. He has written widely, bringing acute insights on a variety of musical repertories and topics related to Martin Luther, sixteenth-century psalmody, hymnody, and the sacred music of Johann Sebastian Bach. In Music and Theology, twelve scholars influenced by Leaver's work contribute essays in diverse areas of sacred music history and philosophy, focusing on the intersection of music and theology. Ranging chronologically from the twelfth-century writer and composer Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) to present-day considerations of American church music and worship, the volume provides thought-provoking new work for all who study church music. Reflecting the prominent emphasis in Leaver's own scholarship, eight chapters deal with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, including his organ music, sacred cantatas, and passion settings. A final chapter provides a chronological listing of Leaver's own voluminous writings on music and theology.

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.

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.

The McMaster Journal of Theology and Ministry is an electronic and print journal that seeks to provide pastors, educators, and interested lay persons with the fruits of theological, biblical, and professional studies in an accessible form. Published by McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario, it continues the heritage of scholarly inquiry and theological dialogue represented by the College's previous print publications: the Theological Bulletin, Theodolite, and the McMaster Journal of Theology.

Music and Theology will be a volume in the Horizons in Theology series. It will offer a relatively brief but highly engaging essay on the major concerns and questions regarding Music as it intersects with theology—past and present. Don Saliers is a senior scholar in this field, one who is able to address in a clear and concise style the scope and contours of this question as it relates to theological inquiry and application. He will sketch the nature and significance of the subject, the history of reflection, the current lines of inquiry, and his own contribution to the discussion. The scope of the essays cannot be exhaustive and completely interdisciplinary. Instead, Saliers will open the broader lines of discussion in suggestive, evocative, and programmatic ways. The Horizons in Theology serve as supplements and secondary required texts in colleges and seminaries, as well as the interested nonspecialist reader.

Music, Time, and Its Other explores the relation between the enigmatic character of our temporal experiences and music’s affective power. By taking account of competing concepts of time, Savage explains how music refigures dimensions of our experiences through staking out the borderlines between time and eternity. He examines a range of musical expressions that reply to the deficiency born from the difference between time and an order that exceeds or surpasses it and reveals how affective tonalities of works by Bach, Carolan, Debussy, Schoenberg, Messiaen, and Glass augment our understanding of our temporal condition. Reflections on the moods and feelings to which music gives voice counterpoint philosophical investigations into the relation between music’s power to affect us and the force that the present has with respect to the initiatives we take. Music, Time, and Its Other thus sets out a new approach to music, aesthetics, politics, and the critical roles of judgment and imagination.