Article
Art
Faith
Music
5 min read

Music and religion belong together

The connections between music and faith and the mystery within.

After 15 years as a lawyer in London, Oliver is currently doing a DPhil at the University of Oxford.

A pianist plays in the foreground and a seated singer gestures with eyes closed behind
Rachel Chaplin accompanies Evi Dobner.

J.S. Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Bruckner, Elgar. The list could go on and on. That is – a list of composers and musicians who wrote music for and played music within the Church. The roots of Western classical music are in the church, as Jeremy Begbie shows in his book Resounding Truth. In fact, it was only relatively recently that ‘popular music’ meant music outside of the Church. The Church has been a great sponsor of the arts throughout modern history, not least in the great Michaelangelo. It is time for that sponsorship of human creativity, in all its forms, to return (see the Renaissance project of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, for a new initiative on precisely this).

Why is it, though, that music and religion can sit so closely alongside one another? And why, in this day and age, might it be time for the two to reconnect?

For all its form and structural devices, there will always remain a horizon of mystery about music. Roland Barthes called music a field of signifying and not a system of signs. In other words, even in its most programmatic examples, music-as-sound has a kaleidoscopic range, which refuses to be pinned down to one meaning or another. This is why Friedrich Schleiermacher in the nineteenth century found music so useful in the elaboration of his religious idea of Gefühl – an inward yearning and feeling, or, as he also called it, the intuition of the universal. And it is for this same reason that Karl Barth in the twentieth century, a passionate listener to Mozart, was so cautious of using music constructively within his theological system.

Even in its most programmatic examples, music-as-sound has a kaleidoscopic range, which refuses to be pinned down to one meaning or another.

In that sense, music is well placed to carry the new wave of Christian apologists like Elizabeth Oldfield, James K.A. Smith, or even this website, seeking a new direction away from rationalism and clever abstract truth-claims. God is both more real, and more mysterious than that. Music, in fact, can lead the way for language itself. To release language from the captivity of pointing to apparently clear and obvious truth is a distinctly Christian move. After all, we remember that truth is not what a rationalist, or an empiricist, or a logical positivist would want, but is a person, Jesus Christ. And language, like music, can embrace such a mystery. The word ‘God’, as the theologian Gerhard Ebeling once wrote, brings to utterance the mystery of reality. To refer to God is the most pure possibility of language. It affirms the presence of what is completely hidden. “To speak about God”, Ebeling continued, “means to speak about reality as a whole and therefore to speak about humanity, who is exposed to reality as a whole. Conversely, to speak about God is to deny that one can speak about the world as a whole as such, by speaking only about the world, or that one can speak about humanity as such at all by speaking about nothing other than humanity.”

Whilst music without words, then, has often been assumed to be the most numinous, there is no reason why music with words should be any less numinous. Language paired with music knows a not-just-of-this-world reality. Even the most didactic settings in church hymn books engage right-brain activity, shape the memory, and therefore contribute to life formation. Ignoring that function in the shrunken assumption that the goal is simple mathematical truth is a form of sub-human, less-than-creation, folk-lore.

The word ‘God’, as the theologian Gerhard Ebeling once wrote, brings to utterance the mystery of reality. To refer to God is the most pure possibility of language. It affirms the presence of what is completely hidden.

We must celebrate, then, a whole new generation of composers who have written glorious music for Church choirs setting texts from the Bible, amongst them, Sir James MacMillan, Judith Weir, Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Arvo Pärt, Alexander and Joanna Forbes L’Estrange, and Deborah Pritchard.

And to their number, we can also now add a professional oboist, Rachel Chaplin, whose beautiful new album ‘Music from an Inner Space’, seeks to guide the listener into religious contemplation. This is an account where words and music both contribute to create a space for contemplation and prayer.

The words are most often taken from the Psalms, given stunning new accounts in these compositions for strings, trumpet, piano and soprano voice, but also in the composer’s own settings such as the remarkably poignant See Him. Psalm 51 is rendered with a bubbling brook of cleansing water rather than the deathly painfulness of Henry Purcell’s setting. A short verse from Psalm 23, ‘he leads me beside quiet waters’, manages both to be consoling and to feel unsettling, urging the listener into a new and uncomfortable space. Like a tree gives Psalm 1 one of its best-ever accounts, with a confidence, a liveliness, and a sense of purpose normally missed.

The simplicity of the vocal settings, combined with the immense skill of the accompanying players, promises for this music to be heard more widely, and reconstructed in different contexts, private and public, within and without the church. What’s more, the care of the musical curation is matched by the composer’s sourcing of paper for the liner notes, artwork for the album cover, and accompanying beeswax candle, specially designed for the album. Listening should not just be on the go. Listening should go with what Charles Taylor would call attention: stopping, lighting a candle, and breathing, still, for more than the length of time it takes to boil a kettle.

Many of us enjoy listening to music of all kinds. Most of us recognise feelings and emotions which appear to go beyond the data and push notifications which the world loudly proclaims to us. Choosing contemplation and prayer over production and wealth-creation can usher us into a form of life which is more human. Music and religious feeling were made for each other.

You can catch Rachel and the group performing the album at the Greenbelt Festival on 24 August 2024.
More details at www.rachelchaplinmusic.com

Review
Culture
Film & TV
Monsters
4 min read

How to do the Devil’s work in modern America

The Bondsman ‘literal evil’ fits so easily into today.

Giles Gough is a writer and creative who host's the 'God in Film’ podcast.

A bondsman looks to a colleague.
Kevin Bacon and Jolene Purdy star.
Amazon Studios.

The Bondsman looks like the kind of story we’ve seen many times before, but look closer and you’ll see some fascinating insights.  

The show dropped on Amazon Prime last Thursday, starring Kevin Bacon as murdered bounty hunter Hub Halloran, who is resurrected by the Devil to hunt demons that have escaped from the prison of Hell. Hub learns how his own sins got his soul condemned, which pushes him to seek a second chance at life, love, and bizarrely enough, country music. 

After being murdered in an all-too visual pre-credits sequence, Hub is resurrected, and after seeing some supernatural horrors he can’t explain, Hub is quickly sent chasing down those demons with the help (and often hinderance) of his mother played by Beth Grant. They receive instructions on which demons to capture via fax. The demons are suitably unsettling, with their red pinprick-of-light eyes and gravity defying leaps. As scary as they are, they are also helpful enough to get themselves killed with conventional weapons and burst into flames as soon as they die, saving Hub the inconvenience of having to dispose of the bodies.  

In the first few episodes, it would be easy to dismiss The Bondsman as schlocky genre fiction. Kevin Bacon easily leans into the laconic, foul-mouthed cynic, more comfortable with ultra-violence than discussing his emotions. The Southern Gothic is an aesthetic we’ve seen in more Amazon Prime shows than we care to remember at this point, and the gore is at the level you would expect from horror experts; Blumhouse, and the setting of rural Georgia, is reminiscent of The Walking Dead. You could be forgiven for leaving this show at the pilot and not returning to it. But if you can make it through the formulaic first few episodes (which are mercifully short, 35 minutes at the longest) your patience is likely to be rewarded.  

For any viewers familiar with Angel or Constantine, the idea of a hero who fights evil but is still damned to hell for their past actions, is well worn territory. But if we look at Hub’s ‘co-ordinator’ Midge (Jolene Purdy) we get a small insight into the banality of evil. Midge is coerced into selling her soul to the devil in order to save her dying infant son. This highlights how often people are drawn into corruption because they were forced to pick the lesser of two impossible evils. As Midge’s own ‘co-ordinator’ tells her: “The fastest path to hell: selling your soul to help someone you love”. Midge’s son is ‘miraculously’ healed, so long as she continues to meet her quota of convincing people to sell their souls. It seems the devil has a better health plan than corporate America. 

Those subtle jabs at corporate America make the show quietly subversive. The devil’s minions here appear as the ‘Pot O’ Gold’ company, a slimy operation that preys on the weak and perpetuates misery in order to benefit a faceless boss. What’s interesting is how ‘literal evil’ fits so easily into the model of a capitalist corporation. Whilst many US politicians may decry the evils of socialism, it seems that as far as evil in America in The Bondsman is concerned, the call is coming from inside the house.  

It's true that God is largely absent from this story. In the same way that competent, protective parents are absent from children’s novels. If he was present, that would undercut a lot of the narrative tension. Despite this, it’s interesting how even in a world where characters reference and believe in the existence of God, virtually none of the characters think to pray or ask for his help. It brings to mind the C.S. Lewis quote about how “the doors of hell are locked on the inside". 

This might possibly be the show’s greatest contribution. What we can see from The Bondsman is God in the inverse, a negative image. Instead of the hope of an eternal life, they’re faced with the numbing despair of lasting torment. Hub and Midge are sent out on missions by a faceless, uncaring ‘boss’ rather than a loving intimate father, forced into being corporate co-workers rather than found family. Once it moves past the adolescent gore-for-gore’s sake of the first few episodes, it seems The Bondsman might have a fantasy world worth exploring. 

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