Discordant Religion
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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... Would one day come up with this. I hear a lot about sinners Don't think that I'll be a saint

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 and hope, holy. Check out the film clip too. It's kind of cool. I think I even like the rap in the middle.

Speaking of rap, a similar mainstream conversion seems to have played out with Kanye West. We the descendants of Abraham. Yehshon 836. Unset free. Is free indeed. Say to wretch like me. Hallelujah. Hallelujah.

That's C'est La from Kanye West's last album, Jesus is Lord. It's not exactly subtle. There are 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 Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions

Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, How to Talk About Jesus, without being that guy, thank the Lord. It's by Sam Chan, a good mate of mine. Every week at Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, culture, or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth speak.

Music is social, psychological, and mathematical. It also points us to God.

That's what we explored last episode with Professors Jeremy Begbie and Kirstie Barlhart. 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 recognize 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 of the greyer aspects of music.

There's music that grates with us, masterfully so. And 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 today were talking about. In fact, I left them talking to each other. 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 Professor Begbie, one muso I know suggested I ask him about dissonance in modern classical music. Is it just bad music? Is the deliberately dissonant music of the 20th century, thinking of Arnold Schoenberg and so on, a matter of

You know, just some people happen to like going down that route. Or is it a representation of a psychology or a cultural moment? It's certainly a representation of a cultural moment. And Schoenberg would have said that. We're talking about what's usually called 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 that's

Yes, I think that's definitely a cultural moment. I think it can be oversimplified, the connection between that and the culture of the time. But it's surely no accident that that music arose at a time of

of massive and tortuous 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, takes a long time to resolve or perhaps doesn't fully resolve, that ends with a question mark. Because 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 leaves something open. Lots of composers did that before. I mean, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, they all did that. But 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? In the course I teach at Duke in Theology and Music, the one question I'm not allowing is, do I like it? That may be an interesting question or appropriate up to a point, but it's very much the question of our culture 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 have I to learn? What have I to learn about the culture out of which this came? What this composer is doing? And then as Christians say, what can I learn as a Christian from that? What can I learn theologically from that?

Kirsty Barlhartz is the Professor of Integrative Studies at Sydney's Excelsior College and a 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. I wanted to touch on Olivia Messia, the composer, because he speaks about not only an emotional response to his music, and people might not be familiar with some of his works,

very modernistic works. 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. There were workers, just all sorts of people who were bundled together in this internment camp.

And he wants to speak a message about eternity and about 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 in an interview about what he hopes the audience will hear, and I think this is

maybe something people sense. You don't have to be a faith believer to have this experience, but sometimes you listen to music and not only does it simply move you emotionally, but there's a sense of the transcendent, of something extraordinary, bigger than you, some extra universal experience. And it was evoking 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. Olivia Messiaen's music is not everyone's taste, but however we respond to it, it underlines the point that music is a kind of language. It does 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. MUSIC PLAYS

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 not 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 on the human mind. And 21st century listeners are more familiar with dissonance than they think.

One point on that which I think is particularly interesting is people, when they hear this kind of music, this awful dissonant atonal music, they say, oh, I would never spend money on that. I'd never buy that. Well, actually you do because it's pervasive in film music. Film composers of the 20th century and 21st century use a huge amount of dissonance and unresolved dissonance very often. And what they're often doing, of course, is taking you into the drama of the images and the words

It's such that you really feel that. So we shouldn't think, oh, we never understand that. Or I think, no, popular culture understands distance extremely well. And the great film composers, and there are many, many great film composers around the world, they know that.

And they know how to deal with this kind of music because they've been to school with the Schoenbergs and the Berg's and Faber's and Stravinsky's and the eternal composers 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 darkness and it's all going to hell and it's all terrible. Well, come on now. We need to be much subtler than that.

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

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 we're meant to feel about the message. So we're going to play a little more of this. Feel free to picture producer Kaylee here as a soprano. I'll stand with the baritones. And director Mark, of course, is up the back with his favourite triangle. MUSIC PLAYS

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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.

Some forms of Christianity ban all music. Many churches tried to ban rock and roll. Going back to the early church, many churches banned instrumentation and only allowed voice. How do you account for that anti-music tradition if music is so important to Christian spirituality? Great question. Various strands, I think, are 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. 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 body.

bodily movements and bodily processes. I mean, like heartbeat, for instance, you know, your basic kind of rhythm, you'll find all over music. Twos and threes are the kind of commonest rhythms in music that derive from the body and so forth. So I think it's its materiality

that frightens some people. And 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 its sheer emotional power, which is also linked to its bodily involvement, that music can inflame, it can calm, it can soothe, it can console, it can do all these things. And that's 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 we all know. I mean, gosh, Hitler, think of the use of

of music at his rallies, music can do appalling harm. That way it will be used for very harmful ends, let's put it that way. So I think those are the two main things. And both of those derive, well, they're associated with Plato, even if they weren't derived from him, he definitely, those are his fears.

I often say, mind you, if I'm with people who agree with me, in other words, people who are right, if I sit 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 would, 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, can be incredibly dangerous. You're dealing with an amazingly powerful tool. I often, I mean, 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 the poor old vicar or priest or minister or whatever, it sees 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 a poor minister, perhaps a bit unmusical and, you know, and she doesn't do, 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 kind of tussle. And I think the musician there, instead of just sort of

beating his breast and saying, oh, isn't that great? I'm so powerful. He said, well, gosh, there's a huge responsibility here. 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 and the aesthetics and the objects of creation because that 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 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 music probably was too superficial. He's a very interesting guy, Clive. I'm caricaturing a bit, but he had a big shift

and eventually came seeing virtually he says, "You must sing." It is a thing most expedient, I think is the phrase that he uses. And the scholars have wondered what it was that did that. And most agreed that in part, it was hearing 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.

that 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 puts it, make you, he doesn't put it this way, but make you love God even more deeply. 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, because music's going to run away and do its own thing otherwise. So you've got to, as it were, harness it.

to the words of the Psalms and only the Psalms. So then he got too 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. 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. But even when Christianity has embraced music wholeheartedly, it's sometimes made a real hash of it. That's what...

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today. He's a

And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.

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68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.

It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.

There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash help.

and make a tax-deductible donation to help this wonderful organisation give people like Turat a second chance. That's anglicanaid.org.au forward slash undeceptions. Where we head after the break. 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.

I want to ask you, is modern church music just too happy to capture the full spectrum of the divine drama? I think a lot of it is.

When I say that, people think, "Oh, you're attacking so-called contemporary church music." No. Yes, I am up to a point, but it's right across the board, I think, this. I would say one of the biggest dangers we're facing in the church music world is sentimentality. And even standard hymns, many standard hymns resolve their cadences in extraordinary predictable and easygoing ways.

Things are so regular. Things have to have this beautiful ending for everything. The way I put it is, I think the vocabulary, the musical vocabulary in a lot of church music is very, very limited. If you read the Bible, of course, 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 that, I think, is a great thing. 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 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'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 can't we say, well, hang on a second, we're Christians. We believe, particularly in scripture, you've got the full gamut of human experience that

and all the range of dispositions and postures before God. We've got all that. And we've got a culture that really can understand a lot of types of music, for goodness sake.

Let's widen the vocabulary. 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. It's easy to make these theological points, and we need now 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, have seen it

With the lyrics, they've seen that the lyrics are often extremely narrow in range and possibilities. I think a lot of that's changing in the songwriting world at the moment. There's very, there are 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. Well, there's a challenge for Undeceptions listeners. Create some musical lament for the church and see how that goes. Well, yeah, that's, of course, very often the very thing that's missing. And with lament, think of lament worldwide. It's a universal musical form. You'll find it in every culture.

And much of it relies on the vocal sighs that go naturally with lament. So it speaks very deeply to us. But it's pretty hard to find in the Western traditions. It's not impossible, but it's pretty hard to find. It's assumed you have to be upbeat the whole time, which is just not Christian. It's just sub-Christian. It's sentimentality.

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 what you come up with here on the show sometime. Just you and a guitar or piano will be fine. Back to Jeremy. One of the things I think we do have to learn from that is that sadly in the Christian church,

Too often, we've loved easy resolutions. I'm going to take you there in the interview, don't you worry. All right, okay, quick fixes. And one of the things this 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 world marred by dissonance.

And it's into that world that God comes in Jesus. 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, then I think we've had it. When I was doing music full-time back 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 five, Open the Eyes of My Heart by Paul Belocci. Open the eyes of my heart, Lord. Open the eyes of my heart. I want to see you. I want to see you.

Okay, it's a lovely tune. It's a great sentiment. It's pretty. Following up at number four, Above All by Maranatha. Above all kingdom, above all throne, of all wonders, the world is ever. Great message, of course. Jesus died for me, thinking of my salvation above all. But it could be a love song in its sentiment, right?

Number three, Michael W. Smith's Awesome God. It's a catchy tune, and I remember churches turning it into a kind of antiphonal thing where one side of the auditorium sings to the other and they sing back. But its mood is entirely up.

Speaking of up, here's number two, Shine Jesus Shine by Graham Kendrick. Buff and I had this at our wedding. It was the 90s, okay? And the number one Christian worship song from the 1990s, Hill Song's Shout to the Lord. 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 a group of 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 underbelly of life, the sadness, the mistakes, the discord, death, loss, brokenness, outrage.

Is that because Christianity doesn't face up to those things? Is Christianity just the opiate of the people, helping them cope with life now 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, the night before Jesus died, where he takes bread and wine and says, this is a picture of my death, overshadows how the account ends. But here's what it says. When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives. That's Matthew 26, 30.

As the one who presided at the meal, Jesus himself will have led his disciples in that song. We don't know what the song was, of course. But Matthew's language, hominescentes, tells us that it was one of the 150 psalms in the biblical book of Psalms. That's a word that indicates singing one of the psalms.

Was it one of the happy, worshipful psalms? Possibly. Passover, when this meal took place, was a celebration, mainly. Then again, Jesus had put quite a dampener on the night by telling them all that he was going to die, and then passing them bread and wine and saying, this is my body, this is my blood. And the thing is, many of the individual psalms in the book of Psalms are not celebrations.

Scholars classify the Psalms into different genres. There are Psalms of praise, there are royal Psalms, wisdom Psalms, and so on. Roughly 30 of the 150 Psalms are classified as Psalms of complaint or lament. That is, words that are designed to cry out to God about the underbelly of life.

Here's how Psalm 10 opens. Why, Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? Or Psalm 13 is another classic lament. 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?

Or Psalm 22, just to take one final example. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the cries of my anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer. By night, and I find no rest. These were all sung by Jews in Jesus' day, and then 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 would be yelling out one of these psalms. It's a lament psalm. It's actually Psalm 22. In the crucifixion scene from Matthew chapter 27, we read, About three in the afternoon,

Jesus cried out in a loud voice, which means, Matthew explains, It's a direct quotation of the Lament Psalm, Psalm 22, written centuries earlier. Jesus obviously didn't sing this lament from the cross. He screamed it.

and thereby endorsed lament as a profound mode of communication with the Father.

A few years ago, Bono from U2 was invited to write the introduction to a new publication of the Psalms. It's actually a really insightful essay. And at one point he says, 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?

It's a pretty clear indication of the importance of lament. But actually, Bono doesn't go far enough. Psalm 22 and all the other lament psalms are more than us shouting at God. It's 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 that mode of personal engagement with God, even in the discord and tension, that we're in a position to hear the beautiful melody that promises a resolution, that calls us home. You can press play now. Jeremy, are there musical scores that move you to tears? And if so, can you explain why?

Yes, there are some, but I'm not sure I can give it huge theological justification. I'm happy for an emotional justification. Okay. In jazz, when I hear Oscar Peterson improvise, I think he moves me to tears. And I think he's doing something like what Bach was about. It's just a sheer joy in music making. And he's taking very simple, basically simple ideas. He's elaborating them in the way that

that just gets to me. I'm always moved by the music of Brahms, Johannes Brahms. And I think it's because he combines a kind of extreme sorrow and 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 gloriously formed, but all the more moving for being so formed.

St. Matthew Passion will always get to me. There's an aria towards the end, which I find it hard to keep a dry eye with. It's after Peter's betrayed Jesus and

The Altar Sings, Have Mercy on Me, Ibram Adik. That's very hard. You have to be incredibly hard not to be moved by that. The atheist 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'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.

I often feel close to tears when I just think about my former career in music, when music is all that I did. When I think of it now, it's 25 years ago, I can almost be brought to tears. It's just such an interesting thing in our lives. Do you mean of joy or regret? An ache, an ache. It's like the best friend dies.

in my life that I haven't seen for 20 years. That's the feeling. 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 captures the full spectrum of life, the discord and pain, as well as the resolution, the coming home.

Honestly, music really affects me. Interviewing Professor Begbie made me realize that even talking about music can affect me. I'm a complete sop, I guess. Anyway, back to Jeremy. I'm 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. It 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. But they feel rather guilty for missing it. 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 arch. 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 really, you know, take time. It's OK. God will find a way of redeeming that of that, however good and however bad it was. God won't waste anything from it. He'll take it.

So music can tell stories, it can teach, it can move us, it can even point to God. Kirstie, Professor Balhart's, 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. Probably for about the first...

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 studying all the European philosophers and the secular existentialists that really somehow pulled me away and I lost that faith. When I was starting my first PhD which was music not surprisingly

In the UK, I discovered people in a Buddhist community. I became quite intellectually intrigued with Buddhism. It appealed to my reason, I think. And for many, well, two decades really, many years, I sincerely practiced that with the hope of being somewhere on that path to enlightenment. And it was considerably down the track, I think, after...

a number of 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, why do people die, why do people

lose their jobs, why do awful things happen? And I didn't find that Buddhism was able to answer those questions. And I also found that nearly two decades later I wasn't any closer to enlightenment, I don't think, after sincerely studying the scholarly side of Buddhism as much as trying to practice its various meditation practices, including a musical one, including playing the shakuhachi as a meditation instrument, which is a Japanese bamboo flute.

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 satisfying coalescence of science and God and that there might be a creative force and a creative mind behind the beauty that we see, those sorts of things.

And I also really had questions about the historicity of Jesus. Maybe your average non-Christian supposes that things like the supernatural rolling away of the stone from the front of the tomb or the ascension of Jesus, the resurrection, the healing miracles just might be some kind of superstitious magic. And I was probably...

thinking of myself more rationally minded, more scientific minded in the sense that if it 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. So

Actually, I remember being in the room with Kirsty when she was doing that course. It was in my lounge room. Over six Tuesday evenings, guests were simply meant to make their way through the Gospel of Luke.

I recall Kirsty finishing all four Gospels by week two. And at the end of the course, she wrote to me a 10 to 15 page letter with all of her questions, complete with footnotes. She's a very special kind of person. So I didn't have any scientific evidence against God. I didn't have any historical evidence against God anymore. The tide was changing.

But it didn't mean I'd made an emotional commitment to that. And then I found myself one day, it was back when I was a little fitter and able to run around the harbour and looking and beholding the sunset and the beautiful nature that I observed and 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 and

maybe, and this is a common misconception I think, 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 discovered there's actually a different freedom within Christianity that comes from hope and reassurance and having some stable knowledge of what God is like. And so...

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

You know, David himself, King David, was a great musician and a player of the lyre and he had a band of musicians. He often wrote his song lines, his lyrics, if you will, for a group of musicians or for the song leader, the music master of his group of musicians, Wamparasiib. 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 verse is actually in the New Testament when we're called 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. And also that there's something about the making music together, the communion of doing something that actually gathers community, which is important. So that's a kind of communion.

maybe a very casual kind, but there's solidarity and 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.

Got questions about this or other episodes? I'd love to hear them, and we'll try and answer them in an upcoming Q&A episode. You can tweet us at Undeceptions, send us a regular old email at questions at undeceptions.com, or if you're game, record your question for the show by going to undeceptions.com, scrolling down, and hitting record. I'd love to hear your voice. And while you're there, check out everything else related to this episode and plenty of other bonus content.

Next episode, do children grow up believing in spiritual things because that's what their parents tell them to believe? Or are babies born with an innate knowledge of God? The evidence is in. Find out next episode. See ya.

Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kaylee Payne and directed by Mark, plays the triangle, Hadley. Our theme song is by Bach, arranged by me and played by the fabulous Undeceptions band. Editing by Nathaniel Schumach. Head to undeceptions.com. You'll find show notes and tons of other stuff.

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

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 and popularity, I'm thinking people like Arvo Pärt, John Tavener, who wrote music for the wedding of Prince Charles or Henrik Goretzky, have seemingly returned to simplicity and to tonality post the atonal alienation you were speaking of earlier with Schoenberg.

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?

My goodness, 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 popular, well, popular, was well known by some in the 40s and 50s, 1940s and 50s, can be so divorced from anything you can possibly understand, let alone enjoy. Right.

that we just have to recognize that as, hey, this is just perverse after a bit. And then you get this swing back, of course, to a certain, as you say, a certain kind of simplicity. A 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,

Such music undoubtedly has a very, very important place and ministry. I think of a cathedral, it's in Seattle, that I'm sure some listeners will know that, where in the Sunday evening, all they do is just sing Compline 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.

But 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 trying to say in the midst of this multiple overwhelming, here is something I can instantly resonate with, enter into. Now then, what's all that got to do with the Christian faith or theology? I think I'm with Vatican II. Music needs to be accessible.

But it needs to do something more than simply confirm you in 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 the theme of the literature or whatever it is. So I do believe in music that disturbs us as well as consoles us. Why? Because the gospel is both disturbing 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. 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 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 that's not the whole picture.

It is an element in the Christian life. And the danger is that we want to put all our spiritual eggs, so to speak, in the basket of one or two or three composers. Is that making sense, Kirsten? Have you got me? It makes a great deal of sense.