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In the thirty-second episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Jeremy Begbie, the Thomas A. Langford Distinguished Research Professor of Theology at Duke University. Begbie opens by discussing the role of the imagination, the ways appreciation for the imagination waned in terms of perceived dependability through Enlightenment, and the renewal of interest the imagination experienced in recent years. In unique ways, Begbie contends, music brings individuals into expressions of the true, the beautiful, and the good in ways that defy reductionistic thinking, firing a properly ordered imagination. Begbie discusses his own calling to Christianity, how music came first but then, when theology also proved critical, it opened previously undiscovered horizons that neither music nor theology alone could have opened. While it took time, Begbie came to view his calling as one that lived at the intersection between music and theology, deriving deep joy from performing but also from mining the riches of Scripture and doctrine. Those insights then animate Begbie’s own writing as well as the leadership he currently seeks to provide the Duke Initiative in Theology and the Arts (DITA. Music plays a critical role in DITA’s offerings. Those offerings, however, also include dance, writing, and painting, all oriented as means of teaching theology. Begbie then concludes by offering his understanding of the academic vocation, one in which he believes patience is important. Patience then also proves critical in reminding scholars across all disciplines that mastery of the true, the good, and the beautiful remains illusive this side of eternity.
- Jeremy Begbie’s Abundantly More: The Theological Promise of the Arts in a Reductionistic World (Baker Academic, 2023)
- Jeremy Begbie’s Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Baker Academic, 2007)
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
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Our guest is Jeremy Begbie, the Thomas A. Langford Distinguished Research Professor of Theology and the McDonald Agape Director of Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts. Thank you for joining us.
Jeremy Begbie: Thank you very much. Delighted to be here.
Todd Ream: In 2024 Cambridge University Press, published Judith Wolfe’s The Theological Imagination: Perception and Interpretation in Life, Art, and Faith, in which Wolfe argues Christian theology offers a potent way of imagining the world, even as it brings us to the limits of our capacity to imagine.
As you reflect back on how you express your calling as a scholar whose understanding of the academic vocation resides at the intersection of theology and music, what is your assessment of Wolf’s argument?
Jeremy Begbie: Um, I think that is completely right. Uh, it’s a good book and a very good way into thinking about imagination. Imagination is defined in all sorts of ways. I think there are two main strands in it. Uh, the first is our imagination is the ability to make or perceive connections between things, and thus, make sense of the world as a, a good detective sees this and they see that and they see that over there and they make the connection. That’s, that’s the very least what the imagination does.
And the second strand, I think, is that the imagination enables us to envisage things, which we can’t now see. So I don’t know what’s going on in the room next to me, but I imagine, and I can imagine what it would be like. Someone said to me the other day, I can’t imagine what it’s like to stand on the summit of the Matterhorn. No indeed. But we can just begin to imagine when people say, I can’t imagine, they usually mean I can a little bit, but it is an imaginative act. I haven’t been there and I’m unlikely to be there.
And if imaginations understand and that kind of understood in that twofold way, it’s important to see that imagination is operating all the time. We couldn’t make sense of the world without imagination and we couldn’t even think about the future, the things that we can’t yet see. So imagination is absolutely fundamental to being human.
I guess the problem is, and Judith Wolfe mentions this, of course, is when the imagination is well fallen, when it gets out of control. So we make connections between things that are not actually there. So we’ve misinterpret the world. Some people still think of the world as a machine, a very mechanistic view of the universe. Some people have that’s an imaginative construct. It’s a, something that doesn’t actually adequately describe or count for the world, but it’s a very powerful imaginative vision.
And the other big danger, of course, is that we construct some kind of fantasy world and we live in it as if it were the real world, as if that is reality, like a kind of extreme Trekkie or Star Trek fan actually begins to see their whole world inside the Enterprise. The important thing is to baptize the imagination. That’s what, of course, C.S. Lewis’s great phrase. And I would use another phrase quite often these days, a, a scriptural imagination when a Scripture that enables us to make the connections and to envisage what we don’t yet or don’t now see.
Now, as far as music is concerned, it seems to me it’s an extraordinary tool of the imagination in, well take Lewis again and The Magician’s Nephew or in Tolkien’s Silmarillion, they imagined the creation of the cosmos as a musical act. And it’s extraordinary powerful. It’s very moving. And what’s that doing is, of course, it’s giving the imagination a joke so that we’re not, for instance, seeing the world as a kind of mechanistic system, closed system, rigid, predictable, just unwinding like clockwork. Uh, we’re invited to imagine the world as shot through with consistency and also with unpredictability.
Another musical image that is very often uses of the idea of a single melody at the heart of the world and all sorts of melodies around it. That’s a, a musical metaphor when you have kind of main theme and you have all sorts of variations around it. That’s another way of understanding the Logos, the, the word at the heart of all things, the reason, if you like, at the heart of all things.
So what the imagination’s doing there is it’s asking us to perceive the world in a different way from the way we might normally perceive it. The way I put it quite often is that music or any of the arts makes the familiar, unfamiliar. It jolts us so that we have to turn our heads and not just sort of nod. We have to say, oh, I’ll have to rethink that. And I get Jesus was doing that of course, with the parables the whole time. That’s exactly what he, a parable was an imagination jerking device so that you begin to see him and understand him and the world very differently. So imagination has a major part in being human. And of course in, in theology, in understanding the Gospel.
Todd Ream: In what ways do you believe the role that the imagination shared with theology was perhaps compromised during say the 1800s and 1900s, and we’re now sort of beginning to make ground again and renew the relationship that theology and the imagination share?
Jeremy Begbie: Well, I think that in the late 18th century, early 19th century, there were, of course, this is the beginnings of what would be the Industrial Revolution. It was the height of confidence in Newtonian science, which was fast developing. It was a technological period as well, with incredible strides taken in, in technological advance. And that naturally people think, well, maybe this scientific method, the natural sciences, particularly physics, chemistry, biology, can explain all things. So kind of what we would call a reductionist vision that can explain everything.
And it was the romantics that begin with, some before them, but certainly the romantics, English and German Romantics, like Coleridge and Wordsworth in England we’re pushing against that and saying nothing actually wrong with science, but it can’t give you the whole picture, and it’s a dangerous model of the world. It’s kind of machine model of the world if you’re going to over rely on that.
And so I think that’s what some people then suspected the imagination because they thought, oh, it’s just fantasy. It’s just you’re not living in the real scientific world. You’re living in this kind of make-believe, arty, imaginative world. And the people like of course, Coleridge, much later, Barfield and George McDonald, all names I know will be known to your, to your listeners and of course C.S. Lewis himself, the wonderful thing about them, they set alight the imagination of millions, not in order that they can retreat into a fantasy land, but so that they can perceive the world and live in it more faithfully. And that’s one of their great gifts.
You say other signs, things are changing. Yes, I think probably, I mean, there are plenty of signs, particularly I gather in the 18 to 25 or 18 to perhaps 30 age group, there’s signs that old, very secular, very closed view of the world, which Charles Taylor calls imminent frame that that is, that view is, is cracking and crumbling. Important writers on that, well, obviously they’re Christian writers, people like John Polkinghorne for many years but also agnostics like Mary Midgley, the philosopher.
And most recently, people like Paul Kingsnorth wrote a book called Against the Machine, incredibly important book, perhaps most of all and most popular at the moment, Ian McGilchrist, who’s a well, a psychiatrist, a, a neurophysiologist, I believe him. He’s extraordinary reach, and he’s challenging this. He does it in terms of left brain, right brain, but he’s challenging this. He basically, he, he’s an appeal to the imagination, so I think things might be changing. Um Marilynne Robinson would be another one. She’s written strongly against this very reductionist kind of worldview, and her appeal is enormous. So maybe things are changing.
I mean, mercifully, I’m not God, so I don’t have, I don’t have the overview of everything. No one has the overview of culture, but there are currents in our culture which are getting impatient, shall we say, with, with a radical kind of scientism as it’s called. And that’s very healthy.
Todd Ream: In what ways then do you believe the Church can serve as a site for the cultivation of the imagination and what resources perhaps including theology and music, but other dimensions of the practices that its stewards and makes available do you believe that can be of, of service in this effort?
Jeremy Begbie: I think the Church has all sorts of possibilities and resources. A bit depends on where the Church is situated, which, you know, or context, what cultural context they’re in. But um, in, its in the Church’s preaching and teaching, I think we could be doing far more to employ the arts as jolters of the imagination, the media through which you have to see the world differently. That means encouraging artists, it means working with artists, and artists across the board, not just painters and of course, but also musicians, writers, and so forth.
I think Christians should be unashamedly reading the likes of Lewis and MacDonald and others and their followers. I think that ought to be happening. I think one of the good things about the American church is they tend to read Christian literature far more than in the U.K. and so long may that continue. I think podcasts will have a huge role to play in, certainly in the next 5 or 10 years, if, if the trends continue.
I mean, these are some of the things I think we should be doing, and the Church’s leadership needs to wake up to that, of course. And in the training of leaders and not see the imagination as essentially the enemy, but as a glorious faculty that can be fallen and go corrupt, yes but also can renew our sense of wonder in the world.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to transition now to asking you about your own formation in relation to your calling as a servant of the Church and as a servant of the university. Not surprisingly, you earned undergraduate degrees in both music and philosophy from the University of Edinburgh, a bachelor of divinity and a doctor of philosophy degrees from the University of Aberdeen.
At what point though, did you discern that theology and music would play critical roles in how you would exercise your own vocation?
Jeremy Begbie: Right. The answer is: fairly late. I was brought up in a home where my mother was a Christian, my father probably not, and I went to church a little bit as a, I suppose 6, 7-year-old, something like that. But, but, but not after that and certainly not through my teenage years. I don’t think I was ever a settled atheist, but I knew nothing about the Bible and virtually nothing about Christianity at large. And that was typical of a Scottish schoolboy in those days. I won’t mention what decade it was, but it was a long time ago, and it’s probably, it’s probably the same, the same now.
From the minute I started playing the piano, I don’t know, age five, six, something like that, I was just captivated by the world of music. It’s all, all I wanted to do. I bathed in it, I snorted it. I, I lived in it and music gave me what I thought, I suppose at time was what any self-respecting religion ought to give. That is, it gave me a sense, it gave me friends, it gave me a reason for getting up in the morning. It gave me a career, or at least that’s, that’s the way I was going. It gave me an extraordinary, overwhelming, the emotional experience. Um, I just thought, gosh, what else do you need?
I mean, if you want to add a religious gloss, okay. But it’s not, it didn’t attract me. I wasn’t particularly interested in that. I knew, and I knew nothing as well. I’d never read the Bible or anything in the Bible, really a few passages here and there.
Then it was towards the end of that first degree that you mentioned, Todd at Edinburgh University, an, an old school friend of mine, we’d been in school together, called Alan Torrance started speaking to me about the New Testament and about Jesus, basically. And he started telling me things that I never really heard before, particularly it was this revolutionary idea that God had done something in the world to make Himself known, self-revelation of God. I’d never really considered that. I thought Christianity was basically about rules. And being religious in some kind of general way.
Then he said I had an elective space in my third year at Edinburgh, and he said, why not go along and hear my father lecture? Because he teaches these things. He’s a theologian. I said, oh, right. And I had known him before a little bit, and I, I think I knew that’s what he did but never heard him lecture or anything like that. So I crept into the back of this lecture hall, like Nicodemus at night and, and wondered what earth was going on. He was talking about Hebrews. I didn’t know what a Hebrew was, nevermind, plural. And I don’t think I understood anything that he said on one level.
But on another level, he had something which I didn’t have, and it would be very hard to then to describe that. It was a passion and a kind of emotional involvement, but there was also a superb intellectual involvement as well. So he combined, you could say, head and heart, he combined this intellectual rigor, well, with faith, with trust, and with the kind of joy that I’d not seen before. And it was the combination of those things that I suddenly thought something, something’s going on here.
Interestingly enough, the only other person I saw that in was my piano teacher at the time, was a very distinguished concert pianist. He had this incredible theoretical knowledge of music, but he had this passion and was a brilliant player, very major, major player at the time. So he combined these things. He was also a very devout Christian which I’d never thought about much at the time, never asked him about, but it’s interesting how it’s that mixture of, of mental rigor and robust thought with passion and faith. That’s what attracted me.
And then James James Torrance, since Alan’s father they introduced me into to their home, and I found a kind of hospitality that I’d never seen before. I also saw that what he was in the lecture theater was exactly what he was at home. So there was a consistency of lifestyle that was deeply attractive.
Well, I started reading the New Testament. I started suddenly find myself praying, and then I started sharing my faith with others, and no one taught me that’s actually what being a Christian sort of does to you so over a period of two or three months, I, I, I fell into grace. I don’t remember a particular day, but I do remember a particular week or two when it became absolutely critical, and my life was turned around round.
Now then the question, what happened to the music? Then everyone said well, you’ll be able to write, you know, lots of hymns for the Church. And so, well, yeah, okay, I will do that and that’s important. Um, but I wonder how I was going to kind of combine these two. I felt very soon a call to ordination, which was ridiculous because I had only been a Christian a few months. And I took a, a radical turn then from a career in music to thinking of ordination as a future. My parents thought I’d gone mad and that I’d grow out of it. I heard them talking in the kitchen one evening, he’ll grow out of it, they said basically. You know, he’s still young. Uh, which I was of course, I mean, I could understand their anxiety.
But then, I pursued ordination training and I started reading theology big time. I went to Aberdeen University to do degree in theology and then started up a PhD, and it’s then I thought, what am I going to do with this music? Now in those days, I don’t know if Christian Scholar’s Review was, was it right running then?
Todd Ream: Mm-hmm.
Jeremy Begbie: In those days, as far as the arts concerned, there was very little literature. Nevermind with music. There was a bit on painting. There was Rookmaaker and so forth but was very little literature to help me bring these worlds together, the world of the Gospel and theology and the world of music. So I did a, a lot of reading and some writing, and eventually became a PhD in what what I call theology for music. And that is when you start with a Christian worldview, and you ask, well, what does that mean for the way we practice and enjoy music?
In time after ordination, I came back to Cambridge to teach theology. I was offered a place for three years and I thought, well, I’ll try it. But it wasn’t my intention. I wanted to go on and be a pastor of a church. But anyhow, I got the teaching bug and the more I taught, the more I realized I was teaching theology as a musician. That is over and over again, I was having recourse to musical ways of thinking, music models. Um, I, I, just, as a matter of course, I had to.
I also found that this had a very big effect on the classes that I taught because it wasn’t typically done in those days. So I found, for instance, some of your listeners may know this, but when it comes to say the Trinity, I found that the way in which we perceive a three note chord, these, that sounds overlap in a way that our visual perception doesn’t allow. So I suddenly found there’s a musical way of, of reading, say John’s Gospel, the Father in the Son, Son in the Father. How can they be inside each other?
The way we hear two notes is precisely that. We hear the notes in and through each other. We don’t hear them as like two objects in a visual field. I suddenly realized, my goodness, this really has, this has extraordinary potential. And many other things in music, I found what was kind of, were theologically resonant, not just powerful teaching tools, but uh, profound ways of discovering more fully the Gospel of the New Testament.
The greatest mentor at that time is, is someone I, well, I did meet him once, but didn’t know him, was your greatest musician, Leonard Bernstein in the States. I watched his children’s lectures in music, and I learned more about education from those lectures than anything else because he had this extraordinary way of performing. And also he had the academic credentials, and he could communicate a way that wasn’t patronizing or talking down to kids. I mean, adults enjoy those lectures as much as anybody else. And I began to think if I could do something like that musically, yeah, that would be a dream.
So I came back to Cambridge. I got into the teaching theology world. And I very naturally found, I was doing not just theology for music, but I was doing music for theology. That is how can music help us do a biblical theology better?
Todd Ream: You still, to this day, have a relationship with the theology faculty and the university at Cambridge?
Jeremy Begbie: Yes. Um, yes, indeed. Yeah. I’m also what they call affiliated lecturer in the faculty of music. And that taught me also a huge amount. They’ve been very gracious to ask me and I, they, I think of myself as the religious affairs correspondent in the, in the music department there because there’s anything ever sort of religious or Christian, they say, well get, Begbie onto that. I mean, so it’s a radically secular department, although some people have faith in it, but it’s, you know, have they ever thought we’re evangelizing or whatever, that they would, they would understandably get a little bit anxious.
But I found in teaching these students majority undergraduates, very bright undergraduates, these are students who were every day performing and singing the sacred music in the college chapels as to a very high standard. I found that well, I, and challenged them, I said, you’re going to have to do some what we would call theology. That is, if you’re going to understand the text you’re singing, you’re going to have to go deep into them and understand what they’re saying and not saying. And they said, oh yeah, okay. So we talked a lot about that.
Then I talked a lot about the way in which music, because of its very particular powers, can help us enter those theological worlds. And that fascinated them I found. So with, I suppose so to speak, the musicological backing, I could cross the bridge to where they were and then they were very open to talking theology. Indeed one of them, one year wrote and said, ” At the end of the course, I realized I need to talk about God.”
Todd Ream: Yeah. Well, wonderful.
Jeremy Begbie: That, and that was a dream. So that taught me a lot. It taught me a great deal. But yes, I do have a connection with the Cambridge Divinity School, as it’s called, divinity faculty and music faculty as well.
Todd Ream: Would you talk about then the discernment process that led you to come this side of the Atlantic and serve also at Duke University Divinity School?
Jeremy Begbie: Uh, well, it came from an email from the dean and he said, we, we have a chair in theology and we’d like to fill it with someone who can do the theological, but it can also develop our art, theology and arts program. Because then actually there was no theology and arts program. There were a lot of students involved and interested in the arts. There were a lot of faculty involved and excited about the arts. But there was no, there were no courses as such, and there were no there was no program and there was no funding.
So they said, if we raise the funds and support you, would you be able to start up a concentration, particularly in the doctoral program, but also in the master’s program, a concentration in theology and the arts. So it was a dream really come true because I, I thought Duke was fantastic place anyhow, and I knew quite a few people here and I came over, as they put it, very American for conversations, and they plied me with all sorts of goodies and I said yes, but I said yes on understanding I wasn’t going to move to the States, so I still, my residence, I Duke is for about half the year and the rest of the time I’m in the UK.
But what we try to do is make a virtue out of necessity. That is, we’ve built links between Cambridge and Duke, a kind of, a lot of our projects are transatlantic projects. So that’s how that came about. And, I, I love the place. It’s been the happiest time of my life probably.
Todd Ream: Well, I think we both know Greg Jones may have called them conversations, but he’s a very intentional person.
Jeremy Begbie: That’s putting it mildly. Hey, think that man is I, I used to tease him, he’s the most natural fundraiser I know. We have, we have conversations, occasionally he gets enthusiastic, and I find myself reaching for my wallet, you know, and yeah, Greg, how much, you know?
So, no, he, he was extraordinary. And he was, he was absolutely true to his word. He said he wanted this to happen and they would, they would take the initiative on the fundraising, and they wheel me out every now and then to do my thing. But, but, but the support here, you know, in raising that money and it’s a very considerable amount that they’ve raised, has been absolutely superb.
Todd Ream: Wonderful. Thank you.
You’re the author or editor of 13 books, almost all of which reside at the intersection between theology and music or theology more broadly, theology and the arts. Published by Baker Academic in 2007, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music may be your most widely recognized book or perhaps one of your most widely recognized books.
Would you offer an overview of what you argue in that book and then what you hope audience members encounter when reading it?
Jeremy Begbie: Thank you. Um, that is a book for, I’ll call a mid-level readership. That is, it’s not. It’s not at the kind of hyper-academic level, but it’s not at the hyper-popular level. It’s for the, the publisher called the intelligent lay person who wants to know more about their faith. It’s really, there’s a, there’s a double thing in that book.
The first is I’m trying to give a survey of sorts of ways in which Christians have thought about music. So it’s a history, you could say the history of the theology of music that is, people like Augustine and Boethius and later Luther and Calvin up until the present day, the way in which Christian minds have confronted music and say, how, how are we to understand this in relation to the Christian faith and to biblical theology in particular. So it’s a, it’s a kind of, it is telling that story, which is a fascinating story, very instructive in all sorts of ways for the current debate.
The second strand, yeah, there is an agenda and I, it comes out pretty strongly, and that is, I’m pressing the reader to think about music within a doctrine of creation, within a scriptural imagination of the created world at large that is centered on Christ and the triune God, the threefold, threefold Trinity. And the reason for that is because if you, out of the survey I did of ways of thinking about music, what you find is there’s a very definite break around about the Renaissance, early Reformation, when up until then, the way of thinking about music if in so far as people really did think about what was going on theologically was to set it inside a massive vision of the created world.
This is if you remember from Plato and by fact the music of the spheres a cosmological view of music. So music is seen as a way of tapping into the, the, the physical world at large. We are not just imposing something in the physical world. We are listening to it and trying to move with it and turn that into sound. That’s the dominant way for 1500 years in which music was thought about, many variations and some weaknesses in the way it was done, I think. But that was, that was, that was the way it was seen.
Uh, in so-called modernity, let’s say from, I don’t know, 1500, 1550 onwards, that paradigm has massively winged, so we now see, we tend to see music as a purely human invention in concerned with conveying emotion from person to person, end of story, so we’re no longer setting it in this wide cosmic context.
Now, that, of course, is part of a much bigger change in culture, which applies to virtually every discipline and human understanding. Generally, what I think is, Taylor’s phrase: but the disembed, our disembedding from the cosmos, from any large scale vision of the created world, so now we have a very anthropological way of understanding music that is divorced from the cosmological. I think that’s a big loss. I, I don’t think it makes sense of, of the Christian faith, and I then also, you, of course, then tend to think that, that, that music is no more than our attempt on our own to make sense of the world in some way.
There’s a very distinguished musicologist I remember saying to me very bluntly of course you’ve got to realize from my point of view, the cosmos, the world has no meaning other than the meaning we give it. And that’s, that’s, and he said, as we all know now. Well, that’s interesting, a lot of people disagree, like, you know, a few billion Christians for starters.
So we’ve got to make sense of music as something which we have created, which has to understood purely in social and cultural terms. I think it’s a huge loss, and I think a Christian way of looking at music understands much more of responding to an order, a glorious sonic order as I call it, that’s already there, waiting for us, and it’s for our job to take that and rework it and transform it in all sorts of ways.
If you want to see a very dramatic illustration of the break, the break in perception, you go from Luther to Calvin. I am not knocking Calvin. I adore him. He’s probably one of my very favorite theologians. But if you read Lutheran music, he talks about the cosmological thing right from the start. If you read Calvin on music, as far as I can tell, he never mentions that tradition. He knows it, and he probably believes it. Yeah, but he never mentions it. For Calvin, music is a kind of rhetorical tool, an emotion, emotionally charged, very important, emotionally charged tool for human communication.
What I think we’re now, the situation we’re in is we’ve got a kind of, as a friend of mine put it, a selfie, selfie view of music where music is about us and nothing else. And I think that’s a great loss and I don’t think Christians should be, should be promoting that. It is about us, of course, but us within a wider order, of course created order and ultimately in relation to God, but it’s this internal, how can I put it, the model of self-expression as if that’s all music could ever be about. I think that’s an incredibly narrow way of looking at music and a shrunken view that we should have little to do with.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. In 2023, Abundantly More: The Theological Promise of the Arts in a Reductionistic World, as you were just sort of echoing there was published. When you look back at the books that you published to date what arc do you see in terms of themes and ideas that you’re trying to communicate? Uh, perhaps, you know, drawing kind of points of connection between the book you’ve just discussed, and then your most recent one.
Jeremy Begbie: That’s a very interesting question. It is going to sound terribly basic, but I’ve been deeply excited by movements in biblical theology. And the what’s never fails to excite me is when someone takes me deeper into the scriptural texts and I see and hear more than I could have heard or seen before. That’s what excites me.
And a great deal of my work is trying to say, do you not see the riches in these extraordinary documents? They’re revolutionary. They are wonderfully unpredictable. You don’t know what’s coming next. Uh, they’re all focused around this, very human being, God incarnate in Jesus, they concern a God who is irreducibly threefold, trinitarian. Don’t you see what you’ve been given?
But I find, and I’ve done it myself as well, but I find some of my colleagues working in this field say, well, Bible doesn’t say much about the arts and music, so let’s go on to whether it’s philosophy or cultural interpretation or whatever, all of the disciplines, psychology of music or psychology of the art, if that’s where we first go. No, we, we attend to these as I think as Christians, to these texts before anything else.
And the second, and of course with that, is the doctrinal tradition, the creedal traditions of the Church, which far from trying to limit and freeze the Christian faith, are trying to help you see how extraordinarily relevant and powerful it is, for every aspect of life. I often say, with the creeds, they’re not trying to explain a mystery. They’re trying to preserve a mystery, in all its wonder and, and it’s fruitfulness.
So I see, so James Torrance taught me this, of course, doctrine, that’s incredibly exciting, provided it is constantly returning to the apostolic witness of Scripture. So I think that’s the kind of thread. And then in the light of that, all sorts of things become very important music like the creation of the doctrine creation thing that I mentioned before.
I think another thing recently you mentioned the Abundantly More book, in Abundantly More, what I’m trying to question there, counter is something called reductionism, which I mentioned already. When we say the world is nothing but. You know Mozart’s music is nothing but the expression of, white hegemony or whatever. My brain is no more than the firing of neurons, et cetera, et cetera, whether it’s scientific or cultural reduction. There are all sorts when we say nothing but.
Uh, Donald Mackay, the scientist, talks about reductionism as nothing but-ry, and I think that’s, that puts it well. I think the arts have incredible powers to, counter that because when it comes to arts, there are multip-ly, as Calvin Seerveld, used to say, multip-ly elusive. That is, there’s always more that they’re saying than you could ever enclose or contain. That doesn’t mean they can mean anything. It just means you’ll never get to the end of what they’re saying. There’s always more. What I try to do in that book is relate that to the Trinity, in particular, that there is an abundance of love that was overflowing more than we can ask or imagine within God.
And this overflow, this sheer generosity of God, I think is beautifully or can be beautifully expressed and made known in the arts because by their very nature they’re always overflowing. Now there’s much more to it than that, but I think the thread, the thread red is actually the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity is, is just wonderful news, wonderful good news, and it concerns a love that doesn’t try to possess the other, that doesn’t try to control or delimit, but always gives itself to the other. That’s what, that’s what the Trinity is saying. There’s love in the heart of God. So, so those are the, those are the kind of themes I think that hold together.
But Scripture and doctrine, first of all. I can’t put it in any different way. It seems so blindingly obvious, but, but that’s what I tried to many times, I had a class last week and they were saying, they were talking about some idea, and I said, well yeah, John’s Gospel actually has a chapter or two on that idea. Oh, really? I didn’t realize that. It’s all there.
Todd Ream: Yeah, so as an expression of the calling that drew you to Duke University and to the Divinity School, you established in 2009 what has come to be known as the Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts or DITA, which is an effort that “promotes and supports the vibrant interplay between Christian theology and the arts by encouraging transformative leadership and enriching theological discussion in the Church, academy, and society.”
Would you offer just a few details concerning how you and your colleagues seek to foster that interplay through these initiatives?
Jeremy Begbie: Of course this yes, I started up when, when I first came, and it’s developed into three strands. It’s research, teaching and artistic programming, RTA. Research we’ve always had four or five, some, you know, six or seven some stages, stages, doctoral students, people working at PhD levels who will be leaders in the Church of one sort or another, whether in the academy or in the Church or society at large. And the I, so we are in the business of training leaders. One of them is probably known, well, perhaps a lot of them are known to you, but one will be known probably to your listeners as David Taylor. He’s at Fuller Seminary working in Houston, who’s a very big, he was a major leader in this, in this field, and we are privileged to have him as a PhD student here. So research and my own writing is, is the kind of research engine as well.
Second, teaching at all levels, but particularly at the master’s level. And that’s extraordinarily exciting because we now have a concentration in theology and the arts of about 50 students. That is people who have artistic interests or experience, some very experienced people in music or songwriting or whatever, who come and they want that, they want some theological enrichment to help them.
Now, some of these are going on to be pastors. Some are not, but a lot, a lot are. And of course our dream is that as pastors, they won’t leave this part of them behind, the arts will be intrinsic to their ministry.
Artistic program, programming, that’s the third. RTA is about practicing the arts, demonstrating them. And so we have resident artists. We have many festivals. We had a big conference last September. We’ve had artists like, well, artists of residence now is Matthew Rushing, who is associate or assistant director of the Alvin Ailey Company. He’s coming to do workshops, a very profound Christian and a deep thinker as well. Um, we’ve had Steve Prince for instance, from the, from William and Mary, he is a New Orleans, I’m not pronouncing that right, New Orleans artist, who’s exploring the kind of black, black traditions of the Church through his art in, in extraordinary ways.
Another thing that I’ve started up, which came really out of the blue, is I’ve built up an orchestra called the New Caritas Orchestra, which came about when two members of, well, one member of the Boston Symphony and another from the Baltimore Symphony got in touch and said they’d been reading my stuff and could we talk? So the three of us got together and we planned first a small event of about 10 players. When I would speak to the audience and we would demonstrate things musically and basically teaching theology, that’s what it, it amounted to but a kind of Gospel presentation, but in a way that could be accessible to those perhaps of little or no faith, but we’re still curious about it.
That’s developed into an orchestra about, about what we got now, 55, something like that, including its rather intimidating, including some very major players, players of faith, who want to explore the Christian faith and explore the way in which their music interacts with Christian faith. We normally have a session after the concert they give, in which we do a little sort of teaching for them and what’s so interesting is how often effectively they’re saying we’re treated so often as mere technicians, most of the time.
And even amongst the in, in the churches were treated as those who can kind of spice up a service a bit, rather than thinking Christians. And that, that was a real breakthrough for me. So I realized they actually want to do theology and relate it to their musical, to their musical practices. And no one even in the Church seemed to be doing that. So that’s been an extraordinary, exciting development.
As I said, I was speaking to a group last night of a, an Asian Christian group here and said, all these good things have come purely by invitation. I didn’t set out to start these things up. You get a phone call or you get an email that’s saying it’s very important to see when these things cross your path because you can be so busy trying to build your career or build your future or something, you don’t, you miss the things that God is dangling right in front of you and so it’s been a great joy.
Todd Ream: Perhaps one of those things that came by this kind of communication is that in 2026, you’ll return to the University of Aberdeen, where this fall the Gifford lectures will be offered and that you will serve as the Gifford lecturer. Are you willing to offer us a quick overview of what you’re thinking you want to share there, without giving too much away?
Jeremy Begbie: Yes, I’m right in the middle of the preparation and I’ve got to be careful because, because many of the ideas are still being formed, embryonic.
The overall theme is I’m looking at musical rhythm and rhythm in relation to the rhythms of the world and the rhythms of our life, and I’m exploring the resonances between musical rhythm and a Trinitarian theology. That’s what’s, what’s going on.
And I’m going to leave it there. I’m going to leave it there. That, that, that’s what’s happening. The Gifford lectures are supposedly about natural theology, which is a very contested term.
Todd Ream: Yes.
Jeremy Begbie: But what they’re particularly interested in is what are, what are the signals and the signs of God’s activity in the world at large, even outside the Church. And effectively that’s what I’m about here when it comes to musical rhythm. There are things going on here that are theologically resonant. We have to be very careful though, with natural theology, that if we’re looking for signals of God, of transcendence or whatever, let’s make sure we know which God we’re looking for because otherwise, you’re into all sorts of problems of projecting onto God all sorts of ridiculous things. So we have to be careful.
Todd Ream: Fortunately for those of us who can’t cross the Atlantic to hear them in person they stream them and then post them, and we’ll be able to watch them then, but allow me to offer my congratulations on being, on that appointment.
Jeremy Begbie: They will include performance as well, that’s the other thing, obviously, music and musical rhythm, you’ve got to demonstrate it. I’m drawing in some musicians at Aberdeen in order to do that.
Todd Ream: As our time unfortunately begins to become short now, I want to ask you a question about how you’ve come to understand the academic vocation. What’s the good in pursuing it? What practices have you found that sustain it, and what forces have you then also found that you have to be aware of that may threaten it?
Jeremy Begbie: Well, it’s an enormous question. I think they’re probably all much more qualified, but I would say the goal of the academic life is what the Bible calls wisdom. Now, Tony Thiselton’s great commentary on, on 1 Corinthians speaks of wisdom. It’s in relation to a verse in 1 Corinthians 2. Um, he speaks of wisdom as habits of judgment that help us live in a more godly way.
Well, I think he said, has habits of judgment applicable to life. So it’s not about amassing information, although of course there’s information to gather. Wisdom is geared towards a lifestyle that’s in tune with God. In other words, godly living. That’s what I think for a Christian, the goal of all academic inquiry ought to be ultimately, ultimately, so it, it’s unapologetically intellectual, but it’s the exercise of the mind in relation to every other part of what it means to be human and particular to action in the world. I think that’s what I’m about here, and I think actually in the last resort, it’s what theology is about.
I think if, if Paul the, say the Apostle Paul was ever asked what theology was about, I think he’d say something along those lines. I dare say it’d be something along those lines. It’s not just about accumulating data. It’s about forming habits of judgment, ways of thinking that are applicable to life, that is to help us live in a more godly way.
In terms of I think academic virtues, well, all of the major virtues apply, but particularly patience. I was talking with a great scholar yesterday actually about this. And he was talking about a student, and he was very impressed with the student because she exhibited intellectual patience.
Intellectual patience is not thinking you have to get the final answer this afternoon. It’s okay to leave some things open and to let the truth sink in. That’s, I mean, of course, sometimes you have to be in a hurry and say things quickly. Of course, I appreciate that, but there are times when if you try to force a thing too quickly you get it wrong. So, patience.
Generosity, so in our, gosh, you, you write a review you edit a journal with hundreds of reviews, you can usually tell from the reviewer whether, whether it’s a generous person writing it, we need a generosity of spirit so that if we are reviewing something or assessing any kind of theology, we say, let’s give it the best hearing we can, even if we go on to make critical comments. A lot of reviewing is not like that. Sadly, a lot of theology is not like that.
And then of course, prayer. Not self, I suppose, a virtue, but, but prayer, regular worship, all the, the basic Christian practices are absolutely vital. Vices, virtues, vices, the illusion succumbing to the illusion that we can get the final overview, the complete grasp of something. Whatever your subject is, you never will, whatever the subject. You may be able to pin something down at one level, but there are always bigger questions around it, which you, which you won’t be able to get. So the idea of total intellectual mastery. That is a, of course, academics constantly succumb to that. I don’t, myself, you understand Todd? I’m free of these, but, but lesser people do.
Now you know what I’m getting at. In other words, you in other way putting that, is it’s best not to try to be God because only God has the overview, mercifully. We don’t. And, and he’s given us Christ in which of course gives us His glorious vision, but we’re never, because we’re finite creatures, never going to have the complete view. It’s a very exhausting business trying to be God. It’s best to rejoice in being a creature. That’s the way God wanted it.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much. Our guest has been Jeremy Begbie, the Thomas A. Langford Distinguished Research Professor of Theology, and the McDonald Agape Director of Duke Initiatives and Theology in the Arts. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Jeremy Begbie: Thank you so much. It’s been a delight.
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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
