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Music and Theology (Horizons in Theology)

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

Saliers starts from his experiences of music. What do we make of the revelatory experiences of Christian worship? Any study of the relationshps between music and religious belief ...must begin by acknowledging the power and yes, the mystery of music. Sung theology is praise and thankgiving, petitionary prayer, proclamation and narration of the mighty acts of God. Singing faith is the "cantus firmus of the whole Christian way of life. For all of this, there is still a difference between singing theological beliefs in hymns, anthems, and more extended musical forms, and the work of systematic inquiry into the meaning of theological claims, with the use of philosophical reasoning. Quoting Gelineau, "Music as art would not have such a wide range of connotations nor such a strong capacity to stimulate if it was not rooted in the totality of the cosmos and the human body, if it was not allied so closely to the mind and to the Spirit." For hearing music as the bearer of theoogical import requires not only a musical ear,...but also a sensibility for hearing music as revelatory. There is some analogies between faith and the experience of music: it is appropriate to speak of the mystery of what is hidden in music.
Faith becoming music is part of the process of the word becoming Flesh, indeed.
Rev. Virgil C. Funk