links for the weekend: Ethan Hein on songs covered by Norah Jones and The Allman Brothers; Norman Lebrecht on the day the symphony died; Anglican high and low liturgy and why that matters with art snobs; Brad East on providence as a doctrine of consolation and Matt Jantzen on the same as doctrine of racial entitlement and theologians against that paradigm; Alastair Roberts on providence and ambition; riffs on Leviathan; and Jim West will be happy to know there are new books on Emil Brunner this year

We haven’t had a links for the weekend in a while and there’s some catching up to do.

Alan Jacobs has doubts about bids at re-enchantment, what exactly do people want the world to be (re)enchanted with?

https://blog.ayjay.org/some-enchanted-evening/

September 8, 2024

some enchanted evening

 

It seems that “enchantment” is having a moment right now — e.g. — and, well, okay, but I’d like to make two points: 

1.       Experiencing the world as enchanted has absolutely nothing to do with acknowledging that Jesus Christ is Lord, and that at the end of history every knee will bow and every tongue confess this. That is to say, Christians who have boarded the Enchantment Train should realize that what it promises is often (if not always) something quite different than what the Christian faith — which is often disenchanting — promises, and demands. 

2.       A related point: As I wrote a decade ago, “The porous self is open to the divine as well as to the demonic, while the buffered self is closed to both alike. Those who must guard against capture by fairies are necessarily and by the same token receptive to mystical experiences. The ‘showings’ manifested to Julian of Norwich depend upon exceptional sensitivity, which is to say porosity — vulnerability to incursions of the supernatural. The portals of the self cannot be closed on one side only.” 

You want to live in an enchanted cosmos? Cool. But be careful what you wish for. You might get it. 

Is the cosmos enchanted? Is it disenchanted? Is it standing on one leg and singing “When Father Painted the Parlor”? (Tom Stoppard reference there.) It’s not something I’m inclined to think about much, because for me — YMMV, and it really and truly may vary, you may be aided enormously by such reflections — it’s just another way to avoid thinking about Jesus. I already have a thousand of those, I don’t need a thousand-and-one. 

…

So Jacobs is not on board with the re-enchantment train.  I can’t say that I am, either, and I’ve still got an roughly eighty book reading list surveying Christian thought on powers, principalities, unclean spirits, exorcism, and spiritual warfare.  One of the fun paradoxes of playing with an idea that racial supremacist canards about music could be informed by principalities and powers is that it’s not a remotely new idea.  Not only would I not take credit for the idea, I could say the idea is implicit in James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power, although I think far better explications of what the powers and principalities can be thought of as being have been written not by Cone in his famous book but by Esther Acolatse, Robert Ewusie Moses, Daniel K Darko, and Albert Kabiro wa Gatumu.   

 

Alan Jacobs may not be as into literally academic study of evolving Christian and Jewish concepts of demonology as I am but I take his point that merely pining for re-enchanting the world doesn’t address the question of what that world is going to be enchanted with.

 

Since Jacobs alluded to David Bentley Hart’s latest I am reminded of Emil Brunner’s old book The Mediator where he contended (at some length) that the general impulse in liberal Protestantism as it emerged in German theology (and elsewhere) was ultimately a rejection of Christ as Mediator.  All other dogmatic and doctrinal concerns such as rejecting penal substitutionary atonement, expiation and propitiation understandings of the Cross as “barbaric” were subordinate to the actual final goal, which was to reject the exclusivity of Christ.  Reject “that”, Brunner contended, and you have rejected being a professing Christian altogether.  All the art mysticism Europe could churn out in the wake of Friedrich Schleiermacher or Rudolf Otto was not going to change that basic move.

 

Attempting to expand art mysticism and art asceticism to a more global swath could eliminate the Eurocentrist impulse, perhaps, but not the elitist impulse. Anglicans such as David Brown and Gavin Hopps can argue that John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme can be regarded as equally expressing a desire for universal human fellowship as Beethoven put into his Ninth Symphony.  But in Pauline terms that would amount to the altar to the unknown god, natural religion and natural theology only get so far.  In the case of both Coltrane and Beethoven it’s still the cognoscenti who are enlightened and not the ordinary people who might balk at Beethoven’s bloviating length or not follow Coltrane’s harmonic and melodic idiom.  That’s not a knock against either Coltrane or Beethoven, by the way, I’m just pointing out that enchantment projects in the liberal arts advocated by academics tend to have a strong gnostic/mystery cult aspect to them.  That’s the element Alan Jacobs didn’t discuss but it’s not a count against his basic point. He has written elsewhere about highbrows worrying about the activities of levelers, and leveling may be its own kind of disenchantment project.  

Theories of aesthetic judgment; art critics as theologians assessing spiritual food; and the problem of advocating theories of judgment when James 2:12-13 teaches to live and act as those who will be judged by the law of liberty

(Update 7-14-2024, I apparently forgot to include the blog post(s) that spurred this set of thoughts, over at The Music Salon, http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-survival-of-culture.html) and On an Overgrown Path a bit earlier, https://www.overgrownpath.com/2024/07/great-music-has-no-independent-existence.html)

James 2:12-13 NIV

Speak and act as those who are going to be judged by the law that gives freedom, because judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment.

Regular readers of Wenatchee The Hatchet have, I hope, probably noticed that while I have written about the reception history of powers and principalities language in the Pauline epistles and touched on interpretations that apply this to spiritual warfare or empires I have been generally disinterested in what is known as political theology. To be more blunt, I have never really had any use for it.  I have quoted John Neville Figgis a few times and he contended that it was not profitable for Christians to bloviate about theories of political sovereignty for regimes which only exist in their own imaginations.  Figgis gave that warning back in 1911 or so.  His warning was, let’s just say, summarily ignored by conservative Christians of just about every stripe in Anglo-American Christendom.  I was only aware of the life and work of John Neville Figgis in roughly the last five years so I admit he is a thoroughly obscure and literally academic figure.

two pieces from Current Affairs discussing Philip Ewell's book, some semi-organized thoughts on epistemic trespass that happens when musicians and music theorists opine about religion

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/03/can-music-theory-education-overcome-its-whiteness-problem 

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/12/a-music-theorist-on-how-white-supremacist-assumptions-have-shaped-the-evaluation-of-music

...

But when people in the United States say “European” music, it’s really just a few places—German-speaking territories, prime among them—and we present it as the way we should think about music. And of course, the idea that pitch, the piano, and 12 tones in a system that emanated—to be blunt—from the Catholic Church is the system that represents all music, that’s kind of what we’ve been teaching. And, of course, colonization: you have to immediately think about the idea of presenting what were essentially white supremacists and patriarchal ideas across the globe in a colonial context. Of course, Christianity played a massive role.

I’m teaching Theory 1 currently, and to just look at all the music theory textbooks, literally last night I thought, Oh, my God, all of these hymns, all of these chorus, all these “Jesus, my pain and suffering”—there’s a lot of Christianity in the music theory textbooks, which I didn’t really dig into in my book. Maybe that’s the next project because that’s what we’re talking about: Catholic traditions morphing into German Protestant traditions of making music.

...

As Taruskin pointed out in The Ox, consolidating and ratifying liturgical music within Carolingian Catholicism is more or less why we began to have the musical notation traditions we have.  Now, obviously, just because those were the historical seeds of what Taruskin called the literate musical traditions of Europe and the United States doesn't mean for a second things stayed that way. Although Taruskin name-checks him, he doesn't mention that Charles Garside Jr. made a case that Zwingli and Bullinger, by banning music from church services, functionally created the realm of fully secular music that was not automatically in service of throne or altar.  

...