Music of God

Music intersects with all theology and all culture. Scripture is full of “data” about music, and possesses a musical quality in its composition. Christian worship is musical worship, and is itself a through-composed symphony. As an art form, music raises questions about our relationship to the material world (instruments and vibrations), about our use of symbols and the role of the imagination, about how we know and what we know, about our making.

Music has this sort of breadth because it is a created reality rooted in the reality of the Triune life.

God is Word and Spirit, Word and breath. That is to say, He is Word and music, both discourse and poetry. In the life of God, ratio and passio are as inseparable as Son and Spirit. And so in created reality too they cannot be disentangled. We cannot speak without pitch, timbre, rhythm, rudimentary melody. We cannot write without form, which means all writing has rhetorical and poetic features.

Music is also an expression of the perichoretic quality of the life of the Persons. As sex is the mutual envelopment of man and woman, as food involves a common share in a common table and so a common share in one another, so music involves mutual penetration of sound and person, of singer and singer. We can’t get closer to a created image of perichoretic union than a well-trained choir, each voice fully itself while it penetrates and glorifies all other voices.