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Music and faith, music and belief – what’s the difference, and how can music illuminate our lived experiences of faith?
This is the first of five episodes featuring conversations I recorded this summer with the plenary speakers of the Christian Congregational Music Conference. It was a joy to talk with them, and I’m so glad I get to share these conversations with you! (Scroll down if you’d like to read the transcript of this episode.)
About Jonathan Arnold: Rev. Dr. Jonathan Arnold is the Dean of Divinity at Magdalen College, Oxford. Before ordination, he was a professional vocalist, including with St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir and The Sixteen. He is the author of several books, including Music and Faith: Conversations in a Post-Secular Age and Sacred Music in Secular Society.
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Transcription of Music and the Church Ep. 41: Music and Faith in a Post-Secular Age with Jonathan Arnold
Sarah Bereza: Let’s start out by talking about your relationship to music and your own faith background.
Jonathan Arnold: I have always had a love of music and particularly of singing. So I’ve been in choirs ever since I was a young child at a primary school, secondary school. And then towards the end of my secondary education, I discovered the wealth of Cathedral music, which I didn’t really know at all. But when I was about 18, I joined the cathedral choir and had a very steep learning curve of learning to sight read, learning Anglican choir repertoire, which I didn’t know, learning how to sing with lay clerks and choristers. And after a year of that very steep learning curve, I went to university in Oxford where I fell in love with the whole world of choral singing and joined as many choirs as I could possibly join. And at the end of that first year, I then was offered a sort of permanent position at one of what’s known as the foundations in Oxford, which is one of the big five choir foundations in Oxford and Cambridge.
Jonathan Arnold: So at Magdalen College Oxford, I became a choral scholar, which meant that I was singing seven or eight services every single week, different repertoire for each one. So by that time I could sight read. And by that time, even though I was studying theology at the university officially and had a vocation towards that, I discovered this other vocation, which was music and singing. And I was absolutely determined to to follow that. So at the end of university, I packed up my bags, moved to London without a penny or a job, started teaching music wherever I could, joining choirs wherever I could, making a crust, paying the rent, and then applying to music college. And I went to the Royal Academy of Music, studied singing, and became a professional singer. So I sang for eight years with St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir and for 14 years in total with a choir called The Sixteen, who are a professional English choir and many other choirs as well as well as doing solo things.
Jonathan Arnold: But the theology was always there. So whilst I was doing that, I then registered at King’s College London to do a doctorate in church history as it happens and completed the doctorate. And then the two vocations of music and theology led me down this path where ordination sort of came at the end of that road. And I went forward for selection and became a priest. So after a few years of training and curacy, I basically gave up the singing and started work as a full time college chaplain in Oxford at Worcester College. And I did that for eight years. And then I’ve transferred to Magdalen college where I’ve been Dean of Divinity. And in both of those environments in Oxford, there’s a lot of music. There’s wonderful college choirs, music within the liturgy as well as pastoral ministry, academic work and so on.
Jonathan Arnold: So that’s where I’ve, that’s my journey and that’s where I’ve come from. Which really explains why I have this interest in singing music and spirituality.
Music and Spirituality
Sarah Bereza: How do you understand the relationship between music and spirituality?
Jonathan Arnold: Well, it’s always been a very close relationship for me. So close, I think that I would say that singing for me has always been a form of prayer. And in fact, when I became a chaplain, I sort of went through a period of therapy writing a book about sacred music where I was trying to work out where I had spiritual experiences through singing were not just in the liturgy. They were also in the concert hall, the recording studio, listening to music at home. So there’s an individual level of, of experiencing the transcendent, numinous nature of God through sound. There’s also obviously, through singing, a communal aspect of prayer or praise, but it’s really fundamentally, I think about connection.
Jonathan Arnold: I think it’s about how one finds a way of connecting the material with the divine. As Martin Luther wrote about music – believing very much in Pythagoras, his idea of the music of the spheres, that there’s a kind of celestial music to the universe, that the mathematics of the universe and music are deeply entwined, the kind of musical ratios that are embedded within the physical world. And Luther thought that human music was a way through towards celestial music, rather like looking through an icon that you get through the musica mundana as he called it, the mundane music, in order that you might glimpse something of the musica celestia, the celestial music that we most of the time can’t hear because of our own inadequacies, because of our frailties, you know? And so I find that a very useful concept really. And St. Augustine went so far as to say God is music. Now I think, you know, before we say that that’s a kind of idolatry, we might need to unpack it a little bit. That, you know, music is not God, but one aspect or an aspect of the divine trinity is a kind of musical harmony. And I think humanity, whether they are believers or not, strive [and] seek for meaning to life. And very often the harmony of music can give us an inkling of that deeper harmony within the universe, that we might say has an effect upon our spirit or our soul.
Music with – and without – words
Sarah Bereza: Speaking as a practitioner, so often when we’re talking about music in a church context, we talk about music as a way to get people to remember the words. And we don’t necessarily talk about it as something more just about music and what we do when we make music. It’s as if music’s importance in the worship setting is only about conveying the words.
Jonathan Arnold: And of course, historically there’s been a lot of tension around this subject. When polyphony first came into being in the 11th and 12th centuries in Paris and it’s burgeoning through the 13th and 14th centuries, music became more and more elaborate to the point that in the 15th century, certain Renaissance humanists, like Desiderius Erasmus for instance, were highly skeptical of the noises that choirs were making because the melismatic music – that is phrases that take a single syllable of a word and stretch it over half a page of music – are not conveying anything about the meaning of the words. The words are completely lost in elaborate 15th century polyphony. And so when the Reformation came along, the idea of the emphasis upon the comprehensibility of the word then came back to the fore. So Luther and his chorales, Calvin and his metrical psalms, all are ways of getting people to sing their theology, to sing their faith, and to learn the words. And of course other reformers like Ulrich Zwingli in Zurich – who was perhaps the finest musician amongst the reformers – banned music altogether. Partly on the basis that it was unscriptural – he thought that when St, Paul says, “Sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs in your heart,” – Zwingli said, “Well, in your heart means to yourself.”
Jonathan Arnold: So the tension has been there. And of course since the Reformation, Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment and particularly 20th, 21st Century Evangelicalism, the words have been absolutely crucial to what’s being conveyed by the sound of the music. But I think there’s also a deeper story too, about the music itself. And one could as an example, give untexted music like a Bach cello suite, and discuss, well, does this have meaning? Is this absolute music that has no meaning outside of its own self, or can we hear it within a context of faith? I mean either the context of the composer himself – J. S. Bach who was a believer – or perhaps the listener, or a much more complex and wider set of social, theological, historical contexts.
Sarah Bereza: This brings us back to thinking about music and spirituality, and the relationship with that. And can listening or performing a Bach cello suite be itself a spiritual practice, right?
Jonathan Arnold: In my previous book, I interviewed Rowan Williams, and one of the things that he said – we talked about the cello suites – one of the key things he said is, “Learning to listen is what it means to learn to live with and before God.” So I’m listening with intent. Listening with care and attention is one way that we learn about how to encounter the Divine. And I think we found between the two of us that the connection between listening to a Bach cello suite or maybe a piece of plain song has a kind of intensity to it that we’re not quite sure whether we can name it or describe it. But I think Rowan Williams said it was something like a mystical experience that you may have, maybe akin to something like St John of the Cross. It’s like the burning of the hot coals upon the upon the lips. It’s an encounter which is at once intense, and numinous, and transcendent.
Jonathan Arnold: So I think there’s a whole wealth of ideas around listening intently and the spirit of Christian spirituality, about participating in the Divine Trinity of the Godhead.
Music and Faith, vs. Music and Belief
Sarah Bereza: Can we talk about how you compare music and faith, with music and belief? You make a distinction between those two relationships.
Jonathan Arnold: Yes. So in my talk here at the conference, and the new book that’s come out, which is Music and Faith: Conversations in a Post-Secular Age, I talk about where we are in Western society now or I think where we may be heading. The forces of secularism, of what we might call new atheism seem to be on the way.
Jonathan Arnold: The idea that concepts of God are simply going to die out within the next 50 years is patently not true. And we’re now living in a world where people – who have various strains and facets of belief, or faith, or unbelief – are coexisting within perhaps a more creative way. So the idea of the distinction between faith and belief comes from an analysis of the word for faith or belief that we have from the Greek New Testament. The word we have in the Gospels and St. Paul is pisteuó. And in that one Greek word, it’s like a prism. It has many, many meanings. It can mean faith, it can mean trust, it can mean relationship, and it can mean belief. But in the English language, we have these very different concepts. We have faith, and we have belief, and we have trust, and we use them in different ways. Whereas in the Greek word, they’re all in the same word.
Jonathan Arnold: So what does this mean? Well, in terms of translation, it means that when we come across this Greek word, we’ve got to make a decision about how to translate it. Do we translate it as belief or faith? And whatever we do, we make a huge difference to the meaning of that text. Because faith is largely about something that we do. It’s something that we practice. We either do it through solitary prayer or through communal activity or through the living act. It’s a kind of active expression of the internal conviction. But we don’t have a verb in English “to faith.” So we don’t use it. We don’t say today I am faithing or I am going to do some faith, but we do have the verb “to believe.” So whenever it comes as a verb, like pisteuó, we always come up with, “I believe.”
Jonathan Arnold: Now belief in the English language has this connotation of propositional consent. You know, I believe in angels. I believe in devils. I believe in the Virgin Mary. You know, I believe this, but I don’t believe this, this and this. So it’s basically creedal. And so you end up with this kind of rational thought. You know, some things I believe and some things I don’t. Whereas faith doesn’t really ask those questions so much. Faith isn’t saying, “Well, how much do I believe in the Virgin birth today? Or how much do I believe in the resurrection?” Faith is more about the doing. So it’s about joining in with the hymn. It’s about singing with the choir. It’s about kneeling down and praying. It’s about helping the homeless, the bereaved, the prisoner, the weak. And it’s not so much about, “Well do I believe in this or not today,” – it’s about just actually doing the Christian faith.
Jonathan Arnold: And I think where we come to music, I think we’re much more in the realm of faith than we are in the realm of belief. Now, one of the ways that that’s being expressed today is in the rise in western Europe, maybe not in North America, but in western Europe there’s been a documented rise in biblical illiteracy, or in other words, there are fewer people who know their Bible. They’re more likely to know Harry Potter story than they are to know a Nativity story, for instance, or at least a third of people surveyed think that Harry Potter narrative might come from the Bible. And a third of people didn’t recognize that a Nativity story came from the Bible. So this is interesting. This is unfortunate stuff and it’s kind of arisen out of a wider phenomenon of people not reading to their children anymore, and all sorts of things to do with change in children’s education.
Jonathan Arnold: So how does Christian music then fit in with that particular framework? I think for some people the music, it can be a conveyor of the words of belief. So it can be something which affirms and carries their particular convictions. You know, I believe that Jesus died for me, that he saved me, that I’m saved, He rose from the dead. These kinds of sort of rational ideas. But for others, encounter with sacred music might be something a bit less to do with those assertions. And more to do with a kind of spiritual connection with the Divine through beauty and through what I call: encounter, experience, and relationship.
Jonathan Arnold: And I think a lot of people who go to church are there because of encounter, experience, and relationship. Whether or not they hold exactly the same set of creedal propositional beliefs as the person standing next to them.
Encounter, Experience, and Relationship
Sarah Bereza: Let’s talk more about encounter, experience, and relationship. Encounter with God? Encounter with God through people?
Jonathan Arnold: So one of the stories I tell is about a man who kind of had a really rough start in life, couldn’t cope with being loved by anybody, and kept on pushing people away. But one person loved him to bits, and just stuck with him, and warmed him up, and allowed him through a long period of encounter, experience and relationship of human love that he could trust this person and begin to trust himself to show love. And in that sense was was saved. Now if human love can do that miraculous thing for the human soul, let us imagine what Divine love might be capable of.
Jonathan Arnold: And so it is about starting with the human story and moving towards a Divine story, which I think is what God has done through Jesus Christ. I mean, we have a human encounter, which leads us through to a divine encounter. It’s both human and divine and in music. And if we think in terms of those Augustinian ideas, that music is somehow divine, that God is music somehow. It’s one way. I mean, it’s not the whole way, but it’s one way in which we can capture something of the divine through the natural world. Other people might do this through nature and the countryside and a beautiful mountain. Some people might do it through poetry, others might do it through communal projects. There are many ways to do this.
Jonathan Arnold: But why music is so special – and people like Karl Barth have said this in the past – is that it doesn’t have propositions in itself. The words might have assertions, but the music doesn’t, it doesn’t say, it doesn’t coerce you to believe one thing or another. So if we have this verb “faith-ing” or “to faith,” then music is – that’s what we’re doing. And I like to say that it’s a very worthwhile place to be. Especially in what I call a post-secular age where there are lots of people going to church who don’t necessarily believe there are a lot of people who are belonging without the believing. And we have to really as a church, as Christians throughout the world, really look at that with great honesty about ourselves and what the phenomenon is, and say, “well, how does music fit in here for all of these people? How do we have a church that is accepting of everybody without losing its creedal identity? How do we welcome the stranger, the orphan, the widow without being exclusive?” And music is one way of connecting people in harmony that is like no other really.
Ministering to People in the Church
Sarah Bereza: This might be taking us rather far afield, but I’m so curious about your thoughts on ministering to people who are in the church community, and are not necessarily people who are focused on belief. Maybe find themselves rather in a lot of doubt, or find that specific creedal statements are not something that interests them or concerns them. And yet, here they are, coming to church, worshipping.
Jonathan Arnold: Well, a colleague of mine, Brian Mountford, has written a book on this called The Christian Atheist: [full title: The Christian Atheist: Belonging without Believing]. It’s an extraordinary title, isn’t it? But he’s, he’s found some, and a lot of them are in Oxford. One really interesting example is Phillip Pullman, the author who lives here in Oxford, who calls himself a cultural Anglican, I think. And perhaps even Richard Dawkins would call himself that. People who love the tradition, the history, the words of the Book of Common Prayer, the beautiful liturgy of the candles, and the music, but wouldn’t sign up to any of the creedal beliefs of the church. So that’s one side of it.
Jonathan Arnold: Now what are those people getting? Well, they’re getting a great sense of community, a great sense of social cohesion. Which goes back to an evolutionary basis. Another colleague of mine, Robin Dunbar at Magdalen has done years and years of experimental research on the origins of singing as social cohesion within evolutionary development. So in Neanderthal man, singing develops as a way of bonding a particular group together. And by that bonding creates a greater strength and a greater defense against predation. So it keeps itself safer from a potential attack. And he’s also done experiments on how, when people get together to sing, even if they’re strangers, that has a chemical effect in the brain, so endorphin levels go up. So there’s no doubt that coming to church and singing is good for you mentally and physically. And of course, you might say also spiritually and psychologically.
Sarah Bereza: I feel like I need to advertise children’s choirs, like, “Your children will benefit from this! Stress relief for children!” Which feels very silly, but it’s also entirely true.
Jonathan Arnold: It’s entirely true, and it’s scientifically proven. So yeah, I’ve got a whole body of evidence, you know, of these experiments that we know that it raises endorphin levels and dopamine levels. That the chemical reactions in the brain are rather like the kind of trance inducing states that you get in some of the more shamanistic religions. So yeah, there’s great benefits from it, whatever your belief. So as a Christian minister, how do I deal with that? Well in Magdalen our congregation is very eclectic. It can be students who are Christian believers. It can be students who are not Christian believers, or fellows, professors or just people who’ve just wandered in off the street, because we get a lot of tourists. They could be from anywhere in the world and could be, you know, paid up members of other religions, Buddhism and Islam, whatever.
Jonathan Arnold: So we present what we present. We present a dignified, beautiful service of prayers, of worship, of singing, and leave it to the member of the congregation to experience it how they will, and perhaps leave it to God to manifest himself through the worship, through the prayers, through the music, to each member of the congregation as he wishes, as he can. So we operate a totally inclusive policy and welcome people from wherever they are, and offer up whatever we can do to the best of our ability. Now if people want to follow that up with me through a private prayer or questions or as very often happens, preparation for baptism or confirmation, then that’s great.
Jonathan Arnold: And very often I will see people come and go and they’ve come to a service, they love it. They’re over from Australia or Hong Kong or just about to go home, and they say that was just beautiful. It was amazing. Absolutely wonderful. Some people want to take it back to their own place and actually experiment with their own church liturgy. And so there’s a kind of consulting role that we take on sometimes. So we’ve been over to the states a couple of times to do this. Sort of take the whole package out there and sort of work with a particular group of churches and see what they’d like to adopt and what they wouldn’t, what we can learn from them, you know? So that’s, yeah, that’s the way, that’s the way I do it.
Music and Implicit and Explicit Theology
Sarah Bereza: Let’s think about implicit and explicit theology and how music relates to this and faith.
Jonathan Arnold: So rather like I was saying about faith, the difference between faith and belief is this symbiotic relationship between implicit and explicit religion. Implicit relates rather than more to the doing side, the practice of religion, the singing, the praying, the worship, the doing the works of charity and so on. Now the implicit in music is something which is implicit because we don’t have to name it, we don’t have to say what it’s doing. It’s something we do and we feel, we experience, we encounter, and it’s a relationship thing because we are often doing it with other people. And it’s relationship thing because we’re doing it to build a relationship with God, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to any particular sets of beliefs. Now, explicit religion of course, is important because doctrine is what we build our religion on. It’s how we come together and say, well, this is the basis of our faith. We believe in Jesus Christ, for instance. So there are certain things which differ amongst Christian denominations and there are some things that really don’t.
Jonathan Arnold: And explicit religion is saying, there’re some doctrinal things here which are the bottom line. So I certainly don’t want to do away with the idea of belief. I don’t want to do away with the idea of explicit religion. But what I am saying is that at its best in church life, the implicit religion that we practice often through music and singing and prayer, actually has an influence upon the explicit and the belief. So that over time a community will – in a nuanced way – change its set of explicit creedal beliefs. Now, we may not believe that doctrine evolves because we don’t see it evolving very quickly. And very often if somebody believes something different to us, we don’t see that as an evolution. We just see it as something Other, you know, but if we think historically, well, doctrine does evolve over time.
Jonathan Arnold: Christian doctrine does evolve, which is why tradition in the Christian story and the stories of the saints and of great spiritual writers through the centuries are hugely important to the spiritual nourishment of the ecclesial body throughout the world, as well as all the set of creedal propositions that we get from the Bible. So I’d like to just put that forward, that music is a great force amongst other things in the world of natural theology that can have a beneficial effect upon the whole realm of our implicit and explicit religious life. And I think that’s all a very positive thing to say.
