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Everybody is aware of mutual recriminations between artists and the church. Members of the church criticize one and another piece of art as perverse, sacrilegious, destructive of faith and morals; last year's tirade by the mayor of New York against a painting of the Virgin in a display of contemporary British art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art is but one of many recent examples. And artists criticize the church as a threat to artistic freedom, as having no aesthetic taste, even as being hostile to the arts. Of course that last charge is ridiculous; name the congregation in which there is no music and no visual art! One may think it's pretty bad music and pretty bad visual art; but there it is, in abundance. And as to the other charges by artists against the church: surely they need to be qualified before they come even close to the truth. Some members of the church are a threat to some cases of artistic freedom, some members of the church are lacking in aesthetic taste. And on that last: Christians scarcely have a monopoly on poor taste.

There's a related complaint of which most people know little: a complaint against theology by people engaged with the arts. I mean, a complaint against Christian theology by Christians engaged with the arts. Christians already immersed in the arts read books or take courses in theology and find themselves in a different sphere from that with which they're familiar, one in which the arts they love are almost completely ignored. Some don't mind this shift in mentality; they happily put their love for the arts in cold storage while they immerse themselves in theology. Others feel so alienated that they want nothing more to do with theology. But there are some in whom the conviction arises that this is not how it has to be. Theology is missing out on something. Theology has always borrowed insights, concepts, and the like from areas of thought and experience outside itself. Traditionally theology borrowed heavily from philosophy; in the modern world it has borrowed heavily from psychology and theory of interpretation. Surely there must be things in the arts that would be of use to theology—untapped resources.

Jeremy Begbie is a professionally trained musician who teaches systematic theology at the University of Cambridge; it's this last complaint against theology by a lover of the arts that underlies his recent book, Theology, Music and Time, and the anthology, Beholding the Glory, in which he has assembled essays from eight writers, including himself. To his great credit Begbie never expresses the complaint in whining tones, and he goes beyond complaining to an exploration of possibilities; nonetheless, it cannot be missed that he as a musician is lodging a complaint against his own professional field of theology: by ignoring the arts, theology is neglecting a valuable resource for its own endeavors.

More specifically, it's for his own home field of music that Begbie wants to make the case. Here's how he introduces the project of the book: "[O]ur primary purpose here is to enquire as to the ways in which music can benefit theology. The reader is invited to engage with music in such a way that central doctrinal loci are explored, interpreted, re-conceived and articulated. It will be found that unfamiliar themes are opened up, familiar topics exposed and negotiated in fresh and telling ways, obscure matters—resistant to some modes of understanding—are clarified, and distortions of theological truth avoided and even corrected. In this way, we seek to make a small but I hope significant contribution to the revitalising of Christian theology for the future."

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