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Robert Shaw, a perceptive sleuth of quality and one of the 20th century's finest conductors, said that J. S. Bach might be the "single greatest creative genius" in the "whole history of the Western world." Mozart said of Bach's works, "Now there is music from which a [person] can learn something." Brahms commented, "Study Bach: there you find everything."

It isn't only experts who know that Bach stands high on the list of creative geniuses. Recordings of his music abound, books about him continue to be written, there are Bach festivals in places like Pennsylvania and Oregon, and he is popular not just in Germany but in Japan as well. His music is heard more often in the concert hall than in the church, though ironically most of it consists of cantatas written for worship. In the face of this concert-hall success, why should we 21st-century Christians listen to the music of a German Baroque composer who died in 1750? And given the church's impulse toward relevance and marketing, can we use his music at all in 2007? If so, how?

One of the graduates of the Master of Sacred Music degree program I direct says she is a Christian because of Bach. She is not the only person who has told me this. Bach's reputation as the "fifth evangelist" (after Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) still reverberates today.

Bach's cantatas proclaim the good news of God's mercy in Christ. They do not seek to manipulate or sell anything. They simply announce what God has done and does. By doing so, they extol God with "boundless freedom" that is paradoxically bound to form because of the Incarnation, to quote Jaroslav Pelikan. Bach's music lives out the church's presupposition that music is for the glory of God and the edification of one's neighbor.

Part of Bach's attraction, like the gospel itself, is the grace and shalom of such a perspective. Much of what passes for church music today assumes with the surrounding culture that music is a tool for selling things. The boundless freedom of Bach's music proclaims the freedom Christ brings and gives the lie to all deathly notions of manipulative control by music or any other means.

With this freedom come the major themes of the Christian faith. We don't have all the cantatas Bach composed for the church's Sunday services and festivals, but we have more than enough to hear him embody these themes musically as well as or better than any other composer in history.

Music takes time. It expresses an order between humanity and time by means of tonal relationships. Fine composers craft these relationships with delicious expectancy and surprise. Bach is a master of this craft. He calls us to hear with ever-new ears God's gift of music. This gift overwhelmed Martin Luther. He wanted composers to shape and develop its raw sonic material. Bach responded to the call. His music can be heard with complete integrity and joyful satisfaction purely as music.

Luther also knew that music was next to the Word of God. That means it comes "from the sphere of miraculous audible things—like the Gospel," as Oskar Soehngen wrote. And that in turn reveals a remarkable reality: Words about the Word can be sung. Luther delighted in this relationship and in the "strange and wonderful" way that one voice can sing a melody while other voices dance around it "in a celestial roundelay." Bach understood and worked out Luther's implications. He used a rich interplay of voices and instruments to underscore and magnify the meaning of texts. His music always gives us a fresh way to listen to the new song of God in Christ.

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