Column title: Crossed My Mind: Thoughts on Culture and Communication
Column entry: The “Jazz Factor” in Christian Theology and Communication
By John Hatch, Ph.D.
Eastern University (retired)
CCSN Senior Fellow
Column Description: As Christians, we are called to have the mind of Christ. This goes against the grain of our social and cultural conditioning. We seek personal or political advancement; Christ seeks the lost and the least. We grasp for cultural ascendency; Christ descends to the cross of love. This column is dedicated to thinking about culture and communication under the sign of the cross.
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Last month’s column explored the nature of grace as a divine gift that engenders both order and freedom, especially in and through language. This month I’d like to briefly riff off that theme. My choice of metaphor here is intentional: these comments are inspired by the nature of music.
Over the past year, I’ve done extensive reading in the works of Jeremy Begbie, a distinguished theologian at Duke University who specializes in the interface between music and theology. He argues cogently that reflecting on the nature of music can help attune us to the mysteries and paradoxes of Christian faith. Although his insights range widely, there’s one big idea that recently jumped out at me for its relevance to this column on human culture and communication.
Begbie shows that the nature of music—especially great music—bespeaks a world of “ordered openness,” reflecting the nature of the God who creates and sustains it. In other words, good music, like God’s good creation, is filled with intricate and diverse order, yet not rigidly ordered. From astrophysics and galaxies to genetics and amoebas, there is much freedom, variability, and unpredictability. No two snowflakes are alike, and every fingerprint is distinct in some way. The wild and wondrous diversity of geological formations and living creatures boggles the mind and fires the imagination.
Good music takes after these qualities found in nature. While it incorporates genres (e.g., concerto, symphony, folk ballad, rap song, rock single) and structures (key, mode, meter, melodic theme, section, movement, etc.), it also contains irregularities; and while most music moves in a direction, it doesn’t necessarily proceed in a straight line. Begbie explains: “In much tonal music, unpredictable interruptions, ‘indirect routes’ and ruptures are an inherent and enriching part of the process. Sometimes implications are never picked up at all, and implications can be established which are discarded and not taken up until much later.”[i]
Let’s look at a few examples.
Bach. According to Begbie, in Bach’s music we encounter “the simultaneous presence of radical openness and radical consistency.”[ii] For instance, Bach will build an entire composition or section of a piece around a particular melodic figure—creating a sense of order and consistency—yet do so in ways that are varied, irregular, unexpected and fascinating. This means that “unless one happens to know the piece well, it is virtually impossible to predict what comes next. Yet what is heard is filled with sense.”[iii]
Tchaikovsky. While growing up, I heard Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 playing on my parents’ hi-fi many times, and its iconic opening theme is burned into my memory. This piece is widely considered one of the greatest piano concertos of all time; yet on first hearing it, Nikolai Rubinstein—a pianist Tchaikovsky hoped would perform it in concert—responded derisively that the concerto needed to be thoroughly rewritten, since it was a complete mess. (Thankfully, Tchaikovsky didn’t comply!) Among other things, Concerto No. 1 departs from the compositional norm that the opening theme be woven throughout the piece (at least in the first movement); instead, Tchaikovsky’s opening theme completely drops away and never returns. Nonetheless, it works.
Popular music. In a similar vein, take one of the greatest rock albums of all time—the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper. This concept album starts with the Fab Four pretending to be a fictitious band (“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”)—as displayed in the cover art, both inside and outside the sleeve—and then drops the idea after the second track (except for a tacked-on reprise near the end of the album). Yet somehow, the conceit worked its magic on listeners, and the record’s grab-bag of wildly diverse songs was somehow perceived as a cohesive album.
Looking at popular music in general, we often find musical digressions that render a main theme or refrain more exciting when it returns—for example, the bridge in many hit songs, or extended instrumental breaks in progressive rock. (“Roundabout” by Yes is a great example of both.)
Jazz. And then there’s jazz, in which spontaneity and creative flights are prized over note-for-note accuracy—giving rise to the tongue-in-cheek saying, “It’s not a mistake, it’s jazz!” A good jazz player knows how to incorporate such blips and slips into their ensuing improvisation, making the most of these imperfections to serve the larger thrust and spirit of the music.
Begbie finds it theologically instructive that unpredictable and seemingly disorderly elements can play such a vital role in good music. On this point, he cites theologians Daniel Hardy and David Ford, who “suggest that we should talk not only of order and disorder but also of ‘nonorder,’ the ‘jazz factor’ in creation: that spontaneous element in the world and in human life that reaches its apogee in the unforced, unpredictability of Jesus Christ.”[iv]
These concepts—“nonorder” and the “jazz factor”—are highly relevant to Christian communication and human relationships. But first, a digression . . .
A father had two sons. The younger, being self-centered and short-sighted, didn’t want to wait until his father’s decease at some future date to receive his share of the inheritance. So, he did the unthinkable: demanded his inheritance now. (He might as well have wished his father dead.) Then, adding insult to injury, he squanders his father’s hard-earned wealth on parties and prostitutes. And after the money’s gone and he’s sunk to eating pig slop to survive, he figures he can go back to his father’s house as a servant and at least get three square meals a day. So, he prepares a little speech of repentance and heads home . . .
Okay, so we know how the prodigal’s story turns out. The father sees the rag-clad wastrel coming down the road, drops everything, and runs to embrace him before he’s even had a chance to apologize! And it turns out that the father is even more prodigal than the son: he instantly orders his servants to prepare a royal feast for the one who squandered half the family wealth.
So, what’s my point—or rather, Christ’s?
Nonorder. The jazz factor. Jesus is telling us that the Father of creation is more interested in improvising grace, generosity, and redemption for his children than in maintaining perfect order. If order were a top priority for the father in the story, he never would have granted his younger son’s request in the first place, since it went against the moral order of first-century Jewish society. And he certainly wouldn’t have thrown his arms around the foul-smelling young man before he’d had a chance to grovel and apologize, nor thrown a lavish party to celebrate the wastrel’s return. This father goes completely off-script, acting on impulse—departing from the dutiful order through which his older son views the world—and his actions are beautiful. If this parable were a piece of music, it would be great jazz.
And what makes the father’s actions like beautiful music instead of jarring noise? In a word, love. Love gives grace, not simply because it is free to do so, but because it cares deeply for the beloved. While it recognizes the benefits of rules and good order, Christlike love values the person more than the rules, the relationship more than order, grace more than just deserts. Love is more interested in maturing goodness than maintaining static perfection. Love takes joy in the journey, with all its twists and wrong turns, setbacks and detours, on the way to the Father’s house. As St. Paul writes, “Love is patient, love is kind . . . . it keeps no record of wrongs . . . . It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”[v]
This description reminds me of the quirky term nexting, encountered in John Stewart’s classic interpersonal communication text, Bridges Not Walls.[vi] Stewart suggests that when communication goes wrong, there’s very little to be gained by finding fault or fixing blame. Instead, he recommends that we ask ourselves, “What can I help to happen next?” to make the interaction or relationship better. Across the sweep of biblical revelation, God takes this kind of approach to communicating with wayward humanity—demonstrating that “God is love.”[vii]
Communication scholars typically make much of clarity, truth, and justice in communication. Christians are called to an even higher standard: “speaking the truth in love.”[viii] Rhetoricians prize eloquent speech. St. Paul calls us to an even greater prize: “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal . . . . And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”[ix]
And how we need it. “Love covers over a multitude of sins,” St. Peter tells us. For all our flaws and failures in relating to God and one another, love can turn discord into beautiful harmony. Overflowing with grace, love’s “nonorder” redeems disorder, while restoring the joy and zest that’s been missing from order.
Love—it’s the ultimate jazz factor.
Notes
[i] Jeremy S. Begbie, Theology, Music and Time (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 60.
[ii] Jeremy S. Begbie, A Peculiar Orthodoxy: Reflections on Theology and the Arts (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018), 18.
[iii] Begbie, A Peculiar Orthodoxy, 19.
[iv] Begbie, Theology, Music and Time, 234, citing Daniel W. Hardy and David Ford, Praising and Knowing God (Philadelphia, Westminster, 1985), 20, 142.
[v] 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, NIV.
[vi] See John Stewart, Bridges Not Walls: A Book About Interpersonal Communication, 11th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 2011).
[vii] 1 John 4:8, NIV. For a helpful summary of and reflection on God’s approach to communication in Scripture, see Robert S. Fortner, Communication, Media, and Identity: A Christian Theory of Communication (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 60-65.
[viii] Ephesians 4:15, NIV.
[ix] 1 Corinthians 13:1, 13, NIV.