New Sacred Music Guy at Duke

Welp, Duke is now complete. I've been blown away since I visited Duke Divinity school about how perfect of a fit it is. They have some of my favorite theologians, they are very intentional about involving students in ministry rather than just having them sit in a classroom, they take spiritual life seriously by having morning prayer every morning and setting up spiritual growth groups for us, they care deeply about the Church and at the same time bringing the gospel to the public realm. However, the one area I would have admitted that it's not ostensibly the BEST place to be trained for ministry is theology and arts. I think most people would say to go to Yale if you really want to focus in that area. Well, I just heard yesterday that Duke hired Jeremy Begbie to be a professor starting next year. From what I hear (I haven't read anything by him myself), he is a leading theologian in sacred music. They want him to teach classes and start a number of arts and theology initiatives. Since God has been rekindling my love of art, particularly music, over this past year, I'm very excited to have the opportunity to study under him.

This got me thinking about theology and art today. I admit that I'm still reluctant about that relationship because too often it seems like people really like music but they want to feel good about it, so they find some proof-text from scripture to show that 'God is the great artist,' or some such justification. But still, my boss told me that Jeremy Begbie says that classical music communicates the order of God. This is a huge simplification and third hand, but I think that's a neat idea. It makes me wonder - in modernity, music was neatly ordered, and so was theology (systematic theology). In postmodernity, liberal theology paralleled postmodern music - the twelve-tone stuff like Shoenberg. The postliberal theology that is quite present at Duke came out of dissatisfaction with modernity and postmodernity. It makes me wonder, what would postliberal music sound like? Postliberal theology views the Bible and the Church as a narrative that transcends the system of doctrines of modernity and chaos of postmodernity. How would postliberal music present that narrative but also present the fragments of liberalism and insufficiency of modernity?