29/07/2024
“A musical approach to Scripture encompasses a number of aspects, each of
which can help us see Scripture in a fresh light….One aspect of the music
metaphor is the relationship between melody and harmony. The Bible has a
clear storyline, a melody, but it also has a range of individual and corporate
stories that run together, sometimes taking center stage, sometimes fading into
the background, providing harmony and counterpoint, treble and bass, height
and depth, in such a way that no single writer (or musician) could possibly
represent it all. Studying the Bible is about exploring the detail of the harmony
—Why is the oboe, or Obadiah, doing that, and how does it contribute to the
whole piece?—without losing sight of the melody…. Another (and more subtle)
aspect is the interplay between rhythm and meter. Meter is the underlying time
structure of a piece—one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four—and although
it may vary within the piece, it provides a grounding in time, a sense of orientation,
for the listener. Rhythm is the structure of the sound you actually hear—
boom, ba-cha, boom, boom, ba-cha— which may involve a number of notes in
one beat, or a number of beats without notes. The rhythm rides the meter like a
surfer rides a wave, playing, doing its own thing, but always mindful of and
constrained by the steady movement underneath. As the Bible commences with its overture, we hear a melody, and a regular
rhythm begins. As things develop, various harmonies and disharmonies arise…
leaving us listeners to wonder what the Composer is doing. And a good Composer
allows dissonance to create anticipation for the right time to heal it. Then
the melody returns, cutting through the cacophony and bringing a temporary
sense of resolution. To someone who has never heard the piece before, some
moments can even sound like the symphony is fully resolved and is about to
finish (a new reader of the Bible could easily think the tension is resolved, for
instance, upon the entrance into the Promised Land or David’s coronation). Yet
these temporary resolutions produce tensions of their own, which point forward
to more complexities, and beyond them, to further resolutions. Throughout
the Bible, as time metronomically marches on, the rhythms of Scripture
continue to be accented, with particular days and festivals highlighting rest
and freedom, law and atonement. But every bar, every cadence, every pause,
heightens the sense that the piece is still incomplete. Eventually, after an
uncomfortably long silence, the score builds to a massive crescendo in Jesus
the Messiah, as the various themes come together and resolve in a fashion that
nobody could have quite imagined, but yet seems completely natural… Only at
the finale, when the Christ-crescendo is recapitulated and the instruments are
joined by earthly and angelic choirs, do we ultimately see the full scope of the
Composer’s vision. As such, a musical reading of Scripture does more justice
to the way Scripture actually works. Scriptural Scriptural typology is more like a
piece of music: familiar themes like temple, kingdom, exodus, judgment, and
sacrifice keep recurring, but always slightly differently. The judgment of Jerusalem
is not just a “picture” or “shadow” of the last day; nor is it simply a dramatic
“event” that happens once and then is no more. It is somehow a part of the
future judgment, a foretaste of it, and yet at the same time historically distinct
from it. The final resolution, when it comes, is both familiar and new at the
same time. It is, in that sense, musical. — ALASTAIR ROBERTS & ANDREW WILSON,
ECHOES OF EXODUS: TRACING THEMES OF REDEMPTION THROUGH SCRIPTURE.
