This dissertation attempts to shed explanatory light on the work of Johann Sebastian Bach by situating it within the broader framework of Lutheran theological aesthetics. Although Bach has long been considered one of the most influential musicians in European history, he wrote very little about himself and the personal convictions that inspired his music. This vacuum has prompted theologians and musicologists to explore – and speculate about – the nature of those convictions and the historical sources that shaped them. Here I argue that Bach was a sophisticated interpreter of Lutheran aesthetics, who used music to make the beauty of Christ’s cosmic redemption more audible to his listeners.In order to defend this thesis, I adopt the following methodology: in chapter one, I present a conception of Bachian aesthetics from both theoretical and practical perspectives. In chapter two, I open up a historical vantage point for understanding that aesthetic conception: the thought of Martin Luther and his followers. Although Luther has typically been considered an anti-aesthetic figure, I follow the recent Luther scholarship of Mark C. Mattes and Miikka E. Anttila, who argue that Luther held to a radically Christocentric conception of beauty. After presenting my condensed rendering of Lutheran aesthetics, in chapter three I seek to situate music within that theo-dramatic framework. For Luther, music is one of the most beautiful gifts of God, which was created through Christ and can help Christians gain a foretaste of the heavenly beauty achieved by Christ’s crucifixion. In chapter four, then, I re-read chapter one in light of chapters two and three, with the goal of presenting Bach as a sophisticated interpreter of Lutheran aesthetics. In chapter five, I pivot to consider the implications of this study for the modern academy and church, two locales that are critical for both Bach and this dissertation. In particular, I suggest that neither the modern academy nor the modern church offer an entirely hospitable locale for studying and understanding Bach’s music. The dissertation closes by offering several alternative cultural locales for understanding Bachian aesthetics, to which both the contemporary academy and church should pay more attention.

This dissertation attempts to shed explanatory light on the work of Johann Sebastian Bach by situating it within the broader framework of Lutheran theological aesthetics. Although Bach has long been considered one of the most influential musicians in European history, he wrote very little about himself and the personal convictions that inspired his music. This vacuum has prompted theologians and musicologists to explore – and speculate about – the nature of those convictions and the historical sources that shaped them. Here I argue that Bach was a sophisticated interpreter of Lutheran aesthetics, who used music to make the beauty of Christ’s cosmic redemption more audible to his listeners.In order to defend this thesis, I adopt the following methodology: in chapter one, I present a conception of Bachian aesthetics from both theoretical and practical perspectives. In chapter two, I open up a historical vantage point for understanding that aesthetic conception: the thought of Martin Luther and his followers. Although Luther has typically been considered an anti-aesthetic figure, I follow the recent Luther scholarship of Mark C. Mattes and Miikka E. Anttila, who argue that Luther held to a radically Christocentric conception of beauty. After presenting my condensed rendering of Lutheran aesthetics, in chapter three I seek to situate music within that theo-dramatic framework. For Luther, music is one of the most beautiful gifts of God, which was created through Christ and can help Christians gain a foretaste of the heavenly beauty achieved by Christ’s crucifixion. In chapter four, then, I re-read chapter one in light of chapters two and three, with the goal of presenting Bach as a sophisticated interpreter of Lutheran aesthetics. In chapter five, I pivot to consider the implications of this study for the modern academy and church, two locales that are critical for both Bach and this dissertation. In particular, I suggest that neither the modern academy nor the modern church offer an entirely hospitable locale for studying and understanding Bach’s music. The dissertation closes by offering several alternative cultural locales for understanding Bachian aesthetics, to which both the contemporary academy and church should pay more attention.

The aim of this dissertation is to expound the role of vision in John Calvin’s theology. Given the many-sided and often confusing—sometimes even apparently contradictory—nature of Calvin’s account and use of the category of vision, I set out to illuminate the implicit and deeply rooted coherence of his thought on this topic. Calvin’s treatment of vision consistently intertwines two fundamental elements: (1) a theological interpretation of the literal, bodily sense of sight, and (2) the use of sight as a metaphor for comprehensive, penetrating ‘spiritual’ understanding. A dominant strand of scholarship, along with much popular thinking about Calvin, tends to regard him as either an extreme iconoclast or, if the visual is acknowledged as playing a role in his theology, as always insisting on recourse to ‘the word’ over against the visual. (The word, for Calvin, encompasses both Jesus Christ as ‘Word’ and ‘words’ proclaimed or spoken about Christ, including, for example, the Christian sermon and sacred Scripture.) By contrast, I contend that visual patterns of thinking pervade his thought, even without recourse to the word, which is to say the use of language to describe or clarify the visual. To this end, I propose that his theological use of vision is best elicited according to an implicit distinction between simply ‘seeing’ (frequently, specere) things as they appear to present themselves—that is to say, perceiving a thing isolated from God and all other created things; and ‘beholding’ (frequently, aspicere) things as they truly are—that is to say, understanding a thing in relation to God and, by extension, to all other created things. Seeing indicates the superficial perception of some thing, grounded in mere physical perception, while beholding indicates dynamic vision, which may also be called ‘insight,’ involving the exercise of faith, in which some thing is comprehended in relation to the divine and thereby to all other created things. While beholding may or may not entail physically seeing an object, it does require that a thing be understood in relation to its source and end, which, according to Calvin, is God. Seeing and beholding are related in that both are modes of visual comprehension—involving a range of modes of visual encounter, from literal sight to mental picturing to singular visual manifestations of the divine—though seeing is a relatively diminished mode of visual comprehension in relation to beholding. Around this seeing-beholding distinction I organize what I call Calvin’s ‘theology of vision.’

The bulk of this dissertation is occupied with an exposition of Calvin’s theology of vision. After developing an account of it, I close by drawing out some of its implications for current debate in theological aesthetics. I suggest that Calvin gives us theological tools for articulating the mystery of humanity’s visually mediated encounter with divinity in a way that encompasses but is not reducible to the traditional concepts of aesthetic experience and aesthetic action.

ABSTRACT

In this dissertation I examine Calvin's trinitarian theology as it intersects his theology of materiality in order to argue for a positive theological account of the liturgical arts. I do so believing that Calvin's theology of materiality not only offers itself as a rich resource for thinking about the nature of Christian worship, it also opens up a trinitarian grammar by which we might understand the theological purposes of the arts in public worship.

Using Calvin's commentary on musical instruments as a case study, generally representative of his thinking on all the liturgical arts, I identify four emphases: that the church's worship should be (i) devoid of the "figures and shadows" which marked Israel's praise and that it emphasize instead a (ii) "spiritual," (iii) "simple," and (iv) "articulate" worship suitable to a new covenantal era. A common feature of these emphases is an anxiety over the capacity of materiality to occlude or distort the public worship of God and to mislead the worship of the faithful in idolatrous or superstitious ways. While a more narrowly patrological argument dominates Calvin's thinking on the arts in worship, I contend that it is in his thinking on creation, the resurrected body of Christ, the material symbols of worship, and the material elements of the Lord's Supper, that a distinctly trinitarian pattern of thought becomes conspicuous. Here materiality discovers its telos in the economy of God by way of its participation in the dynamic activities of Christ and the Spirit.

Taking the first three emphases in turn, while setting aside his concern for "articulate" worship as an issue more directly related to the question of metaphor rather than materiality, I argue, sometimes against Calvin, sometimes with and beyond Calvin, for a more integral role for materiality in public worship, even if this means following the logic of Calvin's theology to conclusions which he himself did not imagine. I contend that just as the triune God appropriates these distinctive material things to form and feed the church, so he takes the liturgical arts, as material artifacts, to form and feed the church in their own way, even if not on their own terms.

Against the dominant contemporary options of usefulness and disinterestedness, this dissertation attempts to display that beauty is better--more fully, richly, generatively--described with the categories of fittingness and gratuity. By working through texts by Gregory of Nyssa, this dissertation fills out what fittingness and gratuity entail--what, that is, they do for beauty-seekers and beauty-talkers. After the historical set-up of the first chapter, chapter 2 considers fittingness and gratuity through Gregory's doctrine of God because Beauty, for Gregory, is a name for God. That God is radically transcendent transforms (radicalizes) fittingness and gratuity away from a strictly Platonic vision of how they might function. Chapter 3 extends such radicalization by considering beauty in light of Christology and particularly in light of the Christological claims to invisibility, poverty, and suffering. In a time when beauty is wending its way back from an academic exile enforced by its associations with the `bourgeois,' such considerations re-present beauty as deeply intertwined with ugliness and horror. Chapter 4 asks how it is a person might perceive such beauty, which calls for pneumatological and anthropological reflections on Gregory's doctrine of the spiritual senses. The person who sees beauty rightly, for Gregory, is the person who is wounded by love.