A Mighty Cantata

Lutheran churches were celebrating Reformation Sunday this past weekend, and I was blessed to hear J. S. Bach’s eight-movement cantata based on Martin Luther’s hymn Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott (“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”) the way Bach intended—in the context of a worship service.

The Neffs met up with their friends Mark and Nina Moring at Grace Lutheran Church in River Forest, Illinois, for a splendid service of evening prayer complete with choir, orchestra, organ, and professional soloists.

In our time, Bach’s cantatas are usually performed as concert pieces, as if they were mini-oratorios, small-scale versions of Handel’s Messiah or Mendelssohn’s Elijah. But that is not at all what Bach had in mind. He wrote these pieces to be paired with sermons as musical expositions of Scripture.

Robin Leaver explained it all in issue 95 of Christian History and Biography: The Gospel According to J. S. Bach. In an article entitled “Sermons that Sing,” the Westminster Choir College musicologist described how this unique musical genre functioned in 18th-century Lutheran worship.

“These services were long,” writes Leaver, “lasting up to four hours—with a complex liturgical order based on Luther's evangelical reinterpretation of the traditional Mass.” (Fortunately, the service we attended on Reformation Sunday lasted just an hour and fifteen minutes.)

Leaver explains:

[T]he cantata was closely connected with both the reading of the Gospel and the sermon. The simple sequence was this:

Gospel, Nicene Creed, Cantata, Hymn, Sermon.

The portion from one of the Gospels appointed for that day was read. The choir responded to the Gospel, affirming the faith by singing the Nicene Creed in Latin. Then the choir and instrumentalists performed the cantata. The whole congregation responded by singing in German the hymn Wir glauben all' an einen Gott ("We all believe in one true God"), Luther's rhyming, metrical version of the Creed. After this second affirmation of faith came the sermon, a detailed exposition and application of the day's Gospel reading. The cantata therefore stood in the middle of a sequence that began with the Gospel reading and ended with the sermon. Like the sermon, the cantata was also an exposition and application of the Gospel of the day.

The cantata was thus a theological commentary on Scripture and even an exhortation to faith and perseverance. In the Ein’ feste Burg cantata we heard, God’s strength and sure victory are repeatedly invoked to urge the believer to be steadfast in fighting the devil.

The bass soloist sings:

Consider well, O child of God,
This love so mighty, which Jesus hath
In his own blood for thee now written;
By which he thee
For war opposing Satan’s host,
Opposing world and error,
Enlisted thee!
Yield not within thy spirit
To Satan and his viciousness!

The soprano (representing the Christian soul) then responds to God with this invitation:

Come in my heart’s abode,
Lord Jesus, my desiring!
Drive world and Satan out,
And let thine image find in me new glory!
Hence, prideful cloud of sin!

I’m sure the poetry is better in the original German, but you get the picture. This pattern of exhortation and faithful response repeats throughout the full range of Bach’s cantatas.

Leaver’s article gives examples from various Bach compositions of the many inventive ways he used both musical and literary techniques to drive home a gospel truth and evoke both the terror of God’s judgment and the comfort of his grace.

Bach’s—and Luther’s—message is ultimately about God’s triumph. As the libretto of Ein’ feste Burg tells us:

Who hath to Christ’s own bloodstained flag
In baptism sworn allegiance
Wins in spirit ever more.
All that which God has fathered
Is for victory intended.

* * *

Professor Leaver’s full article is available online, but only to ChristianHistory.net subscribers. You can sign up for a mere $12 a year (surely you can afford a paltry dollar a month).

Or you can order a print copy of Christian History & Biography issue 95 for $5.00 plus shipping and handling.

Listen to the first movement of J. S. Bach's Ein' feste Burg.

Read more!

History Lesson: Positively Protestant

Last summer, I received an essay from a friend—a leading Evangelical intellectual—who said that the label Protestant should fade out in favor of the label Evangelical because, in part, Protestant was “negative.”

In many people’s minds, it certainly is. It sounds like it is about dissent and disagreement. It evokes images of picketers carrying poorly made signs back and forth in front of a factory. Indeed, it sounds disagreeable.

More recently, another friend published an engaging account of his exploration of Catholicism. The book is Jon Sweeney's Almost Catholic, and you can read an excellent review of it on my wife LaVonne’s blog.

The book is a good read, but its argument rests in part on his contrast between the “universal” character of Catholic faith and the negative Protestant alternative:

To be Protestant is to define yourself as protesting against certain forms of religion. ... there is little need for Protestants anymore. What are we still protesting? The Reformation of the sixteenth century was a European event.

So many seem to think that the essence of being Protestant is to conscientiously object to what is or was Roman Catholic. A little history and a little linguistic research shows Protestant to be a much more positive word, referring to what the original Protestants stood for rather than what they stood against.

* * *

Sweeney rightly ties Protestant to the Second Diet of Speyer (1529), and the response of the German evangelical princes to its decision to restrict their freedom. But he misleadingly labels Protestant “a political moniker,” when the cultural context thoroughly mixed religion and politics. The word religion certainly existed, but it remained for the Enlightenment to create it as a distinct category of thought and experience. Sixteenth-century people were more likely to think in concrete terms of the overlapping authorities of king and pope, bishop and prince, priest and magistrate. Neither religion nor politics was an abstract category for them.

What do the major historians of Protestantism say? Like almost all their colleagues, John Dillenberger and Claude Welch link the origin of the word Protestant to the ‘Protestation’ of the German evangelical estates in the second Diet of Speyer. But they see in that term “the duality of protest and affirmative witness.” That protest, they write, was

from the standpoint of affirmed faith. Few churches ever adopted the name “Protestant.” The most commonly adopted designations were rather “evangelical” and “reformed.” ... [W]hen the word Protestant came into currency in England (in Elizabethan times), its accepted significance was not “objection” but “avowal” or “witness” or “confession” (as the Latin protestari meant also “to profess”).

That meaning lasted for another century, say Dillenberger and Welch, and it referred to the Church of England’s

making its profession of the faith in the Thirty-nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer. Only later did the word “protest” come to have a primarily negative significance, and the term “Protestant” come to refer to non-Roman churches in general.

* * *

Writing about the second Diet of Speyer, the esteemed Luther biographer Roland Bainton called the word Protestant

unfortunate as a name because it implies that Protestantism was mainly an objection. The dissenters in their own statement affirmed that “they must protest and testify publicly before God that they could do nothing contrary to His word.” The emphasis was less on protest than on witness.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of the history of the church at Oxford University, traces the history of the term. From 1529 until 1547, Protestant was limited to the sphere of German politico-religious life, identifying those princes who followed Luther or Zwingli and who in 1529 “issued a protestatio, affirming the reforming beliefs that they shared.” The term entered English in 1547, when the officials who were organizing the coronation of Edward VI listed “in order the procession of dignitaries through [London].” There, in that list, was a place for “‘the Protestants,’ by whom they meant the diplomatic representatives of [the] reforming Germans.”

* * *

When Edward VI was crowned, the word still had a positive connotation. On the CultureVulture blog for the Guardian, Sean Clarke notes that it was 60 years from the introduction of Protestant in English until its first use in the extended sense of "object, dissent, or disapprove.” That (according to the Collins Etymological Dictionary) was first recorded in English in 1608. The Online Etymological Dictionary places the first use of protest to mean “statement of disapproval” in the year 1751—another century and a half. Through much of that history and well after, protest continued to mean “avow,” “affirm,” “witness,” or “solemnly proclaim.”

Poor, misunderstood protest has had a history something like that of another word—apology. That word has gone from its positive, head-held-high sense of “a formal justification or defense” (as in “the essay was an apology for capitalism”) to something tinged with shame and remorse (“a statement of regret or request for pardon”).

We need to recover the positive sense of protestant. It denotes things that we stand for: the authority of Scripture, salvation by grace through faith in Christ alone. It’s a matter of principle. And because it is about standing for truth, Catholics can be protestants too.

* * *

Works cited

Roland H. Bainton, The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century (Enlarged Edition, Beacon, 1985)
John Dillenberger and Claude Welch, Protestant Christianity Interpreted Through Its Development (Scribner’s, 1954)
Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (Viking, 2003). Read more!

Shameless Self-Promotion Dept.: Holy Week Edition

Today's mail brought the brochure for this year's performance of Franz Joseph Haydn's The Seven Last Words at the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Memorial Chapel (string quartet version with guest meditations). I mention it because I'm one of the "special guests" providing one of the meditations. Others include Martin Marty, David Tracy, John Buchanan, Willie T. Barrow, and Jean Bethke Elshtain. For the full list and for ticket information, click here and scroll down to March 18.

This will be the second time I've participated in this event, which is made especially meaningful by violist Richard Young's pre-concert parsing of Haydn's musical themes and their relation to the theological themes of the work. (Young collected meditations from past years in Echoes from Calvary. His essay on the relationship of the music to the theology can be found in the book's appendix.)

In 2004, shortly before I first spoke at one of these events, I wrote up the following historical commentary for Christianity Today:

The Passion, Eight Adagios, and an Earthquake

Haydn's Seven Last Words is a powerful guide for Good Friday meditation.

By David Neff | posted 3/01/2004 12:00AM

In writing about Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, I identified it as a devotional exercise. It seemed to me to be an extended visual meditation on the five Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. Others have identified it as a meditation on the Stations of the Cross. In any case, the movie translated a classic Christian devotion into a shockingly modern form.

The church has preached the Cross from its apostolic beginnings at Pentecost, but it seems that once people heeded the message of the Cross and became followers of Jesus, they felt a need to structure personal and communal ways to remember that pivotal event in salvation history.

The most ancient description of a ritualized remembering of the Passion is a fourth-century eyewitness report by a Spanish nun named Egeria. She traveled to the Holy Land and reported that Christians in Jerusalem gathered for three hours on Good Friday to listen to the bishop read from the Scriptures the prophecies of the Lord's Passion and their fulfillment.

Christians have developed other forms of commemoration (literally, "remembering together"), such as walking the Way of Sorrows (via dolorosa) either literally in Jerusalem or symbolically by praying and meditating before a series of plaques that recount the events of Jesus' painful trek to Calvary.

This Holy Week, I am going to participate in another variation on such communal remembering: a service of meditations on the Seven Last Words. This service was first developed by Jesuit missionaries in Peru, who blended cross-centered preaching with guided meditation to create a kind of congregational "spiritual exercise." In Jesuit terms, the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church says, Spiritual Exercises refers to a 4-week program of meditations designed by Ignatius Loyola to combine "sense impressions, imagination, and understanding, in actuating the will towards the pursuit of perfection." Ignatius devoted fully one-quarter of the meditations (the third week) to the Passion, and these meditations shaped the spiritual lives of his followers. In the century after Loyola created the Spiritual Exercises, these Jesuit missionaries created a three-hour meditation on Jesus' seven sayings from the Cross for use on Good Friday.

This service eventually became an occasion for dramatic music as well as meditation. In 1785 or '86, the Austrian Catholic composer Franz Joseph Haydn received a request from Spain to write a series of seven orchestral interludes to accompany the spoken parts of the service. Though Haydn wrote with classical restraint just after the close of the Baroque era, the spirit of the Spanish Baroque is at work in this project. (To gain a visual impression of how the Spanish imagination had dealt with the Passion, consider the Pieta by El Greco, Ignatius's younger contemporary, or Christ on the Cross by Velasquez, who lived at the same time the Jesuits shaped their meditations on the Seven Last Words.)

Here is how Haydn himself described the service for which he composed his Seven Last Words:

Some fifteen years ago I was requested by a canon of Cádiz to compose instrumental music on the seven last words of Our Savior on the Cross. It was customary at the Cathedral of Cádiz to produce an oratorio every year during Lent, the effect of the performance being not a little enhanced by the following circumstances. The walls, windows, and pillars of the church were hung with black cloth, and only one large lamp hanging from the center of the roof broke the solemn darkness.

At midday, the doors were closed and the ceremony began. After a short service the bishop ascended the pulpit, pronounced the first of the seven words (or sentences) and delivered a discourse thereon. This ended, he left the pulpit and fell to his knees before the altar. The interval was filled by music. The bishop then in like manner pronounced the second word, then the third, and so on, the orchestra following on the conclusion of each discourse.

My composition was subject to these conditions, and it was no easy task to compose seven adagios lasting ten minutes each, and to succeed one another without fatiguing the listeners.

Haydn's music—an introduction, seven musical meditations on the words, and a final "earthquake" movement—not only succeeded in not "fatiguing the listeners," but its popularity and power has lasted more than 200 years, from its first performance in 1787 till now. Haydn also created a version for string quartet so that the music could be played where the full forces of an orchestra were not available. And in 1795-96, he wrote a choral version, which was published in 1801.

In one of history's curious twists, Good Friday services that focus on the Seven Last Words have become more popular among Protestants than among Catholics. Perhaps this is because the service lends itself to preaching, and Protestants, we all know, love to preach. The service also lends itself to multiple preachers, which is why it is often sponsored as an ecumenical service by local ministerial fellowships.

The event in which I will be participating this year, uses Haydn's string quartet version, and its nature is ambiguous. Is this a concert? Or is this a service? The promotional materials call it a "concert," a "performance," and a "presentation," but in order to be true to the work's original intent, eight religious leaders (including yours truly) will be offering brief meditations. (I am speaking on "I Thirst." In two previous events, CT's associate news editor Stan Guthrie spoke on the same saying from the cross.)

The ambiguity is heightened by the choice of venue: the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. A grand Gothic-revival structure, the broad strokes of the Rockefeller Chapel's architecture evoke medieval cathedrals with their soaring tribute to God's transcendence. But whereas Gothic cathedrals were filled with Christian symbolism: crosses, angels, saints, pelicans, and such, the details of Rockefeller Chapel reflect the liberal Protestant spirit of its times, and its few Christian symbols are discreetly placed so as not to offend anyone.

The musicians for this occasion are the Vermeer Quartet, and I know from conversations with violist Richard Young that they take very seriously the religious character of Haydn's music and its performance. Since 1988, their annual presentations have tried to recreate something of the original experience.

Not everyone can get to the Vermeer Quartet's concerts at the University of Chicago and Northern Illinois University where they blend music and spoken meditation. So in 1994 they produced a two-CD set—one CD that is music only, and one CD that features both music and spoken word. The CD features such high-profile preachers as Billy Graham and Martin Luther King, Jr., renowned scholars such as Raymond Brown and Martin Marty, and the voice of Jason Robards.

Whether you participate in person or by listening to a recording, the music of Haydn is a powerful instrument to help focus meditation on the Lord's Passion.

Sidebar:

The Seven Last Words

Jesus' sayings from the Cross

• Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. (Luke 23:24)
  
  
• Today thou shalt be with me in paradise. (Luke 23:43)
  
  
• Woman, behold your son. Behold your mother. (John 19:26-27)
  
  
• My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Matthew 27:45-46)
  
  
• I thirst. (John 19:28-29)
  
  
• It is finished. (John 19:30)
  
  
• Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. (Luke 23:46)
  
  

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today.

Read more!

Book Review: How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind

A few years ago, an African-American friend and I were discussing a popular black pastor whose doctrine of the Trinity just wasn’t orthodox. My colleague thought Christianity Today should give the man a pass. After all, he was doing good ministry and the fine points of the Trinity were just more of that dead-white-European-male baggage.

I hadn’t thought of it before that moment, but suddenly I had a flash: Athanasius, the architect of Trinitarian orthodoxy was African, not European. (So, of course, was Arius, the heretic who drove Athanasius to distraction.)

I took the opportunity to remind my colleague that orthodoxy arose out of the African context.

* * *

Indeed, many of the shapers of Christian orthodoxy were African. Names like Augustine, Tertullian, Origen, Clement, Anthony, and Pachomius were familiar from my undergraduate church history survey. But my professor had not presented them as Africans ministering and teaching in the context of an African culture.

That common omission is what theologian Thomas C. Oden wants to address with the Early African Christianity Project as well as with his book, How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind (IVP, 2007).

The title of Oden’s book suggests a parallel to Tom Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization. That’s unfortunate, because readers may expect Oden to play the raconteur in the Cahill manner. Instead, How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind is an outline and an agenda for research. (The agenda genre is classic forward-thinking Oden, who has devoted other books to outlining where theologians should be turning their attention.)

Classical African Christianity, claims Oden, has been ignored—or treated as something other than African. Augustine, Athanasius, Tertullian, and others have been treated as Europeans in disguise.

The story of Christian theology has been told from a European perspective. Oden wants to tell that story differently: classical Christian theology was heavily shaped by Africans. The language we use to worship the Trinity, the received definitions of the Christ’s two natures, the early church’s methods for restoring repentant sinners, the basic patterns of monastic life, our fundamental approach to biblical interpretation, the church’s devotion to its martyrs—all of these things have their roots in African theological debate, African prayer, and African biblical study.

The movement was from south to north. Concepts hatched in Alexandria or Carthage were appropriated in Constantinople or Rome or Milan. Eventually, Arab Islamic expansion across north Africa drove many Christians from their native soil. The result is that some of what Cahill’s Irish monks preserved was in fact African. Writes Oden:

There is little doubt that Irish Christianity sustained strong African and monastic motifs in its piety, hagiography and temperament. This can be seen visually in its crosses, funerary objects, décor, calendars and art forms, as well as literarily in poetry, song and preaching.

Oden theorizes that as the scholarly monks who followed the rules of Pachomius and Augustine were driven out of Africa by the Vandal and Arab invasions, they migrated to Sicily and the little island of Lérins off the coast of France. From there came the influences that shaped Irish monasticism. That monasticism, as Cahill tells the story, eventually shaped European Christianity, which in turn sent missionaries back to Africa.

But even before the seventh-century Muslim conquest, the influence flowed from south to north. Not only theologians like Athanasius, but influential rhetors (the Greek term for professional orators) like Augustine and Tertullian brought distinctly African patterns of argument to Rome. Throughout this book, Oden asserts the significance of the African context for the contributions of these key figures. Then he repeatedly appeals to African scholars to document and analyze the material in its African context.

Those repeated appeals may grow tiresome for the general reader, but Oden’s focused audience is African scholars who need to take up the outlines of his agenda, document the broad strokes with all the historical detail, and above all, demonstrate just how socially and culturally African our orthodoxy is.

* * *

Why is Oden so urgent? Part of his motivation fits broadly into his program to redeem theology from liberalism. It was northern European liberalism (Adolf von Harnack is the chief villain in Oden’s narrative) that dismissed the significance of the African context and tried to label many ideas of classical Christianity as Greek philosophy, alien to biblical thought.

But the urgency derives even more from the current sub-Saharan struggle between Christianity and Islam. As Oden writes:

The rising charismatic and Pentecostal energies in Africa are stronger emotively than intellectually. They may not sufficiently sustain African Christians through the Islamic challenge unless fortified by rigorous apologetics.

That rigorous apologetic can clearly come from Africa’s own history, but only if African theologians reclaim the history of Africa’s north for the entire continent. That reclamation is at the heart of Oden’s agenda.

* * *

For a special treat, see the literary timeline of early African Christianity included among the appendices of How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind. A similar feature can be found on the Center for Early African Christianity website.

Read more!

An Opportunity for Texas Readers of this Blog

Yesterday I received an e-mail announcement of an upcoming lecture by patristics scholar Dan Williams. Dan is the editor of the Evangelical Resourcement series of books from Baker Academic (which yours truly has blurbed) and consulted with my team at Christian History and Biography to produce our theme issue on the Council of Nicaea. In addition, he was one of the four theological editors of the Call for an Ancient Evangelical Future.

Here is the poster for his upcoming lecture at Baylor:




I always enjoy listening to Dan, and I'm sorry I'll be in frigid Illinois rather than temperate Texas on February 28. But if you're going to be near Waco on that day, you may want to take in this lecture. More info after the jump:

For further information, contact:

Joyce Swoveland
Office Manager/Assistant to the Chair
Department of Religion
Baylor University
One Bear Place #97284
Waco, TX 76798-7284
office: 254.710.3758
fax: 254.710.3740
Read more!