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One of the great legacies of the Reformed tradition is an emphasis on worldview thinking. Every area of life is to be brought under the lordship of Christ, and every legitimate discipline may be used as a means of worshipping God with one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength.

In a recent volume, Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. (1946 – ), President of Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan, reminds Christians that life-long learning is a spiritual vocation.

“Thoughtful Christians know that if they obey the Bible’s great commandment to love God with our whole mind, as well as with everything else, then we will study the splendor of God’s creation in the hope of grasping part of the ingenuity and grace that form it. One way to love God is to know and love God’s work. Learning is therefore a spiritual calling; properly done, it attaches us to God. In addition, the learned person has, so to speak, more to be Christian with. The person who studies chemistry, for example, can enter into God’s enthusiasm for the dynamic possibilities of material reality. The student who examines one of the great movements of history has moved into a position to praise the goodness of God, or to lament the mystery of evil, or to explore the places where these things intertwine. Further, from persistent study of history a student may develop good judgment, a feature of wisdom that helps us lead a faithful human life in the midst of a confusing world. And, of course, chemistry and history are only two examples from the wide menu of good things to learn.”1

Footnotes:

1 Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. Engaging God’s World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2002), xi.

Have you ever looked upon a fresh snowfall, observed its splendor, and wondered why God made it so? Perhaps you’ve stared into a fireplace to see dancing flames and pondered the same. It raises the question: is there a relationship between natural beauty and God?

The grandson of Jonathan Edwards and a minister in his own right, Timothy Dwight (1752-1817) served as president of Yale from 1795 until his death in 1817. When he arrived at Yale, the campus was in poor spiritual condition, much influenced by the French skepticism of Voltaire and Rousseau, but under his teaching and leadership, revival came to the campus, contributing to the Second Great Awakening in America.

He was a prolific writer—of sermons, verse, essays, and hymns, of which the best known is “I Love Thy Kingdom, Lord.” Many of those sermons were published after his death in the five volume set, Theology Explained and Defended, from which the following passage is taken.

Here, Dwight glorifies God for His kindness in “gratuitously superinducing” nature with pleasurable variety and beauty. The world could have worked without it, but more drearily so. Human constructions can entertain one for awhile, but there is no substitute for the splendor of God’s creation. Though Dwight fails to see that even the desert can have a severe beauty all its own, he provides Christians a model for treasuring their environment as a wonderful gift from God.

“Were all the interesting diversities of color and form to disappear, how unsightly, dull, and wearisome, would be the aspect of the world! The pleasures conveyed to us by the endless varieties with which these sources of beauty are presented to the eye, are so much things of course, and exist so much without intermission, that we scarcely think either of their nature, their number, or the great proportion which they constitute in the whole mass of our enjoyment. But were an inhabitant of this country to be removed from its delightful scenery to the midst of an Arabian desert, a boundless expanse of sand, a waste spread with uniform desolation, enlivened by the murmur of no stream and cheered by the beauty of no verdure, although he might live in a palace and riot in splendor and luxury, he would, I think, find life a dull, wearisome, melancholy round of existence, and amid all his gratifications would sigh for the hills and valleys of his native land, the brooks and rivers, the living lustre of the spring, and the rich glories of the autumn. The ever-varying brilliancy and grandeur of the landscape, and the magnificence of the sky, sun, moon, and stars, enter more extensively into the enjoyment of mankind than we, perhaps, ever think, or can possible apprehend, without frequent and extensive investigation. This beauty and splendor of the objects around us, it is ever to be remembered, are not necessary to their existence, nor to what we commonly intend by their usefulness. It is therefore to be regarded as a source of pleasure gratuitously superinduced upon the general nature of the objects themselves, and in this light, as a testimony of the divine goodness peculiarly affecting.”1

Footnotes:

1 Timothy Dwight, Theology Explained and Defended, quoted in Crowned Masterpieces of Literature That Have Advanced Civilization, vol. 10, ed. David J. Brewer (St. Louis: Ferdinand P. Kaiser Publishing Company, 1902), 3964-3965.

The decadence of the rock music culture is notorious. Critics compare it with Dionysian dissipation1 and Babylonian corruption,2 and none lamented the shift “from Bach to Rock”3 more than the late philosopher Allen Bloom. In The Closing of the American Mind, he spoke warmly of the role that Bach and Beethoven could play in the “cultivation of the soul” in men “whose noblest activities are accompanied by a music that expresses them.”4 In contrast, said Bloom, “Rock music encourages passions and provides models that have no relation to any life the young people who go to universities can possibly lead.”5

A stark contrast suggests itself: Society has come to anticipate ruinous behavior from rock stars (as in “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll”) but to “expect that classical musicians live cultured, erudite, and fulfilling professional lives.”6 Unfortunately, this is not always the case. So argues professional oboist Blair Tindall in her book, Mozart in the Jungle.7 Tindall is an accomplished musician, having played in the New York Philharmonic, performed a one-woman concert at Carnegie Hall, served the Broadway orchestras of Les Miserables, Miss Saigon, and Man of La Mancha, and soloed on the soundtrack for the feature film Malcolm X. She has also been a dope-smoking, serial-adulteress, by her own admission and painstaking itemization.

Her environment was also rife with homosexual sin. At the summit, Leonard Bernstein, conductor of the New York Philharmonic and composer of West Side Story, went openly gay once his wife died in 1978. And throughout the various companies, lesser figures were dropping like flies as they engaged in dangerous sex. Tindall stopped counting when the hundredth man she knew personally had died of AIDS. So rampant was the disease in the musical community that it claimed 75 lives in the New York City Opera company alone.

For Tindall, sex was means to employment in a contact-driven industry. On tour in California with a group playing Andrew Lloyd Webber music, she got a job offer in the wake of sex with the touring conductor. She wondered, then, “Why . . . did I bother with an answering machine? Between Sam and my former oboist boyfriends, I got hired for most of my gigs in bed.”8

Some were “church gigs,”9 and some involved the performance of such exalted, Christian music as J. S. Bach’s Magnificat and St. John Passion. How can musicians participate in these performances while living dissolute lives, which often include drug use as well? (Indeed, Tindall observed that “[s]ubstance abuse was almost a badge of honor” among her colleagues10.)

She has written a depressing book, but it demonstrates well that the cultural elites cannot be trusted to serve as moral and spiritual models and that, whatever one’s social status, a life without the light of Christ is open to all sorts of personal wreckage.

Thanks be to God that followers of Christ can be found in orchestras and ensembles throughout the world. May their tribe increase, and may the Church under gird them with encouragement and prayer, for their mission as salt and light among their professional colleagues is daunting.

Footnotes:

1 E. Michael Jones, Dionysos Rising: The Birth of Cultural Revolution out of the Spirit of Music (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1994). Also see Allan Bloom on Nietzsche in his book The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 73.
2 See, for example, Gary Herman, Rock ‘n’ Roll Babylon (New York: Putnam, 1982); Harriet Mellow, Notting Hill Babylon: A Rock ‘n’ Roll History (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2001); Pamela Des Barres, Rock Bottom: Dark Moments in Music Babylon (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996).
3 William D. Romanowski, Pop Culture Wars: Religion and the Role of Entertainment in American Life (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1996), 198.
4 Bloom, 72.
5 Ibid., 80.
6 Blair Tindall, Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2005), 213.
7 Named both for a concert tour to South America and for the thicket of backstage immorality she witnessed—and savored.
8 Ibid., 194.
9 Where the setting inspired no holiness on their part. At one, she recalls that she and another musician spent their break “making out on the chaplain’s darkened office floor.” Ibid., 73
10 Ibid., 107.