Musica Christi: A Lutheran Aesthetic (review)

Musica Christi is an amended version of Marion Lars Hendrickson's doctoral dissertation, completed at the University of Durham in 2003(p. xiii). Hendrickson is a Lutheran Church Missouri Synod pastorwho teaches in the United States of America at Concordia University Wisconsin. His work in this book is a significant contribution to the study of theology and music in the Lutheran tradition. It is broken into twoparts. The first part largely surveys vocal music and reflections about itby musicians and theologians from the Reformation to the present. This includes German, Scandinavian, and American contributions. The second part is more systematic. Here Hendrickson draws together the insights of the first part. His conclusion and thesis throughout the book are that the Lutheran aesthetic is Christological: 'I am arguing for the recognition of the unifying form of beauty revealed in Christ to faith which has found expression, in many and various ways, consciously and unconsciously, within the traditions of Lutheranism' (p. 5).

Hendrickson begins with Luther's singing and saying of the Gospel and then moves to Walter, Rhau, and Scandinavia. He concludes the period of the Reformation by asking what is Lutheran in music. He finds the implicit 'seeds of a Christologically explicated aesthetic' in the communicatio idiomatum (p. 51) and the Threefold Office of Christ which produced tension – and the assigning of music to adiaphora – but which Hendrickson views as resolved by a theologia crucis springing from the Gospel rather than the Law. The rest of the book runs out these themes.

The chapter on the Reformation includes an instructive discussion which presages later disputes. Taking their cue from Luther, Philipp Melanchthon and Georg Rhau developed Boethius' view of numbers in Christ. That is, they did not relate music to numbers as defined by arithmetic and geometrical concepts, and therefore to an unseen but legalistic entry into the divine; rather, they viewed music in Christ as the one who reveals its harmony and proportion. Johannes Bugenhagen, on the other hand, took a narrow view of sola scriptura and wanted to restrict musical texts to Scriptural words; so he did not find Rhau's view congenial. For Rhau 'the proclamation of the written Word is united with music in order to form and inform the interpretation of the written Word, as well as to form and inform one's interpretation of the world in which the Word is proclaimed' (p. 42).

Hendrickson sees the Thirty Years' War as turning the Lutheran aesthetic inward toward human feelings and the experiential part of mystical union. J.S. Bach, however, stands for the fullness of Luther's Christology and checks, albeit in a hidden way, Pietistic and Rationalistic excesses. With the nineteenth century, feelings and fine art are metwith the contradiction of a renaissance in Lutheran confessionalism. Hendrickson traces the story through N.F.S. Grundtvig in Denmark, Ludvig M. Lindeman in Norway, and U.L. Ullman in Sweden, and then to Felix Mendelssohn and Johannes Brahms in Germany. With Brahms, Hendrickson can correctly point to an overarching Lutheran point of view, but whether this can be found so easily in Brahms himself may be questionable.

With the twentieth century Hendrickson runs out the contradiction that the 'full and free expression of the Lutheran aesthetic in music' (p. 172) emerges under the oppression of Nazi Germany, while it suffers 'under a burden of principles and laws' (p. 172) tied to 'the rampant consumerism of late twentieth century American culture' (p. 173). Here Oskar Söhngen, Ernst Pepping, Hugo Distler, Thomas Laub, Carl Nielsen, Egil Hovland, and American worship wars come into view.

After running the historical materials through a more systematic grid, Hendrickson appends a coda in which he makes two telling points. first, current divisive disputes will not be solved by debates about music, but need to get beneath them to the more substantive underlay of Christology (p. 271). Second, it is not only essential to train musicians in Christology, but it is even more essential to train pastors...