Improvisation as a theological method. Towards a free and imaginative reading of the Bible. Part 1

Religious traditions tend to become systems of oppression and attendants of violence. Subjugation of women in religious societies, as well as the difficult position of sexual and gender minorities among churches serve as examples of the violent undercurrents of sacred hierarchies. To say the least, religious convictions are prone to be conservative, unyielding and unimaginative.

This should not necessarily be the case. As a matter of fact, religion can be a source of endless creativity and irresistible hope that cherishes all life in its variety. I suppose this applies to all major religions. In this article I however concentrate on the Western Christianity, the religious tradition I am most familiar with. The history of the Western Christendom is full of power conflicts, prejudice and inflexibility, resulting in condemnations and sheer bloodshed. On the other hand, the very same tradition includes innovations, reforms, religious creativity, tolerance,beauty and love of neighbor. My perspective is the latter option. What is the hermeneutical principle that enables us to read Holy Scriptures in a free and creative way?

It is not difficult to say that religion should promote democracy, gender equality and freedom of opinion. Thus saying one often neglects that religion is deeply autonomous at heart, not motivated from beyond its own sphere. In the public discussion the call to tolerance comes usually from the outside of the religious realm and is of little avail to those who are deeply attached to their religion. For example, if a secular Westerner tells muslims how they should live their religion, his/her opinion is smoothly invalidated as inappropriate and inexperienced. Religious traditions belong to the insiders.  In addition to that, Christianity involves a peculiar suspicion towards worldly wisdom. This distrust is based on Biblical notions, such as “the world hates those who belong to Christ” (John 15:19, 17:14) and “friendship with the world is hatred toward God” (James 4:4), or the Pauline idea of God’s foolishness that is wiser than human wisdom (1. Cor 1:25). No wonder, then, that devout Christians see themselves surrounded by people with whom they cannot communicate their central beliefs. The public opinion about human rights and democracy may be viewed as something alien to real Christianity, and discussion about sexual rights may sound like “gender-ideology” by means of which conservative Christians feel being persecuted . Therefore, reluctance to accommodate recent knowledge of human sexuality is not necessarily based on ignorance or chauvinist attitude, but rather on willingness to stay faithful to one’s religious identity and fear of losing it.

Therefore we need to search for liberating hermeneutic principles within the Western Christian tradition itself, not as rules coming from the outside, but as something essentially belonging to the faith. As a metaphor, I would apply the image of the Bible, not as a strictly confined stall but as a wide pasture where the Good Shepherd leads his own, a garden where seeds of ideas may flourish. Or, to state it otherwise, not as a Christian’s instruction manual but as a musical theme to improvise on.
Indeed, the New Testament supplies us with examples of creative use of inherited traditions. In the words of New Testament scholar Gerd Theissen: “We find it difficult to imagine what a great step it was for the first Christians to criticize the old [tradition] - and to do so in the conviction that they were thus fulfilling its deepest intentions.” Dispensing with sabbath, circumcision and purity laws, Christians nevertheless consider the Hebrew Bible as the sacred text to rely on. Peculiar, liberating hermeneutics belong to the Christianity already in the beginning. Being faithful to that tradition we may criticize the very tradition itself.

Methodological remarks

The hermeneutical key applied here is the idea of musical improvisation. I rely in that regard on the work of Jeremy Begbie, the British theologian and musician, and his Theology, Music and Time (2000) in particular.  Begbie investigates the theological significance of musical improvisation (here he clearly has group improvisation in mind), attesting how improvisation exploits “the occasional constraints” that eventually do not reduce the improviser’s liberty but enhance it. The occasional constraints mean the physical space in which the improvisation occurs and its attendant sounds (e.g. the concert hall, with its buzzing heaters, traffic outside, etc.), the other persons involved and  the music they produce, the audience and the improviser him/herself – mood, degree of nervousness and so forth. Someone not familiar with musical improvisation might say that to improvise means merely playing something, which is easy because one does not need to stick to the written notes. Musicians know that it is quite the contrary. Improvising requires all possible musical skills: the mastery of one’s instrument, the knowledge of musical theory and, above all, the attentiveness to react to other players’ music. Improvisation takes place within an idiom (blues, bebop etc.) that likewise restricts one’s possibilities – one cannot e.g. play in baroque style when playing jazz –  but does not destroy one’s freedom to produce something new. The paradox of improvisation is this: The improvising musician is always deeply rooted in the musical tradition, yet the most faithful reproduction of some famous improviser’s performance is not an act of improvisation.

Musical improvisation provides theology with an image of the developmental process. The Christian theology is always related with tradition and the Scriptures. It has always reviewed and interpreted its tradition anew. Some points of this history are generally known, such as the Ecumenical Councils of the early Church or the Reformation Confessions. They manifest the possibility and necessity to improvise the Christian truth. Christians have been bold and progressive in their thinking. Take the Holy Trinity for an example: unitarians have it right when they maintain that the New Testament does not know the detailed doctrine of the Triune God that the Council of Nicaea established as the criterion of orthodoxy.  Unfortunately these historical documents  often symbolize the petrified tradition that prohibits creative development. Theological improvisation is an essential part of the sacred legacy that obliges us as Christians.

Further, musical improvisation is related to the notion of gift, a theme extensively discussed in recent theology. It has been customary to notice that all forms of giving implies reciprocity: a recipient of a gift is expected at least to be pleased. During a musical “jam session” one receives a theme or a musical gesture from another, passes it on and returns it in a different form. Musical idioms can be viewed as gifts, that one must receive so that they may become gifts. As gifts, they must not be reiterated or given back immediately. To give a counter-gift requires delay and unpredictability.

Improvisation becomes a comprehensive theological idea when Begbie writes: “God establishes a creation which is itself a ‘return’ to him, brought into being to praise its Creator.” With a poetic vent he continues: “Humankind finds its true being in improvising on the givenness of the created world with the others who are given to us, never treating givens as something to be owned or enclosed in finality, but ‘over-accepting’ them in such a way that they are regarded as intrinsically interesting, and rendered more fully felicitous for a potentially enormous number of fresh melodies, harmonies and metres.” According to this view, sin is an assault on God’s freedom to give and thus a refusal to sing God’s praise. It is to ‘block’ the music of creation as gift. It is the refusal to improvise, to ‘make the best’ of what is given and pass on the movement of generosity. Salvation is a drama of giving and receiving, when Christ is both God’s gift and human return in one person. Life in Spirit means to share in God’s own gratuitous exchange in faith and

    to be caught up in a non-identical repetition propelled by the Spirit, to be implicated in a continuing         and endless ‘giving back’ to God in joyful, ecstatic gratitude, an improvisational process which             always involves giving and receiving, which can never be finished, and which is endlessly different      and continually unpredictable. And this gratuitous gift-exchange, enacted in the economy of God         and overflowing through us to others, is ultimately rooted in the intra-divine trinitarian love. (Begbie 2000, 254.)

In this tentative account I have chosen three remarkable theologians from the Western Christian tradition to demonstrate the possibility of free, creative, yet serious and attentive Biblical interpretation. They represent different phases of European theology in a time span of a millennium: Gregory the Great (540-604), one of the most important authorities of medieval theology, a pope who mediated patristic thinking to the middle ages. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) was a reformer of monastic and spiritual theology in the high middle ages. Martin Luther (1483-1546) was the Saxon Reformer, who initiated the movement that conclusively changed Western European church and society. Choosing these three theologians is somewhat arbitrary, and another choice of authors would be highly possible. Yet there are important connections between them. St Bernard was deeply influenced by St Gregory, and Luther was indebted to both.
 

Detecting liberating hermeneutics in the texts of the above mentioned authors does not suggest a new theory of their view of the Scripture, nor does it claim that their theological thinking should be reevaluated as a whole. To be honest, St Gregory, St Bernard, or Luther might not recognize ideas that I detect as their own. They are germs of ideas, underdeveloped lines of thought that they were perhaps unable to realize in their own era. Yet I believe we can take advantage of these thoughts, if we can imagine that we share the very faith of theirs. Moreover, these inchoate ideas are, in my opinion, something essentially belonging to the vision of God. They are not some notions of moral decency but rather deep insights of what it is to be a Christian.
(to be continued...)