Confronting this ‘pressure’ is the gifted musician, theologian, pedagogue, and philosopher, Jeremy Begbie. He has been a force for furthering our understanding of the symbiosis between faith and the arts, and is a leader of the Duke Initiative for Theology and the Arts. As well as having prodigious talent on the keyboard, he is the conductor of the recently created New Caritas Orchestra, made up of Christian orchestral musicians from throughout North America.
In his work, he has exhibited a striking gift for finding musical metaphors for the great Christian doctrines, using for instance the tonic triad, the chord that has a gravitational pull for the listener in tonal music, as a metaphor for the triune God. Not only do you have, with the tonic chord, three entities and one substance, but that chord can be sensed at the musical horizon: the thing all the melodic and harmonic forces in a piece yearn to reach.
In Theology, Music and Time, Begbie suggests that music can actually help the listener and musician to experience ‘God’s Time’. All at once we musically know the origins (past), are involved in playing the music in the measure we are presently in, and yet, with meter, and harmonic and rhythmic tension sense our ultimate goal in the future.
In Abundantly More: The Theological Promise of the Arts in a Reductionist World, Begbie begins by describing the ‘pressures’ of current thought, which he frames by reference to the struggle with the concept of ‘Naturalistic Reductionsim’. He defines this as:
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