In Conversation with Dr. Jeremy Begbie

Executive Director of the Biola University's Center for Christianity, Culture and the Arts Luke Aleckson in conversation with Jeremy Begbie, Professor of Theology at Duke Divinity School.

World-renowned theologian Jeremy Begbie has been at the forefront of teaching and writing on theology and the arts for more than twenty years. Amid current debates and discussions on the topic, Begbie emphasizes the role of a biblically grounded orthodoxy as he shows how Christian theology and the arts in many forms can enrich each other. He discusses how Christians can think and interpret the arts in the context of a Christian worldview.

Transcript of Conversation:

Professor Luke Aleckson:
My first question is how can Christians think theologically about the music that they encounter in everyday life?

Dr. Jeremy Begbie:
Well, I think to begin with there's very little written on this and it's now a growing area, people getting very interested and quite rightly so because music's always been part of human, human kind, as long as we, as long as we've known it. So in every culture and every society, you'll find something like music. So we do as Christians, I think we need to think through what is this music? What's it doing? How can we, how can we approach it in a Christian way? So what I say, when I'm teaching this subject in class, is I say there there's a question that's not allowed from now on in the whole course, and that's the question, do I like it? And the reason for putting it that way is because we live in a culture that suggests that's the first and the last question you could ever ask about well, but particularly music. And the implication is, if you don't like it, then don't bother with it, dismiss it, take it off your playlist and have nothing to do with it. What I tried to include in the class to inculcate is a different question, which is what's going on here and that could apply to many other forms as well, what's happening here, What is this musician or compared to or trying to do as far as we can tell, what's this music doing in this situation? So you're curious about what's happening that you may like it or not like it, putting all those things to the side and then following from that: How can I learn from it as a Christian, how can I respond to it in a Christian way? How can I listen to it with Christian ears? And so first we ask sort of, what is it, what's going on? And then we say now, how can I approach that in a Christian way? I think that will go with any art form, but the taste question is so dominant and so much thinking about music in our culture and sometimes in Christian culture. So, I think that's the first thing. And then a number of questions follow out of that, I found it's very good to ask what dimension of Christian truth is being addressed here, although that might not come from a Christian, you know, from a Christian composer or musician or performer or whatever, what dimension of Christian truth or the gospel or the Bible. Can this help me understand and experience an example. I'm working with a student here and the very bright students working on rap, um in hip-hop culture and he's read huge amounts about this and he's been doing work with an Old Testament scholar who is very much an expert on the Psalms and the Psalms of lament and protests in particular and he's found extraordinary commonalities between these two though, a great deal of rap does not mention God directly or have any particular theological intention. What you're getting very often in rap is a sophisticated form of poetic expression. That can be protest, is sometimes lament, a great deal of anger sometimes even very, very negative thoughts about others of the sort that you get pretty regularly in the Psalms. And so, and then you think, well, this is this this music and poetry, it's both has come out of a condition where people are seriously disadvantaged. Like so many of the Psalms, like us. So through this medium, we begin to see and understand immediate experience more of what the Psalmist sees, understands, and experiences, and that can be enormously illuminating. So, that instead I don't I don't mind rap, I wouldn't sort of spend money to listen to it. But you see, I've asked, what's going on here and what dimension of Christian truth can I learn about through it. That's a different kind of question. And then all sorts of things open up. And of course, we just look at the Bible, look at the sheer range of emotions of attitudes and anger and joy and sorrow and doubt and all these things all there in the Psalms. So much music over the last well, even just the last two or three hundred years has explored all of those, all of those emotions, even when God is not being mentioned, it's explored those emotional states and what it's like to feel those things and therefore music can be a very powerful way of helping us as well live into the very things that the Bible is speaking about, which of course involves setting all that in a theological or Christian context. And I think the other thing to, to ask along with what dimensions of Christian truth or Gospel can I learn about? The other thing is what can I learn about the culture? I'm living in all, all music to some extent, will reflect or express what's going on in a particular cultural group. Not always, sometimes it's indirect, sometimes it's very direct. But if we're not listening to the music of the culture and asking what's going on here, it's quite likely with miss out a great deal of the very culture that we seek in which we seek to bear witness to the Gospel, wait a minute, rap again would be another good example of that, but also much more up your street look. I mean, extraordinary. Well in Britain we had a fair amount of near nihilist art at one stage and of course everyone was in protest enormous about it. But the question is why on earth do they feel they need to produce this kind of art and why does it, why does it raise some involve so much money? Also, another thing again in your field? And Jonathan Anderson's field, they notice a huge amount of interest in, let's call it broadly religion, spirituality in connection with the visual art and the same goes with music to a certain extent, I think we need to, to be slightly, we need to be wary of not jumping on that too much and saying well all we need do is add a bit of Christian varnish and then it'll all be okay, but we at least need to listen what is being yearned for their, well what is being protested against, what are they trying to escape, avoid, circumvent by using that kind of language, the so-called return of religion in visual art. So we learn a heck of a lot about the culture through music and let's have our ears open to that before we say, I don't like it or I like it early on.

Professor Luke Aleckson:  
You mentioned the looking at everything theologically and with that comes the possibility or the potential that as we listen to anything, anything that enters our ears culturally that we can learn more about God through that. So not just learning about the culture, but also learning something, maybe sometimes we call that general revelation, like learning God through the voices of the people that, that he has created and obviously as you mentioned with the Psalms in almost universally less than ideal circumstances, but yet God is still present in these things. So maybe using the example of rap or otherwise how do we, how do we learn God? How do we know him through these flaws?
Dr. Jeremy Begbie:
Huge, huge question. I was, I was in a hotel not so long ago and the assistant restaurant manager came up and said that she was, she was writing a book because I was writing sketching something for a book in the, with my laptop there, and I said, what's the book about? She said how to find God. So here, here we go, I had to find God. Well, I think just let's take one aspect of that, we have to be, of course what's going on throughout or ought to be going on, is that Scripture is orienting us towards supremely Jesus Christ and that's happening within a community called the church. So, it's not as if any, anytime God language is used, we can assume, oh yeah, this is the God of Jesus Christ, but we were constantly orienting into that direction. So, if we're looking for signs of this God in culture at large, let's make sure it's this God that we're all into towards and not jump on every bit of spiritual, religious language that happens to come along, nor must we carefully not saying because music gives me a great experience, oh that must be a religious experience that must be a direct encounter with God that won't, that won't follow either. So we're constantly oriented through Scripture to the God of Jesus Christ, that's the first thing, but within that orientation, I have found that music can unlock all sorts of aspects of Christian truth in a way, in my own teaching of theology, that's proved very fruitful for instance. Um yeah, in jazz, inside we've got a great jazz unit here, at Duke and a fantastic bass player and I've worked with quite a bit. The very dynamic of improvisation involves an interplay between the given, like the chord pattern or whatever it is, and the things that are unpredictable, the improvisation, the fact that you can't tell exactly what note is going to come next. So, there's a kind of novelty, but its faithful novelty, it's faithful to what is given. That interplay it seems to me it played out in sound is an extraordinarily powerful way of understanding and its own its own experiencing the interplay between God's faithfulness and God's novelty and the Spirit theologically, we could say between word and spirit. So yes, God has given us in Christ all we need, but the Spirit improvises on that truth in ever different ways in every different situation faithfully. And we need to live in the interplay between faithfulness and novelty. I think about worship, it's the same thing. Um people get anxious about liturgy, but in fact everyone, every worship service has a form of some sort, it's not completely random. You have when someone comes to a church, they've been coming to, sometimes they know there's going to be roughly this kind of structure, but they'll know also that things are going to be different. It'll be slightly different to him. The ceremony won't be like it was last time. They may say this prayer again, but it probably says a different thing to them now that they're saying it a week later. So it is the Spirit take taking this form or structure whatever, but improvising it appropriately in different situations. That's where that dynamic is built into all music course, not just jazz, even very, very notated prepared music. When the performers are up there in the concert hall, they'll never play it the same way they may decide to stretch out a phrase or two, contract it or play something a bit louder this time or whatever. They're improvising for the occasion, improvisation has always been built into one sort or another. It's just that the art of jazz as it brings, that interplay right out there, and we delight and love it. And I often point out to people who are some of the great composers like Bach, for instance, we think of him as just the notator, but he was in many circles easily as well-known as an improviser as he was a composer, and people used to toss themes to him and say off you go. Same with Mozart fantastic improviser. Beethoven famous improviser. It's only particularly the late 19th and 20th centuries that the art of improvisation in the so-called classical world has very much died, were not died, it's suppressed, let's say. Okay, so that's one another example that I've often used is to contrast the way we hear the world with the way we see the world, and what this can tell us about the Trinity. So if a painter comes along with a pot of red paint and paints a splotch on the canvas and then comes along with a lot of yellow paints over the red. If the reds dry then the yellow will hide the red. Or it could be the other way around the red could hide the yellow. And if the paint's wet, they merge into a new color in the orange. The way we see the world means that we can't see different objects in the same space at the same time as different. Now, you can say look inside that there's red and yellow. Yeah. And of course there are many brilliant artists Paul Klee would be one would he know who's evoked the experience of many colors in the one space. But actually, if you analyze close up the paintings, no. In our visual field things have bounded spaces. They have edges so that you can't have them together and still visible as two different things. Our visual field is full of objects that have that have edges. So you can say a thing is there, but it's not there, there's nothing wrong with that. But it has some limitations in this, in the world, we hear it's very different. So if you have a sound and I play a note on a piano, what you actually hear fills the whole of your space, you don't say of the note you hear it's here, but it's not there, that wouldn't make any sense. You can say it's coming from over there. Yeah. But what you actually hear fills that whole space sounds don't occupy little bounded locations. They fill the space. And then of course you had another sound, another note that fills the same space, but you here, it is different. And if you add another say through your cord, you will hear all those together in the same space. But they are complete. They are irreducibly distinct, not separate but distinct. So they have a kind of thirty-three notes and oneness there within the space that you hear. And that it seems to have enormous implications. For instance, in John's Gospel, we hear that the Father is in the Son, and the Son is in the Father. And yet the Father is not the Son and the Son is not the Father are not simply identical. How do you, how do you get your head around that? It's very hard to paint. Um, and I started painting myself by the way, have nothing against painting, very hard to paint, but it's incredibly easy to hear because you play two notes together. They are sounding through each other. They are in each other yet irreducibly distinct. And so I found this in, with agnostics, atheists, in colleges schools, whatever. I just found this opens up a very different imagination and a great deal of our struggles with the Trinity I think have been due to over relying on a visual way of understanding the world that doesn't make sound better than vision or something. I'm not that's not what I'm saying at all. The problem so often in Christian history is when we overstress or over depend on a particular sense to do all the work for us when this is just as we're sitting there in our ears, just waiting, waiting to be exploited. Um, and all sorts of other wonderful things come out of that. Like for instance, residence, you know, in a three-note chord, the sounds are enhancing each other. They're not just sitting alongside each other. They're not tolerating each other, they're helping each other become more the sounds that they are or were made to be. That's what's happening in a three-note chord with three strings. You get what's called sympathetic resonance. That seems to be a very powerful metaphor for the Trinitarian life, as well. It's the Father, Son, and Spirit are not three individuals sitting alongside each other and merely tolerating each other. We're talking across a distance or something, you know, the Son loves, the Father loves the Son, and in so loving the Son, the son becomes, indeed is, fully the Son's own self, so that there's mutual interplay, there's mutual enhancements. You can, you can push it very much further than that, but that's, that's the kind of gist. So, I found in teaching Trinitarian doctrine, if we begin to hear the hear things through sound and hear the world and not just see it. Some of the perennial difficulties, Trinitarian Doctrine begin to look a little less, there's still a great mystery, but still look a little less problematic, let's say.

Professor Luke Aleckson:  
That's incredible. And, and maybe even, uh, that that problem or that struggle with, with the Trinity that is maybe historically present throughout the history of the, of, of theology, um, is often, has been negotiated via text primarily via the mind and via rationality, rational argument. So, you're sort of arguing for a more expansive understanding of even what theology is or how it's how it's opened up.

Dr. Jeremy Begbie:
I think, yeah, it involves the whole of us. Um, of course, of course, I don't want to be anti-text because Trinitarian Doctrine is expressed in text and they realize their language is cracking, cracking open. It's the text, John's Gospel, that push us to re-imagination to imagine the world in a different way. Um, it's the text that are bearing witness to something that needs music, poetry, painting, drama or whatever needs that in order that it can really take root in us. And that's happened from the beginning, from the beginning, they were singing for God to say from the beginning, they were painting images and pictures. You know, it just happened, it just happened. So that's not that's not to leave the text behind. It’s to say, let's take these text seriously. But don't think we can do all the work and explain your understanding them in text. We need these other modes of knowing, I think you're saying that other modes of knowing, other modes of experiencing the world in order to bring two glorious light, what what's there in the text and what the text are trying to tell us. We need visual art to do that as well. Of course, we do what all sorts things you can do visual art, you could never do in music. We need drama as well. Of course we do. What is Scripture telling us if it's not a drama, this is Kevin and his work, um things you can do therefore, in drama, you cannot do in any other form. God's given us these capacities, these abilities. Let's use them. And very often we therefore thought that witness and apologetics and teaching doctrine can only be done in the one way, via merely text and merely speaking. Important, critically important.

Professor Luke Aleckson:  
Those are absolutely. And so much of our music has been this, this hybrid, as much as we think of music as oftentimes popularly, the, you know, the sound and the text or the language sort of merged together that they are….   

Dr. Jeremy Begbie:
Exactly. I often say this in teaching worship, we think say when you hear a sermon, all you're doing is hearing words, no, you're seeing a preacher and that preacher will often have body language and there's a sound of the voice hugely affect what you're receiving. Might be doing it in a cold church, a warm church, you might do a dark church on the light church, there might be stained glass windows, There might not, there might be a dreadful picture there that you can't get your eyes off. That might not all of these things. Any psychology of perception will tell you all of these things are affecting what you're hearing. This is the frustration of the preacher. Sometimes I do a lot of preaching myself is you think you've proclaimed the truth and you perhaps you have, but it's not been received because of all these other things that go with it. And you're right with music. Music never comes on its own. It comes with usually with, certainly with what you see, it very often comes with texts in most in most worship. It comes with memories, associations, all sorts of stuff it comes with. And so we need, we need now multimedia theory of worship or theology of worship. Um, you know, in the days when they started teaching worship courses in colleges and seminaries, worship course usually turned out to be a history of liturgical texts. This is what they said, this is what they preached. But wait a minute they said it within a building that was designed in a certain way, arches or no arches with a resonance or no resonance, um processions as its drama. Wait, I need to say all this to use visual art. That's what so now more and more people are saying we're going to understand the worship of the past. We have to understand it not just in terms of the words they used, important as that is, in terms of the setting in which those words took place very important.

Professor Luke Aleckson:  
Yeah. And even uh more, more broadly I'm thinking even of David Byrne's book how music works sort of discussing the history of music through the spaces that that it feels.

Dr. Jeremy Begbie:
Yeah. Yeah it's a very good book. Yeah. Thank you. Um History of music isn't just the history of scores or texts after all, music was not written down until about 1000 A.D. For the first thousand years of the Christian church, no one thought of writing music down which is an extraordinary thought. Um, so it's ludicrous to say the history of music, you can just be history of scores. That's one thing you go to traditional music degree. That's what will be focused on probably that's all right. But let's remember even geographically now most music happens with that very often without notation at all. It's a practice, people make sounds and they receive sounds or hear them or listen to whatever. That's what's happening in a social cultural situation. And, and that's when you begin to understand what music is doing, not just by studying a score important as that is. Yeah. If everyone is as wise as you and me, the world will be a lot happier, wouldn't it?

Professor Luke Aleckson:  
That's what I tried to tell everybody then.

Dr. Jeremy Begbie:
I know, but some reason I can't convince anyone else of that.

Professor Luke Aleckson:  
I know the feeling well, speaking of your wisdom, I really appreciated the way that you do use words and, and uh, you know, record them uh, in the text that you have published, and uh, some really important work that, as you mentioned, hasn't really happened in the past in Christendom or otherwise, to really give that kind of space and that weight to do music and the arts in general, as theological practice or as a place to learn on theology and uh, and flesh it out maybe. Um, so I'd be curious to know what you're working on now or what you've worked on recently, that's sort of on your, on your mind.

Dr. Jeremy Begbie:
Well, um, thank you very much. I think you're being over generous. But, um, the book that I've just finished. Yeah. Been finished another two weeks is a book on the arts and reductionism, reductionism is the tendency to flatten everything until one type of explanation. So, we say human beings are nothing but just list the chemicals or the universe is nothing but atoms and subatomic particles jostling in random fashion. Once you've boiled everything down, that's what the reductions want to boil everything down to one type of thing and one type of explanation, and that can happen. It can happen all sorts of ways. I mean, you can have economic reductionism where you say in the last resort, everything's about economics and money. You can explain all human behavior in terms of finance or all human behavior in terms of psychology, you're a Christian only because you're psychologically why that way, or because your parents were, because you were brought up in this culture or whatever. That's another form of reductions. There are lots of them around. And it I think it's a very dangerous, dangerous thing. But what I'm trying to and from Christian point of view, it will eventually lead to the exclusion of God of course, because you're trying to get down just to one kind of reality and usually that means physical reality and nothing else. So, it's a profoundly anti-Christian when it's taken to its extremes. An anti-Christian pressure. I think what I try to show in the book is that the arts have a crucial role in resisting this tendency towards reductions because the arts by their very nature, keep telling us there's more here than you think. So, an example, if I'm in the face of an expert, I hesitate to do this. But an example I continues is the difference between the picture of shoes on the side of a shoe box, you get a shoe store and Van Gogh's picture of the farmer’s shoes. It's become quite famous where there is an extraordinary picture of just two shoes, but they're full of mud and earth, and they're bent and the shading is beautifully done. And the difference between the two is obvious, that Van Gogh’s says so much more than the other. It does the shoebox in the shoe store. They just want you to identify the shoe. That's all they're trying to do. So, that you can get the right shoe. In the case of the Van Gogh––what's it about? It's about being a peasant, it's about tough work, it's about manual labor, it's about aching feet, it's about earth, it's about moderates, and you never get to the end of it. That doesn't mean the painting can be about anything. No, no. There's a limit to that. You're not saying it can mean anything, but its meanings are multiple. It's saying there's a heck of a lot more to a pair of shoes than you think. And then when you, I don't know, go on, you get home after a rainy day or something and there beside the door is a pair of shoes, so the familiar becomes unfamiliar and that's when the great ministries of art, it seems to me is things you just pass by normally sudden become laden with significance. A great landscape painter makes you look at this landscape you might have looked at for ages, but helps you see all sorts of things in it. A place of color forms, overarching forms that you perhaps never noticed before. A kind of inner beauty that that you never stopped to consider the familiar, made unfamiliar. It's so, the artist is adept at saying, it seems to me, there's more here than you think. There's always more than you could say. Always more than you could articulate. The world has a kind of always more less about it. Now, For Christians, it seems that's incredibly important because we want to say the world is not just one type of thing, but we also want to say there's more than the world that is that all this more-ness is because there is a God at work in this world who's ever bringing new things out of this world so that this world is not a closed system. It's open to God. It's not that the arts prove God's existence. I'm not saying that at all, but the very way they work keeps things open in a way that is theologically very friendly, Christianly, very friendly. Let's put it that way. So basically that's a kind of long-winded answer. That's what the book's about baker, I don't know, be out next year sometime. It's been it's been fun. Well, fun. It's been a struggle to write because I've tried to do with a lot of scientific reductionism in the process and have also begun to see how many people appreciate the arts in very reductionist ways. A reductionist approach, the art will be to say, what's the message of this painting? Tell me, it's in a statement. And then if you can't, it can't mean anything that's reductionism, reduce it to a statement. And there it is, that's what you call linguistic reductionism. If you can't reduce it to language, it can't be true. And that seems to be profoundly dangerous thing to say, and a ridiculous thing to say, because so many things we both know and appreciate and live into can never be expressed in language, and certainly not encapsulated in language or summed up in language held in language wonderful and important as language is.

Professor Luke Aleckson:  
So that's basically, it's incredible. Yeah. Well, that that reminds me of another kind of maybe linguistic reductionism, which uh, happens sometimes within worship or within worship, music. Um, and even within the history of the protestant church at various points saying, the only reason we allow arts or allow music into the church is for an educational pedagogical reason that performs a function and it allows for theology to be spoken linguistically. Um, and I would say that those some of some of those screens are still alive and active in the church, that, that the arts have to justify their existence by virtue of their of their language.

Dr. Jeremy Begbie:
I'm afraid that is, yeah, it's something of written quite a bit about and still trying to say what, I'm I spent my life kind of shuffling between two extreme groups though, though, I'm sure you belong to no other nor by all. Uh, what they do is the one group that you might call us a kind of word obsessed Protestant doesn't, if you can't wrap it up in words and enclose it in a statement, it can't be true. That kind of extreme things. The minute you stop speaking, you're in terrible, terrible danger that the other is a kind of lazy, what I call lazy aestheticism, which says something like, well use words if you have to, but the sooner you can get away from language the better. And then we can all just hold hands and sing hymns and without words or, or harmonize something inglorious residents but not use any language because Christians eventually need to escape language that both of these seems to seem to be very, very mistaken, that Christians glory in the language that God has given us supremely language of Scripture and supremely the language of Christ himself. But there's no claim that that language can enclose the realities that they speak about. And God has given us all these other modes of knowing which I believe can be faithful to those texts, to those words, without having simply to ape them or without them having to be in precisely the same language. So we live, so to speak, inside script. Yes, looking at the world and living in the world. But we do so with music for instance. So in a in a song or hymn, we have if it's if it's a joyful words, you would expect something like joyful music, but it will be joyful in its own way. Thank you very much. Not in a linguistic way, it will be doing joyful things in a musical way. What's more, it may well be speaking of beauty and order in the very way it's designed. That's it. It's just going to do that whether you like it or not. And you have to say, well, that's interesting because there it's expressing something which the words at that time don't explicitly express music is very good at doing that. It'll have a text, but it will tell you about all sorts of things that the text at that point is not telling you. Um, so you can see what I'm trying to avoid as a kind of simple tying down music to words uh, kind of obsessively and on the other saying, who cares about the words God has given us, the sooner we can get away from words, the better.. I that seems to me that we are to be faithful to the words God has given us but faithful in different ways faithful in musical, artistic dramatic, even in dance ways. And we must rejoice in those ways. I realize that course raises questions––well, how do you know you're being really faithful? And that's the struggle, that's the struggle of being a Christian. How do we know? Sometimes it's hard to tell music. It's very interesting in the history of music. Music goes with words. Uh, the more this happens in the in the Reformation to appoint, the more people try to get the music fitting like a glove to a hand, the more music will say, I want to do something else as well as this or I want I want to be music. I don't want to be words at this point. Thank you very much. I love what you're saying. But I would like to say it in a musical way. Thank you very much. And so over again. Music does its own thing in in the first. Yeah. But very likely anyhow, in the early church it was almost, it would be very often a single syllable to every note very often. That was regarded as the ideal. We don't actually know precisely that's called syllabic singing, but soon they managed to stretch a syllable over a note over two three notes and then stretch more syllables over more notes. And what that does is that the text now is very far from the way you would speak it, you see, Because the music is doing its musical thing, it's making melodies and that causes trouble for someone, you see, that's music kind of asserting itself, and yet doing something glorious. If the song that its setting is about joy and the Lord, Hey, this is music. Doing joy in the Lord. Thank you very much. But we'll do it in a musical way, please. And that means melodies and perhaps much later nice harmonies and all sorts of other things. And we need to respect that. I think the Reformation struggle with us again and again and again, too much to learn from that.

Professor Luke Aleckson:  
There's even a sense that maybe that reductionism is based off of a fear of not having everything contained, so allowing it to open up is in fact very parallel, if not the same with a type of faith that that God can hold it together.

Dr. Jeremy Begbie:
That's.. thank you golly, what a cue. Because that's the culminating point of the introductory chapter that common to most reductionism is a desire to control and master. You see a reductionist who says the universe actually is nothing. But these things, wow, they're in a powerful position because once they know it's just these things, they have the view of the whole of reality they think. They think reductionism problems is to put you into a very powerful position. Um if you can say it's all about psychology in the end, wow and you're a psychologist, you're in a very powerful position because that's all you need to rule the world is psychology. Of course it's ridiculous, but it's that desire to control and master, and at the deepest level that reduction and therefore is well, no, let's put it another way at the highest-level reductionism is a way of saying I have the overview of reality. Well, wait a minute who has the overview reality only God? So, the desire to control and master everything ultimately is that ancient sin of wanting to be God, want of, refusing our creaturely-ness, refusing our finite-ness now we want to be in that position where we can see everything as it really is. Mercifully we don't and because being God is a very exhausting business when you tried. Um but reductionists will try that. So I think that there is a thing there and the glory of the Gospel is that it releases us from that aspiration to have to hold and to seize and to dominate. Just think of personal relations. You know, it's, a it's profoundly pathological but incredibly calm. There's a great book actually, just got it here. An author, I would strongly recommend. he's a sociologist, not a not a Christian by Hartmut Rosa that's called The Uncontrollability of the World, it's one of the more most Christian books I've read in a sense that he's just reaching for a Christian view of the world and he thinks the problem of modernity is the problem of control. I know we need to learn what he calls resonance with the world. It's short, it's very readable, and as a student of mine said to me the other day, it'll rock your world. So, I just recommend that this is very, very much talked about these days. Rowin Williams, a theologian, is also this is one of his very key themes, that the kind of love that's built into God, the Trinitarian love, is a love that gives itself for the sake of the other and doesn't want to control the other in a closed, in a closed circle or close relation. So we're down to the very deepest things here of who God is and who we are in relation to God. That's where reduction is and I find a study of reduction takes you ultimately.