Our world has been shaped by reductionism, the view that everything can be reduced to something - matter, molecules, or motives. So nothing is sacred. Our Christian faith says the exact opposite. And the arts can fight against reductionism.

Resources:

• Jeremy Begbie's bio
• Jeremy Bebgie's website
• Abundantly More by Jeremy Begbie
• Some of Jeremy's other books
• Randy Newman's presentation about music: Explorations of Joy

Transcript

Welcome to Questions that Matter, a podcast of the C.S. lewis Institute. I'm your host, Randy Newman, and I have the great joy today of having a nice conversation with Jeremy Begbie. Jeremy is a professor at Duke Divinity School and has written quite a few books about music and the arts. He's really helped me a whole lot to think differently about arts and how we think about God because of the way God has created our world so beautifully. Jeremy Begbie, welcome to Questions that Matter.  

Thank you so much. It's a delight to be here, Randy.

Well, most of the conversation I want to talk about today is about your newest book. It's called Abundantly More. The subtitle is the Theological Promise of the Arts in a Reductionist World. But before we get there, I just wonder if you could maybe introduce our listeners a little bit to your thinking. You, you write and speak a lot about the arts for theology. What do you mean by that and how does that shape your thinking?  

Sure. Well, I make a rough distinction between what I call theology for the arts and the arts for theology. Theology for the arts is when you start explicitly with a theological doctrine or position like the doctrine of creation or the person of Christ. And through that lens you encounter art and ask what difference does this particular belief or, or doctrine or whatever it is? What difference does that make to the way we hear music, the way we paint pictures, the way we process images? So you're moving quite explicitly from a theological position towards the arts and interpreting the arts in the light of that. Now, I think that never stops. That's the way we always ought to do things. But within that, I've also discovered that the arts have very particular powers, what I call singular powers, to help us understand the gospel more deeply. And so, for instance, when it comes to music, I've often, I mean, very early on I discovered that the model of a three note chord, the way we hear a three note chord releases us from many bad habits in theology so that the biblical witness to the triune God can actually be heard more clearly. And that's what I call music for theology. But you could do with any of the arts. So you were still looking to scripture as our norm. Of course. But within that, as we look to scripture, we find that the arts can unlock things in scripture well, that nothing else can in quite the same way. And I think that really matters when we do theology.

Oh, that's so helpful. And again, I, I want to tell our listeners, I, I've benefited. You've, you've not just taught me some things to think you certainly have. But you. You've given me lenses through which to think.

That's kind of you. That's what I'm trying to do. That's what I'm trying to do.

Yeah, I. I was a music major in my undergraduate days, which was. I began that before I was a Christian. And then when I became a Christian, I. I had to wrestle with the fact that it seemed to me that music was like a God for me, and I had to somehow not quite separate from it, but I needed to get a distance in a certain sense. But then after a short time, it was, oh, no, I can really, really appreciate music and, in fact, get a grasp about who God is and the way he created us as people create in his image by appreciating and diving further into music.  

A lovely introduction because I could have said almost exactly the same in the same words. But I came to Faith after I'd been a musician for many years and set on a professional career. And then when I came to faith, I had to do a bit of distancing. But very soon I found the connections were very, very rich. And far from music becoming less interesting, music became far more interesting because I could hear so much more. I think many of my musical friends were thinking, oh, boy, your world's going to turn from color to black and white. It was exactly the opposite, that through the Christian faith, we can hear and see far more than we could ever see otherwise.

I return to this theme so very often that my guess is perhaps the listeners may be tired of this. I hope not. But the distinction C.S. lewis made about first and second thing, it's just so very helpful that when you try to have music as a first thing or the first thing or the primary, it's disappointing it can't hold up to what we're looking to it for.  

Absolutely. Lewis is the writer, I think the best writer on this, and I've been going back to him recently on precisely these lines. No. Music, too, for me, had become a kind of God, and I had to dethrone it. Not because it was unimportant, because I'd invested religious hope in it. And that was simply going to disappoint me, as it did time and time again. There was this great core of something wonderful. But the minute I focused on the music, it was, well, a kind of idolatry. It's only when God entered the picture very directly that then music became. Suddenly it found its place. It wasn't a kind of shrinking so much as now I can hear much more. And I can be much more thankful for it because I'm not trying to make it a god.

So I don't know if this will go anywhere, but is there something about music and the arts that demand or seduce us to that kind of idolatry because it's, it's so very powerful?  

Absolutely, yes, I think there is. I think it is. And I, I think. Well, I think there are a number of things involved. I think the music and certainly the other arts have the ability to connect parts of us which often remain disconnected. Head and heart, intellect and feeling, body and mind, body and emotion. With virtually all the arts, it's the whole of you that's being involved. And so the arts have a huge claim upon you. And I think that there's that which is very beguiling and extraordinarily attractive and moving. But we just have to be careful. Augustine is the great. Is the great saint. He adores music and he weeps tears with music. And yet he keeps saying, whoops, not careful, careful. Whoops. Now wait a minute. It's because he knows. And Calvin's another. Calvin is often thought of as having a low view of music. No, not at all. He had extremely high view of music. Yeah. Because he recognized how powerful it was and he stands in that tradition. And that's why he's sometimes anxious about it. It's not because it's a bad thing, but because it's so powerful. You've got to be careful. But that applies to almost anything. But you're right, there's something about the arts that is kind of all claiming, isn't it all. It sort of takes over the whole of you. Or it can feel like that.

Yeah. Well, so let's look at the other side. You wrote this book about how the arts can protect us against reductionism, help our listeners. How do you define that? Or what do you mean by Reductionism. 

Reductionism is a current in our culture. What I would call a cast of mind, a way of looking at the world, a way of attending to the world. And the gist of it is that the reductionist will tend to think there's only one way of explaining everything, but another way. Everything can be explained but in one way with one kind of thought, one kind of language. And it's a flat worldview because you're trying to flatten everything down. The great, I think he was a physiologist, Donald MacKay, used to speak about nothing. Buttery reduction of nothing. Buttery, that is the brain is nothing but a computer and the universe is nothing but subatomic particles, but purposelessly rather interacting with each other. You can usually spot a reductionist because they'll often use words like no more than, or merely or only. And it's the, it's the flattening of everything down. Now the most obvious form of reductionism these days for a lot of people is a certain kind of scientific reductionism that's called naturalistic reductionism, which says basically that the only realities are those realities that are amenable to the natural sciences. But what I try to do is show it's actually a cast of mind. It's in the science. But we'll find it over and over again in all sorts of, in all sorts of other ways. We might say another characteristic reductionism. You try to reduce the whole to the parts. So you might say a piece of Bach, you know, Bach's B Minor Mass is nothing but notes or something like that. Yeah, you might say the only, the only reason you believe in God is because of your parents. That's reductionism. Yeah, that's a kind of what you would you call a psychological reductionism. Which is a very common, very common these days.

Yeah.  

Hey, we can explain it all in terms of psychology or sociology or whatever, or evolutionary theory can, can be another way. So we're trying to find a kind of one size fits all explanation of everything. That's a reductionist mindset. And I think it's been deep, deeply harmful in our culture and still is. I realized, of course, many scientists are not hardline reductionists as far as science is concerned. They might be in other ways because it's so endemic in our culture, but not as far as science is concerned. There are very few hard line naturalist reductionists. Someone like Dawkins is very rare actually in the scientific world. My father was a physicist. I remember he often used to say that. So. So now what I found with the arts though, I found that the arts seem to have the power to resist these reductionist impulses. Sometimes the arts, or thinking about the arts, writing about the arts, can be very reductionist. We're not careful. But the very way that they work, they seem to expand rather than contract, to open things out rather than flatten things. And I suppose, I mean just to give a couple of examples off the top of my head, I often make, and I borrowed this from Hilary Brandt and Adrian Chaplin. It's a wonderful contrast between a picture of a shoe on the side of a shoe box that you might see in a store, in a shoe store.

Okay.  

And Van Gogh, or Van Gogh's picture, he did a number of them, but of a peasant's shoes, of farmer's shoes.

Right.  

And if you look at the peasant shoes, obviously you're looking at boots that are worn. They speak of tragedy, poverty, earth, hard labor, trying to make ends meet. I mean, all sorts of stuff. And you can never get to the end.

Yeah, good, right.  

Of what you're saying about it now, that doesn't mean that that painting means anything. Of course not. So it's not an infinite variety of possibilities, but you'll never be able to sum it up in a single sentence or, or in a perhaps in another image or whatever. It is irreducible in that way. It's always expanding. So art, by its very nature, I'm arguing, in this book, is multiply elusive. It's always expanding. Now, you go back to the shoebox, or the whole point of the diagram, the side of the shoebox, is that you get the right shoe, end of story. You don't find people queuing up to view the picture on the side of a shoebox in a shoe store and thinking, my goodness, isn't that incredible? I could be here all day. That's not normally what happens. So I think the greatest art is always reminding you that there's more than we can ever contain with our minds, contain with our language. It's reminding us that the world is all. All the more than we can control or grasp, you know?

Oh, boy. While you're talking, so many different images are coming to mind. But I hope this doesn't get us too far off the point. But. But your illustration of the shoes in a shoe store here. Help you buy a pair of shoes. And Van Gogh's painting. When you said shoes, my mind went to the Holocaust Memorial museum in D.C.. In the museum there is a display of shoes of people who had been killed in the Holocaust, and the exhibit was arranged in a certain sense it was just haphazard. And yet it wasn't because of the lighting. It was its own kind of exhibit. And I remember the first time I went there, that was the moment that was the most painful and most powerful for me. And I mentioned it to one of the docents in the museum and they said, you won't, you wouldn't believe how many people say that exact same thing about that display of shoes.  

That's a fantastic illustration. I never thought of that. I haven't been to Auschwitz. I had a friend, neighbor who went to Auschwitz and she said exactly the same to me. He said, you know, Jeremy, you should just see the shoes. So what's happened there? It's at least in Auschwitz it's framed. But the shoes are framed behind the glass. Glass pan. In other words, they're turned into a kind of image.

That's right.  

Of course. They are limitlessly evocative. Well, almost limitlessly evocative and resonant. And they're just. They're pounding at you with meaning. Basically. It would be ridiculous to say these are just shoes. Be ridiculous. The reductionist ones come and say oh no, they're just shoes, nothing else. They're just pieces of worn leather. That's a supremely good example, I think. And great art does that in such a way that we can't forget it. And effectively, what they've done there, as you rightly say. Is this the museum in New York you're talking about?

No, it's in Washington, D.C.  

I beg your pardon. Right, yeah, yeah, I've heard about that. Well, they've done the same at Auschwitz itself. In the museum there. Yeah.

Well, I kept having this experience reading your book of going back and forth between these terribly reductionist explanations of things. And then the expansionist way that an artistic understanding, you just keep going. You can see this song does so much more than just convey words of a song or this symphony or this painting or this poem or. I love the fact in your book you pointed out: Why is it that sometimes, oftentimes the prophets shifted and went to poetry? Well, it's because what they were trying to communicate couldn't be captured in just mere prose. They had precisely an artistic way about that.  

Well, I think we invest a huge amount of hope in the literal assertion. I'm not against literal assertions and certainly not propositions or anything. Of course that kind of language has its place, but we also need language that suggests uncontainability. In other words, that makes you realize that this language might be very true, but it can't contain the reality. It's talking about the best kind of language. And of course then the best kind of language does that is, for instance, poetry, irony, metaphor, parable. I mean, why did Jesus actually speak in parables? It's not because he thought I'd make it a bit more entertaining. It's because he had to. He also spoke in straight assertions. Sure. Time and time again, he's just parable. Now, there's another factor that goes with this which I think is interesting. And it's part of how the arts do this expansive thing, and that is that the arts make the familiar unfamiliar. So what Jesus does time and time again with his parables, he takes something very, very familiar. Like in the Good Samaritan, a mugging at the roadside. That's a very familiar thing, sadly, in that culture as it is today. But of course, he takes it and he makes people rethink the entire thing in terms of the Samaritan is the one who actually helps and not the others. Another example, I mean, Coleridge, sorry, Coleridge, the great poet, he had this great phrase about taking away the film of familiarity so that you see something fresh. Now, the arts are constantly, constantly doing that. The Bible is doing that over and over again. It was a commentary on Isaiah. I remember reading once when the commentator was saying, you know, Isaiah, of course, uses these fantastic metaphors all the time, or Amos, you know, Justice, Rolling Stream and all this. Why are they using that language? Because they want to jerk. Jolt the imaginations. People who have lost hope. And when you lose hope, your imagination tends to atrophy, tends to just flatten down. So it's no good at that point, Isaiah is giving them some kind of, I don't know, political prognosis about what's going to happen with the invading armies. That's not going to help. They need to be jolted out of their apathy and their lack of hope so that they see the familiar world around them, but they see it differently. They're going to see now that they're going to be taken back across the desert and back home. There's a show I always think of in this respect, it's still running in London, I don't know of, in New York, called Stomp. And it's when. When they take a whole lot of apparently, well, just tools and perhaps even useless, but just tools like brushes and sticks and matches and cans and trash cans and whatever. And they make out of this an hour and a half of the most mesmerizing choreography. Effectively, no words are spoken, no music is played. And it begins with them with brushes or brooms. They're just brushing the floor and they begin a kind of rhythmic thing and start dancing with that with these brushes. And then they swing the brushes around and they tap them into all with the brush. Now, so you go to this show and then you drive your car back into the garage, and there in the corner is a brush. And that. You can never think of that brush in the same way again because you've been shown what it could be and what it could become, which is a parable in itself, of course.

Oh, man.  

So familiar has become unfamiliar and. And that's what it means to see the world not just in terms of these kind of isolated things, but of all the possible significance of something as mundane and ordinary and banal as a brush.

Is that show. Do they. Is it all improvisational?

No, it's very carefully choreographed. It looks improvisation. It looks improvisation. And it could be improvisation. It could be. Here's another example. And this is much more biblical. It's called Tree of Life, and it's from Mozambique, and I don't know where it's now held. It's a sculpture, basically, and it was in the British Museum for a bit. And it's an illusion, of course, the Tree of Life in the band of revelation. So it's a picture of the new creation. And you think, well, this is okay until you look a little closer and you find that the entire tree is made up of weapons. In this case, from the Mozambique Civil war. Oh, the entire thing is a recreation, effectively. See, you know, about swords into plowshares and. Yes, yes, and. And AKs into the tree of Life so that I. You can't look at weapons in the same way. Again, the familiar has been made unfamiliar. And I think that's one of the great gifts of the art to the Christian faith. They make you look. Or can make you look at the world in a very different way, and you can now see possibilities rather than just, oh, well, he just. It's just that sadly, of course, with people, you know, that's the ultimate reductionism, isn't it? Oh, they're just a bunch of molecules or whatever. Or, oh, he's just a young person or he's just a layabout, you know, he's just the lazy adolescent in my youth group who won't do anything. He's just a. That's language. He's only this. But of course, how is Jesus looking at this person, this person, if not as the one who could become the child of God, say? And so is there a way of helping. That's a question of looking at the familiar now is unfamiliar. I thought I knew who or what this was. I was categorizing this person under a label, by the way, in in all this, I don't know if you've ever come across Ian McGilchrist. You know this name? Oh my goodness.

Right.  

Could I recommend to your readers. Ian McGilchrist is a writer. It's. He's a particular theory of what's called brain lateralization. That's left brain, right brain. But it's a complete rewriting of that entire theory and he brings out virtually all the points I've been making. He's not quite a Christian, but he's very, very sympathetic to, to. And he's basically. He's a radical anti reductionist psychiatrist by training. He's a medic, a psychiatrist, also trained in English literature. He says a lot of this very well in a book called the Master and His Emissary. Your listeners, I hope will go out and buy it straight away. You find it very hard to put down once you've started it and you've.

Got a, a recording coming up, a podcast with him between the two of you. Is that right?  

Got a conversation. Here at Duke. Yes. When I'm basically, we're having a conversation about art and faith. His, his theory is that what I've been speaking about, reductionism is essentially the dominance of, of a left brain way of looking at the world and that the arts are critically important in releasing us from that dominance. He's not against the left brain, but from that kind of dominance it's profoundly, so much of it is profoundly Christian. He doesn't know it. I don't. Well, he does know it. Uh, but, but it's. So yes, I'm having conversations with him about just that.

Just, just to drive home the point. This is, this is a real thing, this reductionism. You quote Francis Crick in your book.

Oh yes.

Become almost iconic about this outlook. And here's a quote from Francis Crick. You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and friends, free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. I read that. At first I laughed, then I felt really sad and, and then I thought I. I wouldn't have wanted to ever invite him over for dinner.

Well, actually my father and your father in law knew him a bit better. Not to say anything too much about that. But okay, if you really believe that. I mean I don't know about curriculums up, but if you really believe that. Wow, it's hard to, to get on with life.

Yeah. Everything.  

What are you going to do with feelings of sympathy for someone? What are you going to do with compassion? What are you going to do? Of course, the, the endless. The problem for the ultra reductionist is is the phenomenon of consciousness, which is incredibly difficult to explain neurologically. I was with a colleague at Cambridge yesterday, not a Christian, who, who raised, who'd read my book and raised this question with a neurologist at, at high table in one of the colleges and said, what are they making of consciousness these days in, in neuroscience? And he said, oh, that's, that's just unsolvable. We don't, we haven't a clue about that.

Okay, well, all right. Unsolvable. What a great word to have.  

Major Cambridge neuroscientists say that effectively. It's when you're conscious of something, you're just. you're conscious of something. Yes, but if you believe beliefs or think consciousness is no more than brain states, well, what are you going to do about that? About something? Because that is not actually observable by the scientist. So then you've got a problem. Well, what about your belief in reductionism that is extreme. Is that no more than brain states? Oh, I believe it's true. Well, hang on a second. You can't believe that things are true. Beliefs have to be about something and you've just denied the about bit. It's just brain states. Do you see how, in other words, reductionism over and over again defeats itself? It trips upon its own shoelaces and, and disappears up a kind of plug hole. And that's, that's what, that's why I call, I think in this book, I call, I speak of the oddities of reductionism. Yes, it's extreme form. It's the extreme form I'm talking about. Of course, it leads to some very bizarre conclusions.

And you know, the, the, the evangelist in me. My, my title at the C.S. lewis Institute is Senior Fellow for Apologetics and Evangelism. So I have to throw these things in every so often.  

I'm very honored to be in your presence. Yes, well, someone senior.

Well, you may want to turn that down. But, but it does seem to me that we can get into some very, very helpful conversations with non-believers if they hold to this view. And one route to go is exactly what you just were doing with the conversations of: Well, how do you get that? Or what do you think? If it's all reductionist, why is it so that approach. There's another approach that I felt like as I was reading your book of I wonder if it's good to just sort of spell out another perspective and almost make a reductionist hope and want it to be true, absolutely. We're talking about. You know, when I listen to Absolutely Dvorak, I. I find myself having trouble not choking back tears. I'm so moved to emotion or I remember standing in an art museum at this one painting and I, I couldn't move away from it. And even after I went back to it, it was just so captivating and to talk in those kind of terms so that a reductionist says, yeah, I've had that experience too.  

I couldn't agree more. I think argument has a place. I think there's a kind of logical ad absurdum approach where you can just. If you really carry along this is what you're going to have to say. And of course there are scientific, very, very good scientific books out now which will expose a lot of the fallacies. That's fine. That will really do it for some people. Or it'll be important for some people. For others, indeed. I think you're right. I would appeal to all sorts of experiences that they've simply airbrushed out as insignificant. And love, of course, will be one, consciousness will be another. And yes, the kind of experiences people have in music. Now there's a philosopher I know I better not mention him, a very, very distinguished philosopher in Cambridge and we were co-examining a PhD once and, and he knew a heck of a lot about Christianity and he said, oh my goodness, it's suddenly in the middle of this, of this defense, you know, Viva, as we call it there. He suddenly said, oh, if only it were true. I mean, the music at Evensong and the glorious words that they're singing and the vision of hope that they're articulating. Oh, if only that were true.

Yeah.  

Which I think is just when he's very anti reductionist. He's not, he's certainly not a believer, excuse me. But he sees there's just a huge amount that reductionist strategies are never really going to be able to cope with. And what you're saying is there. And what I. Well, there are many forms of evangelism, of course, but one of them is to say, have you thought about seeing it this way? Because this has a good deal more explanatory power. It's not a new proof. It's not a new proof we're not into that world. But it is a. It brings an entirely different perspective on the world. That's why in the book you probably notice I, I take the anti-reductionism on so far, but then I just dive into John's gospel.

I was going to ask you to go there because part of it.

It's deliberately a shock tactic to say the world of John's gospel and the world they're assuming is, is not just that it's ancient or something, it is built on radically different foundations where language, for instance, can have multiple levels of meaning.

Yeah.  

And you can have multiple types of language.

Right.  

And also that it's, it's, it's clearly moving you that it's. That it's dealing with the realities of the harsh realities of this world. But also that the. Of course, in John's gospel it's such this major theme of abundance, of expansiveness.

Yes.  

Could it be that God is a God of uncontainable love?

Yes.  

He's pouring this out, this love out on the world. And where you're trying to reduce everything to one kind of explanation. He's trying to say the world is a good deal more interesting than you imagine. And the reason it is is because I'm at work in it and I'm uncontainable and I'm a God of abundance and I want you to have that. And then I, then I just come out of that quickly and then we're back into the discussion. Because I wanted this dark contrast to come up between this very kind of mean spirited cast of mind to one that is intrinsically generous, sees the richness of things rather than just as it were, the one color of everything or turning everything into black and white. And then later in the book. Yes. I developed that more in terms of what you might call systematic theology or doctrinal theology, I hope in a readable way. But it was to get that contrast. I'd never properly seen that before. All these extraordinary. You know, the fact that the feedinf of the five thousand in one of the synoptics. You get the, the basket fulls left over.

Yeah.

At the wedding of Cana in John chapter two, you know, she only wanted an extra bottle and she gets  gallons of wine. You see what I. What with somebody, I just say, what do you make of that? I mean that the Christian God is kind of mean and stingy and is always cramping your style. Doesn't seem to be what's going on in John's Gospel. And why do you think they would invent this? And you know, in other words, that's one form of evangelism and there are many forms. But it's when you just the sheer contrast of worldview that we're dealing with one. Just one other theme, Randy, if I may. That comes out of this and as I'm not certain, I think reductionism of any sort, I believe is a way of trying to control and master reality. You think about a reductionist. There's something in us which would love to have just a single explanation for everything, right? One, one kind of language, one kind of atom, one kind of micro, micro particle. Because then we'd be in control. Because if you can get that, then really you've got reality, thinks that they've got reality. Remember that that is real and everything else is actually, well, mythology or, or a kind of illusion, one sort of. So it's a quest for the real and so that you can control it. Now a lot of people have written about that. There's a wonderful sociologist, German sociologist I've come to know quite well called Hartwood Rota. He wrote a wonderful book called the Uncontrollability of the World. He's another of these people who's not yet a Christian, I think he may well be one day. And he's basically saying that's what modernity is, is about in the end, it's this huge hubristic attempt to think we can be in charge of the world. And of course if you contrast that then again with John's gospel in the New Testament, which is about much more powerful. And the thing that defeats all that, of course is the excessive, generous, self giving love of God. When I love another without trying to control them, the risk of loving another without trying to control them. And that's the love that's driving the universe. Now again, that's a huge jolt of the imagination. And if we can get the arts helping people to see that, I think we've, we've done some good. And I think with the arts generally, I know there are a lot of controlling artists, I appreciate that, of course there are. But there's no doubt that artists at their best are reminding us when as I think, we're not in charge of the world. It's beyond our control. It's meaningful, it's orderly, but it's beyond our grasp. This, this. Well, it's the primal sin, you could say, to play God we're infinite, that we've got the overview, that we can see reality as it really is, that we know good and evil and not God. That is the ultimate. That's what's driving a lot of the reductionist mindset, I'm sure.

Wow, this is such good stuff. I want to underline your phrase that you use several times. Explanatory power. The arts expand and so we have more explanatory power. Let's go one, one last issue. Toward the end of your book, you talk about the, the, the language of praise, the, the experience of praise and how that is a, an expansive way of connecting to God. Even though it's, it, it cannot fully capture it by any stretch and yet it, it gets us in that expansionist kind of posture. Say a little bit about that, that.  

Oh gosh, well that's a wonderful way to close. And I think you said it and you said it very to praise God is, is at its heart it's, it's another way of saying we're not in control. And yes you are Lord, but always remember it's the control of love that is, it's not the oppressive cramping control, it's the power of generosity. So when you praise God for God's sake and not our own, but praise God for God's sake, you are acknowledging that the power at the heart of the triune life of God, part of the Trinity is, is a self giving subversion of control. It's a self giving love that doesn't try to control the other. That's the love that ever flows between Father and Son, the love that Jesus himself embodies towards his Father and towards us. So yes, I think the praising I mentioned, I think there, Augustine towards the end he has this experience or he talks about the experience of singers who are singing, I think a psalm. It's in one of his commentaries on the Psalms and they're singing something in words, a psalm, let's assume. And they suddenly break into what he calls the ubilis and which seems to be a kind of singing that's not words, which expands beyond words. That doesn't mean that the words don't matter because it's come out of a psalm, it's come out of God's word. Of course, but the song is a kind of recognition with this wordless singing is a kind of recognition that those words can't capture the reality that they're speaking about. Yes, and he thinks that is praise in action. In praise we're recognizing one who we cannot control. And sometimes that means, therefore we use words. Of course we do, but we also use wordless things like images, like free singing. I mean, you know how we do sometimes when at a football match was me, you say like that, you know, your, your fist goes up and. Yeah, and there's a kind of shout of joy. That's not really language. No, no, but, but, but. So it's, it's a. It's a signal that language is very, very important. Of course God has made it important. It's not there to try to capture. There we are.

Very good. Very, very good. Well, I recommend your book. I recommend people check out some of your YouTube videos when you were doing lectures for the Veritas forum or other places. You've really helped us, I think, just allow the power of the arts and music to help us love God more. So I'm really very thankful for this conversation. I'm going to put a whole bunch of different show notes below this and hope our listeners can benefit greatly from it. And like all of the things that we produce at the C.S. Lewis Institute, we pray that God uses this so that you will love him more with all of your heart, soul, strength in mind. Jeremy, thanks so much for the time. 

Thank you so much. It's been a great pleasure. Thank you.

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