Several centuries ago, music was, in Daniel Chua’s words, “tugged out of its cosmological structure” and reduced to an autonomous creative art. Christians, though, have good reason to rehabilitate ancient musical mysticism and metaphysics.
Music is the best language we have to describe the unified diversity of God’s life, the perfect harmony of Father, Son, and Spirit who is, in Jonathan Edwards’s words, the “Supreme Harmony of all.” The Triune God is a polyphony in three voices, an infinite three-tune fugue, each melody so perfectly attuned to the others as to be one God. As Tolkien and Lewis intuited, the singing God created by singing, so the world might sing back.
