Divine resonance : Meaning-generation via instrumental music within Christian worship

This thesis investigates the generation of Christian meaning via the performance of instrumental music (IM) separate from text within Christian worship.

IM is non-verbal, purely qualitative, and lacking in conventional theological reference. Its meaning is multivalent and relies heavily upon the sensory, imaginative, emotional, and transcendent realms of human experience. Within logo-centric views of Christian meaning-generation, IM can be perceived as contentious and tends to be treated predominantly as an accompaniment to text or ritual activity, a cue, or a soundtrack to visual presentations rather than considered as a stand-alone worship act. This thesis argues in a theoretical and interdisciplinary way that IM is a valid and valuable medium within worship. When IM is contextualised within worship, it produces a distinctive kind of musical-liturgical dynamic space (MLDS) in which a unique and particular set of intra-musical, liturgical, and extra-musical/-liturgical factors and interrelations between factors converge. IM functions within MLDS as a Christian symbol via which new Christian insight and experience can be elicited for worshippers at both implicit and explicit levels of meaning-generation.

IM’s Christian symbolic capacity is argued on theological, liturgical, musicological, and semiotic grounds and exemplified in musical-liturgical scenarios. Paul Tillich’s discussion of symbols and the art-religion interface, Karl Rahner’s transcendental theological anthropology and Real Symbol, and Louis-Marie Chauvet’s interpretation of symbolic mediation ground the thesis theologically. The role of metaphorical and analogical processes and the affections within worship with reference to James K. A. Smith’s idea of the Christian imaginary, David Tracy’s notion of the analogical imagination, and Don Saliers’ account of an affections-ethics link underpin the thesis liturgically. Detailed structural and semiotic analyses qualify the thesis’ musicological claims. The semiotic theory of Charles Peirce provides the thesis’ central theoretical component – including his tripartite structure of the sign and ten sign classes. Peirce’s semiotics provides a detailed and rigorous tool for explicating MLDS and supporting the claim that IM can generate Christian meaning.