Professor of Theology & the Arts (1957- )
The root problem with the bloated image of the artist that haunts modernity, I suggest, is not the way the artist is being pictured but the model of divine transcendence that feeds it (and which in turn is fed by it). What kind of deity lurks there?
JEREMY BEGBIE
Redeeming Transcendence in the Arts
The bona fide artist must be governed as little as possible by law-governed nature, the material encountered. This can lead to attempts to escape, or direct attention away from, all things concrete and finite, but much commoner in modernity has been a conception of the artist as one who masters and controls, bends the material to predetermined purposes.
JEREMY BEGBIE
Redeeming Transcendence in the Arts
To be new or original, after all, is proof that we are alive and have agency, that we are not enmeshed in an inexorable chain of cause and effect.
JEREMY BEGBIE
Redeeming Transcendence in the Arts
Music can serve to enrich and advance theology, extending our wisdom about God, God's relation to us and to the world at large.
JEREMY BEGBIE
Theology, Music and Time
Theologically, what are we to make of this superhuman inflation of the artist? One reaction is simply to insist that we cut the artist down to size, in the hope that by demoting the artist we will promote God. Creation-talk belongs to God alone, we are told, and any slippage of that language into the human sphere is to be shunned. The sentiment is understandable, but without qualification it is liable to lead to dead ends. To imagine that by dethroning the artist we thereby make room for God will all too easily encourage a zero-sum game in which divine and human are seen as essentially unrelated, pitted against each other, vying for the same space. The more of God, the less of us; the less of God, the more of us.
JEREMY BEGBIE
Redeeming Transcendence in the Arts
Only God truly creates, for only God is unconstrained by things external to himself.
JEREMY BEGBIE
Redeeming Transcendence in the Arts
Could not the art of dance, at its best, be read as gesturing toward the resurrection of the body celebrated in 1 Corinthians 15, a fully physical body certainly, but a body whose life vastly surpasses that of the body of this life ... the body riven by sin and running toward death?
JEREMY BEGBIE
Redeeming Transcendence in the Arts
The artist, that is to say, begins by looking to the world around him, and then, on the basis of his powers of observation, offers some perceptual account of it for our appreciation.
JEREMY BEGBIE
Beholding the Glory: Incarnation Through the Arts
A fervent quest for the new, after all, is another form of the longing to shake off constraint--in this case, the constraint of the past.
JEREMY BEGBIE
Redeeming Transcendence in the Arts
In much postmodern theatre ... the line between theatre and non-theatre is deliberately erased.
JEREMY BEGBIE
"Christ and the cultures: Christianity and the arts"
Art reminds us that in fact the world always exceeds our grasp and perception.
JEREMY BEGBIE
Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music
Music has its own distinctive contribution to make to theology precisely because it is a distinctive human practice.
JEREMY BEGBIE
Theology, Music and Time
For all its interconnectedness, music is marked by a unique and irreducible integrity, its own way of working.
JEREMY BEGBIE
Theology, Music and Time