Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

“Music begins where words leave off.”

~ Donald Whittle

In 1986 I joined a ‘music pilgrimage’ to visit the sites of East Germany associated with Johann Sebastian Bach, at the time behind the iron curtain. I was excited by the promise of adventure. But in retrospect, I consider my growing awareness of the conduits and lines reaching from Luther, who died in 1546, to Bach who was born some 139 years later, and from them to us, far more significant than anything I encountered or saw at the time.

We began in Eisenach, the city in which Bach was born, and where Luther attended school, participated in the boys choir and spent “the happiest years” of his youth. The notes I kept speak of visiting Bach’s childhood home and walking from there to the Georgenkirche, standing next to the font where Bach was baptized, and splashing water on one another in remembrance of our own baptism. A short bus trip then took us to Buchenwald, the concentration camp outside of Weimar. There we viewed the bunk-bed buildings where the prisoners were housed and the gas chamber where thousands were exterminated. Afterwards, we gathered at the gates of the camp to listen to the sepulchral chants of Bach’s, “Christ lag in Todesbanden,” “Christ lay in the bonds of death.” The music provided an audible space for us to feel internally what we had seen externally.

During the next several days we visited a number of churches Bach once served, and listened to the pieces he had composed on the organs he had played.. Our music pilgrimage concluded with a public organ recital a the Thomaskirche in Leipzig.

I haven’t forgotten that trip, nor the impression Bach’s music left on me. Long before Bach, Plato, in his Republic, spoke of music as the chief of arts “because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul, and take the strongest hold upon it.” But it wasn’t until the Reformation and its secular counterpart, the Renaissance, that conventional music began to undergo new and innovative changes, which Bach was among the first to explore.

Martin Luther’s new vision of the church as composed of all God’s people, encouraged music written specifically for the people. As a result secular folk songs were regularly ‘baptized’ for sacred purposes and the congregational ‘chorale’ became a staple ingredient for worship. Polyphony (two or more simultaneous melodies playing or sung with one another), became popular. In the early 1600's, under the influence of the Renaissance, the first operas began to appear. For the first time the solo voice, accompanied by instruments, singing an extended aria, was introduced. These new conceptions of melody, along with the emergence of a set tonality, with major and minor keys, provided Bach with the musical language he would use.

Consider the fact that Bach lost both of his parents when he was nine and watched ten of his children die young, and you will know why some musicologists have recently added personal tragedy to the lasting influence of his compositions. Bach, says Gerd Reinaecker, possessed a “consciousness of catastrophe.” And Alex Ross points out that, “The texts of Bach’s church cantatas...indicate that the life of man is like a vanishing mist; that we live with one foot in the grave; and that those who sit among us like gods will be forgotten,” to which he adds this poignant observation, “The words ‘Kyrie eleison,’– ‘Lord, have mercy’– have been set to music thousands of times, but in the first bars of the Mass in B Minor, Bach’s valediction, they become a peculiarly visceral cry, a collective plea for grace.” 1

That said, I’m convinced that Bach’s Lutheran heritage provided the force field of faith that allowed the restless energy of his imagination to speak so directly not only to the debilitating events in his life, but to the catastrophic events of our time and to the desperation of those caught up in them. Most of his compositions, from concert repertoire to church cantatas, bear the singular dedication,“Soli Deo Gloria,” “To God alone the glory.” They reflect Luther’s signature theology which considers the cross as a paradigm of God’s presence ‘with us’ and acting ‘for us’ in the real world; suffering as a human to embrace us in our suffering.

Over the intervening centuries we in the Northern hemisphere have been inescapably caught up in the ideology of empire, and readily seduced by it. Even our music generally reflected the glories of life. Much of life however is written in the minor key; it has a shaded side as well as a light side. Great music, including that of Bach, like life, usually modulates between major and minor modalities.

Reflecting on Bach’s approach to music, the eminent Canadian theologian, Douglas John Hall speaks of Bach as “an intuitive theologian of great sensitivity,” and says that in his case, great music “can and must call into question that within all of us that wants to embrace oversimplification and premature triumphs of the positive.” Then, referring to Bach’s theological mentor, Martin Luther, he adds this insightful comment, “It is not likely coincidental that the theologian (Martin Luther) who named the distinction between a theologia crucis (theology of the cross) the thing by its proper name and the theologia gloria (theology of glory) that deceives, was also a gifted musician.” In other words, the theological insights of Luther, “a gifted musician,” and the musical insights of a follower, Bach, “an intuitive theologian,” converge. 2

Both Bach and Luther, rather than focusing on some glorious otherworldly experience that leads people to deny reality, each in their own way acknowledge the actual, often desperate experiences of human life, and speak of God’s presence with us in them; a light to lighten our darkness, a wellspring of hope in the midst of our despair.

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1. Alex Ross, “The Book of Bach” The New Yorker (April 11,201): 86.
2. Douglas John Hall, Bound And Free: A Theological Journey (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 79.