The Trumpet Child – 3

The trumpet he will use to blow
Is being fashioned out of fire
The mouthpiece is a glowing coal
The bell a burst of wild desire

Here we get a description of the trumpet child’s trumpet. What is this all about? Looking carefully at this verse we see that the trumpet is inseparable from the child who plays it. The instrument used in the re-creation of the cosmos is not borrowed or meant for something else; it is fashioned for this specific use. The trumpet is the product of the child who plays it. The child and his trumpet are one. If we transpose this idea into the theological realm it gets us into some fairly profound and exciting theological concepts.

Reflecting on the history of Jesus Christ, the church has always struggled (usually not so successfully) to hold together and elaborate simultaneously the twin pillars of the Christian confession: the person and work of Christ. The temptation is always to separate them: to talk about the person of Jesus apart from what he does or to talk about what Jesus does apart from who he is. One way to explain this temptation is to look at the complicated and troubled relationship Christian theology has had with the Greek philosophical tradition. Christianity is rooted in Jewish or Hebrew thought, which speaks of God primarily by describing what God does. For the Jewish people, God is the one “who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Deut. 5:6). Accordingly, the primary theological question for Jewish thought is not what is God? but who is God? Jewish thought is oriented toward the concrete and the personal. This is why, if you were to ask the writers of the New Testament to describe God, they would say something like, “God is the Father of our Lord Jesus who raised him from the dead by the Spirit.” Very concrete. Very personal.

Greek thought, however, is oriented toward abstraction and universality. It was the Greeks who taught us to think of God as the Supreme Being or First Cause, the great untouchable, timeless, omnipotent source of everything. How did they arrive there? The answer is quite interesting. Colin Gunton argues that it is actually the raucous and unpredictable gods of Greek mythology that are the source of polished Greek theism. When Greek philosophers went to talk about God in conversation with their own tradition, they were compelled to tidy up the picture of the gods they inherited. Instead of a ring of jealous and whimsical gods, they posited a single, self-contained, unmovable God. Much easier to deal with, right? Instead of tribal gods that did nothing but start wars with each other, they wanted a universal God who could bring universal justice (theology and politics have always been inseparable!). The general pattern was to strip the mythological gods of their negative qualities and assume that the real God is everything they are not. From this came other ways of talking about God, all of them starting with what is observable in the material realm and then abstracting to arrive at ‘God.’ By the time Christianity came on the scene, the Greek idea of God had reached some formal (not material!) similarities with the single, all-powerful God of Israel. Christian theologians who were looking for a way to make Christianity credible (and hence avoid martyrdom) saw this as a golden opportunity. They began adopting Greek terminology and patterns of thought in order elaborate the Christian doctrine of God.

The problem with this is that the Greek way of speaking of God is often in deep conflict with the Hebrew way of speaking of God. Because Greek thought is oriented toward abstraction and universality, it resists particularity. The God of the Exodus and Resurrection is very particular, though. Something, therefore, had to give. Sadly, God’s biblical character (living and thoroughly involved in history) tended to be read through the lens of the Greek abstractions—omnipotence, omniscience, impassibility, etc. To be sure, there was always a focus on the concrete actions of God in the biblical story, but the ontology underlying the explanations of the biblical story was usually Greek. When theologians came to Christology with this Greek/Hebrew conflict, Jesus’ person tended to be abstracted from his work. His work, i.e., his very particular actions in history, had a hard time being fitted to his person, the eternal Son of God. This all comes to the surface when you consider Jesus’ crucifixion. How can the eternal, immutable God suffer and die? He can’t! was the typical answer, so in order to talk about the crucifixion you had to put the question of his divine personhood on the back burner, or offer some lame solution, like Jesus’ divinity wasn’t involved in his suffering and death. Until the 20th century, there was never a sustained attempt to elaborate God’s being—and hence Jesus’ personhood—on the basis of the concrete events of Jesus’ history.

This is all relevant to Over the Rhine’s song, right? Of course! In this description of the trumpet, there is a remarkable interweaving of who the trumpet child is and what he does. See, I told you they were adept theologians. The trumpet (signifying the child’s activity) flows from his very person, and the trumpet child’s personhood is wholly bound up with and invested in this trumpet. The trumpet and the child (the work and the person) do not relate like oil and water. They are indistinguishable, intimately related to each other. A musician playing an instrument is probably as good an analogy as possible for imagining the interrelation of Christ’s person and work. Rowan Williams uses it in his excellent book, Tokens of Trust. It is the constant back and forth between musician and instrument that is the heart of the analogy. When watching a musician, you are always led from musician to instrument and from instrument to musician. You can’t make sense of what the musician is doing apart from their instrument, and you can’t make sense of the instrument apart from the musician playing it. And there is no way to sequence the relationship between musician and instrument. Everything happens at once. How appropriate, then, that Jesus is the trumpet child! Theologian Robert Jenson has picked up on this musical analogy and recently tried to elaborate a musical ontology of the divine being. He says God is a fugue. I like it.

Now of course I am reading a lot into this verse, but that is what you are supposed to do with music! Boring songs only mean one thing, and that is why they don’t last very long. Good songs stick around, usually because they can generate lots of different meanings for lots of different people. You can’t really write a theological commentary on a Brittney Spears song (well, you could!), but you can for an OTR song. That is their greatness. Their songs work on so many different levels. You can just sit back and listen to it, or you can write an excessively long blog series about it. I recently heard (I think from my brother) that Bob Dylan is beginning to be taught in universities. See, that is what I am talking about. His music is brilliant. That doesn’t mean that it is not accessible, it just means that it merits different kinds of analysis.

The trumpet he will use to blow
Is being fashioned out of fire

There is a significant strand in the Bible that associates fire with God himself. There is the famous Exodus 3 passage where God speaks to Moses in a burning bush; there is Pentecost with the flaming tongues of the Holy Spirit; and there are the books of Deuteronomy and Hebrews with their description of God as “a consuming fire.” From this divine fire comes the child’s trumpet. It is the product of God himself. The trumpet child’s activity is the very being of God set in motion. As Jenson would say, God is the music that comes out of the child’s trumpet. The present tense nature of the fashioning is important. In the context of the song, the present tense verb is connected with future promise that the trumpet child will play his tune. Something is happening now that is significant for what will happen when the trumpet child appears. God is, so to speak, getting ready. The trumpet is being forged; a place is being prepared for us. The kingdom of God is at hand. Stay awake!

The mouthpiece is a glowing coal
The bell a burst of wild desire

This is great stuff, especially the last line. The first line takes me immediately to Isaiah 6. The mouthpiece of a trumpet, of course, touches the player’s lips. In Isaiah 6, Isaiah sees a vision of God in the temple, which causes him to declare, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips.” An angel then approaches Isaiah with a burning coal and touches it to his lips, saying, “Look! This has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.” The burning coal is from the altar, the usual place where atonement for sin happens. Here it happens on the prophet. God’s fire consumes his unclean lips, and he is sent out to speak the Word of God to the people of Israel. The song is right to associate the trumpet child with a prophet. The Christian tradition has long recognized that Christ embodies and brings to fulfillment Israel’s history. He is prophet, priest, and king all in one. Here in Isaiah we get a small prefiguration of this, as Isaiah the prophet is associated with priestly activity. Atonement for sin happens on him. Very strange. Christ, though, sheds light on all of this. He is one who endures the full weight of God’s burning fire. He is not merely singed, as Isaiah was, but consumed. “He descended into hell.” He steps into our place and takes our sinful bodies to the grave. Atonement ultimately happens on his body. He is the king who rules by performing the priestly action of offering himself as a payment for sin, and he is the prophet who now proclaims himself to us. The trumpet child, therefore, will play his tune pressing his lips to the burning coal of God’s fire. What an incredible image! His song comes from the fire he endured for our sake. It is a song written out of suffering love.

The bell of the trumpet is a burst of wild desire. What fuels such suffering love? God’s wild desire! As I said, this verse holds together person and work in a remarkable way. The Greeks could never speak of God’s actions as bursts of wild desire. They were trying to get away from speaking like this. But the God of Israel and the church is certainly wild and full of desire. Just read the Bible! And there is nothing back behind such desire, no boring part that is the ‘real’ part of God. When God makes a trumpet with a burst of wild desire, he is being true to himself, acting from the depths of his being. The way the church has conceptualized this is with the doctrine of the Trinity. This doctrine is not fuzzy math: 1+1+1=1, huh? In fact, it is not about math or numbers at all. It is about who God is, God’s identity. And who is he? Father, Son, and Holy Spirit! An eruption of outgoing love! An outburst of wild desire! That is what the doctrine of the Trinity is meant to tell us. Explaining to his eight-year-old granddaughter what God is like, Robert Jenson says it thus: “The life of God is just, as it were, one big excitement, a kind of explosion of excitement.”