Alastair's Adversaria

The final part of my four part discussion of music and typological realism has just been posted over on the Theopolis Institute:

Music is the glorified form of temporal action and speech. It transfigures and elevates our temporal activities. Figural or typological reading of Scripture attends to the musicality of God’s historical activity, to the ways in which the realm of human action has been taken into the divine symphony. This glorification and healing of human time transfigures: its characters and scenes come to bear and display a greater majesty, participating in and manifesting a beauty and a reality higher than themselves.

The musicality and, hence, the higher unity of time is established through the work of the Holy Spirit. Typology is where we follow the coherent unfolding of the symphony of the Spirit throughout history—the symphony of which Christ is the unifying theme. As an antidote to our overdependence on quasi-spatial and quasi-substantial models for union with Christ, the typological realism I am advocating suggests that our union with Christ should be regarded as existing in large measure within the orchestrated time of the Spirit.

We are united to Christ as he has come into our dissonant and discordant time, healing and transfiguring it through his action, and as the Spirit works this glorious music of Christ into and out of our lives. We are caught up within the Song of the Word, a song once intimated in the softest of broken whispers, then clearly and definitively expressed by its unaccompanied Author, now swelling through the Spirit’s inclusion of new voices under his lead, until one day all creation will resound with it.

Read the whole piece here. If you haven’t already done so, read parts 1, 2, and 3 first.