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This semester Perkins was treated to a brilliant sermon entitled “Why Music Matters” by retiring faculty member Dr. Chris Anderson. We have included that sermon in this Perspective so that you can access it also. Dr. Anderson offers what I can only describe as a theological corrective to our contemporary habits of mind that prioritize the visual, the “viewpoint.” Dr. Anderson reminds us that God begins creation not with sight but with sound—"with voice,” with vibration, with the dynamic and rhythmic unfolding of time itself. “Creation gets done orally, aurally,” he says. In this, Anderson suggests a truth that theological education desperately needs to recover: that faith is not fundamentally a matter of looking, but of listening—of attuning ourselves to the transformative, living music of God’s ongoing creation.
 
To emphasize hearing over other senses might be taken as discriminatory against those who are deaf or hard of hearing. But this sermon is a corrective and a reclamation rather than an exercise in bias. If sound is the first medium through which God breathes the world into being, then theological education that is not musical is indeed sterile—brilliant perhaps, but half-formed, like a score without sound or a text without voice. Anderson’s insight that “sound mirrors life… sound is transformation made audible” presses us to imagine a theological curriculum shaped not simply by analysis but by “participation,” by the shared ethical work of harmony. Riffing on Wynton Marsalis, Dr. Anderson notes that music is not law but ethics: choosing not to have ‘my’ way so that ‘our’ way might emerge. This is not only the beating heart of Christian theology but the vibrant pulse of the Christian life together.
 
The future of theological education may well depend on our willingness to reclaim the auditory as sacred across the curriculum. Music is not some eccentric side discipline reserved for the few who are just wired that way or pursuing an MSM degree. At Perkins, we are called to teach theology not merely as knowledge but as a life-giving practice and to imagine formation as learning to resonate with one another, with creation, and with the living God whose voice sang the cosmos into being and will one day “sound the trumpet” that gathers all things in joy.
 
At Perkins, may we lean ever more fully into this “sound”—cultivating ministers, scholars, and communities who hear the music of God’s ongoing creativity and dare to join the song.

- Dean Bryan Stone