Theology in the Mode of Monk: An Aesthetics of Barth and Cone on Revelation and Freedom, Vol 1
By Raymond Carr
Cascade Books, 240 pages
Published November 7, 2024
Theology in the Mode of Monk: An Aesthetics of Barth and Cone on Revelation and Freedom is a monumental academic work introducing a bold new approach to theology. In a three-volume trilogy, scholar and public theologian Raymond Carr swings wide open a door that most didn’t know existed. With “Epistrophy,” named for a 1941 Thelonious Monk tune, Carr initiates a project of the “turning about of historical and hermeneutical insights.”
Carr introduces a methodology of musicality that is free, faithful, creative, playful and blues-inflected, leading to a theological approach that sacrifices nothing in the way of rigor, technique or critique, yet suggests that dissonance is a generative force for imagination, conversation, and – dare we say – reconciliation. This ingenious approach offers a new mode of inquiry that leads to fuller knowledge while allowing for openness, connectedness, and joy.
The singular musical aesthetic of jazz pianist Thelonious Monk is the key Carr employs in opening the door to this brave new world of theologizing. Along with players such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespsie, Monk ushered in a musical revolution by employing dissonant harmonies and opening improvisational and conversational space in the music. Carr brilliantly picks up on Monk’s practice of “rethinking the bop tradition without rejecting it” in this new revolutionary “bebop” world of jazz. Rather than jettisoning traditional tunes, Monk was “signifyin(g) on the form;” building on them in a way that avoided stereotyping, sanitizing or sentimentalizing. Through dissonances, rhythmic displacements, asymmetries and discontinuity, Monk introduced a gritty realness that pushed his music to new places.
Monk’s aesthetic becomes the medium and the mode that allows Carr to tie together two of the 20th century’s tallest theologians. Carr writes, “Monk’s music suggests a way to (re)think and advance the relationship between Karl Barth and James Cone, whose theologies, like Monk’s music, arise out of two different revolutionary moments that frame their future theological endeavors.” Musicality becomes the medium to hear in concert: Barth’s radical theology of revelation “from above” and Cone’s radical theology of liberation “from below” play on the periphery, round and round the cantus firmus, Christ, the central divine melody.
While Carr’s ambitious approach may raise a few eyebrows, his Herculean efforts to hold these giants together while giving each the space they demand and deserve pay off. Carr’s project helps us more fully see, hear (and be challenged by) Barth and Cone in the fullness of their thought and the long polyphonic arc of its development. Carr directly confronts what Willie Jennings describes in the introduction as the “scholastic objectification” of Barth as a tool of theological self-sufficiency and Cone as a theological museum piece. Carr’s humanizing work is hopeful, brilliantly illustrating how critique and criticism can spark conversation as a generative force for theological thought and liturgical practice.
Carr writes for the academy, not the church; if seminaries can bring together Barthian and Black religious studies to seriously engage with his material, Carr’s theology will, in time, shape the church powerfully. That is not only welcome but also increasingly necessary.
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