Theology of the Voice

Grieving at the tomb for her crucified Lord, Mary Magdalene encounters someone who she thinks is the gardener, but when he speaks her name she immediately recognises his familiar voice: Christ isn't dead, he is alive and stands before her! We each have a unique voice; we are known through its distinctive tone, accent or lilt; its physical sound conveys what is in our hearts as well as our minds; it reveals more than our words ever can and enables us to relate to and respond to others. Temporal and mutable; embodied, personal, and immediate the voice can be formative as well as informative; it can gesture as well as pin down; and whilst it can indeed be rational and discursive, it can also be affective and intuitive. Above all, the voice has an uncapturable, living, transforming, and disconcerting power. A Theology of the Voice presents a wholly new approach to the study of early Christianity, which has traditionally been presented in terms of the development of doctrine and the formulation of the creeds. It argues that in a context in which God is held to be unknowable and inexpressible, doctrinal and creedal formulations need to understood as beginnings rather than ends, and that early Christian reflection on the voice and vocal performance offers a fruitful way of understanding these formulations for what they in fact are: open-ended statements which gesture towards the truth but which can never fully capture it. This book therefore offers a new way of doing theology which resists the traditionally logocentric, rational, and often elitist focus of theology, and by focussing on the characteristic qualities of the voice from an inter-disciplinary perspective, takes account of the betweenness, open-endedness, and difficulty of all theological statements; of the importance of performance and of alternative modes of knowing (affective, tacit, participatory), which together make theology more widely accessible and effectively democratise doctrinal reflection.

Carol Harrison is Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity and a Canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. She has published extensively on Augustine of Hippo, as well as on listening and music in the early Church. She was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2018.