Jazz for Jesus

Bill Edgar is both a professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, and an extremely talented jazz musician who has spent a lot of his life in France. He is not only very intelligent and cosmopolitan, but uses his gifts to share the gospel in various ways. EN took the opportunity to interview him while he was in Britain earlier this year.

EN: Bill, tell us about your background?

BE: My parents met in North Carolina during the war, while Dad was in the army. That is where I was born. Shortly after, we moved to Paris, France, and I grew up there. Then we spent seven years in New York. But after that, the rest of Dad's professional career until he retired in 1983, was in Geneva. It was not a Christian home, but it was a wonderful home.

Later, I was sent to an English-style boarding school in Newport, Rhode Island. Though I was not a Christian by any means I had quite a keen interest in spiritual things. I read many of the French existentialists. We were required to attend chapel every day, and sitting in the pews (with a stone face because it would not be cool to show any interest), I was nevertheless drawn by many of the things I heard, including the music.

EN: So how did you come to Christ?

BE: I went to Harvard University in 1962 and in the second year there I took a course taught by an evangelical Christian man, called Harold O.J. Brown. He helped clear away a lot of the obstacles to Christian faith for me. In the spring of that year I was going to Switzerland and he recommended that I visit a friend of his there named Francis Schaeffer. I put the name in my pocket and went off. After a while of being in Switzerland I thought, 'Maybe I'll go and visit Jo's friend.' I went to L'Abri for a weekend and everything turned upside down for me. I knew Schaeffer was a Christian but I had not realised there was a community there. There was a discussion group on Saturday night with wonderful students. Then there was an extraordinary worship service with Ranald Macaulay preaching in his kilt! While I was there I had a long conversation with Francis Schaeffer and it was during that time that I saw Christianity was true and the Holy Spirit came into my life. I stayed for another month!

From Harvard to Westminster

EN: Where did you go from there?

BE: I was studying music at Harvard. I wanted to be a scholar, a musicologist. In my senior year though, I thought I had better go to seminary and find out some more about what it was that I had come to believe. To make a long story short, I ended up at Westminster Theological Seminary. I spent three years there under the great older professors, John Murray, Edmund Clowney, Edward J. Young (my OT professor) and Cornelius Van Til, who was my main mentor.

Then I became a school teacher for ten years, teaching music and philosophy. We started a little Reformed church in Connecticut and also got involved with a youth work in the US called FOCUS - Fellowship Of Christians in Universities and Schools. It was through that I met my wife Barbara. FOCUS is really an American version of the Bash camps in Britain. I went on staff with them as well as being a teacher. Then at the end of the 1970s, we were urged to go and lecture at a little Reformed seminary in Aix-en-Provence. I taught apologetics for 11 years there.

EN: What happened to your music during this time?

BE: I had a jazz band in France. I have always had an interest in African-American music. In fact, one of the things that drew me to Christianity was that at L'Abri they were very open to discussing and enjoying the arts. There was a specialist there in black music who knew a great deal about classic jazz and had done a lot of editing for the European edition of Riverside Records. This was Hans Rookmaaker. He was actually an art historian from Holland. He and I became very good friends. So I have always known that there is a Christian background to much of the best jazz.

As a pianist who plays jazz you are often in demand because you can read 'charts' (as they call them) and back up bands. So in France I got involved with a very wonderful outfit called 'The Hot Club of France.' Our band used to play for them. This was a club founded in 1934. It is a kind of advocacy / sponsor of jazz. We played in their festivals and it was great fun.

But then, for various reasons, in 1989, we decided it was time to go back to America. If you had told me as a student that I would end up as a professor at Westminster, I would not have believed you. But that is what happened. So I have been teaching apologetics there now for 13 years.

EN: Where do you think Christianity is going in America at present?

BE: Of course, our sovereign God can change anything, but let me give you a bit of a pessimistic point of view for now. In America Christianity is miles wide and inches deep. The Gallup polls (and by the way George Gallup is a wonderful Christian) show that the US has 46% of people going to church and 90% believing in God. They say they believe in the Bible. They say they believe in the Ten Commandments, although they cannot name more than one or two of them! But if you look at the moral life and the atmosphere of political correctness which now dominates our universities you would not know that there are all these people going to church.

But there are some encouraging signs. You see in some of the immigrant churches tremendous life. Many of the Chinese and Koreans and blacks from the islands are Christians. So there is life all over the place, particularly in our cities, and God could use that to turn things round. But on the whole the march of secularisation goes on. And secularisation no longer means the decline of religion. According to Gallup it means the rise of individualised spirituality but the decline of a corporate and Christian formulation of spirituality. There is a little chapel at Kennedy airport where you press a button and the altar changes. It revolves from Catholic, to Buddhist to Hinduism to whatever.

Doing apologetics now?

EN: How do you try to equip your students in apologetics to face that kind of culture?

BE: First of all we try to justify apologetics, because some students come in believing that you do not need to defend or argue for the faith. They have the kind of 'You just preach and God will work' idea which avoids the need for intelligent thought.

Secondly, I try to explain Christianity as a world-view, a system of thought which makes sense of and has implications for all of life. Many Christians in America live in a kind of pietism which sees real spirituality and vocation occurring in a kind of upper level of existence and everything else is not really spiritual, but just has a support role as a necessary evil. We teach this not as just an intellectual system, because it is centred on God and his covenant and fellowship with him. The mandates of God from Genesis 1.28 through Matthew 28.18-20 apply to the whole of life.

Third, we seek to show where we are in our culture, not only in North America and Europe but also around the world. We have around 50 different nations represented among our students. We are now in a global setting, so you can no longer narrowly just teach Western intellectual history. I try to show the students some significant shifts in culture by illustrating from art history and music history and history of science.

Then the fourth part of what we do is to introduce students to what we call the transcendental approach to apologetics. The days are gone when you could just hand people a bunch of evidences (empty tomb, manuscripts of NT, etc.), and just pile it on until they give in. The mentality today, whether you call it post-modern or something else, is just not one to receive evidence and draw conclusions as our ancestors might have. So the transcendental approach seeks to uncover people's pre-suppositions and show how with those you really cannot have meaning and significance in life. In fact pushed to the limit, without Christ, you fall into darkness. Once those pre-suppositions have been unmasked and found wanting, then you are in a position to give the gospel with its evidence.

Finally, we go into a series of what I call 'conversations' where we look at different issues and different types of unbelief and different world religions prise them open. We always have a long session on the problem of evil, because that is still the most prevalent question. And we are dealing more and more now with questions of therapy. In America now we are in a culture where instead of truth, it's what feels good, or what heals. This is a big shift. Language is different. Today, for example, an offence is not to be wrong, but to be insensitive, or to be inappropriate. We try to answer some of that therapeutic language with categories of truth. That is how we seek to prepare people for the ministry, because increasingly in our congregations there are folk wrestling with these things.

Christians and culture?

EN: Given the immorality portrayed in many art forms today some people would argue for a 'cultural monasticism' for Christians. What would you say?

BE: Generally involvement in the arts is a matter of vocation. The reason people fear some of these things like films and jazz is partly legitimate because it is a constant battle. You have to be constantly on guard.

There are a lot of things to say. God has given us dominion over the creation. Psalm 8 asks 'what is man that you are mindful of him?' and answers in terms of a reiteration of the cultural mandate of Genesis 1.28. In the letter to the exiles that Jeremiah writes in Jeremiah 29, he does not say 'hold back, close your eyes, grit your teeth because you will be back in Jerusalem soon'. Rather he says, 'build houses, plant fields, marry and pray for the peace of Babylon'. So there is a sense of lordship over creation under the greater Lordship of our sovereign God. Jesus Christ, did not abrogate that, he fulfilled it. He said, 'make disciples'. A disciple is much more than a monk in a closet. A disciple is one who is called to respond to everything Christ has taught. The teaching of the NT is really an invitation to all the rich levels of human life. Some of it is citizenship. Some of it is working hard. Some of it is mission. It is a rich picture of life in society. It is the whole person who is saved with an eye to transforming culture.

Harvey Conn, who taught at Westminster for many years and was a mentor of mine, used to say: 'The social gospel has it wrong because it is a body only Christianity. The pietist gospel has it wrong because it is a soul only Christianity. A body only ends up as a corpse. A soul only ends up as a ghost. But the two together are a human person.'

An interview with Bill Edgar