Black Metal Theology

A provocative exploration that intertwines black metal and theology to rethink the divine through dissonance, decay and the genre’s radical aesthetic.

Black metal is a genre of extreme music often seen as utterly opposed to Christian theology. Some practitioners adopt Satanic imagery and lyrics in a direct assault upon Christianity. And the artform itself is intentionally dark, abrasive and malevolent. Despite appearances, this book argues that simply putting black metal and theology in opposition is simplistic. Black metal retains a relationship with the Christian forms it tends to despise. This is not with the intention of co-opting or domesticating black metal. Rather, black metal and Christian theology are allowed to deform one another – taking the logic of the incarnation and death of God to its conclusion. To this end, the book offers a set of coherent reflections upon – or rather, performances of – ‘black metal theology’. Like black metal theory, black metal theology is a mutual blackening and complication of black metal and theology. It is not merely an attempt to think theologically upon the body of black metal, or to extract its themes, but to hear black metal as a discourse on God, a talking/singing/making heard of God in which divine simplicity is fatally compromised, while releasing divinity into the transmutative power of decomposition. The result is a rethinking of the divine as expressed in the intimate processes of worldly decay. The texts vary from more standard academic explorations to more experimental forms, to multiply the genres of theology and make its limits porous. The form reflects the guiding idea of the content: to challenge notions of divine simplicity and immutability and to construct a radical theology of a divine that decays and the divinity of decay itself. Decay is a processual, multiagency, creative process in which the boundaries between life and death, the organic and inorganic, are complicated. Taking inspiration from Nietzsche (‘Gods too decompose’) and Derrida (‘there is no simplicity in God’), the essays presented here trace the processes of decay through theological motifs of creation, incarnation and resurrection. The aim is to construct a heretical notion of demonic/divine sovereignty made audible in its own decay into corrosive sound.