The Nature of True Beauty

The Henry Forum

The Capitol Hill Baptist Church, Washington DC

November 14, 2005

Transcript

Mark Dever:

Good evening. My name is Mark Dever. I’m the pastor of the capital of Baptist Church, and it is my privilege to welcome you here this evening to the first in a series of Henry forums that we hope to have every month or two now going on through May, most of them around themes related to this evening’s talk. The Henry Forums are sponsored by the Capitol Hill Baptist Church in honor of one of our own longtime members who served this church in the wider evangelical movement in America and around the world for over half a century, Carl F. H. Henry. The purpose of these events is to try and follow his example as we consider thoughtfully some of the implications of being a follower of Jesus Christ today and to do so with more specialized and concentrated attention than is normally possible in the average schedule of the church.

These events are open to the Capitol Hill neighborhood and the public at large, and we’re glad that you’ve joined us this evening. We hope that they’ll be used to provoke thoughtful and energetic reaction to the truth of the Christian gospel in today’s world. As I say, we anticipate having these forums in the future, in the months coming up. So, if you are interested in being notified about future forums, there should be signup sheets right there, right in the back by the door. Please just put your name and email there, and we will let you know about them. There should also be refreshments afterwards and tapes and CDs available of earlier Henry forums and other things of interest, not for sale, though there are the refreshments and the time just to stand around and talk with each other. Our format will be to hear our speaker and then we’ll have a time of open questions and answers in which you will ask the questions, and we hope our speaker will answer them.

Our topic for this evening is beauty, true beauty and what its nature is. We are attracted to discussions about beauty because we’re moved by the appearance of the Grand Canyon or, more nearby, maybe the Shenandoah Valley. We know beauty, we’ve tasted it, we like it, but talk about beauty is rare today. David Lerner, a professor at Yale and a fairly conservative Jew, has said recently in a magazine article on the lack of such big and basic ideas being addressed publicly, “America is fertile ground for great awakenings, mass movements in which large chunks of the population return to their religious roots. We haven’t had one for a while and we are overdue. Great awakenings are big dramatic events that take off like rockets and burnout like rockets after brief but spectacular careers. Even so, many people find in the aftermath that their life trajectories have been changed forever. The next great awakening will presumably be centered in the Protestant community but will deal in friendship with America’s other religious communities. To have a great awakening, you need a great talker to change people’s ideas about religion in the Bible and God, you have to look them in the eye and speak to them from the heart. My guess is that our next great awakening will begin among college students. College students today are spiritually speaking the driest timber I have ever come across. Mostly, they know little or nothing about religion, little or nothing about Americanism. Mostly, no one ever speaks to them about truth and beauty.”

Does Christianity have anything to say about beauty? The Bible does more concerned with it than some may have realized. The ancient Jewish prophet Isaiah foretold in Isaiah 33 that God’s people would see the king in his beauty. The reference was one ultimately to the promised Messiah and yet we might be surprised to think about exactly what the nature of this true beauty is, because later in Isaiah 53, there is another prophecy about the Messiah in which we find that he had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. What is this beauty yet that is at the same time not beautiful to us? What is the nature of true beauty?

Well, to help us answer this question, we have tonight our special guest who is one of the few evangelicals who have publicly reflected on such basic questions and perhaps one of the few who so well personifies the topic himself.

He knows beauty well, not just because of his sense of dress, but because he was born in Florida and reared there. He is a graduate of Samford University and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, two of the more beautiful campuses in the south. Our speaker has lived in Lakeland, in Pompano Beach, Florida, Birmingham, Alabama, Louisville, Kentucky, and Atlanta, Georgia. He has two beautiful children, Katie and Christopher, and he’s married to the lovely Mary Moler whom we hope to have with us next year. He teaches systematic theology and has since 1993 served as the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is in the middle of a typically insane speaking schedule. He’s speaking this week at conferences in Richmond, Philadelphia and who knows where else from Tennessee to West Virginia. He can himself be heard daily from five to 6:00 PM on his national radio show. You can also read his midnight commentaries, written a little bit later tonight, daily, and his almost hourly blogs on the website.

I first met our speaker during his doctoral work in 1986 at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the years when he was sharpening his biblical and theological critical faculties. He is frequently interviewed on everything from sex and law, to Christian theology. He’s the author of numerous articles and has a number of books in the pipeline and writes, as I say, a daily online column of amazing breadth and carefulness of thought. Our speaker is also an active Christian and a church member, a husband and father, and a committed disturber of the theological peace. I am thankful to count him among my closest friends and hopeful of what he may yet produce. It is my privilege to introduce to you our speaker for this evening, our Albert Mueller Jr.

Albert Mohler:

Thank you. As a matter of fact, after that very gracious introduction, we needed a pause for reflection or repentance, but it is good to be here at the Capitol Hill Baptist Church once again, and I always counted as a great privilege to be here and to be with Dr. Dever, who was such a dear friend, and with members of the enlarging circle of friends here in this church, and I see so many people who are kind of migrating in and out. This is kind of like a laboratory medium of people moving in and out of this culture and Washington, DC, and such good things grow while you’re here, and that’s a very, very good thing for the glory of God to be able to observe when I come back to be with you.

I’ve been asked tonight to talk about a Christian vision of beauty, and I am first struck by the fact that this conversation would be so rare. There are altogether too few opportunities for Christians to ponder some of the biggest questions of life. We tend to focus on the questions of urgency and the questions of eccentric interest, and that’s not to say that these questions that become more commonly the focus of our attention are improper, but they’re sometimes out of balance, and one of the realities we face is that a conversation like this, well it has to begin somewhere, and we’re not sure exactly where to begin, and that’s one of the problems. Where would we begin talking about beauty?

I want to make a couple of preliminary observations, and the first is this: We need to admit that there is something intrinsic to humanity that is drawn to beauty, whatever it is. We need to understand that there is something of an aesthetic desire in us, an aesthetic appetite. We notice that even infants are attracted to certain things because of complexity and color and light. Some of the very issues that the classic theorists of aesthetics have considered as the very substance of beauty and form and attractiveness. We understand that the human desire for and recognition of beauty is something unique to homo sapiens. Dogs do not ponder a sunset. The animals do not sit back to ponder the beauty of the landscape. The heavens are indeed declaring the glory of God, but most of the creatures on the planet are oblivious to this fact. They neither make nor observe and appreciate art. They stage no dramas, write no music, and paint no portraits. But there is something unique and nearly universal among human beings in terms of a desire for art, a desire that one way or another cries out to be satisfied. But at the same time, we need to understand that beauty is in crisis. This is a contested category.

I want to suggest you two reasons why beauty is now a category in crisis. First, because of the devaluation of beauty in popular culture where confusion reigns. We use the word beautiful in what I hope we will come to agree and altogether awkward and inappropriate context. We speak of beauty where what we really mean is prettiness or attractiveness or even likability, interest. None of these things actually are equal to beauty, and in the popular sphere we have a culture of increasing decadence that confuses the artificial for the real, the pretty for the beautiful, and the untrue for the true. All of these are essentially one root confusion, as we shall see. In the popular culture, at one level, kitsch reigns, a false attractiveness, a false art, an inappropriate aesthetic. Popular culture looks at that which is by its very definition most popular, and its popularity is most often not tied to any genuine beauty but rather to something of popular attractiveness.

There’s a second level of crisis in the category of beauty, and this is in the level of elite culture and in academia where the philosophers who give attention to the theories of the aesthetic are increasingly convinced that beauty is a shop worn category. It is either political or entirely subjective or delusional. Many of the major writers in philosophy who deal with aesthetics suggest that beauty is a category we are best to discard. The idea of beauty is too expensive, too contested, and too misleading. In the history of Western thought, beauty has often been a difficult category. Just to think of the post-enlightenment period, think of the Danish philosopher, Kirkegaard, who was convinced that in the end aesthetics was a diversion from ethics and to be concerned with the beautiful was to be inadequately concerned for the good. Or fast forward to Nietzche, who the prophets of nihilism himself believed that the very category of beauty was a symptom of the decadence and the weakness of modern humanity, that beauty itself was a category that only the decadent would consider important, because all that is left is power. Perhaps in the end, Nietzsche saw only power as beautiful.

But if beauty is in crisis in terms of the culture both at the popular level and among the elites, beauty is also in trouble in the church where the influences, first of all, of popular culture have led to confusion about what beauty actually is and why we as Christians should seek it. The Christian conversation about beauty is rich in terms of tradition, but it is generally distant from us in terms of time. We can look back to seminal Christian thinkers, such as Thomas Aquinas, who in the medieval period defined beauty is that which pleases in the very apprehension of it. Aquinas along with the ancients was convinced that beauty emerged out of form, and so here you have form privileged over an amorphous reality, the very emergence of form demonstrating the emergence of beauty by the form and the pattern, the reality of beauty was made manifest. But added to form was light and brilliance, and added to brilliance was color and all of this amounts also to perception. And so, for Thomas, all of these things were unified, as we shall see in one Christian metaphysic.

More recently, the Catholic theologian, the late Hans Urs von Balthasar, spoke of beauty as the appearance of form. As the form appears, beauty emerges and he suggested that theology ought to be reconceived in terms of a Christian aesthetic. Thomas Dubay, a more modern writer, suggests that beauty has an evidentiary power that indeed a Christian apologetic requires beauty, because as the world looks with such confusion at beauty, it is the Christian worldview that alone offers a rescue and a means not only of rescuing beauty but all that must go with it.

But there’s controversy concerning the Christian understanding of beauty. Luther feared beauty. Luther saw that the gospel was itself a sign of contradiction, and that he thought that sinful depraved human beings would claim beauty where no beauty is properly found, and, in seeking beauty, one would deny the gospel by denying its angularity and the contradiction at the very heart of it between the righteousness of God and the sinfulness of human beings.

The reformers in the reformed traditions such as Calvin and Zwingli, understood that beauty was deeply rooted in the glory of God. And, in a conversation that continues, they directed Christians in their congregations and beyond to reconceive the question of beauty in terms of glory and, thus, to understand that the only truly beautiful one is the one true and living God who has spoken to us in his beautiful word and has demonstrated himself to us in the beautiful gospel of the beautiful Savior. Calvin Zwingli, for instance, would allow, because of their concern for the delusion and the confusion of iconography, that would allow no art of course within the place of worship, but they would allow in the community and even in homes because they understood that such art was appropriate, as understood from the Christian worldview, as a demonstration of Christian truth, but not at the expense of the ins Inspirated word, which in the sanctuary was to be preached not pictured.

A Christian understanding of beauty runs directly into the wisdom of the age by suggesting that the beautiful is simultaneously the good and the true and the real. Now this goes all the way back to the conversation of the ancients. This goes all the way back especially to Plato who understood the transcendentals as being essentially reducible to the same thing. If there is one good, then that good must also be the true which must also be the real, which must also be the beautiful, so the good, the beautiful, the true and the real, the four great historical transcendentals are unified in the one but the one had no name. Augustine, the great theologian of the Patristic era in the Christian tradition, took Plato’s category as did his fellow church fathers and expanded it by identifying the one as the one true and living God and taking Plato’s metaphysical speculations into the very heart of the gospel, suggesting that Christians uniquely understand that the good, the beautiful, and the true, and the real are indeed one, because they’re established in the reality of the self-revealing God, the triune God of Father, son and Holy Spirit, the God of the Bible, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He alone is beautiful. He alone is good, he alone is true. He alone is real. Now, that is not to suggest that nothing else reflects beauty, that nothing else understands truth, that no one else would understand the good, but rather that he alone in the fact that he is infinite in all of his perfections is the source and the judge and the end of all questions of the transcendentals, the good, the beautiful, the true and the real, for, as Paul said, from him and through him and to him are all things to whom be glory forever. Amen.

Now, this Christian conversation about the transcendentals opens an entirely new awareness for us, because we now understand that there is a moral context, there is a truth context, and there is a metaphysical ontological context to every question about beauty. We can no longer talk about beauty as a mere matter of taste. Instantly, by affirming the transcendentals, we are required to see beauty is a matter of truth to which taste is then accountable rather than as a matter of taste to which truth is therefore accountable. The unity of the transcendentals in the being of God is one of those powerful categories of Christian thought that is basically unknown to most Christians today and, thus, their worldview is based upon isolated speculation in which they try to put together various components of biblical truth without understanding that the good, the beautiful, the true and the real are one thing. Thus, it violates scripture, it violates the character of God, it violates the Christian tradition, and our patterns of speech, to speak of something which is beautiful but not good, and to speak of something which is true but not beautiful, to speak of something as real but not true.

Now all of these things come together and, immediately, our subjective analysis of the beautiful, our concept of beauty is called into question, because, I think if we admit in our common cultural conversation, we routinely sever the good from the true, the truth from the beautiful, the beautiful from the real, and the real from the good, and it is so easy to do so. We alone as Christians really understand why, and we will try to tie this together in the course of this talk.

Augustine understood that beauty was a key Christian category. Indeed, Christians cannot properly think as Christians without understanding the power of beauty in his Confessions. He said this, “I have learnt to love you late, beauty at once, so ancient and so new. I have learnt to love you late. You were within me, and I was in the world outside myself. I searched for you outside myself, and, disfigured as I was, I fell upon the lovely things of your creation. The beautiful things of this world kept me from you, and yet, if they had not been in you, they would have had no being at all.” Now, out of that confessional statement, what is Augustine saying? He is saying that it was beauty he was calling him. It was indeed his creator who was calling him, and yet, he was distracted by the things of apparent beauty in the world, and yet, lest he despised those things, he also remembers that their reflected beauty comes from the fact that God is their creator, but he only now knows that as a redeemed man, and he’s looking back on the confusion that marked his earlier life. I continue reading from Augustine: “It was you then, oh Lord, who made them, you who are beautiful, for they too are beautiful, you who are good, for they too are good, you who are, for they too are, but they are not beautiful and good as you are beautiful and good, nor do they have their being as you the Creator have your being. In comparison with you, they have neither beauty nor goodness nor being at all. Now there Augustine thinks of all things like a Christian man. He thinks about beauty and understands that he has to go to his creator, and to the Creator, he goes in order to see beauty, and then, knowing the Creator and observing the creation, he sees that the creation does indeed bear the mark of its maker. There is undeniable beauty but in comparison with the infinite beauty of the Creator, the finite beauty of the creation no longer has the seductive allure that once it had. The confusion of the one who knows not the Creator is removed when all earthly beauty is both validated and, simultaneously, relativized by the contemplation of the beauty of God.

This same theme was picked up by Jonathan Edwards, and, again, I read from Edwards in speaking of beauty, and he, among American theologians, probably has had more to say about beauty than any other. He says this:

“True holiness must mainly consist in love to God, for holiness consists in loving what is most excellent and beautiful because God is infinitely the most beautiful and excellent being. He must necessarily be loved supremely by those who are truly holy. It follows from this that God’s own holiness must consist primarily in love to himself. Being most holy, he most loves what is most good and beautiful, that is, himself. To love completely what is most completely good is to be most completely perfect. From this, it follows that a truly holy mind, above all other things, seeks the glory of God and makes the glory of God his supreme governing and ultimate end.”

Now, in that brief statement, Edwards does something that is very helpful and very consistent with the Christian tradition. As a matter of fact, it is a necessary insight once we go to the scripture. If you look in the Old Testament, and if you are aware of the Hebrew language, you will know that the word beauty is really not there. Instead, it is the word glory. Now something very close to beauty is there, but it is rarely ascribed to God. To God, the word, the description, is glory, and throughout the Bible the beauty of God is most customarily described as his glory. Once we understand the biblical category of glory, that makes perfect sense, for it is the reality of God in terms of his inner reality and the external manifestation of himself. So glory encompasses all of the transcendentals, but to gaze upon God is not first of all to speak of his beauty, but first of all to speak of his glory. Then derivatively, we understand that God’s beauty is a component part of his glory.

Edward defined beauty as consisting mostly in the sweet mutual consents. Now that’s the kind of language in Edwards that sends theology students immediately to a vocabulary to try to understand in context what this could mean. What are sweet mutual consents? By this Jonathan Edwards meant that things are rightly set, that the thing is what God declared that it must be. Beauty is achieved when the thing created most closely and most perfectly glorifies its creator. The sweet mutual consent is between the created thing and the Creator in terms a pattern of absolute verification, of absolute harmony, another favorite Edwardian term, harmony, and of absolute truth.

Now, when we look at the unity of the transcendentals, and then we look at our contemporary poverty concerning things beautiful and the whole category of beauty, something has gone horribly wrong. Why would human beings seek to sunder the unity between the good and the beautiful, between the true and the real, between the beautiful and the true? Why would we want to call something that is ugly true? Why would we want to call something that is unreal, beautiful. That is a symptom of a human sickness, and that sickness is sin? Our understanding of beauty as a category in crisis begins not with a contemporary confusion, but it begins in the Garden of Eden where after all our first parents were at least in part attracted to the forbidden fruit because it was attractive to the eyes. A false understanding of beauty, the false allure of the evil rather than the good is a part of the story of the fall, and that’s a confusion over beauty is not merely an item of cultural consternation, it’s not merely a matter of theological debate, it’s a matter of redemption, because the only way out of our confusion over beauty is to know the Creator and to know him, not merely conceptually but personally, and have our relationship set with him once again a right, something which only he can do and which only he did. Thus, Edward’s category of the sweet mutual consents then makes a great deal of sense in terms of a redeemed people once again entering into the mutual consent of the good, the beautiful, the true and the real.

Let me follow through with you some basic frameworks of a Christian vision of truth that will help us. The first issue I want to suggest to you out of three, as a way of perhaps sparking some thought and sharpening our focus, is that the Christian vision of beauty explains why the world is beautiful but not quite. We are struck by the beauty of the created order, and this is validated for us in Genesis 1, where the Creator’s own verdict concerning creation is that it is good. The goodness of creation is non-negotiable. It’s not up for debate and there again the unity, the transcendentals, remind us that the very fact that it is good means that it is true and that it is real and that it is beautiful and, thus, our metaphysic and our aesthetic and our understanding of truth and our evaluation of ethics, it all comes together in creation, because the creation, as God made it and its Edenic perfection, was good and beautiful and true and real. If it had not been so beautiful, it would not have been true. If it had not been so good it would not have been real, but it is, and the Creator’s verdict is perfect.

But, of course, even as we begin with Genesis 1, we then must proceed to Genesis 3 and, thus, the story of creation and covenant and redemption is inescapably the foundation for our understanding of aesthetics and our recovery of the category of beauty, because the disruption and confusion over beauty, the corruption of the very concept of beauty, is not derived from a mere fault in human perception, but it is a matter of human rebellion. Genesis 3 is a picture of the beautiful denied, of the real and the good and the true rejected in favor of the fact that we would be as God. And so, when you look at Genesis 3, you understand that the cosmic effect of the fall extended even to the natural world, so that what once could tell only the truth now lies. In verse 6, we read “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit, and she ate, and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sowed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings.” Now here too is an issue of beauty, and it’s inescapably tied to goodness and truth. First of all, in Genesis 3:6, we certainly are warned that that which is a delight to the eyes may very well be unbeautiful. Our human temptation is to substitute the truly beautiful for that which is a delight to our senses and a delight to our eyes and, thus, we also are drawn to the forbidden fruit of a corrupt and fallen culture.

But we understand also in verse 7 that once they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, then their eyes were opened. Now if we follow the mentality of the enlightenment, this would appear not to be a fall but a rise. After all, a human capacity that had been absent is now present. Now eyes that have been able to see only the beautiful have been opened, and that opening leads to confusion and corruption. Their eyes were open and the first thing they saw is that they were naked. That which could only have been seen as beautiful and good and true has now become something of embarrassment and shame, and so they sowed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings.

The Creator’s verdict upon their sin is made clear in the remainder of Genesis 3, but in the midst of this we understand again that there are cosmic consequences. We’re told that the ground itself will demonstrate the effects of the fall. In verse 22, “Then the Lord God said, ‘Behold the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, and now he might stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever.’ Therefore, the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to cultivate the ground from which he was taken. So he drove the man out, and at the east of the garden of Eden he stationed the Cher beam and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.”

We were told that because of sin, the earth would now become hostile. That which had willingly yielded its fruit must now be cultivated. By the sweat of the brow, the man would have to work the field. Even as by the pangs of childbirth, the woman’s calling would also now demonstrate the effect of the fall. So in Genesis 1, we have the perfection of God’s created order, and we have the unity of the transcendentals, but now the unity of the good, the beautiful, the true and the real has been sundered and, thus, we are now in confusion, and not only in confusion but in rebellion, and yet even still the world is beautiful but not quite. In other words, there is a vestigial beauty in creation that calls out to all concerning the reality of God. This is reflected of course throughout the Psalms where we are reminded that the heavens, for instance in Psalm 19, are telling the glories of God, the firmament, the seas, the crawling and creeping things, all these things cry out the wonder, the reality, the goodness of the Creator, but they are no longer perfectly seen. And, furthermore, given our fallenness, we are given to corrupting even this apprehension of beauty. For one thing, it is all too easy to worship the creation rather than the Creator. We can very quickly look at the creation and think that it itself is beautiful rather than having been made beautiful by the one who alone is beautiful. We can begin to look even at the human creature as beautiful, in and of himself, rather than beautiful because he, she is made in the image of God and, thus, we adopt and bring into the very core of our hearts, as well the center of our culture, a corrupted understanding of beauty that bears more signs of the fall than of the common grace that allows us, still even as fallen creatures, to see this beauty.

There’s another problem, of course, with this beauty, and that is that it often lies. In the oceans, there swims a fish known as the Lion Fish. It is incredibly beautiful and venomous. In the Amazonian jungles, there are many frogs, frogs and toads, and only experts, more knowledgeable than I, know the difference between the two, some beautiful verdant greens, some almost unimaginably, unimaginably purple, some almost iridescent yellow, and all deadly, such that the aboriginal peoples in those places would often poison their poison darts merely with the fluid on the skin of these animals. That which can look beautiful, as a delight to the eyes, can kill.

Thus, we have reflexively learned not to trust our apprehension of beauty. One of the first things parents must teach children is not to eat that which is beautiful. Dr. Dever mentioned that I grew up in south Florida, and in south Florida there are many very poisonous plants. Oleander, which is a beautiful hedge that people, when they move down from the north and they don’t know this, and they plant it, and they don’t realize how poisonous it is. It is so poisonous that even the sap, when one cuts, it is very, very poisonous. It’s so poisonous that the shrub, when cut down and burned, puts off a poisonous smoke. They had deadly nightshade and lantana and other plants and I can just remember growing up being warned, don’t eat anything that looks good, and that’s just a symptom of the fall. Some of the things that are most beautiful and most attractive are most deadly. Some of the things that look most grotesque are actually good. Who was the first person who decided to eat a pumpkin? Who was the first person who looked at so many of these things and said, “I’ll bet that’s edible”? They’re often not the most beautiful, but that which is truly beautiful is that which is truly good.

Our confusion about the created world is a symptom of our fallenness, of the corruption, of our aesthetic ability, our aesthetic capacity, but it’s not just human beings made in the image of God that are affected by such sin, by such corruption, by the severing of the good, the beautiful, the true and the real. It is also creation as a whole, and for that, we turn to Romans 8, where the Apostle Paul, speaking of God’s work of redemption in all of its comprehensive glory, takes us to creation itself. In verse 19, he begins: “For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God, for the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now, and not only this but we also ourselves, having the first fruits of the spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body.” So the work of redemption has cosmic significance. It has a significance for the creation. That which has been corrupted by sin is to be restored, but even now, in this age, we are to see it and understand it as groaning anxiously awaiting the revelation of the sons of God.

In Revelation 21, we have the end of the story and even as we begin with creation, imperfection, and then corrupted by sin, and then we have creation awaiting the revelation of the sons of men groaning under the weight of sin, we then have the promise of a new heaven and a new earth. In Revelation 21: “That I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold the tabernacle of God is among men, and he will dwell among them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be among them. And he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no longer any death. There will no longer be any mourning or crying or pain. The first things have passed away.’ And he who sits on the throne, said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new.’ And he said, ‘Right, for these words are faithful and true.’ And he said to me, ‘It is done. I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to the one who thirsts from the spring of the water of life without cost. He who overcomes will inherit these things and I will be his God, and he will be my son.’”

Beginning in verse 10, we have the new Jerusalem: “And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain and showed me the holy city, Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God. Her brilliance was like a very costly stone as a stone of crystal clear Jasper. It had high and a great wall with twelve gates and, at the gates, twelve angels, and names were written on them, which were the names of the twelve tribes of the sons of Israel. There were three gates on the east and three gates on the north and three gates on the south and three gates on the west.”

As you continue reading about the new Jerusalem, you’ll understand its beauty reflected in the precious and semi-precious stones and elements, streets of gold. This has been turned into the stuff of gospel music, but the picture is much more of beauty than of opulence. It is to cause us to think about what a redeemed city would actually be, how it would appear, creation reset, a new heaven and a new earth and now a new Jerusalem and, thus, we have the completion of God’s redeemed work, and it comes of course with the revelation not only the sons of God but the revelation of the Son of God, the alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, who after all was the first born of all creation, the one through whom all the worlds were made, the logos who was the very instrument of the creation itself.

So the Christian worldview explains to us why the world is beautiful but not quite. It is beautiful but fallen, and yet even in its fallenness, it’s still at least partially and truthfully reflects the glory of God. But the world contains things of prettiness that are deadly, and the inclination of human beings is to worship the creature and the creation rather than the Creator to whom be glory forever. Amen. And yet we are pointed towards the restoration of all things. It is explained to us that the world itself is groaning under the effect of sin and the wrath and judgment of God. That explains a great deal to us. Natural evil, as it is called by the theologians, hurricanes and earthquakes and tsunamis, venomous fish and poisonous plants. It was not always so and it will not always be so and, thus, the Christian understanding of beauty is an eschatological beauty that looks forward to the unveiling of true beauty with the revelation of the sons of God which will come on the day of the Lord when the alpha and the omega will be seen as the beautiful one.

Secondly, the Christian worldview explains why the face of a child with down syndrome is more beautiful than the Covergirl in the fashion magazine. The unity of the good, the beautiful, the true and the real calls us to look below the surface and to understand that the ontological reality of every single human being is that we are made in the image of God. The imago dei is the beauty in each of us. The rest is but of cosmetic irrelevance. Just as we in our fallenness are likely to see the fallen aspects of creation as beautiful rather than the untainted vision of creation before the fall, rather than seeing our own sinfulness in gazing upon the natural order, we’re more likely to try to validate ourselves in an artificial humanism of worshiping the creature, so also, when we look at our fellow human beings or frankly when we look in the mirror, we are more likely to be led astray by prevailing concepts of prettiness and attractiveness and the cosmetic rather than to gaze into the mirror, or to gaze into our neighbor, and see one made in the image of God. The imago dei is the completely transformative category here, because without it we are left with nothing but the superficial. But with it everything else is effectively relativized. The imago dei explains why that child with down syndrome is far more beautiful in herself than the cover girl in the fashion magazine.

First of all, let us remember that one of the transcendentals is the real. What does it say of us that we live in a culture in which no one actually looks like that, because no one was born like that. We’re living in a society in which the kinds of London forecast that 80% of all women would have cosmetic surgery at some point. What kind of world is this? Not to mention what happens with photography. Many of us would look more like that, if we were posing with all the lights and the cosmetics and all the rest, or at least we can fancy that it might be true. These are retouched photographs, airbrushed photographs.

Oprah Winfrey appears by mere coincidence on the cover of every issue of Oprah magazine. I was recently shown a column in which she was complaining that this takes a great deal of her time, because it takes hours to get ready for this photograph, and then it takes hours for the professionals to deal with it afterwards. Now the problem is the artificiality of this seemed to be of basically no concern. Now, it is less likely that someone would be drawn to that photograph on the newsstand if it was Oprah with their hair and curlers gazing out saying, “This is how I look early in the morning.”

Most of us, and I am the first of sinners in this category, would not want to answer the door in order to face a television camera first thing in the morning. We get dressed, we use techniques and technologies, we are at least somewhat attuned to the fashions of the day. So, lest we suggest that we are completely, as God’s redeemed people, without concern for attractiveness, we lie. But we ought to be the people who understand that this is mere window dressing. This is an apron of fig leaves placed upon our nakedness in the garden. It is because we have aspirations, and these aspirations are a part even of a cultural etiquette in which we are embedded in which it is expected that we will show up dressed a certain way and looking a certain way. And yet, there are those who just don’t measure up.

But what is the problem? The social norm or the reality of the human being? In reality, and this is where only I believe a Christian understanding of humanity that takes into full account the reality of sin, this is how we can understand how prevailing cultural standards begin to dehumanize fellow human beings. We begin to understand that we delude ourselves into thinking that attractiveness means beauty. Now, I began by saying that the Christian understands that matters of taste have very little to do with beauty. Beauty is an issue of truth, but matters of taste do enter on the question of attractiveness, and just as nature can lie with its attractive creatures, so also we can lie with the attractiveness we try to portray on the newsstand, on the television, in Hollywood, or in the mirror. An entire industry of millions and millions and millions of dollars is built upon the lie that one can buy enough, or endure enough, suffer enough, or apply enough to be genuinely beautiful. Now we know that this is a lie, because in reality we know about the character, or lack of character, in many of the people who will be on the covers of these magazines. The whole category of pornography is one big mutual co-conspiracy to deny the beautiful in favor of a perverted ideal of attractiveness. The real is denied because, given the insatiable desire of the sinner driven to erotic attractiveness, the real no longer suffices and, thus, the imagined and the fantasized becomes the hunger that is the appetite to be met.

Let me return to the child with down syndrome. It is very easy for us to say we understand what humanity is. And humanity is marked by certain capacities. And, thus, if we’re talking about beauty, and we now enter this frame of reference, we must bring in Peter Singer as a witness, the bioethicist of all macabre things at Princeton University, who believes that to be a member of the species, homo sapiens, is to confer no particular rights. That is a form of speciesism. Only human persons have rights, not merely human beings, and human persons are marked by certain capacities. These are capacities of cognition and the ability to understand the future and a certain self-understanding and a certain requisite level of communicative ability, things without which, professor Singer says, one is no longer human and is, thus, no longer deserving of human rights. And, thus, he says infamously that infanticide is not always murder because, if this baby has not yet achieved the ability to communicate and to anticipate his or her own future, et cetera, it’s no longer a human person deserving of rights and, thus, infanticide can be something much less than murder. He also infamously has said that there are some mammals, cows, pigs, dogs who would have more rights according to his calculation than some human beings.

Now, why would I bring Peter Singer who, in so far as I know, has never written anything in the field of aesthetics into this conversation? It’s because it belongs here. It’s because, if the good and the true and the real are severed from the beautiful, then we are just again involving ourselves in the co-conspiracy of a corrupted understanding of reality, of beauty, and of humanity. And, thus, we must understand that every single human being is made in the image of God and, therefore, every single human being is beautiful. Now, in what way is every single human being beautiful, beautiful, first of all, by the very fact that this individual is made in the image of God. What if this individual fails to meet up to current cultural or even scientific or medical definitions of what it means to be adequately human? We are the people who have to show up and say, “Beautiful, still. True, still. Good, still.” Good, not in the sense that we would bless a disease, not in the sense that we would bless a syndrome, but that we would bless the individual who, made in the image of God, is God’s gift to humanity, in order that we will behold his glory in this smiling face. Our societal failure to see this is not a symptom of what is wrong with beauty. It’s a symptom of what is wrong with us.

Now this requires constant monitoring, doesn’t it? Because the pretty is so seductive. The Christian worldview and the Christian vision of beauty explains why the world is beautiful, but not quite, and why the face of a child with down syndrome was more beautiful than the face of the model on the fashion magazine. But, thirdly, the Christian understanding of beauty explains why the cross is beautiful and not tragic, and here redemption comes full circle. And now our conversation of beautiful is directed towards the one who is beautiful and his beautiful cross. How dare we sing a song like that? Nietzsche would just identify it as one more embrace of weakness by a decadent people who are so self-delusional that they will give themselves even to embracing the sign of their own vacuous hope. Once again, we’re reminded that to deny the beautiful is to deny the good is to deny the true and eventually is to deny the real. Thus, nihilism becomes the only real alternative to Christian faith, to Christian worldview, to the Christian vision of beauty. We either see beauty from the perspective of the Creator through the lens of creation and corruption and restoration, or we have to come up with some other explanation, all various possible explanations, lacking in credibility and unable to reunite the disunited transcendentals. The incarnation is a demonstration of God’s beautiful love, and the one who came born in Bethlehem’s manger was a beautiful babe. The word beauty, again, is not the word most commonly used in scripture, but rather the word glory and, thus, in his prologue, John will say, “We beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”

Now, this glory, this beauty, that is explicitly and wondrously described in terms of the incarnate Lord Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, the Lord of the church. This beauty is not attractiveness, it is not prettiness. This is not the attractiveness of the fashion magazine or of the cultural gaze. Indeed, the prophet Isaiah, in speaking of the suffering servant, looking to Christ, said in Isaiah 53:3, “He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and one from whom men hide their faces. He was despised and we did not esteem him.” In the incarnation, God himself assumed human flesh as the Son and, thus, it was the Father’s good pleasure that the Son, who with him had been existent, reigning over all things before the very creation of time, it was the Father’s good pleasure that the son should assume human flesh and should dwell among us, and yet we were not attracted to him by his beauty.

Now, the amazing thing, as Martin Luther said, is that in this manger in Bethlehem, the Creator lay is a babe. And yet the creation walked by without obvious notice. The wood itself, Luther said, had been created by this one, the Logos, but did it know what it was holding in that manger? The cattle, and we romanticized this in our nativity scenes, were lowing and baying, as Luther himself liked to put to music, and yet they were completely unaware of the fact that their creator was in this beautiful babe. It is very easy to look at a baby and see beauty.

Winston Churchill was once shown an infant with typical infant head, infant wrinkles, and infant baldness, and it was said to him, “Sir Winston, this baby looks like you.” Winston Churchill said, “All babies look like me.” And yet you look into a baby and you understand here is the beauty of new life, the beauty of what we would call innocence from knowing human evil. This is the beauty of the one who in terms of its own, its own naivete, its own watching eyes, its own movements and clumsiness and development, its own nascent reality cries out of potentiality. And yet that baby is no more beautiful than the person down the street or down the hall in the hospital in the gerontology ward, because here again that potentiality lies. It will not always be this way. There is the effect of sin that will all too soon become evident in this one who looks so innocent and so filled with potential. What a short span, said Solomon in the book of Ecclesiastes, separates the cradle and the grave. It is not a pretty process. It is not an attractive process, but in its own way, it reflects the beauty of the Creator and his perfect justice and his absolute goodness and his determination to bring glory to himself. We should be able to look at the face of a senior saint and see scars and wrinkles and blemishes that have been won through the engagement with the realities of life.

Remember the good, the beautiful, the true and the real. We should not wish to hide this. We should not wish to turn away. I was asked by a young minister about lying, about a year ago. It was about Christmas time last year, and a new pastor had made a call upon an elderly lady who was in the hospital. And he, being like so many young pastors, as all of us who’ve been in that position can well remember, was confronted with someone who needed more than he knew to give. And this elderly church member turned to him and said, “Am I pretty?” And he said, “I lied and said yes.” And she was suffering in the last stages of a degenerative disease, and she wasn’t pretty. And I said, “You probably lied, because that was probably the wrong answer.” I said this kindly and gently and affirmatively. I understood his heart. I said, “We need to change “pretty” to “beautiful,” because this isn’t pretty, but it is beautiful. And, thus, we can speak of beauty recovered even in that moment when, in a countercultural move, we say pretty really isn’t important. Pretty really wasn’t important when she was 12. Twenty really wasn’t important when she was 20. Pretty is really not important now. In heaven, there will be no pretty people, only beautiful saints made beautiful by the grace of God and for God’s glory alone.

The cross is beautiful and not tragic. Isaiah 53:3 reminds us that he was one from whom men turned their face, because there was no prettiness in him. And the cross itself is not pretty. It is a symbol of execution. As Nietzsche and others who have followed in his wake and preceded him saw, it was failure and weakness, not strength and victory, but we know the difference. We know the reality, we know the truth and, thus, we embrace the cross as a beautiful cross on which hung a beautiful Savior whose death alone was a beautiful death. In terms of humans, there are no beautiful deaths. Only one death was beautiful, and that was the death of the one who died for our sins.

In 2 Corinthians 4:6, Paul says, “For God, who said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the one who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” And thus, we who have been called to faith, who have come to know the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior, we who have been transformed by the grace of God, now see the Lord Jesus Christ as beautiful, and the cross as beautiful. And we gaze upon him, not with our physical eyes. We gaze upon him with the eyes of faith and with the trusting heart, because to appreciate his beauty is to appreciate his love is to appreciate his mercy. Edwards warned, that is, Jonathan Edwards warned during his own time that the great problem that would befall us is that we confuse beauty and virtue. There can be no beauty without virtue. And now we understand, and gazing upon the cross, that the most virtuous one of all, the only perfect sinless one, is the one who died in our place and, thus, there is a beautiful death. But that beauty, even now, is ours to know because of the vindication of the power of God and the resurrection. Had the cross been the end of the story, as Paul makes clear in one Corinthians 15, it would not be a beautiful death. It would not be a beautiful story. We of all people would be most to be pitied.

In Revelation 22, we are reminded of just how perfect this perfected beauty is: “Then he showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the lamb. In the middle of its street, on either side of the river, was the tree of life bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month, and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. There will no longer be any curse.” There’s the corruption reversed. “And the throne of God and of the lamb will be in it, and his bond servants will serve him. They will see his face, who will gaze upon him, and his name will be on their foreheads, and there will be no longer any night, and they will not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illumine them, and they will reign forever and forever.”

So the Christian worldview explains how the world could have begun as it did, and how the world is now fallen and, thus, it lies, and how the world, even now, is awaiting the redemption that is to come, which will come with the revealing of the sons of God, and how the Creator in the new heaven and the new Earth, the lamb of God, will be worshiped by those who are his own, who will no longer need any light. Let me go back to Aquinas who suggested that beauty is seen in light. It’s no longer reflected or refracted light. In this vision, it is the direct light of the revelation of the Son of God.

Let me conclude by suggesting that for Christians, beauty is an evangelistic category. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky put in the mouth of one of his characters this phrase: “Beauty is the battlefield where God and Satan contend with each other for the hearts of men.” And thus it is. In one sense, the evil one tempts with prettiness and lies about beauty and corrupts the good, the beautiful, the true, and the real, and sunders them from each other, and celebrates the confusion and the fact that they’re now severed from each other, and celebrates whenever something ugly is called true, and celebrates when something unreal is called beautiful. And all the transcendentals, thus confused, become the ground and the playground of his battle with men. So evangelism comes in restoring the unity of the transcendentals. But that can only come by the work of Christ. It can’t come by re-education, but only by regeneration. And the unity that has been sundered can only be put back together again by the one who created the world and, thus, redeems. It’s no accident, of course, that in Romans 10, we are told, citing a verse from the Old Testament, that the one who carries the gospel has beautiful feet and, thus, the recovery of beauty can only come by recovering humanity, can only come by recovering truth, can only come by recovering the good, and recovering the real, which is to say, to be recovered by the power of God.

So beauty is for us an evangelistic mandate, a missiological purpose. We’re the people who better talk about beauty as the only people who really know what it is. Not that we have seen it yet with our eyes, but we have seen it in a foretaste, and we have been promised it with an assured promise. And so in this life, we live amidst the pretty and the corrupt, the artificial. We live amidst the kitsch of popular taste. And we live amidst the elitism of the arts crowd. We live amongst those who don’t think beauty exists and those who think beauty can be manufactured. And we’re the ones who have to say, “We know beauty, and it is none other than Jesus Christ the Lord. And we have the hope and promise of beauty, which is nothing less than the hope and promise of our restoration, the promise of our redemption. And we, along with creation, await the revealing of the sons of God when we shall see him face to face.”

Thank you.