"When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
(John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn)
Beauty is defined as the quality of something that brings “delight to the sense or mind”. In this post I am hoping to touch on how (post &) modern Christian culture has pretty much given away the intrinsic value
BEAUTY to subjectivity in a way that leaves appreciation or scrutiny to mere preference. There is such a thing as absolute beauty, or in other words, aesthetic perfection, and as Christians we need to care about it.
If part of our chief end as human beings is to enjoy God forever (and it is), then we are to delight in Him by embracing his manifold perfections with intellectual fervor that evidences a renewed mind. This mind renewed by the Spirit should effectively transform us to discern true ideas that are good, acceptable and perfect. But, it likewise follows that we should delight in Him through our senses, by experiencing the manifold joy of the fullness of God and enjoying the riches of his creative perfections through touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing.
Food, drink, visual art, poetry, music, architecture, story, the human form, all of these physical realities exist at the pleasure of the created order of God. Whether the residue of God’s fingerprints are undeniably clear or smudged and muted by the impacts of sin, the collected works of humanities’ creative abilities are shadows of the Ultimate. In part the Christian act of worship is joyful discernment of the good, acceptable and perfect qualities intrinsic to the essence of that which is expressed in art, culture and life.
What I am
NOT talking about is creating a Christian equivalent of what the world offers. The activity of (post &) modern evangelical Christianity has a history of pursuing all sorts of sensual delights
in a hopelessly lame way. (I once attended a church that now boasts the church feels “just like your favorite coffee shop”) I think it's fair to say that a large portion of American Evangelicalism has anchored the Gospel to a pathetic and kitsch subculture that is running away into complete banality and irrelevance. As long as Christians think that "changing the culture" means accepting the popular culture, and stripping away the “bad stuff” (alchol, nudity, curse words, Democrat politics, etc.), the mission objective will perpetuate Christianized worldliness. “Changing the culture" needs to be about wholesale swapping out of world views- "Spirit of the age" for the "Spirit of Christ.” The contrary results of post-modern and modern evangelicalism betray confused presuppositions about almost all aspects of theology.
This mentality has pursued intellectual delight and sensual delight to much the same end. Anti-intellectual theology and sloppy, topical and anthropocentric preaching have produced cheap grace or legalism and hordes of milk fed Christians, incapable of connecting their fraudulent presuppositions and values to the world around them. To steal in plain daylight from Doug Wilson, if a deep, thoughtful, God exalting, Christ centered personal faith is rich, hardwood, the faith of the masses is mobile home grade wood veneer. In an effort to sell church, a church sells out. It capitulates on hard teachings so controversy doesn’t send people packing, or needlessly bore the goats in the crowd who are just there to punch in to the religion time clock.
BUT, to their credit, in the midst of this doctrinal squishiness, moral relativism has been nearly always resisted. HOWEVER, the blind acceptance of
aesthetic relativism and its snaggle-toothed offspring “pop culture", has given way to trite and unimaginative faux-culture that's always a step behind the world, soap and sponge in hand. Like Brittany Spears, Tickle Me Elmo, or OP shorts, its popularity is disposable. Loss of the ability to produce and appreciate things that pass the test of true beauty (transcendence and longevity) is evidence of jejune ecclesiology and the over-arching rejection of epistemic certainty and God-centeredness.
Absolute truth and moral ethic are championed by most conservative evangelicals, but aesthetic absolutes deemed impossible. Citing that “it’s what’s on the inside that counts”, or blithely accepting that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” somehow the Biblical fact God made a physical world, and it was good, is overlooked. It is as if an odd type of Gnosticism has crept in. Instead of denouncing all that is physical as evil, it despises the value of true beauty with ambivalence.
Not all of Christendom has failed in this area. But it is something that has shackled the mission of much of the American church to the rise and fall
of worldly whims. Of course there is the error to the other extreme of worshiping beautiful things. Idolatry is still idolatry whether the icon is beautiful or ugly. We should be motivated to worship God when enraptured by beautiful things. We are in awe of Michelangelo’s brush strokes on the Sistine Chapel, but remember God made Michelangelo.
For those of us fed on the stale bread of aesthetic relativism, meaningful appreciation of beauty in art, culture and life seems daunting and elusive. Learning to appreciate true beauty can mean the painful letting go of comfortable preferences. It could be likened to the world shattering pangs as one is wrested away from the autonomous fog of untutored spiritual youth, and into the glorious doctrines of grace.
The Scripture is not silent on the value and qualities of beauty, any less then it is on the sovereignty of God. As we must cast aside our preconceived false beliefs, we must also cast aside our flesh taught aesthetic sensualities, and in both strive to long for what is good, acceptable and perfect.
Labels: aesthetics, beauty, seeker friendly, shallow evangelicalism
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