Christians have a spiritual and intellectual war with the surrounding culture on their hands over one thing: unbelievers have adopted a relativistic approach toward the very nature of truth and goodness. Neither side can imagine the other’s position. The Christian cannot imagine how an unbeliever can hold that truth or morality can be different in differing situations. The unbeliever cannot imagine how the Christian can hold to one truth or moral stance in all circumstances because life is so multi-faceted. The result is that each side speaks to the other in platitudes, clichés and bumper stickers, never gaining a hearing from the other. “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” “Jesus, save me from your followers.” “Abortion is murder.” “Meat is murder.” “In the event of rapture, this car will be unmanned.” “My other car is a broom.” In this war each side thinks the other impossibly lost. How can we break down the barriers and make the gospel compelling again in our day?
Any view of the world that is worth discussing must deal with several areas: Is there a God? If so, what is he like? Where did the universe come from? What is man, and where did he come from? And where is he going after death? But also, there are what the philosophers call transcendental ideas. Truth and goodness are transcendental in that they are eternal and supernaturally derived. Any view of the world worth discussing must deal with the nature of these ideas, not just their content. How do we know what is true? How do we know what is moral? [1]
There is a third transcendental idea: beauty. So any world and life view worth discussing must deal with the nature of beauty as well. How do we know what is beautiful?
Christians clearly see the need to call the world back to biblical standards regarding truth and goodness. God himself is true—he is what truth is. God himself is what goodness is—his behavior and character are the standard of good and moral behavior. However, the God we serve is not only truth and goodness personified, he is also beauty personified. Psalm 27:4 speaks of David’s desire “to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord ...” throughout eternity. Evangelical apologetical systems today usually ignore a discussion of the beautiful, and this article proposes that we will continue to have difficulty speaking in a way this culture can hear unless we include beauty in our apologetics.
If the culture that Christians generate is not beautiful in a way no other culture is, it will become increasingly difficult to make a compelling case to the unbeliever to accept our God or his Word. Admittedly, God does not need us to write good poetry in order to change the hearts of the unbelievers in our midst, but that misses my point. The amazing fact is that God does condescend to use us in his evangelistic work. He is interested in how we live out our lives in him. His interest about our lives goes beyond evangelism, however. His greatest purpose is that he be glorified in our lives and in his creation. He built us to be not only lovers of truth and goodness, but also lovers of the beautiful. Our ability to perceive and enjoy beauty is a gift from God, and part of his image in us. So when we enjoy the beautiful, we are glorifying him (assuming we acknowledge where the beauty came from). One of the effects of the fall has been that we have placed our love for each of these transcendent ideas beneath our love for ourselves, so it should not surprise us that we find in ourselves that we love our appetites more than we love truth, goodness and beauty. In fact, in sin we debase our potential love for the truth into an appetite for information; the love of goodness into an appetite for self-righteousness; the love of beauty into an appetite for amusement.
It is understandable, then, why there is a war in our culture over truth and goodness. Regenerated men and women take up the cause of calling the unbelieving world back to “true truth” (to quote Francis Schaeffer). However, these same believers often have not taken up the battle for “true beauty.” When it comes to discussing beauty, Christians themselves regularly adopt the world’s relativism and argue that beauty is a matter of personal preference and that it does not have an objective element.
Of course, like any other desire, our desire for beauty can be misled and perverted. This occurs when we make the mistake of believing that the beauty we find in this world is in the object we have found rather than a means through which we experience something of the nature of God himself. C. S. Lewis suggested that the beauty we find in the object does not come from the object, but rather through the object. [2] The object is only a medium for the glory of God. Great paintings and music and sculpture are made by man, but only indirectly, since the gifts to create come from God, and human beings have the ability to reveal something of the nature of God through those gifts. This is the delight we find in beauty, and the purpose we find for art: we are momentarily allowed to see our real desire, and how God is the only real satisfaction of that desire.
Beauty, Right Sensibilities, And The True And The Good
Philosophers have long argued about the connections between beauty and goodness and truth. Plato put it this way:
And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of the earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.
Beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may. [3]Of course, this is not enough to compel a Christian, but it is one of Plato’s more remarkable insights. To be exposed at an early age to those things that are beautiful may very well lead one to appreciate and eventually embrace the source of that beauty when old enough to do so. Plato saw the appreciation of the beautiful as a part of the goal of education: maturity in our humanness. However, in our self-centered relativistic age, even the church does not consider this sort of maturity valuable. What if Christians were to adopt the notion that sanctification includes growth toward maturity of our human sensibilities? In other words, that as we grow in Christ we also grow in our abilities to see what is fitting, appropriate, human, beautiful?
In a full-orbed view of the world and life, Christians argue that all of life is under the lordship of Christ. One of the implications of this is that God himself will satisfy all of our real needs, and these needs must include our longing for beauty. Who can explain our deepest desires? What is the source of our need for companionship, love, significant work, security, and a sense of beauty in our lives? Do we deny that beauty is something we desire? Why do we find ourselves unhappy with disorder in our homes or gardens? Even if we cannot find time or even inclination to do anything about making order, we still find disorder disquieting. Those who have none in their lives appear less than attractive to us. Beauty has to do with order, appropriateness, fittingness, right relationships. Who tells us what those are? Yet we long for those elements in the specifics of our lives. Of course, we are never quite satisfied when we try to achieve order in this world. The reason is that we are not to be satisfied with anything short of God himself, and the order of our physical world and its relationships are meant by him to be ultimately unfulfilling when separated from a desire to have him. The strange thing is that even men who have given up desiring God himself still desire order and meaning in their lives. Only when we order our world as a result of our love for God will there be any lasting satisfaction in our work.
Beauty In The Culture Of Worship
This work of ordering is, of course, what culture is. Man, no matter what he believes, generates culture. Students of culture can see in the order of a culture something of what that culture believes. We should reverse that picture and ask the question, “As Christians, what should our culture look like?” There is not space here for us to consider all aspects of culture, but for the purposes of this article we ought to look into the culture of worship of our God. What is the state of order or beauty in our worship?
Many churches are in the throes of worship “style wars.” One side of these wars argues that adopting the musical styles of the general unbelieving culture will attract unbelievers to the church where then they can hear the gospel message. After all, the argument goes, we want to be sensitive to their needs: we do not want the worship service to seem alien to them. So, we need to adjust the order of our worship in order to accommodate the goal of evangelism among present-day unbelievers.
This argument fails in part due to several misguided assumptions. It assumes that if the unbeliever feels comfortable he will come to church; it assumes that the unbeliever will feel comfortable if the music in the services is in the style that he prefers; it assumes that the message of the gospel remains the same if it is spoken through any style of music—that is, that the medium is neutral and does not affect either the message or the hearing of the message; and more profoundly still, it assumes that the idea that “giving the customer what he wants” is a biblical notion (these all would require a sequel to this article).
However, the most profound mistake made in this approach, and the one I want to focus on here, is that it assumes there is no such thing as beauty. If there were, it would carry more weight in our decision processes. To separate the message from the medium is to ignore the way God says things. He had specific design requirements for his temple and tabernacle. He gave specific instructions to the Israelites regarding the way the lamp stands and altars were to be built. The details mattered to God. If God is beauty himself, then when we offer music or other art that disregards the real nature of beauty, are we actually evangelizing for a God who is not fully God? At the least, we are ignoring an aspect of God, even if he still kindly acknowledges our offerings despite our ignorance. The God who is truth and goodness, but not beauty, is not the God of the Bible. What’s more, we are advertising a church made up of people who are not exercising one of the elements of the imago Dei that we claim to possess; that is, we deny a part of the truth when we are not creative and imaginative with regard to our music, for example. When we offer the world what it already has (albeit with changed words) we are acting like barbarians who have no profound artistic culture of their own, and who borrow from the surrounding culture to communicate among themselves. One of the marks of unbelief in our day is a disbelief in absolute truth, goodness and beauty. Doug Wilson said once, “The evangelical church can do anything the world does, only five years later and worse.” [4] That is the picture we have agreed is good to offer the watching unbelieving world: second-hand, warmed-over music that we think is attractive precisely because it comes from the unbelieving culture rather than from a more thoughtful Christian aesthetic.
The result of this way of thinking is not only that we become less creative, less imaginative, and thus mar the image of God in ourselves, but it is also that we actually place the aesthetic decisions for Christian worship services in the hands of the unbelievers in the surrounding culture. This is abdication of our responsibility to be cultural leaders. Tim Keller once said, “The work of the church in the city is to show the unbelieving city what a Christian city would look like.” [5] This vision is accomplished by way of its right relationships, marked by forgiveness and love (something the world can only gape at), and by way of right and just economic and legal business. But also in the community of believers there should be all of the earmarks of mature sensibilities, including an appreciation for the beautiful. One of the signs of real appreciation of the beautiful is the respect paid to artists for the gifts God has given them, and for the accomplishments of their hands.
This is very difficult in today’s American churches, because materialism holds such influence over us. Materialism is an idea that is similar to but not the same as consumerism. Consumerism is a desire to buy our happiness with things, and is a fruit of materialism. Materialism, on the other hand, gives greater value to material things than to those that are immaterial. The more our churches think in materialistic terms, the more they will give matters of practicality and expedience highest importance, and less to matters of art and beauty. Materialists view beauty as a luxury that is expendable. This is how our church buildings have become so ugly, and this is why many congregations are actually proud of the ugliness they have achieved.
This abdication of our aesthetic sensibilities can actually bring about the opposite of our evangelical hopes. One of my students suggested to me that she would have become a Christian far sooner if she had seen artistic work from Christians that had some integrity and creativity of its own. “The music they played me was nothing more than I had heard already. If there had been something fresh and more profound I might have paid attention to their message more quickly,” she told me. This flies in the face of most of today’s church-growth theories, and it does so specifically at the point of its inability to appreciate the beautiful. Could it be that we are shooting ourselves in the foot with our attempts to be relevant? There needs to be some evidence that we are more, rather than less, human: more profound, more transparent, and more multi-faceted than the unbelieving world around us. If we want them to listen to our arguments against abortion or in favor of a stable definition for words like “is,” we must have real life in our midst, not warmed-over music, a Christian version of consumerism, thoughtless church architecture, sentimental art, and bumper stickers that say “Got Jesus?” [6]
A Renewed Definition Of Beauty
What is the antidote to this poisoned state in which we find ourselves? First, we have to repent of our dismissal of beauty as a reasonable category of thought. We have defined beauty in our culture as completely subjective, and as a result, there is no discussion in the public square about what makes something beautiful. In fact, even Christians doubt that there can be anything objectively beautiful.
In a previous article for the Reformation and Revival Journal (cf. Vol. 4. No. 4, 1995), I outlined the differences between objective and subjective approaches to beauty. These are not in opposition to one another, as our Enlightenment philosophers would have us believe (that is, either objective or subjective), rather they are two sides of the apprehension of the beautiful: a real objective beauty is perceived and subjectively enjoyed as beautiful by a human being.
We are the children of the Enlightenment in many ways, and we have been taught that beauty cannot be objective, since all we know we must derive from a study of the material world (as good Enlightenment scholars do). Thus, beauty must be of purely personal definition, as all we ever see anyone do is to have “personal experiences.” Subjective beauty is really an evaluation of the experience of the viewer. If one finds a certain kind of pleasure or positive experience from contact with an artwork, it is called beautiful. This is real and good, and must never be underestimated. God made us to be appreciators of the beautiful, and not all of us will respond the same way to the same experiences. However, just as we do with everything else, we must allow for the effect of the Fall in the area of aesthetic experience. That is, our subjective “beauty receptors” are fallen just as everything else about us is. But, just as our fallen palettes can be taught to appreciate better food, our fallen aesthetic senses can learn to appreciate more beautiful things. This is part of living in a fallen world, and part of the work of our Lord to bring us to be more in keeping with his image.
Since the beautiful is rooted in God himself, his desire for us to love the beautiful is simply his desire for us to love him more fully. He knows that just as the truth will make us free, the beautiful will satisfy our souls. He made us to be satisfied only with him—nothing less will do. So, when we are confronted with something beautiful, it should lead us to worship him who created those beautiful things, and who is beauty.
This leads us to the idea of objective beauty. If he is beautiful, anything resembling him will be beautiful. Beauty that is objective would have elements within the object itself that could be pointed to and called beautiful regardless of our feelings. At this point, many readers may express a certain skepticism, and want to know what those objective criteria could possibly be that would fully explain the beautiful all the time. No one knows what God looks like, so how do we know what resembles him? Allow me to take a moment to explain something before I attempt to answer that concern.
When we are told to think on “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right ...” (Philippians 4:8), do we ask, “Sure, but who’s to say what is noble?” Or do we not, in our deepest selves, rather know (based on the Spirit’s help in our rightly understanding the written Word) that we should indeed think on these things when we find them? We should even desire to go out and look for them. In the same way we need to know the beautiful. We find no systematic outline of rules for the beautiful form in the Bible, but if there were, it would read like the Old Testament moral law that we are told reveals the minimum requirements for goodness. We know that we cannot reach even that low level of moral purity on our own; perhaps it is better that there is not a written law regarding beauty, as it would make us try to achieve it by way of fulfilling rules.
This is not what is meant here in reference to objectivity in beauty. What I am arguing for in this article is not a system of rules within each genre (always use green in painting, or never use diatonic harmonies in music, etc.); rather it is simply to know that there is such a thing as objective beauty, just as we know that there is objective good, and then go about loving it wherever it is found. It is rather a state of humility I am calling for, not a system of rules to adopt. As Augustine wrote, “Love God and do what you will.” So while I am going to offer a step or two toward a Christian aesthetic before the end of this article, it is not for the purpose of coldly discerning between good art and bad art only in order to condemn bad art. Rather I am arguing against the other end of the spectrum, which is for a definition of beauty that is not purely relative. There is no room in our Christian worldview for art and beauty that have no reference to a transcendent God as a source or foundation.
For you who will not accept the idea of objective beauty unless someone shows you just what the rules are, I offer only this: the Bible speaks of beauty. God himself is referred to as beautiful. It makes sense that the Creator should be reflected in the creation, and it makes sense that the ones who are specifically made in his image would have a desire to create beautiful things too (as he did), not only because we are like him, but because we are to be fulfilled by him. We could almost say that whatever is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and admirable applies to art as well as to the rest of life. Does that mean that there is a system or a perfect definition for “noble” or “lovely”? If so, it eludes us in this life. But just because it is hard to pin down is no reason why we should run to the opposite extreme and deny its objective reality. It turns out, part of the delight of living as a human being is the adventure associated with discovering new manifestations of the lovely and the admirable. [7]
To those who will venture on the road of discovery with me, admitting that there is something objective about beauty, even if as yet, it is not clear what, I offer the following: the answers to our questions about what is beautiful in this world are to be found within words like, fitting, appropriate, and tasteful. As children, we learn to see and spot patterns in objects. As we grow, we begin to spot more complex patterns in objects. This is a study of general revelation. What is similar about the leaves of these trees? What is different? The sorting of things into like and unlike is part of the work we do as a child, and much of what we continue to do in whatever work we find in this life. The biologist certainly does this in the laboratory, the medical doctor in the work of diagnosis, the financier in tracking stocks, the teacher in tracking a student’s progress in a certain subject, etc. The artist does this sort of work with the elements of his genre: composition of objects on his canvas or in his camera lens, organization of his dancers on the stage, composition of his sounds in his string quartet, etc. The viewer/listener also must learn this work of spotting patterns in order to appreciate the beauty in the object. The one who wishes to see the objective beauty in an artwork, first needs to learn something of the language of that genre in order to see what the artist saw when he created it.
Thus, objective beauty is to be found in the object itself—in its internal integrity, in its relation to other works of its kind, in light of the history of the genre, and in its communication of human experience and ideas.
Beauty And Apologetics
Repentance and restructuring of our thinking about beauty need to come first. Second, we have to reconsider the relationship among truth, goodness, and beauty. Could it be that Hans Urs von Balthasar is correct when he suggests that without beauty, truth and goodness come to lose their ability to compel? If we speak the truth, but do so without morality, won’t it lose its authority? The truth that Jesus rose from the dead would seem strange indeed if his teaching was that we should all be self-centered and steal from one another. If we speak of morality without truth, wouldn’t it lose its authority? There would be little to compel a moral life in this world if there were no corresponding truth that mankind was not made for this world. If we preach goodness but have no beautiful culture of our own, doesn’t the very essence of Godliness lose some of its power to compel?
When goodness is not beautiful it loses its attractiveness. We can call our children to the glories of moral marriage instead of the immediate pleasures of fornication, but how if everyone is divorcing and there are no examples of beautiful marriages for them to see? There seems so often to be a lack of beauty in the life we are called to in God, and as a result the moral life carries less and less weight in the culture.
When truth is not beautiful, it loses its ability to compel. Logical reasoning is of great worth, but not when it is separated from beauty. Von Balthasar writes,
In a world that no longer has enough confidence in itself to affirm the beautiful, the proofs of the truth have lost their cogency. In other words, syllogisms may still dutifully clatter away like rotary presses, or computers that infallibly spew out an exact number of answers by the minute. But the logic of these answers is itself a mechanism which no longer captivates anyone. The very conclusions are no longer conclusive. [8]The three transcendentals need to be woven together for all three to work properly to their appointed joint end, which is to glorify God and make him known. This is a shocking thought to most of us, as we have never considered that beauty was anything more than a momentary diversion in this life. However, if we accept that God is what beauty ultimately is, we find that our experiences of beauty in this life are meaningful in a way we have not considered.
Moral goodness in this life should bear fruit that is beautiful. When communities live out the truth and goodness of Christianity, there should be a noticeable change for the better in the lives of the members. Better sanitation, education, food, and marriages—but also, better art, poetry, music and architecture. I don’t mean here that truth or goodness lose any of their objective realities when we don’t value the beautiful—we are still going to have to answer for our beliefs and actions—but I do mean that without beauty, proclamations of truth and goodness are less able to compel the audience to taste them and see that they are worthwhile.
The reason the three transcendentals of truth, goodness and beauty are so intertwined in this world is that the three are unified in God himself. Imagine that we preached a god who had saved the souls of everyone who would come to him and believe in him, but who did not love? Imagine a god who claimed to love fallen mankind but who had done no salvific work for those he loved? Neither of these is possible because the truth and the goodness of the True God are so intertwined that they cannot exist one without the other. No god who saved without loving would save. No god who loved without acting would in any meaningful way be said to love.
In the same way, a true and loving God would not create in us a desire that could not be fulfilled in him. He himself is the source of beauty, and he has placed in our hearts the great gift of aesthetic sensibilities. The aesthetic longings we have are part of what it means to be human beings, and that is precisely the state we are in as his creatures. To dismiss the desire to delight in beauty is to dismiss something of our humanness—and that humanness is what our Creator placed in our hearts to make us desire him. He alone can save us, he alone can love us, but also, he alone can teach us how to delight in his beauty, which will be the work of eternity.
Beauty In Worship
Third, our worship in this world (one part of our cultural activity) needs to include the beauty of God as well as the truth and the goodness of God. It is beauty that makes truth edible. It is beauty that makes goodness attractive.
In our decisions about worship, we need to put into practice a good understanding of beauty. Realize that the music we choose is first and foremost to be the best we can offer, not merely what the surrounding culture will bear. The liturgy should be in a language the unbeliever can understand, but should also offer something he cannot find anywhere else in his world: order, fittingness, mature sensibilities, and beauty.
Recently I have been serving as interim music director at a large Presbyterian church with a history of singing the great choral works of the Church. I had a dear Christian lady tell me that her unbelieving husband had come to church with her and, after hearing our choir sing, had said, “If there is a heaven, and if there are angels, they will sound like that choir when they sing.” Beauty can speak to the heart in a way that logical reasoning and moral teaching cannot. Our musical and liturgical choices in worship can display an aspect of God that is often ignored. We must ask ourselves, how can we whet the congregation’s appetites now for the satisfactions that will be theirs in God for eternity? One way would be to commit ourselves to the pursuit of God’s beauty made manifest through his creation and ours, and value that beauty highly when making decisions for worship.
About the Author
John Mason Hodges is associate professor of the arts at Crichton College and director of the Institute for the Arts and Cultural Apologetics. He also serves as the artistic director of Ars Nova, Inc., a multifaceted organization wherein he produces lectures and concerts with a chamber orchestra, and leads the Memphis Arts Group, a fellowship of Christians called to the arts profession. A frequent contributor to publications dealing specifically with music and the Christian faith, he holds an undergraduate degree in music from University of Maryland and a graduate degree in orchestral and operatic conducting from Indiana University. He studied conducting under Leonard Bernstein. He is married and the father of a son.
Notes
- For these and other good worldview questions, see James Sire’s concise book, The Universe Next Door (Downers Grove, Illinois: Inter Varsity, 1988).
- See the essay, “The Weight of Glory” in C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1975), 4.
- Five Great Dialogues of Plato, Symposium, Jowett translation (Walter J. Black, Inc.: Roslyn, New York, 1941), 202.
- Doug Wilson, in a lecture at the Association of Classical and Christian Schools National Conference, Memphis, Tennessee, 1997.
- Tim Keller, spoken at a lecture at Second Presbyterian Church, Memphis, Tennessee, March, 2000.
- The saddest thing about this is that the advertising phrase, “Got Milk?” is clever. It looses all its cleverness when the simple phrase is stretched to include the weighty question about salvation. It cannot help but reduce the gospel to the consumer level and thus misrepresent the gospel. But it seems useful and appropriate to the Christian. Why? Two reasons: first, we have found a recognizable way to get the name of our Lord across, and second, because we are so unimaginative that we can’t think of anything better. Why do we have to raid the world’s imagination to speak of our faith? Dante, Bach, and Milton set the standards for their days—standards that have been seldom seen since. Today, the church imitates the unbeliever because he is sharp of mind.
- A further point is that there is a distinction between goodness and beauty in that there is no moral issue associated with beauty as there is with the good. The opposite of good is evil. The opposite of beauty is ugliness, and while some artists seem to make ugliness a goal, its result is not the same as evil. In fact, if the truth is to be told about the Fall, ugliness is a good goal to have. But the goal of art is not to speak only of the Fall, so the beauty of the creation, and, especially in our day, the beauty of redemption should be a worthy goal for the artist as well.
- Von Balthasar, Hans Urs, The Lord of Glory: A Theological Aesthetics—Volume: Seeing the Form. (San Francisco: Ignatius, and New York: Crossroad, 1982), 19.
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