A Holy Longing
The saying, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," suggests that attempting to say anything concrete about the nature of beauty is a futile task. As soon as one person deems something beautiful, ten others will show up deeming it ugly. But theologians of the early and medieval church did not assume beauty was subjective. Borrowing from neo-Platonic philosophy, they believed that for something to be beautiful, it must also be good and true, with God reigning as the ultimate source of beauty. Today's church can be thankful for people like David Taylor, who connect such esoteric reflections to the church's mission. As the arts pastor for 12 years at Hope Chapel, a vibrant congregation in Austin, Texas, Taylor helped believer artists make the connection between worship, creativity, and community. Here, Taylor makes a similar connection between beauty and gospel proclamation to answer this year's cvp question, "Is our gospel too small?"
What more, you may ask, do we want? … We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. —C. S. Lewis, "The Weight of Glory"
Many of the houses on my block in north-central Austin, Texas, are architecturally ugly. Built in the late 1950s, they are one-story, squat structures. Slapped-on metal porches hang out from exceedingly flat roofs. The asbestos siding is faded. The construction is cheap, the brick dingy and dull. Collectively they perform the duties of houseness fine. But I can't say that I walk down my block and feel awe. I feel glum. I'm grateful for my house, ...
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Dave T.
I think it's possible to call beauty "extra-biblical" if you are doing a quick word search study. There are, however, deep strains throughout the Bible, and even in places like Romans 1:20 (...Those things can be seen in what he has made...) there is an understanding that creation offers us glimpses of God's nature. We more often that not call a snowflake or a sunset etc. "beautiful" with the sense of the eternal Artist behind it's existence. We know beauty when we see it, and we can praise God when we come face-to-face with His artistry in the world: in nature, in the Bible & theology, and even the imperfect ideas and creative acts of his broken image-bearers. If we only look to our concordance, we'll miss it.
BJ
I'm not sure what to make of this article. As a musician and worship leader, I find myself nodding in agreement the whole way through. And yet this concept seems almost extra-biblical. Other than the Psalm 27 verse that the author quotes, you have to use a lot of conjecture to make a biblical case. I took a quick look at all the instances of "beauty" in Scripture (31 in NIV), and more often than not the context described it as deceptive or fleeting. As a previous poster mentioned, Isaiah 53 says that Jesus lacked physical beauty. The only two NT mentions include a blossom's beauty being destroyed and a woman's beauty being spiritual in nature (James 1; 1 Peter 3). I'm not saying our churches should be ugly and devoid of art, but it's hard for me to place a heavy emphasis on beauty when the Bible doesn't seem to do the same.
Dave N.
The trap, if you will, with the medieval view of beauty equating with good is that our human condition seems drawn toward beauty with negative results. (Genesis 3 is a nice place to begin thinking about this.) Our culture works to create and preserve subjective standards of beauty through desperate and expensive medical means only to find that beauty is still ultimately quite fleeting. (The poor, of course, do not have access to these resources and are often seen as less-than-beautiful in our society for a variety of reasons.) We are told in scripture that God evaluates things and people in ways that are different than our own and so we must be cautious when trying to achieve beauty as some sort of objective standard or an end in itself or to necessarily trust our own subjective evaluation of what constitutes the beautiful. As for Sue above I don't know what the topic of beauty and Sarah Palin have to do with each other (other than maybe she was a beauty queen?) or liquor.