Page 3 of 3Thus church buildings of evangelicals tend toward the utilitarian; we try to make the most of the space and furnishings for multiple uses. Few congregations make beautiful architecture and furnishings a priority. Indeed, we tend to be suspicious of anything grand or ornate, or of fine craftsmanship that draws attention to itself. But why?
Perhaps it is because of our prior commitment to truth and goodness. We may feel that spending attention and money on beauty would obscure the clear lines of truth and goodness. Perhaps we feel in our bones something of the Puritans' suspicion of the distracting and obfuscating elaborations of the Roman Church.
Many of us lack even an adequate vocabulary by which to make beauty part of our shared life. For every hymn or contemporary song that celebrates beauty, whether "For the Beauty of the Earth" or "O Lord, You're Beautiful," there are ten that celebrate God's truthfulness, power, and holiness. (Ironically, evangelicalism's love of music, and therefore its genuine love of this expression of beauty, shines through the hymns and songs that praise quite different attributes of God.)
How much of this evangelical ambivalence is defensible, especially in the light of God's own beauty and the beauty of his Earth? Scripture recognizes beauty from beginning to end—from the opening hymns that celebrate God's goodness in creation, through its matchless psalms, to the vision of the New Jerusalem as a splendid architectural wonder.
We evangelicals often practice a "war-time ethic," in which we sacrifice things that would be good in peacetime but seem inappropriate in a time of crisis. There's no point, we believe, in rearranging the flowers sliding off tables as the Titanic slopes down. Why "prettify" a church when the money could be spent on evangelism or relief for the poor?
Yet Jesus confronted this sort of situation and praised the extravagant offering of expensive perfume as perfectly appropriate (John 12). Do we yet know how to integrate this teaching with our other gospel priorities of truth telling and need-meeting?
The connection, I believe, lies here: Beauty is part of Jesus' kingdom. In brief, we should give proper place to beauty—by creating and enjoying it, even writing a theology of it—as an integral part of the "war effort." Beauty is not mere ornamentation that we dutifully defer until the coming of the New Jerusalem. It is an essential part of our gospel, which must be manifest now as we bear witness to kingdom life. Beyond what Dubay and Scarry suggest, this is the true linkage of truth, goodness, and beauty: the full-orbed shalom of the kingdom of God.
Therefore, if we neglect beauty in our homes, in our churches, and in the education of our children, we will be cultivating, and propagating, a deficient religion: the heresy of an un-beautiful Christianity. To preach, and live, the whole counsel of God, including the beautiful—this is the best apologetic we can offer.
John Stackhouse Jr. is the Sangwoo Youtong Chee Professor of Theology and Culture at Regent College, and editor of No Other Gods Before Me? Evangelicals Encounter the World's Religions (Baker, 2001).
CHRISTIANITY TODAY, January 7, 2002, Vol. 46, No. 1, Page 58
