“True Christianity produces beauty as well as truth. … If we do not show beauty in the way we treat each other, then in the eyes of the world and in the eyes of our own children, we are destroying the truth we proclaim.”
Good post! I think beauty is precisely what many denominations in the Christian world have, more or less, lost over the last century. In one way, we've prioritized a stiff, rational theology at the expense of enchantment; in another way, we've embellished private spiritualism without a sense of refinement. Either way, truth without a practiced, lived-out, visible beauty is inauthentic, in my view, or at least it shows the person is in a dark, ugly place to some degree. It is, in part, Job's sense of beauty after seeing God with his own eyes that brings him to repentance! "Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know." (Job 42:3) This sense of wonder, awe, amazement, and enchantment has a deep relationship with knowledge, which imparts our sense of objectivity for discerning truth. The two seem to be inseparable–––much to explore.
Good post! I think beauty is precisely what many denominations in the Christian world have, more or less, lost over the last century. In one way, we've prioritized a stiff, rational theology at the expense of enchantment; in another way, we've embellished private spiritualism without a sense of refinement. Either way, truth without a practiced, lived-out, visible beauty is inauthentic, in my view, or at least it shows the person is in a dark, ugly place to some degree. It is, in part, Job's sense of beauty after seeing God with his own eyes that brings him to repentance! "Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know." (Job 42:3) This sense of wonder, awe, amazement, and enchantment has a deep relationship with knowledge, which imparts our sense of objectivity for discerning truth. The two seem to be inseparable–––much to explore.