Credo
18 March 2024

In the ETHOS feature article of July 2019, Dr. Calvin Chong bemoaned “life in an increasingly aestheticized world.” Indeed, beauty can lead to idolatry rather than true worship. Perhaps the Protestant tradition is not entirely wrong when they warned about the potential danger of beauty becoming an idol in the human heart.

However, this shouldn’t be the whole picture that we derive about beauty in the Christian life. Could there be a positive contribution of beauty for Christian theology? Could there be any sound and fruitful theological aesthetics coming from the Protestant tradition? Not forgetting about any potential dangers, I seek to affirm while offering a critical assessment of beauty at the same time.

In the words of Jonathan Edwards: “God is God, and distinguished from all other beings, and exalted above them, chiefly by his divine beauty.” For Edwards, it is important to know God as beauty that can be enjoyed rather than as power that we should fear.

Surely, the Bible teaches us about the importance of the fear of God. However, what Edwards meant is another kind of fear. Whenever our religiosity is more driven by fear rather than by love, amazement, and enjoyment, it is a sign that we need more beauty, more theological aesthetics in our spiritual lives.

The lack of aesthetic dimension in our knowledge of God can pave the way for legalism—which makes Christian spirituality unattractive, for it fails to experience God as the highest enjoyment in life. What people have is a long list of burdensome religious duties that must be fulfilled without joy.

God is not a kind of static entity that should be thought of in abstract metaphysics using philosophical terms, rather than a disposition to share love and beauty. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth … And God saw that it was good.”

The creation of the universe is unnecessary, for it does not in the least add to the glory of God. Yet, unnecessity is precisely the nature of beauty. Belden C. Lane calls God’s self-communication (of glory, beauty, and love) a wholly superfluous action in an ambiguous sense: it is both wholly unnecessary and naturally overflowing from inexhaustible wellsprings.

Coherently, Christian spirituality that is driven by divine beauty will make good works unnecessary (for our salvation), yet they will still overflow from a thankful heart that enjoys the fullness of divine beauty.

We live in a highly pragmatic society, which values everything according to its function. What is the “function” of many colourful flowers in a vase anyway? Why not just in black and white? Criticising the view that we should only use things in this world only for their necessity, John Calvin wrote:

Has the Lord clothed the flowers with the great beauty that greets our eyes, the sweetness of smell that is wafted upon our nostrils, and yet will it be unlawful for our eyes to be affected by that beauty, or our sense of smell by the sweetness of that odour? What? … Did he not, in short, render many things attractive to us, apart from their necessary use?

A world that tries to save on the cost of beauty turns out to be a reductive and poor world.

It is the nature of beauty to want to be shared. We do not put flower arrangements in a dark storeroom. Beauty is not to be self-contained because of its superfluous (overflowing) nature. One who does not share it only proves that he/she has not experienced the fullness of beauty.

Therefore, this aesthetic dimension can help Christians to share their Christian lives joyfully, not as a burdensome but as a delightful religion. Sharing the gospel as beautiful news can free Christians from coercive expectation.

In this context, the philosopher Alexander Nehamas writes:

Aesthetic judgement, I believe, never commands universal agreement, and neither a beautiful object nor a work of art ever engages a catholic community. Beauty creates smaller societies, no less important or serious because they are partial, and, from the point of view of its members, each one is orthodox—orthodox, however, without thinking of all others as heresies.

We might not agree with Nehamas regarding his notion on relative orthodoxy. However, he is right in saying that because of its persuasive nature, beauty contents itself with smaller societies– spelled and amazed by the beauty of beauty.

Sharing beauty is free from the pressure of unrealistic expectations of universal acceptance.

In Christian theology, beauty finds its perfect embodiment in the person of Jesus. However, the Bible makes a careful assessment on its notion. “His appearance was so marred” (Isa 52:14) and yet this is the true exaltation of the servant of God.

Here, we are invited to perceive beauty not as visible (worldly) glory but as true hidden glory in the shame of the cross. “God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are” (1 Cor 1:28). He chose what was ugly in the world’s view to show his true beauty.

Just as what is wise, strong, and high in the world can make people boast before God (cf. 1 Cor 1:27–29), (worldly) beauty can also keep us away from doxology. In the end, human beings do not worship God but themselves instead.

Therefore, beauty is not absolute in bringing people to God. Sometimes, it is the experience of the ugly– the absence of beauty– that leads people to seek and find true divine beauty in God.

Living in a fallen world, Christians are not exempted from the experience of ugliness. We do not find the gospel in the fact that those who believe in God will be beautified, but rather that Christ had borne the ugliness of our fallenness in his suffering and death on the cross.

Living a Christian life does not mean idolising beauty as a false god but participating in true divine beauty, a participation that leads one to be willing to experience the ugly. If Christians are “being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another,” then we should have the courage to bear the shame and ugliness of the cross with Christ. Whereas one might be tempted to find beauty in the beautifying of self, true beauty in Christ is only found and reflected in the joyful perseverance in bearing our ugly cross.

Rev Dr Billy Kristanto is a lecturer at International Reformed Evangelical Seminary Jakarta. Graduated from Heidelberg University (Ph.D in musicology, Th.D in systematic theology), he is currently a member of the Theological Commission of World Reformed Fellowship.