If someone visited the churches in your city—let’s say the Protestant ones—what would they conclude about Christians, in terms of beauty? If the sanctuaries in your city are anything like mine, they’d assume that Christians don’t care much about it.
Sure, we appreciate beauty when it crosses our path—in a song by Adele or a handmade leather wallet—but only if we have time for it. In the hierarchy of life, there are more important things—like paying our heating bills, getting the brakes fixed, and telling people about Jesus.
Photo courtesy of Artur Rutkowski via unsplash.com
But, while we might prioritize necessity over beauty, God never does. From the beginning, he wove aesthetics into the necessity of life. His new world wasn’t just sustainable and durable, it was also beautiful. We catch glimmers of that beauty when God observes his work and calls it “good” and when Adam enthuses after seeing Eve for the first time, but we run straight into it in chapter three—at the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
The fruit of that tree was “good for food and pleasing to the eye” (Genesis 3:6). The fruit was packed with physical nutrients, but it was also beautiful. This wasn’t a mean trick by God to tantalize Adam and Eve into sinning. Making beautiful things is simply God’s MO. From God’s perspective, beauty and truth share the same spaces.
We get this when it comes to food. We need food to live, but we want it to look good, too. So, we throw out the brown guacamole, even though it tastes just fine. We decline the gloppy oatmeal, and gag at the thought of eating one of China’s 1,000 year old eggs. The culinary arts remind us that necessity and aesthetics aren’t competing categories. Rather, they comprise a unified whole.
That is a lesson American Christianity needs to relearn, because in our zeal for truth, we’ve lost sight of beauty. If the church used to finance and display works of beauty, it now finances and displays messages of truth.
We see ourselves as defenders of truth, and we’ve had a lot to defend against—the sexual revolution of the 60’s, the post-modernism of the ‘90s, and the same-sex issues of recent years. But, holding convictions that are faithful to Scripture is only one aspect of our calling to bear God’s image and make disciples of Jesus.
Christianity through the ages has always held that wherever truth, beauty, and goodness are found, there God is. It’s in our expression of truth and goodness and beauty, that the world will encounter Jesus.
And that’s the genius of the culinary arts. Through them, on a daily basis, God reinforces that truth and beauty—necessity and aesthetics—are not competing categories. The culinary arts remind us that when we offer truth to the people in our lives and the people on Facebook we need to be concerned with beauty as well, because truth stripped of goodness and beauty is less truthful than God intends it to be.
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Shannon, thank you for this article. It was certainly a thought provoking message for me and I appreciate it. Ever since I read “Radical” by David Platt, I had wondered, how many of us, North American Christians, would be willing to sit and study the Word and to worship the Lord for hours and hours on end IF, all of our comfortable pews were taken away, if beautiful sanctuary was torn down and we had nothing but concrete or dirt floor to sit on…. would we still be willing to congregate in such place and to worship the Lord? Are we spending God’s resource on the unessential aesthetics of our church building instead of supporting our missionaries who do not have sufficient funds to pay the utility bill? These are my thoughts and tension I live with while attending a church that provides beautiful and comfortable environment for me……
So, I will chew on your article. Thank you for posting!
I agree, on first looks it seems that what I’m saying is in tension with Platt’s book, but I think there is room for both. Platt and I are challenging different aspects of American Christianity. Platt is challenging our allegiance–would we follow Jesus even if all our comforts were stripped away? That doesn’t mean, though, that a comfortless faith is ideal, simply that the lack of comfort may reveal the quality of our faith. My thoughts aren’t challenging allegiance as much as challenging our assumptions about what God values and whether we value beauty as much as God does. My guess is that the believers worshipping under those trees may still find cause to worship in the beauty of the flower on those trees.
Good point. It seems like ‘comfort’ and ‘financial investment’ string up beauty like some kind of good ol’ western style hold up, ya know? I think when it comes to church structures grandeur is linked with beauty preemptively, yet simplicity with intention and generosity really catches the ethos of God’s beauty-making endeavors in a magnificent way. Comfort (which is utilitary) and money (which is charity) have there own places, but not necessarily in the conversation of aesthetics.
That’s helpful Kay–teasing out the difference between comfort, money, and beauty. There is some overlap in our experience which makes it a bit confusing, but beauty doesn’t necessarily need to be comfortable or expensive.
Banners don’t cost much. Nor do crosses. Beauty and aesthetics don’t have to be in conflict.