Though many believers give lip service to the importance of beauty, the truth is that they often see it as a luxury at best and a seductive distraction at worst. After all, when it comes to the essential task of sharing the gospel, shouldn’t we prioritize the truth? Indeed, many esteemed Christian thinkers insist that truth is paramount in our exposition of the good news. Without necessarily disagreeing, it’s also worth asking, Does beauty always come at the cost of truth? That is, does beauty necessarily obscure or overshadow the truth? We’ll come back to these questions, but they are worth turning over in our minds as we begin a deeper consideration of the role of beauty in our Christian witness.
What is the apologetic value of beauty? In order to answer this question, we need to think about our cultural moment. The West is increasingly post-Christian, abandoning its Christian heritage at an accelerated rate. Consequently, many have grown jaded and suspicious of God’s people. It’s also worth stressing that ours is a moment of renewed spiritual interest. What’s telling here, however, is the direction of that spiritual interest. Plenty of people are seeking spiritual answers, but they’re seemingly turning to anything but Christianity. Taking a consumer approach to everything from healing crystals to tarot cards, people are freely mixing and matching their religious practices. Sociologist Tara Isabella Burton dubs them the “religiously remixed” in her book Strange Rites. We are thus in the odd position of dealing with a culture that is both spiritually open and resistant to the church.
Artistic Beauty
It’s not hard to point to the salutary effect that art has on non-believers. Think of the Victorian novelist and poet Thomas Hardy. Author of such tragic masterpieces as Far from the Madding Crowd and the Mayer of Casterbridge, Hardy was a reluctant atheist who nevertheless found himself drawn to the haunting glories of hymns, especially Christmas carols. He would sneak into the back of churches during the Advent season to relish their haunting melodies. In our own time, an outspoken atheist like Alain de Botton remains captivated by the vision of Christianity, especially its inspiration behind the architectural marvels that fill the cities of Europe. In our post-Christian times, a cathedral can be a powerful conversation starter.
Though it is much more than a mere tool, beauty, whether in natural or artistic form, is able to bypass the natural lines of resistance, consider, for instance, the apostle Paul’s approach at the Areopagus in Acts 17. In this celebrated chapter, Paul finds himself surrounded by the key influencers of the culture—poets, philosophers, and politicians, many of whom gathered at this place simply to tell or “hear something new (21).” Like our own, this was a culture filled with spiritual seekers: “Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols (16).” Rather than simply attacking their sacred objects, however, Paul acknowledges some of their artistic insights, quoting from two pagan poets to argue that in God, we “live and move and have our being” and that we are, in fact, “God’s offspring” (28).
From great literature to great films, the cultural arena is filled with artistic beauty that can help us to make sense of the gospel. When we draw on these sources, we’re offering a variation of Paul’s phrase, “as some of your own poets have said.” But in order to do that, we need to pay attention to those poets, whether they’re novelists, painters, or filmmakers. For those interested, I (Ken) have put together a list of films with spiritual and moral themes.
Natural Beauty
Regarding natural beauty, consider the teeming bounties that confront us in the microcosm and the macrocosm. In the microcosm, something as seemingly insignificant as diatoms (a.k.a., pond scum) reveals a stunning array of shapes and vibrant colors, all of which point back to a supreme artist. Perhaps the easiest example to point to would be a snowflake, each of which is an individual revelation of singular beauty. Examples can easily be multiplied. What’s astonishing about all this intricacy is that it’s remained invisible to us for most of human history. Though modern science is often inaccurately pitted against the church, it’s heartening to see that the Lord has seen fit to greatly enhance our worship through the very technologies that are supposedly displacing him—a supreme irony if ever there was one!
Conversely, the macrocosm reveals a universe of such power and immensity that many a skeptic has been reduced to awestruck wonder. From the colossal hurricane that’s been raging for centuries on Jupiter to the enchanting realms of glowing nebulae, “the heavens declare the glory of the Lord.”
How Beauty Persuades
At the beginning of this piece, we inquired about the apologetic value of beauty. How can beauty aid our efforts in sharing the good news? The apologetic power of beauty consists in its unique ability to bridge the gap between the head and heart. One striking example involves Holly Ordway, my (Cameron) old grad school professor. As Ordway moved away from the atheism of her youth, one obstacle remained: Christ’s incarnation. Try as she might, Ordway simply could not clear the intellectual hurdle of reconciling Jesus’s divinity with his humanity. As she writes in Apologetics and the Christian Imagination, it was the figure of Aslan from C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia that helped her to make sense of the Incarnation. While theological treatments were helpful, it was the imaginative vision on display in Lewis’s story that gave life to the concept.
Those of us who wish to make disciples of all people in our post-Christian moment overlook beauty at our own peril. For those who counter that establishing the truth is of the first order, we don’t disagree. We’ll only add that the truth must also make sense in terms of offering a unifying vision of reality. It’s one thing to be told that the heavens declare the glory of God and quite another to have this declaration confirmed by a blazing night sky. Beauty is our friend in the endeavor to bring people to the truth. We don’t need to shy away from it.
Photo Credit: ©Getty Images/Tom Merton
Kenneth Boa equips people to love well (being), learn well (knowing), and live well (doing). He is a writer, teacher, speaker, and mentor and is the President of Reflections Ministries, The Museum of Created Beauty, and Trinity House Publishers.
Publications by Dr. Boa include Conformed to His Image, Handbook to Prayer, Handbook to Leadership, Faith Has Its Reasons, Rewriting Your Broken Story, Life in the Presence of God, Leverage, and Recalibrate Your Life.
Dr. Boa holds a B.S. from Case Institute of Technology, a Th.M. from Dallas Theological Seminary, a Ph.D. from New York University, and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in England.
