Angels in the Architecture "A Wine Dark Sea and Tumbling Sky"

Like many others, I first gave serious consideration to the holiness of God after reading R.C. Sproul’s book on the subject. I also watched a video series on the subject. I remember being struck by the comprehensiveness of that attribute. The idea that God’s holiness is so pervasive and so complete that not even the angelic creatures can “fully bear that sight” was unimaginable. This first real essay calls us back to a proper understanding of God’s holiness as “the manifestation of all His attributes in all their splendor.” What a great way to put that! But Wilson doesn’t just want an academic contemplation of God’s holiness. He wants a practical application of the doctrine. Specifically to our understanding of beauty.

In short, while beginning with God’s holiness, as I am becoming more and more convinced everything should, the chapter is really about a return to an objective, universal, and invariant doctrine of beauty. Wilson actually says that sound doctrine should include a love of the beautiful.

What is beauty? Where does it come from? In the throes of modernity we have come to accept as gospel truth the maxim “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” What rubbish! And yet, it is difficult to get around the differing ideas of beauty and taste. How can I say that your love of green apples is doctrinally flawed while my love of red apples is orthodox? This isn’t really what the Bible teaches about beauty. When the Bible considers beauty it does so in contrast to the pagan notions of beauty. While we offer living sacrifices to God out of our gratitude for salvation, the pagans offered their babies to the fire and their daughters to prostitution. Which is more beautiful? While Bezalel fashioned the ark of the covenant and the implements for the worship of the living God, we have “artists” who stick a crucifix in a jar of urine and go on about their right of free speech to do it, and isn’t it clever?

While I need to think more about the standards of beauty to come to grips with what they say, I have no doubt that there are such standards. Wilson is right. Our sense of beauty, like our sense of truth is derivative, not originative. We live by presupposition. This must affect our aesthetic as well. I haven’t worked it all out, but I know it works. Wilson points to two basic responses we, as modern evangelicals, typically have to this.

“The modern evangelical either says that our aesthetic vision should be borrowed from the world, or … we must be content with no beauty at all.”

This is no way to live. Art is to reflect the glory of the living God as we are to reflect the glory of the living God. God is the first and greatest artist, and we (as well as creation) are His handiwork. We are some of the first pieces of art. Let us bask in the freedom this allows.