B is for Beauty

This section on "beauty" is from A Is for Abductive: The Language of the Emerging Church by Leonard Sweet, Brian McLaren, and Jerry Haselmayer (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003). The notion of beauty is particularly important for the Church today. My wife is especially sensitive to beauty (and lack of beauty as well) in church spaces and meetings. Here are some clips from his section (pp. 39-42).

Beauty: A vibration or resonance between novelty and order that transports us to heights and depths outside ourselves not otherwise reached. In the presence of beauty we become transformed into artists of creation engaged in being. The postmodern church will reconceive itself as a community of artists--the church as an art colony, if you will.

Beauty truth: Another name for the revelation of God. Handel's oratorio Messiah is, for postmoderns, "evidence that demands a verdict."

Maybe you studied the Romantic poets in college. They are of special interest to people doing postmodern ministry because romanticism was a recurring protest movement in the modern era representing a dissatisfaction with modern rationalism. In some ways romanticism anticipated postmodernism. John Keats, one of the great Romantic poets of the early 19th century, said, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." In these memorable words Keats struck a cord with which postmodern hearts resonate, although "beauty" has been the favorite category for God among many theologians throughout history (Jonathan Edwards, for example).

Perhaps the most effective apologetic for today is beauty, and not just beauty in the arts, but also beauty in open-book relationships. Along with the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the NT (New Testament), postmodern seekers want to see teh beauty of the Gospel According to You (the Gospels' continuing story in you) in the YT (Your Testament--a life well-lived) and the YG (Your Gospel), the Fifth Gospel.

If modernity was the age of the engineer (formulas, blueprints, measurements) and the lawyer (case, evidence, proof, argument), the postmodern world will be the age of the artist. A formula or statistic is about as persuasive to a postmodern heart as an interpretive dance would have been to a modern mind.

Not that postmodern folk are anti-intellectual. Rather, they have expanded their respect for the God-created human mind beyond the narrow confines of rational analysis to intuition, imagination, and aesthetics. For them, the appreciation of beauty (along with goodness) is as essential to the pursuit of truth as was the scale or slide rule to the modern scientist.

In ministry this means that ugly is out: ugly buildings, ugly bulletins, ugly sermon outlines (the nine P's of Philippians), ugly hymns.(bold print mine)

People get ugly in ugly spaces.

Don't be confused here: Don't assume that this sensitivity to beauty means postmodernity is about a "politically correct" niceness and saccharine sweetness. We are talking about beauty, not "niceness" or "prettiness." Full-bodied beauty can contain discord, clash, burn, sting, ugliness. For example, as works of art, Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple and Amistad and Schindler's List are beautiful, yet each contains horrific ugliness. What is the difference between the ugly violence in The Color Purple and the ugly opulence in, say, a religious broadcast on cable TV (aside from the hairstyles)?

As you prepare a sermon, therefore, you ask yourself, "Where's the beauty?" As you design the landscape or interior decor for your building, you ask, "Where's the beauty?" As you select singers or musicians or actors or dancers for public worship, you lead them into an understanding that beauty is not simply an adornment or attraction added to our message; beauty is essential to the message itself, because there is a beauty to holiness, and the concept of "glory" itself is hard to extract from beauty. (bold print mine)

Maybe beauty seemed optional in the modern matrix, but no longer. The old aphorism about cleanliness may never have been true; maybe it should have said that beauty is next to godliness.