How Can I See the Beauty of God?

00:00:00.000 | [Music]

00:00:04.000 | What is God's beauty? Can we see it? Can we feel it? If we go looking for his beauty in scripture, what are we looking for?

00:00:13.000 | If we go looking for his beauty in creation, where do we find it?

00:00:17.000 | Answers to questions like these comprise the essence of my favorite book of 2018, Jonathan King's "The Beauty of the Lord, Theology as Aesthetics,"

00:00:29.000 | published by Lexum Press. Jonathan King was a new author to me in 2018. I discovered that in seminary he studied under Michael Horton,

00:00:38.000 | and he completed his PhD work at TEDS under Kevin Van Hooser. Jonathan now serves as lecturer in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the Universitas Paulina Harapan in Indonesia.

00:00:51.000 | Today I am breaking the mold. This will be a long conversation. I suspect it'll go an hour or so. Jonathan joins me from his apartment in Jakarta.

00:01:01.000 | It's 7 a.m. in Minneapolis, 8 p.m. Jakarta. I'm still waking up. Jonathan, hello. Thank you for your book, "The Beauty of the Lord, Theology as Aesthetics."

00:01:11.000 | As you know, for many of us, beauty is a very subjective concept. Divine beauty is, for us, really even more abstract altogether.

00:01:22.000 | But here at DG, of course, we love talking about God's beauty, Christ's beauty, the beauty of the cross even, and of course we should.

00:01:31.000 | Aesthetically, of course, all of us are moved by beautiful music, beautiful paintings, beautiful images that we like on Instagram.

00:01:39.000 | We respond to beauty instinctually. In your excellent book, you argue that divine beauty is objective. It's defined by a certain fittingness.

00:01:51.000 | So let's dive right into it. Take as long as you need. Explain this connection for us between beauty and fittingness in scripture.

00:02:00.000 | Yeah, it's something like the definition of beauty that I start with as my baseline is coming from the early classical, patristic, and medieval period,

00:02:12.000 | where the concept of beauty was not a sideline and it certainly wasn't just a subjective thing.

00:02:19.000 | The gist of the definition of beauty is something like this. Beauty is an intrinsic quality of things which, when it's perceived, pleases the mind by a certain kind of fittingness.

00:02:33.000 | Now, it's contextual, but within a given context, when you perceive something, you see it's both objective with a subjective response elicited to it.

00:02:43.000 | So I apply the idea of fittingness as an overarching term, which captures the range of aesthetic properties that identify innumerable qualities of beauty.

00:02:57.000 | So fittingness, of course, is with the same type of quality may or may not be fitting within a given context of beauty.

00:03:07.000 | That's why I think it's a very good term, kind of a more of an umbrella type of term, but a term that can be applied.

00:03:14.000 | And you wouldn't just say something has – the delicacy of something or the boldness or something is a fine quality.

00:03:24.000 | You would say within a certain setting, a certain dimension, a certain context, it is or is not fitting, right?

00:03:31.000 | So the judgment of fittingness, therefore, it implies a judgment about the degree to which something or someone exhibits beauty.

00:03:40.000 | So – but that something or someone is not limited to an object or a thing as we normally think of in such terms.

00:03:49.000 | It includes actions and expressions as well.

00:03:54.000 | When you want me to – you've asked about relating beauty and fittingness in regards from Scripture.

00:04:00.000 | I mean, right at the very beginning of Scripture, you know, God created the heavens and the earth.

00:04:06.000 | Of course, in the Greek, that's captured by the word cosmos.

00:04:11.000 | And cosmos itself implies an ordered arrangement of things.

00:04:19.000 | It's a combination of both orderliness and adornment, and it's kind of embedded within that meaning.

00:04:28.000 | The Hebrew text, of course, doesn't use – you know, it doesn't use the word universe.

00:04:33.000 | But when it talks about the heavens and the earth or the host of heaven, for instance, in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew text, we – it's used the word cosmos.

00:04:45.000 | So, as an example, in Acts 1724, of course, in the New Testament, it says, "The God who made the world," cosmos, "and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man."

00:04:58.000 | Now, I don't want to, you know, make – you know, try to wring too much out of this, but I do want to just kind of set the stage that right from the beginning, the creation, there's implied a certain orderliness.

00:05:10.000 | And then from that, do we see fittingness in different ways?

00:05:14.000 | And then being spelled out in – right at the beginning of the Bible, when God makes his assessment of the days of creation being good, and then ultimately, at the end of day six, all of creation being very good.

00:05:30.000 | The assessment there includes an assessment of God's delight in his creation.

00:05:35.000 | The word tov, the Hebrew word tov, is not just something that's proper and good in some functional sense, but it has ethical and aesthetic connotations as well.

00:05:49.000 | Reflecting on the translation of that text into Greek in the Septuagint, those translators translated tov to the Greek word kailos.

00:06:01.000 | Kailos is rich with aesthetic connotation.

00:06:06.000 | In fact, it's – it has this idea of being aesthetically beautiful, morally excellent, noble, organically sound, desirable, praiseworthy, such things as that.

00:06:19.000 | So, I guess what I want to highlight here is that we have a thick theological – we want to have a thick theological picture.

00:06:26.000 | Right from the very project of creation itself, we want to have that thickness.

00:06:31.000 | And not importing – we don't have to import anything in artificially.

00:06:35.000 | I think it's their kind of implied connotations.

00:06:39.000 | Now, the fittingness we see right in the way that – the aesthetic sense of fittingness is right in the way God set up the realms and the habitants of those realms.

00:06:50.000 | We see how the forming of habitations characterizes the first three days, while the filling of those habitations with inhabitants respectively fit for them, characterizes days four to six.

00:07:04.000 | In other words, the artistic patterning depicting the archetypal week of creation displays the aesthetic aspect entails in God's expressed covenant creational purposes.

00:07:15.000 | Now, that's just one example, kind of, you know, at the beginning, but what we can kind of tease out is that things – there is a fittingness.

00:07:25.000 | And if there ever should be a fittingness that is consequential, it needs to be right at the very beginning.

00:07:33.000 | In other words, that it was intended and designed and created by God just so.

00:07:38.000 | Now, in terms of the more – I don't know what's – going back to God as creator and the very nature of God, what I want to – what I argue is that beauty corresponds in some way to the attributes of God.

00:07:55.000 | Now, when I get to the doctrine of God part of my book, which is chapter two, I do argue strongly and definitively that beauty actually is an attribute of God, not just somehow associated with the attributes.

00:08:11.000 | But, you know, we start off with just kind of posing that question.

00:08:15.000 | And then – but as an attribute of God, as part of God's nature or somehow reflective of his nature, the work of God, the work of God outside of himself, creation, redemption, consummation, the overall work and all the work of God is – my claim, my argument is that it's – there's a consistent and fitting expression of the outworking of God's beauty, of divine beauty.

00:08:42.000 | So, create – all that God does is certainly more than just beautiful.

00:08:50.000 | But it's not less than that either.

00:08:53.000 | Right.

00:08:54.000 | It's all imbued inherently because the – at least in my – what I'm putting forward is that beauty is inherent to God and it's reflective of everything that he does, which is the outward expression of his glory.

00:09:11.000 | So – but where this really comes to its kind of concreteness, you know, it's not just in talking about the nature of God in his triuneness and so forth, although as fun – as critical as that needs to be established or at least kind of argued for.

00:09:29.000 | You know, in the expression of God in the person of Christ, the most central claim, the most central claim after arguing that beauty is – it's appropriate to say that beauty is part of God's very nature and it's a quality of the very outward expression of his glory.

00:09:50.000 | I argue that the sun's fittingness as incarnate redeemer is the critical lens for seeing God's beauty.

00:09:58.000 | So again, the sun's fittingness.

00:09:59.000 | Now, Christ became – you know, we just celebrated – you know, we're still in January.

00:10:04.000 | We celebrated Christmas last month, the incarnation of the babe, the child Jesus.

00:10:09.000 | But from his birth all the way up, you know, until his death and then post-death, his resurrection, ascension into heaven, there's – the form of Christ was not just static, was not just the same.

00:10:23.000 | He – in this world, he didn't come as the – he didn't display himself to the natural eye.

00:10:32.000 | And you know what I'm kind of getting at there.

00:10:34.000 | But he did display himself to the normal way that people were perceiving him in majestic glory, triumph, and power.

00:10:41.000 | He presented himself in a very humble means and that was all intentional.

00:10:46.000 | That was by design.

00:10:48.000 | Traditionally, of course, we refer to that as Christ being in the state of his humiliation prior to his exaltation.

00:10:57.000 | There's a fittingness throughout the entire life of Christ and that fittingness is kind of – captures or at least points to the idea that it's sourced from the very beauty of God itself.

00:11:07.000 | Hmm. Critical lens indeed.

00:11:09.000 | So everything Christ did in redemption perfectly fit our need, perfectly displayed God.

00:11:16.000 | Therefore, everything Christ is and does and says is essentially beautiful.

00:11:21.000 | Exactly. Exactly right.

00:11:23.000 | Excellent.

00:11:24.000 | I want to – I want to talk history for a moment and then return to something fascinating that you say about the glory of Christ in human form.

00:11:32.000 | First, what I found your book to be a great help in decoding for me is how older Christians like Augustine and Anselm speak of divine beauty.

00:11:41.000 | There's always been some disconnect as I've read their works and a lot of works, medieval, even Edwards, talking about beauty.

00:11:48.000 | You mentioned the Greek origins of the concept of beauty as an influence.

00:11:52.000 | How does – how does that influence inform how we read the early church fathers when it comes to beauty?

00:11:59.000 | Yeah, and that's something that I'm – you know, there's a lot of work today in evangelical circles, evangelical and reformed circles on retrieving, efforts of retrieval, going back to the early sources and seeing what the church fathers and schoolmen had to say and trying to, you know, appropriate it anew.

00:12:20.000 | Well, my work is not simply a work of retrieval, although it sort of is, in that I look at some of the prominent theologians and schoolmen in both the East and the Eastern Christianity, Western Christianity, and I do appropriate.

00:12:38.000 | I do appropriate some of the best of their insights and for – not just kind of like a magpie picking and choosing, you know, what I wanted, but I mean I tried to do it in a coherent, consistent way, showing that the beauty was fundamental to understanding reality itself, reality, the structure of reality.

00:12:59.000 | So, where this originally came from was the idea of what's called the transcendentals of being.

00:13:06.000 | Being is the most general and comprehensive concept that we have to describe everything that exists.

00:13:14.000 | So, you know, the idea of a to be is a property common to all things that are – that really exist, right?

00:13:22.000 | But to get to do more than simply talking about something as existing, the transcendental – you know, throughout the early patristic era and up through the medieval era, up to the Middle Ages, beauty in general or on the whole was considered a transcendental quality of being along with truth and goodness and oneness.

00:13:47.000 | Now, this wasn't kind of a de novo, a brand new kind of conceptual framework.

00:13:54.000 | It's actually from the early Greek period.

00:13:57.000 | There's what's called the triad, the transcendentals of, say, particularly, triad meaning the three of truth, goodness, and beauty were coming out of the writings of Plato and others in the early Greek period.

00:14:13.000 | What the church fathers did and theologians were kind of recognizing that they were onto something, that reality, that the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty correspond – that corresponding to the good, the true, and the beautiful, they speak of reality being knowable.

00:14:32.000 | Reality in its right form being desirable.

00:14:37.000 | And reality in its best – its proper expression being – taking delight in it, causing a sense of delight to those that behold that reality.

00:14:48.000 | So in these terms, it's an ontological thing, not simply epistemological like where – like some method of knowing something, like just a methodology.

00:14:58.000 | It's meanings to say that transcendentals of being get at the very ontology of reality.

00:15:06.000 | And their insight was, yes, God created the heavens and the earth in such a way that it is in fact knowable, at least explorable and discoverable in a growing, developing kind of way, not that you know everything just by perceiving it all the time.

00:15:25.000 | And that things – that there's a propriety to things, that something in its – what by its nature was meant to be is good.

00:15:34.000 | There's a goodness, an inherent goodness.

00:15:37.000 | And that when things are in their order and their propriety as they were meant to be, it causes delight.

00:15:45.000 | In this sense, beauty is not just a discrete thing like, oh, isn't that sunset beautiful or isn't that vista of the meadow something beautiful to behold?

00:15:56.000 | But it was actually – I mean it literally is the metaphysics that they were working with.

00:16:02.000 | But the point is – or their insight was the structure of reality we can address and talk about in these terms.

00:16:12.000 | And so the theologians in the early church focusing on beauty brought out the subjective nature of it.

00:16:19.000 | And they did it in different ways, but for instance, Anselm talked about the fittingness of God's plan of redemption.

00:16:28.000 | You know, the fittingness of, say, how a tree was involved in the devil's temptation and how in the plan of God the devil is defeated by the Messiah being crucified on a tree.

00:16:44.000 | Anselm, getting this in large measure from the legacy of Augustine himself, you know, they paid attention to these symmetries, to these proportions, to the structure of the plan.

00:16:57.000 | Now, sometimes their metaphysical assumptions drove them to overqualify something or overstate something.

00:17:05.000 | As an example, Anselm, following the previous lead of Augustine, I might add, said, well, those that God redeems are going to, you know, one for one, replace the fallen angels.

00:17:21.000 | Because everything God does is perfectly symmetrical in such a way that there wouldn't be anything that was, well, we have too many of one.

00:17:29.000 | So, they just kind of assumed, they took some of their aesthetic assumptions and drove them maybe a little bit too much.

00:17:38.000 | But, you know, we can, I think, be forgiving if something is over-presumed or something like that, at least flag it.

00:17:47.000 | But we don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

00:17:50.000 | And we see in the very beginning of, again, going back to Genesis, the idea of the good, the true, and the beautiful, again, part of the created order.

00:17:58.000 | Now, this is in the context of Genesis 3, where in the event of the fall of Adam and Eve, but what I'm quoting here in Genesis 3, 6, precedes the event of the fall itself.

00:18:09.000 | So, according to verse 6 in chapter 3, "So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food," and there's the good, "and it was a delight to the eyes," there's the beautiful,

00:18:23.000 | "and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise," there's the true, "she took of its fruit and ate."

00:18:32.000 | So, I mean, so I think, you know, you can see these correspondences without forcing it, you know.

00:18:42.000 | And the early, the patristics and the medieval theologians, that's what they saw.

00:18:48.000 | They said, "Yeah, we can affirm some of these insights from, you know, our early, some of the Greek sages and see where they're consistent with the biblical story."

00:19:03.000 | Yeah, the transcendentals as categories seem to be there from the very start of Genesis right there embedded in Genesis 3.

00:19:11.000 | That's good. Historically, I feel like I have a better grasp of these conversations in the early church, thanks to your book.

00:19:19.000 | So, thank you. You know, your fundamental argument in the book is profoundly simple, that everything God does is beautiful in its God-glorifying nature.

00:19:30.000 | Everything God does is beautiful in its God-glorifying nature.

00:19:37.000 | We've talked about fittingness. Now expound on this, the God-centeredness of beauty.

00:19:43.000 | The God-centeredness of beauty has everything to do with starting with the objective beauty of the person of Christ, the beauty of the work of Christ,

00:19:52.000 | which is traditionally called redemption accomplished, and the beauty of Christ's work ongoing through the Holy Spirit, traditionally called redemption applied.

00:20:02.000 | So, those three things are the preeminent aspects of how everything God does is beautiful in its God-glorifying nature.

00:20:10.000 | Now, I might add, all of this is in accord with the redemptive eschatological fulfillment of his original creational purposes.

00:20:19.000 | So, I start off with the doctrine of God. I discuss how the economical activities of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit reflect a proper fittingness,

00:20:28.000 | but more than a proper fittingness, a perfect fittingness in all of their outward works.

00:20:33.000 | What makes it perfect? What makes it perfect is because the fullness of God's glory is brought to consummative fulfillment.

00:20:44.000 | That's why it's a perfect fittingness.

00:20:47.000 | But I use this phrase, the Christological contours of beauty, and that refers to how the outworking of God's eternal plan through the Son is what brings this consummative expression of fullness of God's glory.

00:21:05.000 | The one other point is how the beauty of our formation as Christian disciples involves Christians living out fittingly their identity in Christ.

00:21:16.000 | That participation of the imitatio Christi, of imitating Christ, of following him, of having this attitude in you, which was in Christ Jesus,

00:21:26.000 | and all these ways that the New Testament calls us to maturity in Christ, there's a fittingness of being conformed to his very nature, to his image.

00:21:38.000 | That's part of this God-centeredness, except it's from God-centeredness more focused to Christ-centeredness in this case, our spiritual transformation from the Father through the Son in the Spirit.

00:21:51.000 | Yes. And speaking of the Trinity, explain this line to a lay audience.

00:21:57.000 | I love this quote, "The beauty of God ad extra, outwardly, as it is perceived and experienced by human beings is what most clearly evinces or displays that perfection of beatitude and sense of delight that belongs to the Trinity ad intra, inwardly."

00:22:17.000 | Page 59. You mentioned this earlier, but explain to us again what are you getting at when we talk about it like this?

00:22:23.000 | Yeah, I really appreciate you selecting that particular quote. It was one that I kind of came to little by little.

00:22:30.000 | What this has to do with is the theological aesthetic relation between beauty and God's beatitude.

00:22:36.000 | And so we can follow the line of argument for this particular, this theological aesthetic relation like this, in four points.

00:22:47.000 | Point one, the beatitude of God is the eternal condition in himself of absolute satisfaction and delight.

00:22:56.000 | And that's bound up with God's fullness of glory as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

00:23:02.000 | Now, that's a traditional understanding of God's beatitude. This is not something that I'm kind of just coming up with myself.

00:23:09.000 | We may not hear a lot about the attribute of God's beatitude, but it is traditional throughout church history.

00:23:16.000 | Point two is the outward beauty of God is expressed and perceivable as an aesthetic quality of his glory in his work of creation, redemption, and consummation.

00:23:30.000 | And it's important here to call attention to the distinctive characteristic of beauty, which is that beauty as beauty is not desired as a means to another end.

00:23:41.000 | But the pleasure or delight associated with beholding the beautiful is its own end.

00:23:48.000 | Think ahead. You might even be able to tell where I'm going to here.

00:23:53.000 | And point three is that characteristic to communicate delight as its own end is correlative to that absolute self-delight that characterizes God's own eternal, internal life as Father, Son, and Spirit.

00:24:09.000 | Okay, so beauty, the uniqueness of beauty as opposed to goodness or truth, to just talk about the transcendentals there, is that that beauty evokes a delight, but you don't use that delight to then do something more.

00:24:25.000 | It is its own end. And we talk about God's beatitude. It is its own end. It's self-delight. He's self-satisfied.

00:24:34.000 | Where I draw this all together is with the postulation that the beauty of God in his outward works, as it is perceived and experienced by human beings, is what most clearly betrays or points to that perfection of beatitude and sense of delight that belongs to God in himself as Father, Son, and Spirit.

00:24:55.000 | Amen. Beautiful. I love that. So, are you comfortable with the language of God as being the happiest being in the universe?

00:25:03.000 | Sure.

00:25:04.000 | Good. Yeah, me too. And I think it's huge. I just wanted to state it. He wants to be seen and enjoyed and delighted in. You're a student of Jonathan Edwards. What does he add here to the conversation on understanding happiness and specifically how we enjoy God's beauty?

00:25:23.000 | Yeah, I mean, the idea, in fact, the actual, in English, the use of the word happiness is specifically what Edward uses in terms of human beings sharing in, ultimately, and in our eternal state, God's happiness.

00:25:41.000 | Now, for Edwards, he affirms, of course, both the objective nature of God as well as the subjective dynamic of beauty. The objective aspect of God, he refers to as primary beauty.

00:25:54.000 | But for him, it's a function of, or in terms of this consent or conformity to God. So, for Edwards, primary beauty is not simply in regard to objects or things or the sunset or whatever. It's within the context of relationship.

00:26:15.000 | And so it presumes persons with volition and the capacity to love. And so that's the – so to the extent that our wills and our love and our affections are attuned and drawn into God, to that extent, we're participating in what Edwards calls primary beauty.

00:26:37.000 | But at the same time, he affirms the subjective dimension of primary beauty in terms of the delight or aesthetic pleasure that elicits when primary beauty is present or perceived.

00:26:49.000 | So he says that it's especially in the context of God's saving grace, salvificly, that human beings infused by the Holy Spirit are granted these spiritual affections, these religious affections that accord with the beauty and the delight of God's nature.

00:27:10.000 | So if our affections, if our religious – what he calls our religious affections accord with the delight in God's nature, we're participating in that delight. He says it this way. I'll do a short Edwards quote.

00:27:22.000 | "The first effect of the power of God in the heart in regeneration is to give the heart a divine taste or sense to cause it to have a relish of the loveliness and sweetness of the supreme excellency of the divine nature."

00:27:40.000 | So yeah, he's God the happiest person in the existence, and this is Edwards' way of saying yes, and that sense of the heart is how God draws us into that.

00:27:52.000 | Beautiful. Yeah, that relational connection is really important. I love the fittingness angle of your book as the objective basis of aesthetics.

00:28:02.000 | At the start of the conversation, you mentioned beauty as something above and beyond utility and function. I can imagine one pushback, and it's one I've had myself, because it seems to me that in this age of technology, there's a certain functional fittingness.

00:28:19.000 | At my desk right now, I see a USB port in the computer and a USB wire plugged into it. The fittingness is obvious. It was designed that way. I don't find it to be beautiful. The USB port, traditional USB port, is not beautiful to me in any way.

00:28:38.000 | Should I see beauty in the fittingness, or is there a fittingness that's just purely functional?

00:28:45.000 | That's a good question, and there's no reason to oppose fittingness with functionality.

00:28:52.000 | Yeah.

00:28:53.000 | Okay. In fact, going back to the medieval perspective of it, something that was properly functional was by definition meant that there's a fittingness, a beauty to that.

00:29:04.000 | But something can be simply functional, utilitarian, get something done, but lacks a certain aesthetic to it or has a low aesthetic, if we want to use that, or a low fittingness idea.

00:29:20.000 | And so fittingness is – it is a matter of degree. Things are not fitting in fullness, in complete, as much as they could possibly be, necessarily, or completely unfitting.

00:29:32.000 | So fittingness is – like beauty, there's degrees of that, right?

00:29:38.000 | So, for instance, I'm not trying to be a plug here for the Apple computer, but we know – I mean, it's well-known how Steve Jobs, when he was at the helm of Apple, he was insistent that their product development prioritized the aesthetics of their products.

00:30:01.000 | Now, he didn't have to do that, but I mean their computer or their iPod or whatever the case may be, iPads, they could have been just as functional but less aesthetically pleasing and rich.

00:30:16.000 | But he made it a point to prioritize that.

00:30:19.000 | So to your little scenario about the different plugs and all this stuff, I think what we want to at least appreciate is that many times in our kind of boorish, kind of not valuing the aesthetic dynamics of the world, of life, of our life lived in the world, we settle.

00:30:39.000 | We settle for very things that are very unfitting, ill-fitting. I'll use that word. Very ill-fitting. They have low aesthetic expression.

00:30:49.000 | But that doesn't mean it needs to be the way – and there's things – if someone cared, they could, in fact, shape things, express things, form things so that their fittingness, their aesthetic expression becomes much more bold, much more apparent.

00:31:04.000 | And so I think it really is a reflection of how we're – what we settle for.

00:31:10.000 | Yeah, that's good. We talked about Edwards and the divine sense.

00:31:14.000 | One of the phenomenal points you make in your book is about the spectacular glory of Christ in human form.

00:31:20.000 | This is a theme I also see in Pastor John's book, A Peculiar Glory, chapter 11. As a Bible reader, I sometimes assume that moments like Christ's resurrection or his transfiguration are somehow extra beautiful and extra glorious.

00:31:39.000 | Like, it's a glance at Christ's shining beauty sort of breaking free from behind the cloak of his bland humanity.

00:31:47.000 | You correct this. You write, "God's glory in Christ all during his earthly career is best appreciated not in an apophatic way, that is, as veiled by his humanity, but in a cataphatic way, that is, as revealed in and through his humanity."

00:32:06.000 | So good. So we see the beauty of Christ not apophatically in what Christ isn't, but rather cataphatically in what Christ is and displays.

00:32:17.000 | Explain this, if you've got to explain this, and how Bible readers see the glory of Christ in every verse of the Gospels.

00:32:24.000 | Yeah, this is one of those unanticipated insights that I got in the course of my research, in the course of my coming to understand beauty, the beauty of the person of Christ, specifically.

00:32:36.000 | So I start off discussing how Christ is the image of God made visible in and expressed through the form of his humanity.

00:32:45.000 | As such, the beauty of Christ is inherent in and expressed through his human form.

00:32:52.000 | Now, a common view, a common view throughout church history, and certainly in more modern contemporary times, a common view is that Christ's actual glory, we talk about the glory of Christ.

00:33:04.000 | Well, a common view is that his divine glory was hidden, was hidden or veiled beneath his humanity.

00:33:12.000 | And Calvin is exhibit one guilty of this, talks about that Christ in a state of humiliation, his human form hiding his glory.

00:33:23.000 | So the idea being Christ's flesh, his human flesh acted like a reverse shield of sorts, you know, to prevent his real glory from being openly seen.

00:33:34.000 | Now, the problem with this is that if Christ's glory was actually concealed by his human form, then God, the son operated totally incognito as Jesus Christ in the form of a slave, as Paul puts it in Philippians 2, 7.

00:33:51.000 | Because because his true identity as God, the son was in this view, what was was actually concealed by a veil of flesh.

00:34:01.000 | And a further problem is that it suggests, or part of the same problem, I should say, is that it suggests a competitive view between the relationship between the divinity of God and the humanity of God.

00:34:16.000 | They're in tension, in uneasy tension with each other in this way.

00:34:21.000 | So, you know, instead, what I argue is that the humanity that Christ took on in the form of a slave, as Philippians 2 talks about, affirms that God's essential nature, you know, his glory is how I equate his essential nature is in fact revealed.

00:34:40.000 | And it's revealed in the most transparent, self revelatory way.

00:34:44.000 | And so from an aesthetic angle, the idea of the form of things is so prominently important when you talk about the aesthetics of something, its form.

00:34:57.000 | And but form and content have to go together.

00:35:00.000 | OK, so so in Christ, you have perfect form or the form of Christ and is even in a state of humiliation.

00:35:09.000 | What Paul calls the form of a slave is perfectly united to his inner content.

00:35:14.000 | That is to say, the person of the son of God.

00:35:17.000 | So, you know, one way to put this, I draw attention to this in my book and using the idea of what's, you know, theologically referred to as the Christ kenosis, his emptying of himself from the form of God into the form of a slave is throughout the whole rich passage of Philippians 2, 6, 6 through 8.

00:35:38.000 | It's not that he exchanged the form of God for the form of a slave, but that he manifested the form of God in the form of a slave.

00:35:47.000 | And that's that's a critically important of critical difference here.

00:35:51.000 | And so the idea that, you know, why is this important to Bible readers is so we can appreciate in the most robust way the the glory of God in Christ without without having without feeling like we have to kind of say, you know, there's just moments that he lets that glory out.

00:36:11.000 | Every single moment of Christ's life was the revelation of God in Christ and the glory revealed.

00:36:17.000 | But it manifested itself in different form and expression.

00:36:20.000 | So what I what I talk about is Christ.

00:36:23.000 | Humanity was the assumption of a form that was most befitting for him to take in accordance with his role as Messiah born under the law to redeem those under the law.

00:36:33.000 | Galatians four verses four and five.

00:36:36.000 | In other words, it would not have been as fitting for Christ to have assumed another form in his earthly earthly life, his earthly career, other than the one with that that is undertaking as the role as the Messiah called for, namely the form of a slave.

00:36:52.000 | So he could have solidarity with the least and the lowliness as he offered perfect obedience to God, the father.

00:37:00.000 | And I would just finish with saying that the other important truth is that it does.

00:37:06.000 | It really does take the eyes of faith to perceive the beauty of the Lord.

00:37:11.000 | You know, and we see this. I mean, the glowing example I talk about this, of course, in chapter four is the penitent thief on the cross who in his abject state of humiliation and dying on the cross right next to Christ, who was naked and dying with him.

00:37:30.000 | Perceived the kingly, the regal status.

00:37:35.000 | Of Christ in his kingship, asked if he could be with him.

00:37:38.000 | And Paul says something that's just unmistakably clear in the same way in first Corinthians two verses seven through 10.

00:37:49.000 | Paul hits on the same idea, quote, But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.

00:38:01.000 | None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

00:38:09.000 | Then he continues, These things God has revealed to us through his spirit.

00:38:14.000 | We do need the eyes of faith so that we can perceive what we will not perceive in our condition of total depravity and blindness, ignorance.

00:38:24.000 | But but it's not because that beauty is not there in its proper expression.

00:38:31.000 | It is there. But when and when our eyes are attuned to it, like that penitent thief on the cross, we see we see Christ for who he truly is, Lord and Savior overall.

00:38:43.000 | Amen. Majestic king in triumph, hanging on the cross.

00:38:47.000 | That's it's beautiful. It is beautiful.

00:38:51.000 | I appreciated your interaction with Calvin on this on pages 165 to 172.

00:38:56.000 | It's really an essential theme in your book. We all must understand it.

00:39:00.000 | To see the glory of Christ, the spirit must open our eyes to see in Scripture a beauty that really defies natural beauty.

00:39:09.000 | I want to shift to material beauty for a moment.

00:39:12.000 | We talked about Apple design, an appreciation for the iPad or an appreciation for fine art or an appreciation for classical music.

00:39:21.000 | None of those things precondition anyone to more readily embrace the beauty of Christ.

00:39:27.000 | There's a certain line of separation between seeing and loving fine art and seeing and loving divine glory.

00:39:35.000 | They require two very different ways of seeing.

00:39:38.000 | With that said, does a regenerate heart with new eyes for the beauty of God behold more material beauty in this world?

00:39:47.000 | In other words, does it work the other way around?

00:39:50.000 | Yeah, you really ask that in a very, very, I like the way you ask that.

00:39:54.000 | I think we can give it a resounding yes, but it's not necessarily beauty as the world sees it or defines it.

00:40:01.000 | You know, so in a different way, I think we regenerate in heart with, as you say, a new vision for the beauty of God is able to take in a sense that reality is somehow making itself known to us.

00:40:18.000 | You know, kind of still still not not leaving behind this idea of the truth, goodness and beauty of reality.

00:40:26.000 | I like what Herman Bovink says on this point, quote, his short little statement, he says, beauty always derives its content from the true and the good.

00:40:35.000 | And it is their revelation and appearance. Beauty always is in relation to form, revelation and appearance.

00:40:43.000 | So Bob Bovink, you know, the Dutch reformed theologian of the late 1920s and early 20th century.

00:40:50.000 | He got this. In fact, he was he was one of the modern contemporary modern theologians that ascribed beauty as an attribute of God in his work of dogmatics.

00:41:02.000 | You know, looking at Scripture as another example in Romans, of course, well known 18 to 23 in Chapter one.

00:41:11.000 | That's where we find the attributes of God's nature described as being clearly perceived in creation.

00:41:18.000 | And what do what does Paul say that those attributes we build in creation, what we build the glory of the immortal God to humanity.

00:41:27.000 | Now, we're fallen and we're not perfectly our senses and our faculties, our soul is not perfected and glorified yet.

00:41:35.000 | But I think as in our regenerated state, we can you know, we can I don't want to I want to be careful not to overstate the point.

00:41:42.000 | But but I do believe the Christian has the spiritually enlightened truth and understanding to see the creative world with new eyes, so to speak.

00:41:51.000 | And yes, behold, more and other dimensions of beauty in the world.

00:41:56.000 | Of course, we don't want to limit our understanding and sense of this to mean just the beauty of the natural world and such things as various works of art that gifted people create and produce.

00:42:08.000 | The beauty found in the world with our what I was saying is spiritually enlightened.

00:42:15.000 | Truth and understanding is includes the actions and activities and beauty of the spiritual kind.

00:42:21.000 | So as an example of this, the spiritual kind, let me let me call attention to Matthew's account of Jesus in chapter 23, verses six through 13.

00:42:32.000 | Now, when Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon, the leper, a woman came up to him with an alabaster flask of very expensive ointment.

00:42:42.000 | And she poured it on his head as he reclined at table.

00:42:46.000 | And when the disciples saw it, they were indignant, saying, why this waste for this could have been sold for a large sum and given to the poor.

00:42:55.000 | But Jesus, aware of this, said to them, why do you trouble the woman?

00:43:02.000 | For she has done a beautiful thing to me.

00:43:06.000 | For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me in pouring the ointment on my body.

00:43:13.000 | She has done it to prepare me for burial.

00:43:16.000 | Truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her.

00:43:24.000 | And of course, the New Testament written in Greek, that word for beautiful that Jesus uses is the word Kailos, Kailos, which is that rich aesthetic definition or meaning.

00:43:37.000 | Beautiful is the right word to use here.

00:43:39.000 | The act that the woman did was just so fitting in that context.

00:43:45.000 | And Jesus calls it beautiful.

00:43:47.000 | So we don't want to trade one for the other.

00:43:50.000 | We don't want to say it's just spiritual beauty that that is the thing or, you know, but nobody should say that we do need to trade what we what you asked was as a as a Christian, we generate it by the spirit of God.

00:44:04.000 | I guess it's valid to say that our senses, whether physical or or how our imagination takes in things or our spiritual perception with all of these, we have the capacity to be attuned to the beautiful in a more full or way and ways and in dimensions that the non-Christian is not attuned to.

00:44:28.000 | I guess that's how I put it.

00:44:30.000 | Yeah, that's good.

00:44:31.000 | Our time is up.

00:44:32.000 | We've got to go.

00:44:33.000 | This has been fruitful, Jonathan.

00:44:35.000 | Let's end with this.

00:44:36.000 | What's your hope for the book?

00:44:37.000 | Give us some final thoughts.

00:44:39.000 | The title of the book, the first part of it is the beauty of the Lord.

00:44:43.000 | I mean, that is that comes from, of course, the most well-known expression of explicit attribution of beauty to the Lord.

00:44:52.000 | Psalm 27, verse four, David's psalm where he he longs, he yearns to behold the beauty of the Lord.

00:45:01.000 | You know, to and to just rest in ease and delight in God's temple.

00:45:07.000 | And so, you know, we're not there yet.

00:45:09.000 | We're in what's what's what we know in theological speak as the already but not yet state, the time between the times.

00:45:20.000 | Right.

00:45:21.000 | And so, you know, if if if I'm striking on something close to to what's what's true theologically,

00:45:31.000 | biblically, that that our sense of delight in the beauty of the Lord is somehow somehow like a reflection or correlated to God's own self delight within himself.

00:45:42.000 | And then, you know, in the new heavens and the new earth, we will be beholding that.

00:45:47.000 | You know what I what I use, I can use the expression the unalloyed reflection of God's own beatitude expressed as doxological, worshipful delight.

00:46:01.000 | And, you know, that's not static.

00:46:03.000 | That is that that's that is as pregnant and as deep with with theological and dynamic import as you could possibly get there.

00:46:11.000 | I think I think that scripture is a little bit only says so much because our finished, our unglorified finitude now couldn't couldn't even get to capturing not not only the the objective beauty that will be hold, but that sense of subjective delight that will experience the new heavens and the new earth.

00:46:34.000 | Our eternal light is not just about beauty.

00:46:37.000 | But as I said at the beginning in God's intention and design of creation, I don't want to make it just because I wrote a book about the beauty of God and his in the works of creation, redemption and consummation.

00:46:49.000 | I don't want to make it about like how beauty is kind of dominates more is more important or takes the place of or somehow somehow becomes, you know, the be all and end all.

00:47:00.000 | No, but I think if my book can be a corrective, it's putting beauty back into back into the picture properly where it's it's it's part of both experientially and within the reality of life.

00:47:16.000 | And so our end, whatever beauty we we experience in this world, both in a spiritual in spiritual terms and in natural natural terms.

00:47:25.000 | We know that we delight it we we we love it. We think about those things that are most, you know, they're captured in our mind and our memories.

00:47:34.000 | But in the in the age to come in the age to come, there will be no just, you know, hearkening back that our longing, our longing, our yearning will be fulfilled, ultimately, and perfectly as we behold the beauty of God in Christ in his glory and our glory with him.

00:47:51.000 | But the whole the whole realm, the whole realm, the universe as it will be, whatever that will be, will be will have an aesthetic.

00:47:58.000 | And that is beyond our imagination.

00:48:01.000 | Oh, amen.

00:48:02.000 | Jonathan, thank you for joining us today.

00:48:04.000 | Tony, it's been my pleasure.

00:48:06.000 | Really. Thank you very much.

00:48:08.000 | That was Jonathan King from his home in Jakarta, author of the new book, The Beauty of the Lord Theology as Aesthetics.

00:48:16.000 | Pastor John returns to the studio with me later this week, and I'll get you new episodes with him as soon as I have them.

00:48:23.000 | Likely not for probably another week or so.

00:48:26.000 | Thanks for listening to this long form conversation.

00:48:29.000 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke in Minneapolis.

00:48:32.000 | We'll see you shortly.

00:48:33.000 | Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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How Can I See the Beauty of God?

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