This Superior Force

To say that God has this superior force, this power of attraction, which speaks for itself, which wins and conquers, in the fact that He is beautiful, divinely beautiful …. God loves us as the One who is worthy of love as God. This is what we mean when we say that God is beautiful.

~ Karl Barth

Captivated by His Beauty

Hast thou heard Him, seen Him, known Him?

  Is not thine a captured heart?

Chief among ten thousand own Him;

  Joyful choose the better part.

Captivated by His beauty,

Worthy tribute haste to bring;

Let His peerless worth constrain thee,

  Crown Him now unrivaled King.

Idols once they won thee, charmed thee,

  Lovely things of time and sense;

Gilded thus does sin disarm thee,

  Honeyed lest thou turn thee thence.

What has stripped the seeming beauty

  From the idols of the earth?

Not a sense of right or duty,

  But the sight of peerless worth.

Not the crushing of those idols,

  With its bitter void and smart;

But the beaming of His beauty,

  The unveiling of His heart.

Who extinguishes their taper

  Till they hail the rising sun?

Who discards the garb of winter

  Till the summer has begun?

'Tis that look that melted Peter,

  'Tis that face that Stephen saw,

'Tis that heart that wept with Mary,

  Can alone from idols draw:

Draw and win and fill completely,

  Till the cup o'erflow the brim;

What have we to do with idols

  Who have companied with Him?

Source: http://www.hymnal.net/hymn.php/nt/437#ixzz2DuNPP069

Great and Amazing

And they sing  the song of Moses,  the servant  of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying,  

"Great and amazing are your deeds, 

O Lord God the Almighty! 

Just and true are your ways, 

O King of the nations! 

Who will not fear, O Lord, 

and glorify your name? 

For you alone are  holy. 

All nations will come and worship you, 

for your righteous acts have been revealed." 

(Revelation 15:3, 4 ESV)

These Lower Things

For there is an attractiveness in beautiful bodies, in gold and silver, and all things; and in bodily touch, sympathy hath much influence, and each other sense hath his proper object answerably tempered. Wordly honour hath also its grace, and the power of overcoming, and of mastery; whence springs also the thirst of revenge. But yet, to obtain all these, we may not depart from Thee, O Lord, nor decline from Thy law. The life also which here we live hath its own enchantment, through a certain proportion of its own, and a correspondence with all things beautiful here below. Human friendship also is endeared with a sweet tie, by reason of the unity formed of many souls. Upon occasion of all these, and the like, is sin committed, while through an immoderate inclination towards these goods of the lowest order, the better and higher are forsaken,—Thou, our Lord God, Thy truth, and Thy law. For these lower things have their delights, but not like my God, who made all things; for in Him doth the righteous delight, and He is the joy of the upright in heart.

~ Confessions of Saint Augustine-Chapter V

Beautiful Valley of Eden

Beautiful valley of Eden!

Sweet is thy noontide calm;

Over the heart of the weary,

Breathing thy waves of balm.

Beautiful valley of Eden,

Home of the pure and blest,

How often amid the wild billows

I dream of thy rest, sweet rest!

Over the heart of the mourner

Shineth thy golden day,

Waiting the songs of the angels

Down from the far away.

There is the home of my Savior;

There, with the blood washed throng,

Over the highlands of glory

Rolleth the great new song.

Source: http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/b/e/beautive.htm

God's Open Face

“For now we see in a mirror.” (1 Cor. 13:12) Further, because the glass sets before us the thing seen indefinitely, he added, “darkly", to show very strongly that the present knowledge is most partial. “But then face to face.”  Not as though God hath a face, but to express the notion of greater clearness and perspicuity. Seest thou how we learn all things by gradual addition?

“Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I have been known.” Seest thou how in two ways he pulls down their pride? Both because their knowledge is in part, and because not even this have they of themselves. “For I knew Him not, but He made Himself known to me,” saith he. Wherefore, even as now He first knew me, and Himself hastened towards me, so shall I hasten towards Him then much more than now. For so he that sits in darkness, as long as he sees not the sun doth not of himself hasten to meet the beauty of its beam, which indeed shows itself as soon as it hath begun to shine: but when he perceives its brightness, then also himself at length follows after its light: This then is the meaning of the expression, “even as also I have been known.” Not that we shall so know him as He is, but that even as He hastened toward us now, so also shall we cleave unto Him then, and shall know many of the things which are now secret, and shall enjoy that most blessed society and wisdom. For if Paul who knew so much was a child, consider what those things must be. If these be “a glass” and “a riddle,” do thou hence again infer, God’s open Face, how great a thing It is.

~ John Chrysostom: Homilies on the Epistles of Paul to the Corinthians

Stunning in His Beauty

The stories let you in on a wonderful secret: We are not only invited guests but the blushing Bride. And our Groom is a heroic King, a mighty warrior who is good and just and stunning in His beauty. He is so full of passion and blazing emotion that He burns—and yes, smokes in the ferocity of His infinite, holy love that compelled Him to give it all away for His Bride. And He who gave it all for us is worth giving ourselves completely to. We exist not to believe, and not even so much to follow, but to love. And as Luther says somewhere, love God with all your heart and do what you will.

~ Timothy J. Stoner; The God Who Smokes: Scandalous Meditations on Faith

Summa

The best ideal is the true

  And other truth is none.

All glory be ascribed to

  The holy Three in One.

~ Gerard Manley Hopkins

A Beauty Crowned With Thorns

How could one hope to understand the least thing about Paul if one did not first acknowledge the fact that in Damascus he has seen then highest beauty, just as the prophets has seen it in the visions that called them forth? That vision then led Paul to sell all else for the sake of the one pearl - to sell all worldly and divine wisdom, all privileges within God's Holy People - in order to perform his ministry with joy as a "poor man of Yahweh". Both the person who is transported by natural beauty and the one snatched up by the beauty of Christ must appear to the world to be fools, and the world will attempt to explain their state in terms of psychological or even physiological laws (Acts 2:13). But they know what they have seen, and they care not a farthing what people may say. They suffer because of their love, and it is only the fact that they have been inflamed by the most sublime of beauties - a beauty crowned with thorns and crucified - that justifies their sharing in that suffering. 

Hans Urs Van Balthasar; The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics; Volume I: Seeing the Form; pg 33

Great Delights

There is very great delight the Christian enjoys in the sight he has of the glory and excellency of God. How many arts and contrivances have men to delight the eye of the body. Men take delight in the  beholding of great cities, splendid buildings and stately palaces. And what delight is often taken in the beholding of a beautiful face. May we not well conclude that great delights may also be taken in pleasing the eye of the mind in seeing the most beautiful, the most glorious, the most wonderful Being in the world? 

~ Sam Storms; Pleasures Evermore: The Life-Changing Power of Enjoying God (Experiencing God)

His Beauty Covers My Deformities

Thou Eternal God

Thine is surpassing greatness, unspeakable

goodness, super-abundant grace;

I can as soon count the sands of ocean’s ‘lip’

as number thy favours towards me; I know but a part, but that part exceeds all praise.

I thank thee for personal mercies,

a measure of health, preservation of body,

comforts of house and home, sufficiency of food

and clothing,

continuance of mental powers,

my family, their mutual help and support,

the delights of domestic harmony and peace,

the seats now filled that might have been vacant,

my country, church, Bible, faith.

But, O, how I mourn my sin, ingratitude, vileness,

the days that add to my guilt,

the scenes that witness my offending tongue;

All things in heaven, earth, around, within, without,

condemn me—

the sun which sees my misdeeds,

the darkness which is light to thee,

the cruel accuser who justly charges me,

the good angels who have been provoked to leave me,

thy countenance which scans my secret sins,

thy righteous law, thy holy Word,

my sin-soiled conscience, my private and public life,

my neighbours, myself—

all write dark things against me.

I deny them not, frame no excuse, but confess,

‘Father, I have sinned’;

Yet still I live, and fly repenting to thy outstretched arms;

thou wilt not cast me off, for Jesus brings me near,

thou wilt not condemn me, for he died in my stead,

thou wilt not mark my mountains of sin,

for he leveled all,

and his beauty covers my deformities.

O my God, I bid farewell to sin

by clinging to his cross,

hiding in his wounds,

and sheltering in his side.

~ The Valley of Vision

We Shall Behold the King in His Beauty

Heaven will largely consist of expanded views of King Jesus and closer views of the Glory which follows upon His sacrificial grief. Ah, Brothers and Sisters, how little do we know His Glory! We scarcely know who He is that has befriended us! We hold the doctrine of His Deity tenaciously—but in Heaven we shall perceive His Godhead in its Truth so far as the finite can apprehend the infinite! We have known His friendship to us, but when we shall behold the King in His beauty in His own halls and our eyes shall look into His royal countenance and His face, which outshines the sun, shall beam ineffable affection upon each one of us, then shall we find our Heaven in His Glory! We ask no thrones—His Throne is ours! The enthroned Lamb Himself is all the Heaven we desire!

~ Charles Spurgeon; Sermon - Heaven Above and Heaven Below

What a Word This Is

If, then, on account of some great building a human design receives praise, do you wish to see what a design of God is the Lord Jesus Christ, that is, the Word of God? Mark this fabric of the world. View what was made by the Word, and then thou wilt understand what is the nature of the world. Mark these two bodies of the world, the heavens and the earth. Who will unfold in words the beauty of the heavens? Who will unfold in words the fruitfulness of the earth? Who will worthily extol the changes of the seasons? Who will worthily extol the power of seeds? You see what things I do not mention, lest in giving a long list I should perhaps tell of less than you can call up to your own minds. From this fabric, then, judge the nature of the Word by which it was made: and not it alone; for all these things are seen, because they have to do with the bodily sense. By that Word angels also were made; by that Word archangels were made, powers, thrones, dominions, principalities; by that Word were made all things. Hence, judge what a Word this is.

~ Augustine: Homilies on the Gospel of John

The Great Artificer

That no flesh should glory in the presence of God.” (1 Cor. 1:29) For God doeth all things to this end, to repress vainglory and pride, to pull down boasting.” “Do you, too,” saith he, “employ yourselves in that work.” He doth all, that we may put nothing to our own account; that we may ascribe all unto God. And have ye given yourselves over unto this person or to that? And what pardon will ye obtain?”

For God Himself hath shown that it is not possible we should be saved only by ourselves: and this He did from the beginning. For neither then could men be saved by themselves; but it required their compassing the beauty of the heaven, and the extent of the earth, and the mass of creation besides; if so they might be led by the hand to the great artificer of all the works.

~ John Chrysostom: Homilies on the Epistles of Paul to the Corinthians; Homily V

Prismatic Beauty

Child of God! If you could see your sorrows and troubles from the other side; if instead of looking up at them from earth, you would look down on them from the heavenly places where you sit with Christ; if you knew how they are reflecting in prismatic beauty before the gaze of heaven, the bright light of Christ's face — you would be content that they should cast their deep shadows over the mountain slopes of existence. Only remember that clouds are always moving, and passing before God's cleansing wind.

"Green pastures are before me, which yet I have not seen;

Bright skies will soon be o'er me, where the dark clouds have been:

My hope I cannot measure, my path of life is free;

My Saviour hath my treasure, and He will walk with me."

~ F.B. Meyer; Our Daily Homily - Men see not the bright light which is in the clouds. Job xxxvii. 21.

The Art Inspiration of an Eternal Beautiful

There is no unity in your thinking save by a well-ordered philosophical system, and there is no system of philosophy which does not ascend to the issues of the Infinite. In the same way there is no unity in your moral existence save by the union of your inner existence with the moral world-order, and there is no moral world-order conceivable but for the impression of an infinite Power that has ordained order in this moral world. Thus also no unity in the revelation of art is conceivable, except by the art inspiration of an eternal Beautiful, which flows from the fountain of the Infinite. Hence no characteristic all-embracing art style can arise except as a consequence of the peculiar impulse from the Infinite that operates in our inmost being. And since this is the very privilege of religion, over intellect, morality, and art, that she alone effects the communion with the Infinite, in our self-consciousness, the call for a secular, all-embracing art style, independent of any religious principle, is simply absurd.

From Abraham Kuyper, Lectures On Calvinism, 1st Hendrickson ed. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008), 135-136.

His Image Impressed Upon Us

Certainly holiness is the beauty of God, for it is his image impressed upon us.

~ Thomas Manton

That Ultimate End

God made all things, in the beginning, good, exceeding good. The whole of his work was disposed into a perfect harmony, beauty, and order, suited unto that manifestation of his own glory which he designed therein. And as all things had their own individual existence, and operations suited unto their being, and capable of an end, a rest, or a blessedness, congruous unto their natures and operations — so, in the various respects which they had each to other, in their mutual supplies, assistances, and co-operation, they all tended unto that ultimate end — his eternal glory

~ John Owen; Christologia; Chapter IV; The Person of Christ the Foundation of all the Counsels of God.

Tree of Beauty

Faithful Cross! above all other,

One and only noble tree!

None in foliage, none in blossom,

None in fruit thy peer may be;

Sweetest wood and sweetest iron!

Sweetest weight is hung on thee.

Bend thy boughs, O Tree of Glory!

Thy relaxing sinews bend;

For awhile the ancient rigor

That thy birth bestowed, suspend;

And the King of heavenly beauty

On thy bosom gently tend!

Thou alone wast counted worthy

This world’s Ransom to uphold;

For a shipwrecked race preparing

Harbor, like the Ark of old;

With the sacred blood anointed

From the smitten Lamb that rolled.

O Tree of beauty, Tree of Light!

O Tree with royal purple dight!

Elect on whose triumphal breast

Those holy limbs should find their rest:

On whose dear arms, so widely flung,

The weight of this world’s Ransom hung:

The price of humankind to pay,

And spoil the spoiler of his prey.

~ Venantius Fortunatus

Another Force Intervenes

Think of the honor and the glory Christ’s righteousness brings even to our bodies! How can this poor, sinful, miserable, filthy, polluted body become like unto that of the Son of God, the Lord of Glory? What are you—your powers and abilities, or those of all men, to effect this glorious thing? But Paul says human righteousness, merit, glory and power have nothing to do with it. They are mere filth and pollution, and condemned as well. Another force intervenes, the power of Christ the Lord, who is able to bring all things into subjection to himself. Now, if he has power to subject all things unto himself at will, he is also able to glorify the pollution and filth of this wretched body, even when it has become worms and dust. In his hands it is as clay in the hands of the potter, and from the polluted lump of clay he can make a vessel that shall be a beautiful, new, pure, glorious body, surpassing the sun in its brilliance and beauty.

~ Martin Luther; Sermon- The Glorified Body of the Christian 

Luring Us Back

Our unending delight is found in the beauty of God, in His presence to our souls. Yet beauty is also part of the journey, not just the destination. Hans Urs von Balthasar devoted his life’s work to showing how God’s revelation to us has an aesthetic character that cannot be ignored. Through revelation, God made Himself known to us in His Son and in His Church.

Von Balthasar writes,

If God wishes to reveal the love that he harbors for the world, this love has to be something that the world can recognize, in spite of, or in fact in, its being wholly other.

In other words, God had to make His beauty visible to the material eye in order to draw that eye back to the spiritual. God literally lured us back to Himself with the beauty of Christ — a beauty unlike any of the ancient world; a beauty whose chief symbol is the cross. Von Balthasar wrote volume after volume tracing this “Christ-form” of beauty through history, culture, Scripture, and the spiritual life.

~ On Beauty: A Message to Its Religious Despisers by Deal W. Hudson

You're Beautiful

I see your face in every sunrise

The colors of the morning are inside your eyes

The world awakens in the light of the day

I look up to the sky and say... You’re Beautiful

I see your pow’r in the moonlit night

Where planets are in motion and galaxies are bright

We are amazed in the light of the stars

Its all proclaiming who you are... You’re beautiful

I see you there hanging on a tree

You bled and then you died and then you rose again for me

Now you are setting on your heavenly throne

Soon you will be coming home... You’re Beautiful

When we arrive at eternity’s shore

Where death is just a memory and tears are no more

We’ll enter in as the wedding bells ring

Your bride will come together and we’ll sing... You’re Beautiful

~ Phil Wickham; You're Beautiful

Paradiso

And as I gaz’d, I kindled at the sight;

No Mortal from the glorious view could turn,

Paradiso. (Canto XXXIII)

~ Dante; Paradiso

The Fairest Of Them All

So what is God’s kind of beauty? Remember, like a yardstick is a yard and measures a yard, God is beauty and measures all beauty. The degree to which human beauty expresses God’s beauty is the degree to which God delights in it (and so should we). This is why God the Father rejoices over Jesus with “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” Jesus is the exact representation of God’s being, the perfect mirror eternally showing who is the fairest of them all. God’s kind of beauty is His beauty. The world, the Word, and His Son are the only perfect reflections. 

~ Steve Dewitt; Eyes Wide Open

Painting the Portrait

It is true, indeed, that the Divine beauty is not adorned with any shape or endowment of form, by any beauty of colour, but is contemplated as excellence in unspeakable bliss. As then painters transfer human forms to their pictures by the means of certain colours, laying on their copy the proper and corresponding tints, so that the beauty of the original may be accurately transferred to the likeness, so I would have you understand that our Maker also, painting the portrait to resemble His own beauty, by the addition of virtues, as it were with colours, shows in us His own sovereignty: and manifold and varied are the tints, so to say, by which His true form is portrayed: not red, or white, or the blending of these, whatever it may be called, nor a touch of black that paints the eyebrow and the eye, and shades, by some combination, the depressions in the figure, and all such arts which the hands of painters contrive, but instead of these, purity, freedom from passion, blessedness, alienation from all evil, and all those attributes of the like kind which help to form in men the likeness of God: with such hues as these did the Maker of His own image mark our nature.

~ Gregory of Nyssa: Dogmatic Treatises, Etc.

Only A Little Copy

A strong place and wonderful was Isengard, and long it had been beautiful; and there great lords had dwelt, the wardens of Gondor upon the West, and wise men that watched the stars. But slowly Saruman had shaped it to his shifting purposes, and made it better, as he thought, being deceived--for all those arts and subtle devices, for which he forsook his former wisdom, and which fondly he imagined were his own, came but from Mordor; so that what he made was naught, only a little copy, a child's model or a slave's flattery, of that vast fortress, armoury, prison, furnace of great power, Barad-dur, the Dark Tower, which suffered no rival, and laughed at flattery, biding its time, secure in its pride and its immeasurable strength.

--J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

Perpetual Vision

When you were here you started the subject of Praise as Worship, which has led me to some bewilderment. Take the traditional language: glorifying, i.e. literally 'making glorious' what is already not only glorious but Glory itself and the source of all other glory--magnifying what is already infinite--exalting what is already highest. 

At first it is hard to see what all this means. It sounds like the most famous flunkeyism, like telling a rich man that he is rich: and I am sure that this impression has a powerful and repellent effect on modern people, especially in democracies. I take it the truth is that in so far as a creature sees God it cannot help in some way (not of course necessarily by words) telling Him what it sees (silence might be one way). Its 'praise' is a necessary reaction: the divine light sent back to its Source from the creature which has become its mirror. The sun is not brighter because a mirror reflects it: but the mirror is brighter because it reflects the sun.

On a lower level this necessity of telling the object what it is has been experienced by every man in love. True, he may tell the girl she is pretty in order to please her: but he'd have to tell her anyway. Thus 'exalting the Lord' is in reality indistinguishable from seeing Him. There's no question of flattery or even courtesy about it: the moment the Creator-Creature relation is normal (in the proper sense of the word normal) praise or worship is there automatically. The picture of Heaven as perpetual worship, a place, in the hideous words of the hymn

            Where congregations ne'er break up

            And Sabbaths have no end

which has tormented many a luckless child (finding one Sabbath per week a ration only too liberal!) comes alright when one sees the real meaning: the perpetual worship is the perpetual vision, the perfect exercise of all one's faculties on the perfect Object. Of that, one could never have too much.

--The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 970-71

Tob!

God looked at the billions of stars pouring out their light, and it elicited from Him a spontaneous exultation over what He had made: “Tob!” Essentially good and beautiful! He didn’t merely evaluate the precision of His handiwork; He made an aesthetic assessment of it all. He declared that it was beautiful by His divine definition and delightful to His divine sensibilities... Jean-Paul Sartre, the famous atheist philosopher, who insightfully noted that the basic philosophical problem is that something is there rather than nothing. To his observation, I would add this question: Why is what is there so beautiful? If the mere existence of matter confounds us, explaining its universal symmetries and harmonies is baffling. Matter is a problem. Beauty is a marvel.

~ Steve Dewitt; Eyes Wide Open

From Whence All Beauty Springs

The World is the Great Book of God

If we carefully and wisely reflect upon creatures, they will wonderfully fill our minds with admiration, and greatly inflame us with love of the Supreme Creator. For the whole universe is, as it were, a book written by the finger of God, in which each creature forms a letter. But as one who has not learnt to read, when he looks into an open book, sees indeed the characters of the letters, but understands not their significance and force; in like manner, he who perceives not the things of God, beholds the external aspect of creatures, but comprehends not their interior meaning. “The senseless man shall not know; nor will the fool understand these things” (Ps. xci. 7).

But the spiritual man, whose mental eyes are open, when he contemplates the external works of God, inwardly perceives how wonderful is the Maker of them; and from the fairness of those things which he is contemplating, he parses on to that Divine Beauty, which is fairer than all other beauty, and from whence all beauty springs. To him who is occupied with this joyful contemplation, all things are miraculous; so that in amazement he is forced to exclaim with the Prophet, “How great are Thy works, O Lord! Thou hast made all things in wisdom ” (Ps. ciii. 24); “Thou hast given me, O Lord, a delight in Thy doings; and in the works of Thy hands I shall rejoice ” (Ps. xci. 5).

~ Spiritual Works of Louis of Blois; CHAPTER XXVIII.

Alien Beauty

Nonetheless, the form and manifestation of the `beauty that saves’ is a strange and alien beauty that challenges and transforms all our assumptions. So it is only when aesthetics is liberated from the tyranny of superficial and facile images of the beautiful that it can begin to understand the beauty of God and its redemptive power amidst the harsh reality of the world. Indeed, the beauty of God which is hidden in Jesus the crucified Messiah, and supremely veiled from sight in the ugliness of the cross, can only be discerned through the gift of the Spirit. It is through the Spirit that we are enabled to see and hear what is manifest in God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. Moreover, it is through the Spirit that the beauty of God in the form of Jesus Christ becomes the power that attracts and transforms, bringing us through the painfulness of death and rebirth into conformity with the image of Christ (Galatians 4:19). And it is through the same Spirit that God inspires human creativity to reflect both the ugly pain of the world and the beauty of redemption... From a Christian perspective, the supreme image that contradicts the inhuman and in doing so becomes the icon of redemption is that of the incarnate, crucified and risen Christ. So it is not surprising that artists through the centuries have sought to represent that alien beauty as a counter to the ugliness of injustice. We are not redeemed by art nor by beauty alone, but by the holy beauty which is revealed in Christ and which, through the Spirit evokes wonder and stirs our imagination.

~ ~ John W. de Gruchy; HOLY BEAUTY: A Reformed Perspective on Aesthetics within a World of Unjust Ugliness

The Splendor of Holiness

Oh sing to the LORD a new song; 

   sing to the LORD, all the earth! 

Sing to the LORD, bless his name; 

   tell of his salvation from day to day. 

Declare his glory among the nations, 

   his marvelous works among all the peoples! 

For great is the LORD, 

   and greatly to be praised; he is to be feared above all gods. 

For all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, 

   but the LORD made the heavens. 

Splendor and majesty are before him; 

   strength and beauty are in his sanctuary. 

Ascribe to the LORD, O families of the peoples, 

   ascribe to the LORD glory and strength! 

Ascribe to the LORD the glory due his name; 

   bring an offering, and come into his courts! 

Worship the LORD in the splendor of holiness; 

   tremble before him, all the earth! 

Psalm 96:1-9

Barth on Mozart

In face of the problem of theodicy, Mozart had the peace of God which far transcends all the critical or speculative reason that praises and reproves. This problem lay behind him. Why then concern himself with it? He had heard, and causes those who have ears to hear, even today, what we shall not see until the end of time—the whole context of providence. As though in the light of this end, he heard the harmony of creation to which the shadow also belongs but in which the shadow is not darkness, deficiency is not defeat, sadness cannot become despair, trouble cannot degenerate into tragedy and infinite melancholy is not ultimately forced to claim undisputed sway. Thus the cheerfulness in this harmony is not without its limits. But the light shines all the more brightly because it breaks forth from the shadow. The sweetness is also bitter and cannot therefore cloy. Life does not fear death but knows it well... I make this interposition here, before turning to chaos, because in the music of Mozart—and I wonder whether the same can be said of any other works before or after—we have clear and convincing proof that it is a slander on creation to charge it with a share in chaos because it includes a Yes and a No, as though orientated to God on the one side and nothingness on the other. Mozart causes us to hear that even on the latter side, and therefore in its totality, creation praises its Master and is therefore perfect. Here on the threshhold of our problem—and it is no small achievement—Mozart has created order for those who have ears to hear, and he has done it better than any scientific deduction could.

— Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2004), 297–99.

Pied Beauty

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things—

  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

  Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

    And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

 

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                  Praise him.

~ Gerard Manley Hopkins

Sign Beauty

All of the things have been painted with beauty, but it is not ultimate beauty. The beauty of the created world was never meant to be the beauty that would fill the eyes of our hearts. It was never meant to be the beauty to which we would look for satisfaction and peace. It was never meant to be the beauty that we would give ourselves to search for, live for, cry for, and die for. No, the physical glories of this created world are meant to be sign glories. The amazing beauty that surrounds us every day was designed to be sign beauty. All of the beautiful things that we see, touch, taste and hear every day, were designed to be signs that would point to the ultimate beauty that can only be found in the One who created them.

~ Paul Tripp; read the complete post at:

http://www.christianity.com/blogs/paul-tripp/psalm-27-sign-beauty.html

Rose of Sharon

“I am the rose of Sharon.” Song of Solomon 2:1

Whatever there may be of beauty in the material world, Jesus Christ possesses all that in the spiritual world in a tenfold degree. Amongst flowers the rose is deemed the sweetest, but Jesus is infinitely more beautiful in the garden of the soul than the rose can be in the gardens of earth. He takes the first place as the fairest among ten thousand. He is the sun, and all others are the stars; the heavens and the day are dark in comparison with him, for the King in his beauty transcends all. “I am the rose of Sharon.” This was the best and rarest of roses. Jesus is not “the rose” alone, he is “the rose of Sharon,” just as he calls his righteousness “gold,” and then adds, “the gold of Ophir”—the best of the best. He is positively lovely, and superlatively the loveliest. There is variety in his charms. The rose is delightful to the eye, and its scent is pleasant and refreshing; so each of the senses of the soul, whether it be the taste or feeling, the hearing, the sight, or the spiritual smell, finds appropriate gratification in Jesus. Even the recollection of his love is sweet. Take the rose of Sharon, and pull it leaf from leaf, and lay by the leaves in the jar of memory, and you shall find each leaf fragrant long afterwards, filling the house with perfume. Christ satisfies the highest taste of the most educated spirit to the very full. The greatest amateur in perfumes is quite satisfied with the rose: and when the soul has arrived at her highest pitch of true taste, she shall still be content with Christ, nay, she shall be the better able to appreciate him. Heaven itself possesses nothing which excels the rose of Sharon. What emblem can fully set forth his beauty? Human speech and earth-born things fail to tell of him. Earth’s choicest charms commingled, feebly picture his abounding preciousness. Blessed rose, bloom in my heart forever!

Charles Spurgeon; Morning and Evening: Daily Readings - Evening, May 1

I Love This Artist

And I love this artist. I love His complexity, His layers, facets, and sides. I love and fear the turbulence and heat of His “moods,” if that is what we can respectfully call them. He blows my mind and rightfully so. He does not fit in any of our nifty boxes. He is neither Catholic nor evangelical, charismatic nor Reformed. He shatters the stereotypes of the old-school fundamentalists  and culture-current Christians with equal, breezy disregard. This One-in-Three torches towns, wipes nations off the face of the earth, then crushes the very instruments of His wrath, judging them for their excess of cruelty. He is untamed, unfathomable, unpredictable, yet utterly and infinitely good. This exuberant, flamboyant, violent Transcendence is a blazing furnace, a percolating cauldron of molten lava ready to blow. And when you wrap your arms over your head ready to cry out in terror, He touches your cheek, whispers your name, and tells you, “Don’t be afraid, I am your God, and you are my child. I will be with you always, even to the ends of the earth. I am your shelter, your strength, ever ready to help in time of trouble. Though the mountains may crack and tumble into the depths of the sea and its water roar and seethe, I am on your side, your strong citadel, your mighty God” (Psalm 46:1-3, author’s paraphrase). It’s difficult maintaining your balance around this God. He makes your head spin and your heart sing. He cannot be taken lightly or for granted. 

The God Who Smokes: Scandalous Meditations on Faith by Timothy J Stoner

Happily and Joyfully Enticed

Just how do we grow in grace and the power to say No to the world, the flesh, and the Devil? I’m convinced that we have only one of two options. Either we can devote ourselves and our time and our energy to demonstrating the ugliness and futility of sin and the world, hoping that such will embolden our hearts to say No to it as unworthy of our affection, or we can demonstrate the beauty and splendor of all that God is for us in Jesus and become happily and joyfully enticed by a rival affection.

~ Sam Storms; Pleasures Evermore: The Life-Changing Power of Enjoying God

Not Made for Mirrors

Why do we want to get near bigness and beauty and magnificence and excellence? It’s because that’s what we were made for. We were not made for mirrors. We were made for standing in front of what is infinitely beautiful, having it to satisfy us.

~ John Piper

Brilliant Sparks

... there is not an atom of this universe in which you cannot see some brilliant sparks, at least, of His glory.

~ John Calvin

Beauty Unexpected

http://philipnation.net/2012/11/beauty-unexpected/

Emanation of God's Glory

God is seeking his glory, seeks the good of his creatures; because the emanation of his glory (which he seeks and delights in, as he delights in himself and his own eternal glory) implies the communicated excellency and happiness of his creatures. And in communicating his fullness for them, he does it for himself; because their good, which he seeks, is so much in union and communion with himself. God is their good. Their excellency and happiness is nothing, but the emanation and expression of God’s glory: God, in seeking their glory and happiness, seeks himself: and in seeking himself, i.e. himself diffused and expressed, (which he delights in, as he delights in his own beauty and fullness,) he seeks their glory and happiness.

~ Jonathan  Edwards

Exquisitely Beautiful

Evidence gathered at the frontiers of modern physics tells us that if any one of a number of features of the universe had been even slightly different, life as we know it would be impossible. Various physical constants have the right values to an astonishing degree of accuracy. To take just one example, the ratio between the gravitational and electromagnetic forces must be fine-tuned to one part in 10 to the 40th power (that’s a one with 40 zeros after it!) Life is exquisitely beautiful, so it is the sort of complex good that a rational agent would value. Human life has immense value (why do we have to spell that out to humanists?) So our universe is much likelier if a powerful, rational agent designed it!

~ David Glass and Graham Veale; Five Ways Science Confirms the Existence of God

A Beautifully Composed Poem

(The universe is) a beautifully composed poem in which every mind may discover, through the  succession of events, the diversity, multiplicity, and justice, the order, rectitude and beauty, of the countless divine decrees that proceed from God's wisdom ruling the universe... But as no one can appreciate the beauty of a poem unless his vision embraces it as a whole, so no one can see the beauty of the orderly governance of creation unless he has an integral view of it. And since no man lives long enough to observe the whole with his bodily eyes, nor can anyone by his own ability foresee the future, the Holy Spirit is given to us the book of the Scriptures, whose length corresponds to the whole duration of God's governing action in the universe.

~ Bonaventure; The Breviloqium

We Cannot Forget the Beauty

Then we went to Constantinople and they led us to the place where they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or earth, for on earth there is no such vision nor beauty, and we do not know how to describe it; we only know that God dwells among men. We cannot forget that beauty.

~ Primary Chronicle of the Sent by Prince Vladimir of Kiev-Rus to Constantinople, as quoted in The Story of Christianity by David Bentley Hart, The Story of Christianity (n.p.: Quercus Books, 2008)

Swelling Fountain of Unfailing Sweetness

The soul must be awakened to the reach of its profoundest yearning: for the "Beauty, ever ancient, ever new," "holy delight," form beyond all the grace of created forms, most beautiful of beings, and Beauty of all beauties. Once glimpsed, the charm of God's Beauty can sweep the heart upward, to Himself, the swelling fountain of unfailing sweetness that alone can satiate the soul's deep thirst for beauty.

~ Robert J. O'Connell; Art and the Christian Intelligence in St. Augustine 

Think Backwards

Ever since the fall, our thoughts naturally flow in one direction: from the beauty to my enjoyment of it. Sin tilted created beauty toward us. But this is not beauty’s created purpose. Since created beauty speaks of God, our experience of it requires us to swim upstream. Beauty’s glory and satisfaction is found in the source, not the self. We must do what is counterintuitive to the sinner; in the wonder of beauty, we must think backwards.

~ Steve DeWitt; Eyes Wide Open