This week I began reading Douglas Jones and Douglas Wilson’s Angels In The Architecture for a small group study.  Previously we had read Plowing In Hope: Towards a Christian Theology of Culture by Bruce Hegeman, which, while I did not agree with everything the author postulated, I found to be very helpful and thought provoking.  There seems to be a focus, at least in the worship circles (as opposed to social circles) myself and the other members of Sensus Divinitatis Publishing are in, on what it means to live a fully-orbed Reformed, Christian life.  How does my faith affect the way I work?  The way I raise my family?  The way I watch a movie?  The way I exercise?  The way I enjoy a stroll on the boardwalk at sunset?  If I call Jesus Christ my Lord, then He is Lord over every aspect of my life, not just what happens on Sundays.

What we have been trying to work out in particular are the implications of that concept for culture building.  What would a Christian culture look like?  Mr. Jones and Mr. Wilson tell us to follow the beautiful, that where we find beauty, we will find God, because beauty in this life is and can only be the reflected beauty of the One who IS beauty itself.

Given the choice between modernism and Medieval Protestantism, how shall we decide?  Many strategies have gone before us.  But why not judge the respective visions by their beauty?  Which vision tells the better story?  Which has poetic grace and rich color?  Most us realize the legitimate place of syllogisms and rational grounds.  But the rational rarely satisfies even modernists.  Pascal explained that “every man is almost always led to believe not through proof, but through that which is attractive.  This way is low, unworthy and alien, and so everyone refuses to acknowledge it.”  All of us are led on by beauty.  Pascal thinks that this is base, but it seems to be the way God designed us.  We can never know enough arguments to be omniscient, but we can judge fruit.  And beauty is fruit.

It seems that, for the authors, beauty is a key to truth.  This idea is one I am interested to explore more.  David Bentley Hart, in The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, makes a similar claim, that to a postmodern culture, the beauty (and peace) of the Christian story can be used as a convincing proof of it’s truth.  Food for thought indeed.