But this isn’t the God of the Bible. In this text, we have a God who is constantly in conversation with humans and an active participant in the events in their lives, both as the subject and object of influence. He is sensitive to the sighs of His creations, touched by their griefs, and affected by the consequences of their actions.

Consider the events which unfolded in the midst of perhaps the greatest crisis of King Hezekiah of Judah’s reign. One day, while Hezekiah lay bedridden, God told His prophet Isaiah to go to Hezekiah in his bedchamber and tell him the outcome of his illness. The news of impending death could not have come at a worse point in Hezekiah’s life. At this time, Jerusalem was in imminent danger at the hands of the king of Assyria, and Hezekiah still lacked an heir. If he died, who knows what havoc and confusion the Israeli nation would be thrown into, without a descendant of David to lead them?

Hezekiah turns his face to the wall in despair. He bitterly weeps out the following prayer, “Remember, O Lord, how I have walked before you faithfully and with wholehearted devotion and have done what is good in your eyes.” His prayer is answered — before the prophet Isaiah even left the middle court of the palace. This is significant because it shows that immediately after Isaiah left him alone, Hezekiah turned to God, and immediately after Hezekiah uttered the last word of his prayer, God responded through Isaiah. “I have heard your prayer and seen your tears,” God says to Hezekiah. God took the human time to listen to Hezekiah’s lament and then displayed a cosmological efficiency by acting in the micro-second after a finished prayer.

After God heard Hezekiah’s prayer, He reversed the prior sentence of death and gave Hezekiah 15 more years to live. He also swore to Hezekiah that the mortal enemy of the Israelites, the Assyrians, would not take Jerusalem. Three years later, Hezekiah’s wife, Hephzibah, gave birth to a son. And seven centuries later, Hezekiah’s descendant Joseph married the mother of Jesus. God used Hezekiah’s seed to bring about the birth of His own Son.

Admittedly, God does not answer in this expedient way in most instances. There are times in a person’s life when serious faith through long, arduous nights seems unrewarded and even mocked by the unanswering air. On the one thousandth utterance of the same desperate plea, a weary pilgrim fraught with the burdens and sighs of one thousand nights begins to doubt either the power of his own prayers or the ability of God in answering them. Are our groans short of the bitterness and gravity of Hezekiah’s? Or is God truly uninterested in the state of our affairs? No wonder there are many who resort to a classical theist God of inaction, immutability, and invulnerability to explain his seeming absence.

But this view of God is not equal to the God of Hezekiah and of the Bible who plays an alternately effectuating and responsive role. A counterview to the problem of an apathetic God asserts that, because He is omniscient and knows what’s best for us, we should allow God room to answer “No,” or, “Wait.” God knows which of our desires are good and which are stumbling blocks, and God, like a father, desires to give to his children only the gifts which are good for them. God also knows when we are unready for a specific fulfillment of prayer and waits for us to grow and mature into readiness before He hands us the inheritance we have been asking for.

This is the rational answer, at least, but it may not be immediately emotionally or spiritually satisfying. We can reasonably intellectualize that God must be an ever-present being, but we do not always feel that He is eternally acting with our best future in mind. Even when we are told that God does strain his ears to hear our weeping and does send answers to our tears, we may still have doubts about the sufficiency of those answers, especially when they are so different in timing and shape than what we envision. How can the answer, “Wait,” be satisfying to us who live in the present? How can we emerge from another uneventful hour spent on our knees to say that it is good to be the supplicant?

Perhaps we can find the answers to these questions when we shift our attention away from ourselves and onto someone in a similar situation, someone who may be able to provide complete empathy and solid support, if not a perfect solution. Let’s look to the Son of God, our sympathizer, and there we shall find that even the prayers of God’s own Son were not always answered according to the Son’s wishes. They were, however, always answered with deference to God’s sovereignty. The first of two last requests Jesus made of God his father was that his Church would be one. He lifted his face toward heaven and literally pleaded with God, over and over again. “That they may be one…That they may be one…” Later that night, in an obscure garden, Jesus would pray another prayer three times right before his arrest: “Abba, Father, take this cup from me.” Jesus is still patiently waiting for the first prayer to be answered. But the response he got to his second prayer was simply, “No. My will is thus.” If Jesus, our paradigm, had to contend with these unwished-for responses from God, perhaps they are the rightful answers to some of our own invocations, and, like Jesus, we should not be fazed by their lackluster appearance or brand God as coolly impassive.

Having recognized that God’s will was not to take away the pain of Judgment, Jesus bent his will to the will of His Father and carried the Cross to Calvary. As a result, God was killed in the act of taking on all the pain and blame of the fault-ridden actions of His creation. The Godhead was torn asunder as Jesus descended into Hades because of our sins. Classical theism takes the divine characteristics of the Christian God, transcendent, self-sufficient, and eternal, and paints an incomplete picture of Him, because classical theism forgets this — God is vulnerable in his relationship with his creation. With Christ’s ascension and conquest of death, we have a God who is utterly affected by our actions.

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Ruirui Kuang ‘12, a History concentrator living in Mather House, is the Assistant Design Editor of The Ichthus.

Risking his standing with the religious establishment, Christ preached radical teachings that confounded the Pharisees.  Gambling his image with society, he frequently crossed cultural and social taboos to eat with the lowest of the low, teaching his followers to do the same.  By investing in twelve uneducated Galileans who were prone to failure, Jesus, fully human, risked his own expectations and patience.  And ultimately with Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, he risked and gave his life for us sinners.  From the life of Jesus Christ, we see what true boldness looks like—a willingness and readiness to risk all aspects of our lives for the sake of the Gospel, fully confident that the sovereign God reigns over our actions.

There is a great difference between a professor teaching military tactics and the field commander leading his men against the enemy.  The boldness of Jesus is manifest in his entire life, not merely his words.  Jesus lived with those to whom he ministered.  He shared his entire life with them, eating with sinners and tax collectors (Matt. 9:10) and sitting down with adulterers (John 4).  Investment and risk go hand-in-hand—one’s investments reflect the risks that one is willing to take.  Jesus certainly possessed the wisdom and power to be a famous and popular teacher.  Yet Jesus’ foremost investment is not in his popularity or image.  Jesus chooses to live a humble, impoverished life among the sinners that he sought to save.  To teach with great wisdom or to give grand displays of power would bring no risk to Jesus.  Instead, he lives boldly by patiently investing his life in relationships, risking disappointment, betrayal, and sorrow.  His model of ministry actively engaged in risk because he sought to invest in broken and sinful people.  Through Christ, we see that the God of the universe is bold enough to take on flesh, exposing himself to all the risks brought forth with life surrounded by sin.

The greatest risk and the greatest evidence of boldness in Christ’s ministry is his willingness to form meaningful relationships.  A televangelist may boldly preach the gospel to millions, yet form relationships with none.  The man at a busy subway station may boldly distribute tracts to hundreds of travelers, yet a printed tract does very little in terms of relationship.  Relationships simply cost more.  They take time and energy and are unpredictable.  Rather than explain to people who he is, Jesus connected and invested in people in order to show them who he is.

Before ascending to heaven, Jesus does not command us to preach from afar, but rather He commands us to “go and make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19a).  The purpose of evangelism is not merely to make converts, but disciples.  The word matheteuo is a command to make learners, people who will be trained by other Christians.  Jesus devoted time to teaching the Twelve, explaining his parables and challenging their faith (Luke 8:9, Matt. 14:29).  The Apostle Paul invested so much in Timothy that Timothy became like a son to him (Phil. 2:22).  In the Great Commission, we are commanded to invest in relationships for the purpose of maintaining lifelong growth in Christ, and such an investment carries heavy risks.  Actively seeking to reflect Christ and advance the Gospel in our relationships in the face of rejection or disappointment demonstrates a constant and internalized boldness.

Given the centrality of building relationships, where do we see Christians act boldly on campus?  Perhaps a student goes out on a limb and invites a friend to church, at risk of introducing an awkward dynamic to a friendship.  Some may take small stands for the faith in conversations with classmates or professors.  The particularly bold may loudly preach the gospel open-air during campus outreach events. Actions such as these mean very little in isolation.  What would be the point of engaging in a “bold Christian event” once a year, but then avoid risks the rest of the year?  Jesus knows the state of our hearts, and it is that internalized boldness that matters.  At the same time, it is better to engage in a modest act of boldness than to do nothing at all.  The simplest solution for feeling reluctant to be more vocal about Jesus amongst friends, for example, is to go out on a limb and take a small stand for the faith.  There is no easy way around doing something—one simply must do. As these small stands become habitual, this will naturally lead to the development of an internalized attitude of boldness.

A natural consequence of a bold life is that people will notice. As Jesus began his ministry in Galilee, “a report about him went out through all the surrounding country” (Luke 4:14).  A woman who fought her way through a crowd because she believed that just by touching Jesus’ robe, she would be healed (Luke 8:46).  Five thousand men followed Jesus as He traveled around the Sea of Galilee because they recognized Jesus as a healer (Mark 6:32).  Even a centurion knew of Jesus’ reputation for healing, asking Jesus, “Say the word, and my servant will be healed” (Matt. 8:7).  Clearly, Jesus became well known during his ministry as a great healer and a teacher with authority. This image of boldness naturally follows His actions.

In considering what it means to be bold, from the condition of our hearts to the decisions we make, we cannot underestimate importance of faith—the confidence that God reigns over our actions.  We can be bold because we know that the One who calls us to be bold now sits on a throne in Heaven.  We know that our hope is in Christ and that He is and will be victorious.  Because of the redemptive work of Christ, we have nothing to fear, freeing us to be bold.  We also cannot emphasize the importance of being filled with the Spirit.  The love of Christ enables us to sustain even the most difficult relationships.  The wisdom that comes from the Spirit enables us to act appropriately.  The Spirit also supplies us with the courage to even act at all.  We cannot be bold without the sustaining love of Christ, perfectly expressed when He died for us.  I just pray that we would be bold enough to live for Him.

As the famous verse goes, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” (Phil. 4:13, NKJV)

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Tony Shen ‘12, a Neurobiology concentrator living in Quincy House, is Special Projects Coordinator for The Ichthus.

The standard responses to the problem of evil focus on the third part of the equation, God as all-good.  In order for good to exist there must also be evil.  Good would not make any sense or have any meaning without the absence of good with which to compare it.  Moreover, moral evil is the result of human free will, which is necessary to show the full glory of God. God is glorified when God’s creation voluntarily chooses God.  Evil is an unfortunate consequence of the path to a higher good.  Another response claims that evil is the training ground for the good.  We learn from bad things and become better and more mature humans as a result.  The journey towards our final unity with God depends on our moral training through experiencing and reacting to evil.  Yet one more response asserts that the good is beyond our conception.  God sees all.  God is behind all things.  Everything happens for a reason and fits into God’s grand design.  What might seem evil to us might be good from the perspective of God.  Our role is to grin and bear it.

Liberal theologians in the 20^th century asked whether there was not another way forward.  Perhaps instead of solving the problem of evil by re-examining what we mean by good, we can address the problem of evil by reconsidering our notion of God as all-powerful.  These thinkers assert that our common conception of God as transcendent and eternally unchanged owe far more to Greek philosophy than to the Bible.  The God of the Bible is not unaffected by human action.  The God of the Bible seeks out relationship with humanity.  There is a certain symbiosis between God and creation.  After all, God makes a covenant with Abraham.  God chooses Israel to be God’s own people.  Abraham negotiates with God to avert the destruction of Sodom if there are only ten good people in the city.  God speaks through the prophets to warn Israel of destruction and to call the nation back into proper relationship.  In the New Testament, one of the defining aspects of Jesus’ relation with God is its intimacy.  Jesus calls God “Abba” or Father.  Christians believe that God’s Word became incarnate in Christ in order to restore relationship and reveal God more fully to humanity.  None of these portraits of God present God as unchangeable and atemporal.  God changes over time; God evolves alongside creation and in relationship with creation.

This untraditional view of God and God’s relationship with creation is supported by a particular reading of Genesis 1.  The standard translation of the first verse of Genesis reads, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.”  Yet, more recent translators, including the highly respected Jewish Publication Society and the translating committee of the New Revised Standard Version, opt for a different reading.  The NRSV reads, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters” (emphasis added).  The key word is “when.”  If you read these first verses as one sentence and if you make the first verse a dependent clause, then the beginning lines of Genesis argue for pre-existent matter.  God’s role in creation is not to create something out of nothing, but to order the “formless void” into something intelligible.  God is not absolutely powerful.  Matter existed before God.  For certain liberal Christians this creation myth contains an important theological lesson: God is not the only force in creation.

All of this reasoning leads to interesting conclusions when you begin to reconsider the problem of evil.  If creation is not wholly dependent on God, then an earthquake does not have to be “an act of God” but can be simply two tectonic plates rubbing against each other without any inference from God whatsoever.  Cancer does not have to be a result of the will of God but can be merely the mutation of an oncogene.  You also no longer have to say that human evil derives from a mythical “fall” in some past time.  If God is all-good and if God created everything out of nothing, then the original state of nature had to be likewise all-good.  You must posit a fall from that original state in order to justify evil in God’s all-good creation.  In the liberal scheme that I have outlined, you no longer have to invent some pre-historic fall, which becomes theologically problematic when you try to make it into a pure myth.  Instead, you can claim that creation, of its own, seeks chaos; it seeks to return to its original state of “formless void.”  God creates order and invites humanity towards the way of God, which is the way of love.  God desires a relationship with humanity, but humans have the free will to say no.

The great benefit of this system is that it maintains the fundamental goodness of God above all else.  God is good without question.  God does not will your son or daughter to die of cancer or some freak accident.  God did not sit by and let the Holocaust happen.  God did not curse the people of Haiti with an earthquake because of a two hundred year old pact with the Devil.  God is love and God works to bring order and goodness to creation.  God is the one “in whom we live and move and have our being” and not some absolute monarch who rules over all of the universe, rewarding friends and punishing foes. Jesus instantiates the love of God for us.  Jesus does not compel us but invites us into fellowship with him, just like God.  Whether or not you agree with this view of God, it is at least worthy of consideration.
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Reverend Jonathan Page is the Epps Fellow at Memorial Church and a Chaplain to Harvard College.

The Zoo encircled both of us.
          paths curved as his horns had curved:
Well, there are stranger Animals,
          By stranger Loves conserved.
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Patrick Spence ‘12, a Classics concentrator living in Currier House, is the Poetry and Fiction Editor of The Ichthus.

Our finitude is palpable. We see it in the mangled bodies of victims of war and natural disaster; we smell it in the acid-sweet stench of sickness and the stuffiness of declining years. We experience it firsthand in our own foolishness and immorality and in the mistakes of the ones we love. We are born into it, and we die of it. It colors every day of our lives, the dim glass through which we view our world.

Moreover, the horrors we encounter in our finite existences seem indiscriminately distributed. The righteous suffer while the evil slip away unscathed. Wealth wrongfully acquired brings countless advantages, but virtue counts for little to the poor. Not even after years of waiting are we sure to get our just deserts. And yet God, we say, is omnipotent, omniscient, and good.

Thus Job’s lament: Why, God? Why, if you are good, do you permit such horrors? Our theme for this issue is the question — Where is God? How do we reconcile the pervasiveness of evil with the Christian conception of a powerful and benevolent Deity? How do we understand the Bible’s insistence that God has commanded the deaths of entire nations, including civilians? Can a loving God truly be behind such stories? Or do these considerations count as evidence against Christian faith?

We certainly cannot hope to settle these questions within a single issue of The Ichthus. But we are confident that in the pages that follow, we have gathered together a collection of writings that can offer both believers and non-believers an invaluable entrée into the ideas employed and positions defended by Christian thinkers in today’s academy. We are especially pleased to feature contributions by celebrated Notre Dame philosopher Peter van Inwagen and Harvard’s own Tyler VanderWeele, a biostatistician and member of the faculty of the School of Public Health. Both offer timely additions to Christian scholarship at Harvard and elsewhere.

I invite you to join us in our corporate reflection and discussion of these important and difficult issues. We sincerely hope that God will reveal to us His truth and character, so that we may see clearly for the sake of the Church and the world. But even if philosophical clarity is not forthcoming, we will still rejoice in the opportunity to proclaim God’s final answer to the evils of this world, which is Christ in us, the hope of glory.

Many blessings now and in months to come,

Cameron D. Kirk-Giannini Editor-in-Chief

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Eboné Ingram ‘12 is a Molecular and Cellular Biology concentrator living in Winthrop House.

I know, at any rate, that it is my desire. Were I left to my own devices, I surely would never rise above this pathetic ostentation and vainglory, the idolatry of self that is the sin of modern man. I wish I could tell youthatIama good and kind- hearted person. But the truth is that I am a sinful wretch: proud, conceited, and judgmental, prone to anger and to deceit. I am a slave to the flesh, a poor wayfaring stranger.

The bad news is that, if anything even remotely resembling Christianity is true, you are, too — fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Even our righteous acts are as filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6). And it is obvious that we know this; the gulf between our public and private personae give us away. And so we are comedians playing to an audience too afraid to laugh — adulterous brides who have spurned our grooms and reveled in our infidelity. We are a contradiction, a fusion of the divine and the demonic, at constant war with ourselves. We are a race of Fyodor Karamazovs, blithering clowns hiding behind masks because we are terrified, absolutely terrified that someone might see the truth beneath the disguise.

The good news is that God’s grace is for adulteresses and clowns — in short, for the world. God has forgiven us and intertwined His Spirit with the Sodom in our hearts. We are sinners in the hands of an angry God — and we can be redeemed. Try as we may, we can never vanquish Beauty, only wound it; despite all our transgressions, we still can sing, write, dance, and laugh.<

The Ichthus, then, like any publication, is a journal devoted to the victories — the stories, essays, and ideas — of its staff. But it also is a journal devoted to the weaknesses of its staff, a journal created in recognition of the fact that we Christians are nothing without Christ. We acknowledge that we need to be saved — and we acknowledge that we have been saved.

We need no façade. Rather, we boast in our weaknesses: God’s power is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). We rejoice in our mortality: Death has been swallowed up in victory (1 Corinthians 15:54). And we remember that our triumphs come not from our brilliance or wisdom, but from the goodness, grace, and majesty of our Lord Jesus Christ.

J. Joseph Porter ‘12, a Philosophy concentrator living in Quincy House, is the Features Editor of The Ichthus.

According to Tickle, fundamental changes to the world and religion follow a five-hundred year pattern: the Reformation occurred approximately five hundred years ago; back another cycle is the Great Schism which separated Greek Orthodoxy from Roman Catholicism; and another five hundred years brings the fall of Rome and the rise of monasticism, five hundred years after the life of Christ. Furthermore, each cycle has a general structure. First there is a hundred-year period of adjustment to the changes. Next there are two hundred and fifty years of relative peace and stability in this new worldview and form of religion. Finally, there is another hundred and fifty years in which this construct falls apart again before the next revolution occurs. She believes that we are nearing the end of this part of the cycle and beginning something new.

Tickle’s descriptive interpretation of the past hundred-fifty years is both scholarly and readable, touching on many major changes without becoming bogged down in details. Examining the past century and a half, she formulates four pressing questions which she claims are driving the Great Emergence and need to be addressed by Christianity:

• Where is the authority?2

• What is human consciousness?

• What is the relationship of all religions to one another?3

• What now is society’s basic or fundamental unit?4

While she succeeds in establishing the importance of these questions in North American society and the need for any religion to deal with them, she focuses on the intellectual issues and outward problems and patterns of the Church, rather than on inner life. Although important, these are not the main business of Christians or the Church, which is to become more like Christ and to spread the gospel. Tickle has an unfortunate tendency to portray the Church as a passive reactor to changes happening in the world of society, economics, and culture. Moreover, she writes as if these reactions are progress — and therefore automatically good, often implying that new, non-traditional answers will become standard for these questions. For example, as she discusses her fourth question in terms of family structure, she inserts this comment about the introduction of the pill and its effect on gender roles: “There is, again, nothing inherently right or wrong in these changes. There is only change itself.”5 Throughout, she ignores the objections of various groups of Christians, neither refuting them nor justifying the goodness of the changes, but presenting the most non-traditional form of Christianity as the form that is going to prevail doctrinally in the Great Emergence.

So far, Tickle only notes an emerging response to her first essential question: authority lies in “Scripture and the community.”6 Theological discussion outside of traditional religion and exchange of ideas replace the more traditional hierarchical forms of authority. Tickle predicts that mysticism, emphasizing experience and paradox, will become much more prominent, as well as interest in pre-Constantine Christianity. Codified doctrine, which assumed a much greater role in Christianity after Constantine and was closely associated with temporal authority, will decline in its importance in unifying communities. What is emerging through these changes is not Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox, but rather something new that comes out of conversation and the mixing of all forms of Christianity. Appropriately, then, Tickle calls the new form of Christianity “emergent Christianity.” The Church is a network rather than a building, a fixed set of beliefs, or a tradition inherited from the family. Tickle’s clearest description of the nature of this new form of Christianity is that “‘emergent’ Christianity is fundamentally a body of people, a conversation, if you will.”7

While emergent Christianity puts more emphasis on community and less on doctrine and theory, this change is not reflected in The Great Emergence. The influences on history mentioned in the book are almost exclusively intellectual and theoretical social issues. As Tickle discusses the origins of the Great Emergence, she focuses on intellectuals, such as Einstein and Freud, and social trends, such as the automobile and the rise of women in the workplace, in order to explain the increased importance of community. Even worse, there is no hint of an active God in any of these changes. Her perspective and presentation of the matter tries to absolve the Christian of any blame in the state of affairs, taking away any responsibility for action on the part of the Church. The system of cycles slips into a kind of history where there is no actual progress or regress, only change. Ideas are portrayed as becoming outdated, with little explanation of why they are outdated or why the changes are good. With this perspective, guilt is “neither appropriate, justified, nor productive,”8 and history takes care of itself. Both those who choose to remain in traditional settings and those who embrace change are given similar gentle approval, which dilutes any enthusiasm for the work of God, personal action, or leadership.

Through all of this, Tickle does not define Christianity, either what essentials should remain through all the changes,or what does in fact remain the same. While she claims to include every form of Christianity, her lack of opinion, judgment, or any central doctrine leaves many Christians out of the conversation that is her “Great Emergence.” Arguing that Christianity is reacting to societal changes, Tickle misses out on the grandeur of saying that God is doing a new thing.

[1] The Great Emergence, p. 28

[2] 45

[3] 73

[4] 112

[5] 114

[6] 151

[8] 104

[10] 42

Jennifer Delurey ’12 is a History and Literature concentrator in Winthrop House.

Theology seeks the particulars of how God works in the world and who He is, how the Infinite interacts with we the limited. Aesthetics pursues a strikingly similar aim: how the Whole, the All, the Eternal manifests itself in the fragment to create beauty. In the fusion of these two similar and yet disparate disciplines can be found incredible and important insights. Yet both theology and aesthetics are huge, diverse fields of thought, with canons too massive for mere piqued interest. For a simple start, The Portal of Beauty introduces a few key thinkers who tie together the two fields. Bruno Forte, in his concise, dense, and gorgeous work on the theology of aesthetics, draws us to a deeper understanding of the Holy One, through an exploration of the many links between studying beauty and theology. These links are reminders of vital, inescapable truths — truths we would do well to apply in our own relationships, lives, and art.

Forte’s knowledgeable, well-read guidance at times forsakes clarity in favor of poetic and eloquent mental acrobatics. All in all, though, his work is an enlivening beginning to an area that merits much further examination. He often stops at summarizing thinkers’ viewpoints, not carrying forward their ideas into practical applications relevant to daily life. And yet his work provides the first stepping stones in a path that we must take. Indeed, through his window into aesthetics shines impassioning clarity about the importance of beauty to the world, and specifically to the lives and missions of believers in Messiah.

Beauty, as Forte defines it, is “an event; beauty happens when the Whole offers itself in the fragment, and when this self-giving transcends infinite distance.”1 The Infinite Whole gives of itself in tiny fragments of its fullness through form and splendor. Beauty as form suggests that a fragment becomes a proportional analogy of the harmony of the Whole, a dwelling-place for the Eternal. Beauty as splendor describes the Infinite breaking forth, shining out of the intimate fragment and giving itself into the finite.

Seen in such light, what event is more beautiful than that of the Holy One offering to manifest Himself as Jesus, a frail, human fragment to His unfathomable entirety? Jesus embodies the exact perfection and nature of God — He is the image and form of the Infinite. At the same time, the power and radiantly loving heart of the Father shines forth from Jesus’ deeds and personality, a splendor unmatched by any other human being in history. Indeed, the incarnation of Jesus is perhaps the most complete and obvious example we have of an event of beauty. Thus suddenly the entire, vast body of understanding of beauty through the ages — aesthetics — unexpectedly reveals the personality and love of God. In examining beauty, one shortly comes to wonder at that strange melancholy that seems to haunt the truly beautiful, the twinge of death that entwines with joy to pierce the heart in aesthetic arrest. Forte puts his finger on the importance of that strange sadness, our need for despair in tandem and contrast with beauty.

“A Christianity deprived of beauty would risk being nothing other than a faith that has never known the darkness of despair, and so being an empty, tranquilizing ‘established Christianity’…True sacrifice requires love, and we only truly love a beauty that has stolen us from ourselves. And so there is a special strength and dignity in despair, attained only by those who have fallen in love with beauty, and absent from a this-worldly Christianity which has compromised with the calculations and comforts of this present age.”2

Forte turns to Soren Kierkegaard to elucidate the interplay between beauty and misery. Kierkegaard intimately investigates various models of how one might stray into pursuing penultimate beauty, all of which lead to abject despair in the dissatisfaction with the merely reflective beauty of this world while the heart continues to long for the true Beauty of the coming Kingdom. Beauty draws us to need desperately, and at some point of the dark night of despair our desperation drives us out of our prejudices, lusts, mediocrity and false comfort into a relationship with the One who is equally desperate to hold us in His arms and fill us with His Comfort. A faith without such passion at its heart is dry, shallow, and cannot but be co-opted by the forces against the Kingdom—quotidian apathy, satisfaction with mediocrity, fleeting pleasures to dull the pain of existing instead of living. Without beauty and therefore despair, we subscribe to a comfortable, controlled religion that places the Infinite One in a box built of our own fears, urges, and mundane routines and will not allow Him to fully reign over our lives. And yet beauty in the world has a way of entrancing its pursuers, never quite fulfilling their inherent longing for the Infinite at its heart. We stop at aesthetically pleasing moments and begin to pursue the pleasure they lend us, rather than the Truth that shines through such beauty and indeed is at its very core. There is a harsh tension between the acknowledgment of the Infinite revealed by real beauty and the desperate yearning for something more that beauty seems to highlight within us.

Forte, in his exploration of and departure from the base of Augustine’s aesthetic theology, elucidates the nature of this tension. “God is…Beauty, original and final; so it is that this worldly beauty, echoing its divine origin and pointing towards its fulfillment in the homeland, is the way that leads to him if, following this way, we do not halt at what is penultimate, but let ourselves be attracted towards supreme delight.”3. In Augustine’s treatment of beauty, we are granted permission to perpetually wish for another moment of beauty, so long as we remain conscious that in our pursuit of that more, what calls to our hearts is not the pleasure of experiencing beauty, but rather the Infinite within the beautiful fragment. The choice to run after the penultimate beauty rather than the Source of all Beauty is a snare, a doorway into the abject pain of grasping at what cannot ever fulfill — skeptics have been entirely correct in fearing beauty’s fickle allure. But because of this snare, it seems that for far too long much of the worldwide Body of believers in Messiah has shied away from pursuing beauty, branding it ‘worldly’ and ‘vain.’ We worry, because the corruption of something so profound as Beauty can so pull the heart from its quest for intimacy with its Creator. And yet in such fear, the Body risks practicing exactly what Forte (and indeed Jesus) warns against — a passionless, dry, “established” religion. Just as beauty corrupted is a fearful thing, so Beauty redeemed strikes terror in the hearts of the adversaries of the Kingdom. Further drawing us to the urgency of our need for beauty, Hans Urs von Balthasar suggests that “…in a world that no longer has enough confidence in itself to affirm the beautiful, the proofs of the truth have lost their cogency.”4

So much of our knowledge of the Holy One is through His creation; what proofs exist of His truth are in His beauty. Augustine speaks to this in a parable, questioning creation. “I looked at the creatures, and asked [about my God]; their beauty was their answer.”5 Should we choose to ignore the vital importance of beauty in drawing the human heart toward God, we risk not only missing vital truths about His nature, but misusing our own creative natures. We as the living Body of Jesus have a mandate to live in His image: an image that yearns for the beautiful, that embodies the beautiful, that creates, mimicking the actions of the Creator.

We have been granted “…salvation of history, and not salvation from history…The more man is man, the more he is an image, an icon of God.”6 This idea is from the Russian Orthodox thinker Evdokimov, a philosopher wrestling with the concept of the icon. In salvation does not come removal from our true selves, but rather growth toward who and what we were made to be. In exploring what it is to truly walk in His image, as we were designed to live, it is impossible to escape the mandate to create. Indeed, the first thing God asks of the human race in the Bible is that we “be fruitful and multiply.”7 We were made to create: our choice is not whether or not we will be creators, but whether or that draws us to first know God, that helps us understand the Infinite from our finite perspective through its form and splendor, that comforts us and agitates us and yet always pulls us deeper into the mystery of Reality. And we find ourselves with a commission to act in His image, creating and interacting with beauty in this world as a tool for drawing every person we meet into the coming Kingdom alongside us.

Forte’s book, densely packed with many more nuanced revelations and philosophies, still manages to leave the reader at a simple, convicting place. It is an invitation to begin a life of Beauty, not a set of spoon-fed conclusions applicable immediately to life. But the invitation is one that returns to the very core of our beliefs. The Eternal, Infinite One manifested Himself in fragmented humanity, took on death, and conquered despair — this core truth is the heart of all Beauty. All beauty in the world is in some way an echo of the Truth in the realization of the Eternal within the finite. And as beauty creates desperate hunger for Beauty, so by daily creating in the image of our Beautiful Creator, we advance His Kingdom and draw closer to Him.

[1] Bruno Forte, The Portal of Beauty, p. vii.

[2] Bruno Forte, The Portal of Beauty, p. 29.

[3] Bruno Forte, The Portal of Beauty, p. 12.

Few potential accusations can strike fear into the hearts of enlightened moderns as devastatingly as the charge of being “narrow-minded.” Bighearted tolerance and open-minded liberalism are very much in vogue in the public arena. These qualities are regularly equated with intellectual virtue. Christians, on the other hand, are frequently and derisively mocked as narrow – admittedly, sometimes with ample cause.

Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) had another interpretation, one opposed to every secular intuition and instinct. This uncompromising Puritan – who today, regrettably, is written off and emembered only for the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”1 – labored to demonstrate that the essence of narrow-mindedness was actually on display in the increasing tendency of Western culture to marginalize God from every area of human existence.2 God was rarely denied outright by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, but He nevertheless was removed from the center of reality in all fields of inquiry. This cataclysmic shift was regarded by Edwards to be a profound tragedy, one that he lamented and fought against his whole life:

“Tis a strange disposition that men have to thrust God out of the world, or to put Him as far out of sight as they can, and to have in no respect immediately and sensibly to do with Him. Therefore so many schemes have been drawn to exclude, or extenuate, or remove at a great distance, any influence of the Divine Being.”3

As Michael McClymond has pointed out, “[F]or adherents of the moderate Enlightenment, a little religion was a good thing. Yet Edwards abhorred moderation in religion…He was the self-appointed apostle to the spiritually indifferent.”4 Allen Guelzo has argued that Edwards was “the most consistently unsecular thinker in American history.”5 Such sentiments do not, I suspect, possess much allure for contemporary readers who are comfortable with spirituality in small doses and who tend to agree with Yeats that the best lack all conviction. By that measure, Edwards comes down to us through the ages as the devil incarnate.

So it would be easy to dismiss Edwards’ challenge with a flippant, casual wave of the hand when he indicts the modern mindset as inherently narrow-minded. I plead with you to resist that urge. A respectful yet critical consideration of a perspective of pure “otherness” – even if ultimately rejected and deemed ridiculous – is a healthy experience for most of us occasionally to endure. As C. S. Lewis has so poignantly urged, it is actually we moderns (naturally prone to “chronological snobbery” as we are) who need such counterintuitive perspectives most desperately:

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook – even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united – united with each other and against earlier and later ages – by a great mass of common assumptions…. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books…. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.6

Just such an old book is Jonathan Edwards’ The Nature of True Virtue. Published posthumously in 1758 along with The End for Which God Created the World (together called the Two Dissertations),7 True Virtue is Edwards’ most renowned philosophical work. In 18th-century debates on ethical theory, the Enlightenment’s decentralization of God took the shape of distancing Christianity from moral virtue. The stunning implication was that, perhaps for the first time in human history, it became theoretically possible for people to be good without reference to God. Edwards, however, would have none of it; he insisted upon a teleological ethic grounded in God’s purpose in creating the universe, rather than human happiness or social flourishing considered in isolation from that design. God’s goal in creation – namely, the relational extension to human beings of His own trinitarian glory – determines from the outset the nature and scope of true virtue in human society.8

Edwards’ decision to cast his treatment of ethics within a teleological framework was a stroke of genius, for it allowed him to include far broader considerations than most “freethinkers” of his age. If God created human beings with the primary function of knowing and loving Him, then to be “good” must be defined in light of that divine intention and never autonomously.

A basic example may help to flesh out the intimate connection between “purpose” (teleology) and “goodness” (virtue): a broken can opener may still prove useful as a defensive weapon against a burglar or for banging a nail into the wall. Nonetheless, if the tool is no longer able to actually open cans, it is not a “good” can opener. Think now of the creation story in Genesis 1. When God concludes His opening work by declaring all of His creation “very good”, the thrust is that everything in the cosmos was once fulfilling its original function. But to fall out of line with one’s design is, by definition, to cease to be “good.” Therefore, before we can decide what makes a human being “good”, we must first discover – in Wendell Berry’s phrase – what people are for, if anything.9 And if Edwards is on target and human beings exist to participate in the knowledge, love and delight that flow mutually between the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit, then to exclude such “religious” criteria from any ethical discussion is irreducibly narrow-minded:

Hence it appears that these schemes of religion or moral philosophy, which, however well in some respects they may treat of benevolence to mankind, and other virtues depending on it, yet have not a supreme regard to God, and love to him, laid in the foundation and all other virtues handled in a connection with this, and in a subordination to this, are no true schemes of philosophy, but are fundamentally and essentially defective… It may be asserted in general that nothing is of the nature of true virtue, in which God is not the first and the last; or which, with regard to their exercises in general, have not their first foundation and source in apprehensions of God’s supreme dignity and glory, and in answerable esteem and love of him, and have not respect to God as the supreme end.10

In The Nature of True Virtue, Edwards engages the leading philosophical trends of his day on their own ground and in vivid fashion makes a compelling case for this simple, blunt proposition: any human behavior whatsoever that ignores God’s goal for humanity cannot be good in any ultimate sense. There are, at the last, no truly virtuous unbelievers to be found in the world. If Edwards’ hunch on the centrality of God is vindicated, it can shed enormous light on the many biblical passages that make such drastic claims (consider Genesis 6:5, 8:21, Psalm 14:1-3, 53:1-3, 58:3, 143:2, Proverbs 20:9, Ecclesiastes 7:20, 9:3, Isaiah 64:6, Matthew 19:17, Romans 3:9-20, etc.).

However, Edwards is also keenly aware of this objection: the moral conduct of those who ignore or reject God’s design for their existence often seems less than evil and sometimes even praiseworthy. From the standpoint of Christian theology, this is the classic problem of the “virtuous pagan.” Edwards does not deny outright this common observation – in fact, he labels such secular virtue “secondary beauty” – but neither is he convinced that it contradicts his main point. How can that be? I have found three striking, complementary illustrations in his writings that have achieved coherence in the midst of seeming contradiction. The first illustration employs the dynamics of the marriage relationship to elucidate the matter: “Let a woman seek to give all the content to her husband that may be, not out of any love to him, but only out of love to another man, he abhors all that she doth.”11 The imagined scenario is one in which an adulterous wife acts charitably and affectionately towards her spouse in all of their intimate moments spent together in the private life of the home. Crucially, the illegitimate affair is still unknown to her husband as he contemplates her acts. From a narrow point of view, all of these “good works” (perhaps cooking a meal, complimenting her husband, buying him a gift) are praiseworthy. However, from the largest, widest perspective (that is, the real one), our perception changes radically: she acts benevolently towards her husband only so that he will not suspect her affair with another man. This illicit liaison is what she chiefly treasures and is unwilling to forsake. No longer viewing her individual actions with tunnel vision, we concur with Edwards: once the knowledge of the wife’s overarching motive (protecting the cherished affair) is gained, the husband will despise everything that she does. All of her good works have become as filthy rags.

A second hypothetical scene: a charismatic military leader is addressing his troops with fierce passion and tender care as they prepare for imminent warfare. With a lengthy track record of faithfulness and service to his men – often fighting on the front line himself and making every personal sacrifice conceivable – the leader authentically communicates his deep love and appreciation for his comrades. No false note is hit. He means all that he says. His men, in turn, would unhesitatingly lay down their lives for their captain; to them, he is a hero, the embodiment of courage and integrity. Once again, with this (narrow and limited) insight into the situation, our hearts are stirred and our evaluation is positive. This man is “good” in all that we have opportunity to witness. Now back up. This man is further revealed to us as a brutal, merciless rebel who has revolted against the true king of the land – a king who protects his people and acts with wisdom and justice in his reign as all prosper under him. Furthermore, his motives are malignant: he desires riches and power for himself, not for the good of others. He is spurred on by an inordinate hatred of the king, deeply jealous of the love and loyalty the people of the land have for the rightful monarch. He tortures those who oppose him and burns villages to the ground with inhabitants still trapped within the torched buildings. Again, we are compelled to reevaluate our initial perception: what initially seemed like moral goodness from a narrow perspective has turned out to be absolutely repugnant, once all of the relevant facts are taken into account. We were once narrow-minded, but no longer; once blind, we now see. Finally, bring to mind your favorite childhood song. To be tangible, I’ll assume you have conjured up something from U2’s The Joshua Tree. Hearing the cherished melody stirs up nostalgic memories of years gone by. The rhythm and the lyrics combine to move your spirit in a way that only a beloved piece of music can. In this moment so narrowly conceived, beauty soaks into the depths of your being. Yet – back up now and take the larger picture in, one last time. This individual tune, which in isolation pulsates with energy and harmony and joy, actually turns out to have been intended by the composer to play an integral part in a larger performance of Mozart’s Symphony No. 41. The song, beautiful with reference only to itself, loses its initial luster; moreover, given its interconnected location within the overall symphony for which it was designed, it actually becomes a disruptive, anarchic force of disharmony that conspires against the whole.12 It doesn’t fit. And thus, it has become worthless and no good. For the person whose ear is in tune with the flow of the entire performance, this individual song is painful to hear and impossible to appreciate or enjoy.

In a universe in which the God Who has made Himself known in Jesus Christ is the source and goal of everything that exists, we cannot pursue morality (or business, or mathematics, or art, or sex, or government, or happiness, or anything) without reference to Him. If we do, we will have become narrow-minded in the process, for any attempt to exclude Him will necessarily disregard the most important part of the narrative, the most relevant fact for consideration. The beauty and goodness which we believe mark our lives can only be evaluated as such when we take the narrow view, the contorted perspective that blocks out the most significant part of our existence. Human “virtue” apart from the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ is spiritually equivalent to the morality of the adulterous wife, the greatness of the selfish rebel leader, and the loveliness of the disharmonious song that disrupts the grand symphony. Once all of the relevant facts are taken into consideration, what once impressed us in our ethical ignorance now returns to us as broken, revolting and hideously deformed. John Piper summarizes The Nature of True Virtue by asserting that we are “infinitely parochial” if we embrace everything in creation but forget our Creator.13 Jonathan Edwards’ essential contention, then, is this: whatever “secondary beauty” may exist among those who have chosen to rupture the harmony of God’s creation song by singing their own tune in a different key,14 the best of this fallen human conduct apart from Christ will turn out to be, upon closer inspection, mere honor among thieves.

The Nature of True Virtue thus provides a daring philosophical explanation of Paul’s claim that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). But Edwards does not abandon us to the gloom of our misery in Adam, starkly bitter and real as it is. Creation is regained through the redemption of Christ, and God’s goal for His image bearers is being restored within this new humanity. C.S. Lewis was fond of referring to this phenomenon as the most important kind of evolution: the redevelopment of God’s image within the community of sinners who embrace His Son.15 What will it look like when the task is finished? I’ll leave that piece of imagination to Edwards:

By these things it appears that a truly virtuous mind, being as it were under the sovereign dominion of love to God, does above all things seek the glory of God, and makes this his supreme, governing, and ultimate end: consisting in the expression of God’s perfections in their proper effects, and in the manifestation of God’s glory to created understandings, and the communications of the infinite fullness of God to the creature; in the creature’s highest esteem of God, love to God, and joy in God, and in the proper exercises and expressions of these…. And that temper or disposition of heart, that consent, union, or propensity of mind … which appears chiefly in such exercises, is virtue, truly so called; or in other words, true grace and real holiness. And no other dispositionor affection but this is of the nature of true virtue.16

[1] “Identifying Jonathan Edwards with ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ is like identifying Jesus with the woes against Chorazin and Bethsaida. This is a fraction of the whole, and it is not the main achievement.” John Piper, God’s Passion For His Glory: Living the Vision of Jonathan Edwards (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1998), p. 83.

[2] I will define “narrow-mindedness,” quite simply, as any way of thinking that refuses to take into account all of the relevant facts for a given situation or theme. Accordingly, there can be varying degrees or levels of narrow-mindedness, depending on how significant the ignored data are.

[3] Jonathan Edwards, Treatise on Grace and Other Posthumously Published Writings, ed. Paul Helm (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1971), p. 53.

[4] Encounters With God: An Approach to the Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 108.

[5] Edwards on the Will: A Century of American Theological Debate (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), ix.

[6] “On the Reading of Old Books”, in God In The Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), p. 202.

[7] “Edwards intended these dissertations to be published together. The one is the mirror image of the other; the ‘end’ for which God created the world must be the ‘end’ of a truly virtuous and holy life.” Paul Ramsey, Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 8: Ethical Writings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 5.

[8] God’s intra-trinitarian glory is defined by Edwards, via John 17, as the knowledge, love and joy which are shared eternally between the Father and the Son, communicated through the Spirit. In creation and redemption, God’s

overarching purpose is to “extend” this reality to human beings, who participate in God’s own life through the Spirit as they behold God’s beauty in the face of the Son.

[9] Edwards explicitly draws this link between teleology and goodness: “[T]he true goodness of a thing (as was observed before) must be its agreeableness to its end, or its fitness to answer the design for which it was made. Or, at least, this must be its goodness in the eyes of the workman. Therefore they are good moral agents whose temper of mind or propensity of heart is agreeable to the end for which God made moral agents.” The Nature of True Virtue, in Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 8: Ethical Writings, ed. Paul Ramsey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 558-59.

[10] The Nature of True Virtue, p. 560.

[11] Miscellany 676 in Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 18, The ‘Miscellanies’ 501-832, ed. Ava Chamberlain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 236-37.

[12] “Yet if such benevolences, however attractive in themselves, are out of tune with the great symphony of God’s love that animates the universe, they are ultimately discordant, rather than truly beautiful.” George Marsden, Jonathan

Edwards: A Life, p. 469.

[13] Piper, p. 108.

[14] For a breathtaking narrative depiction of this idea, see the creation story at the beginning of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion.

[15] See the final chapters of Mere Christianity, especially “The New Men.”

[16] The Nature of True Virtue, pp. 559-60.