Aesthetics and the Worship of God
Beauty is often spoken about, sometimes like a long-dead friend; if we see it as a potent force in the world, why is that and what bearing does it have on our life as saints?
I’m not big on extravagant traveling; being a philosophical localist has made me a localist in practice and taste as well,1 and so I’m more than happy and delighted with those sights and sounds in my immediate vicinity, in the land and among the people God has allotted to my wonderful corner of Creation. (Let’s not get into that too much now!) Despite this inclination I can still think of places I would certainly not complain about ending up in, especially the mighty monuments of old European civilization. I think in particular of sites such as the Cologne Cathedral, which astounds countless millions still even in this decadent secular age, or Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Mont-Saint-Michel, or the Palace of Aachen. The thread that binds all such sights, and the desire for many millions worldwide and year-round to visit them, is manifestly beauty. Sure, antiquity, reverence, awe, curiosity, things such as those certainly play a role, too, but I think beauty is primary or prominent. No one’s flocking to see the world’s oldest landfill or Compton. This rather neglected word seems to be extraordinarily powerful, and history bears witness to that, as I would hold is demonstrated in the landmarks I mentioned above. Christ made us a promise that we could have the faith to move mountains (Mt. 17:20), and what this seems to have repeatedly emerged throughout history as is the faith to build mountains. What is it about beauty that so entrances us? What is it about beauty that so enhances us? If it has such power, what role does it play in our religion? That is the query I wish to explore today.
Now, perhaps unexpectedly, I wish to begin with Heaven. For some, this might make sense, for others, I invite you to watch as the process unfolds. To get straight to the point, the fact is that while many people have their preconceptions of what “Heaven” is and means, Heaven is not so much a place as it is a reality, and that reality is the pure presence of God.2 This is why angels are “heavenly beings,” because they minister directly in God’s presence, not because they’re invisible/spiritual, we have those very words to make that distinction.3 Likewise this is why Christ is “in Heaven” because He is in the presence of the Father now. This is also why we colloquially remark that when we die we “go to Heaven,” because we will come before the judgment seat of Christ on the Last Day, and dwell in His presence eternally. This is why the Church is earth made heavenly and heaven made earthly, because the presence of God descends on His children gathered in worship and sanctifies them.
This can clearly be seen by truly understanding what will happen in the eschaton. Contrary to colloquial misperceptions, we don’t “go to Heaven” in a translational sense but rather Heaven comes to us in the New Creation. We don’t exist eternally as a bunch of hymn-singing Caspers, a quasi-Gnostic eschatology wherein the body is basically dismissed as lapsarian,4 but rather the Creation “will disappear with a horrific noise, and the celestial bodies will melt away in a blaze” (2 Pet. 3:10), all will be reduced to their elemental properties, but then all will built back up renewed, reconciled, and glorified, freed from its groaning (Rom. 8:19-22) and allowed to fully experience the Divine: “But, according to His promise, we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness truly resides” (2 Pet. 3:13). Heaven will be “new” in the sense of different, as the pure presence of God will now dwell in and before all His creatures, with it no longer being needed to warn how “no one can see Me and live” (Ex. 33:20), as rather now “we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is” (1 Jn. 3:2). Earth will be “new” in the same sense, as God will dwell in and before all His creatures purely, for “the tabernacle of God [will be] with men, and He shall dwell with them, and they shall be His peoples, and God Himself shall be with them, and be their God” (Rev. 21:3).
So, heaven is a reality, that of God’s perfect indwelling and His ultimate shalom. This is why the localized Church is so important, because the purpose of our life in Christ is having union with Christ, undergoing Christosis,5 and Christ is the union of Heaven (divinity) and Earth (humanity): “No one has ascended into heaven except the One Who descended from heaven–the Son of Man” (Jn. 3:13). The corporate worship of the Church in her liturgy, based on these cosmic and theological realities, is the communal invocation of this, the special inbreaking of Heaven into Earth and the special lifting of Earth before Heaven (that is, God).6 As I show in the essay I wrote earlier this year on Christian liturgy, there’s an apparent motif in biblical theology concerning the tangibility of faith, and what this theological concept of interpenetration shows is the answer to such a severe and perennial question as this: Where is God in my life? Where? Right before you, in the worship of the Church, in the brotherly love of the congregation, in the consecration of the Eucharistic sacrifice. “Where is Jesus?” There, right there on the altar, in the hand of the priest.7 Nothing has given me more hope than this, that God didn’t just call Himself “God with us” and then leave us, but returns to us in the sacrament of His body and blood: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Mt. 28:20).
Now, what is the pertinence of this to our discourse in aesthetics? Well, it’s by reflecting on what it means for the Church to be heavenly and then figuring out what the connotations of this and other principles I’ve outlined in tandem are that we can begin to see this. Namely, based on what I’ve explained, I wish to make it clear that beauty is an absolutely essential element of worship, and that the liturgical tradition, both in form and content, should involve beauty. We can start by asking why beauty? Well, this is where what I just outlined serves as a key ingredient: if the liturgy, the corporate worship of the Church, is “interdimensional,” bringing us before God, Who is this God we stand in the presence of? This God is the King of the Universe, Lord and Master of all, Author of Salvation and Liberator of the Captive, the Alpha and the Omega: “‘For I am a great king,’ says the Lord Who rules over all, ‘and My name is awesome among the nations’” (Mal. 1:14). My pastor has brought up the following point on several occasions, which I appreciate, that we may certainly have trouble as modern Americans mired by the strictures of democratic governance in understanding what it means for someone to be a king, and what it means for someone to be subject to one. We’re not used to submitting to an authority who is considered ontologically justified to possess his office, we’re not used to hierarchy and destiny. Democracy is a solvent to these medieval/premodern ways of living and thinking. But this God is Our Lord, and we must think of Him accordingly. And how do we honor a king? Scripture is abundantly clear on this, it relishes in it, because it takes especial interest in clarifying how and that God is King. Entire psalms are dedicated to this, the prophets delighted in this, and the Israelites exulted Adonai, their Lord. Indeed, there is an entire section of the Psalter (93-99) that has traditionally been labeled “the royal psalms” because they all consistently praise God and His kingship:
“The Lord reigns! He is robed in majesty, the Lord is robed, He wears strength around His waist. Indeed, the world is established, it cannot be moved. Your throne has been secure from ancient times; You have always been king. The waves roar, O Lord, the waves roar, the waves roar and crash. Above the sound of the surging water, and the mighty waves of the sea, the Lord sits enthroned in majesty. The rules You set down are completely reliable. Holiness aptly adorns Your house, O Lord, forever.” (Ps. 93)
“Come! Let’s sing for joy to the Lord! Let’s shout out praises to our protector Who delivers us! Let’s enter His presence with thanksgiving! Let’s shout out to Him in celebration! For the Lord is a great God, a great king Who is superior to all gods. The depths of the earth are in His hand, and the mountain peaks belong to Him. The sea is His, for He made it. His hands formed the dry land. Come! Let’s bow down and worship! Let’s kneel before the Lord, our Creator! For He is our God; we are the people of His pasture, the sheep He owns. Today, if only you would obey Him! He says, ‘Do not be stubborn like they were at Meribah, like they were that day at Massah in the wilderness, where your ancestors challenged My authority, and tried My patience, even though they had seen My work. For forty years I was continually disgusted with that generation, and I said, ‘These people desire to go astray; they do not obey My commands.’ So I made a vow in My anger, ‘They will never enter into the resting place I had set aside for them.’’” (Ps. 95)
“The Lord reigns! Let the earth be happy! Let the many coastlands rejoice! Dark clouds surround Him; righteousness and justice are the foundation of His throne. Fire goes before Him; on every side it burns up His enemies. His lightning bolts light up the world; the earth sees and trembles. The mountains melt like wax before the Lord, before the Lord of the whole earth. The sky declares His justice, and all the nations see his splendor. All who worship idols are ashamed, those who boast about worthless idols. All the gods bow down before Him. Zion hears and rejoices, the towns of Judah are happy, because of Your judgments, O Lord. For You, O Lord, are the sovereign king over the whole earth; You are elevated high above all gods. You who love the Lord, hate evil! He protects the lives of His faithful followers; He delivers them from the power of the wicked. The godly bask in the light; the morally upright experience joy. You godly ones, rejoice in the Lord! Give thanks to His holy Name.” (Ps. 97)
“Sing to the Lord a new song, for He performs amazing deeds! His right hand and His mighty arm accomplish deliverance. The Lord demonstrates His power to deliver; in the sight of the nations He reveals his justice. He remains loyal and faithful to the family of Israel. All the ends of the earth see our God deliver us. Shout out praises to the Lord, all the earth! Break out in a joyful shout and sing! Sing to the Lord accompanied by a harp, accompanied by a harp and the sound of music! With trumpets and the blaring of the ram’s horn, shout out praises before the King, the Lord! Let the sea and everything in it shout, along with the world and those who live in it! Let the rivers clap their hands! Let the mountains sing in unison before the Lord! For He comes to judge the earth! He judges the world fairly, and the nations in a just manner.” (Ps. 98)
These are psalms with which we may be familiar; I certainly was. Yet, that very fact makes me recall what I said has been pointed out by my pastor: we are by-and-large familiar with such texts, yet is something inhibiting us from truly abiding by them? Let me be explicit, I don’t think we, in the post-industrial, liberal-democratic American Evangelical world, are; more so, I know we aren’t. Looking at so many churches nowadays, especially in America, mine own not excluded, do they at all strike you as a throne room? Would one sit in it and think, “Ah, a king resides here”? No, not at all. Yet, Scripture makes it clear: our God is a King, and He is resplendent in His majesty, and this is clear from the psalms above and elsewhere. “He is robed in majesty, the LORD is robed, He wears strength around His waist…The LORD sits enthroned in majesty” (Ps. 93:1), “Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is Yours” (1 Chr. 29:11; cf. vv. 10-13), “From the north He comes in golden splendor; around God is awesome majesty” (Job 37:22), “O Lord my God, You are magnificent, You are robed in splendor and majesty” (Ps. 104:1), “O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness: fear before Him, all the earth” (Ps. 96:9), “a throne was standing in heaven with Someone seated on it! And the One seated on it was like jasper and carnelian in appearance, and a rainbow looking like it was made of emerald encircled the throne” (Rev. 4:2-3). God is beautiful, for He is king.
Now, I know quite well what the usual responses might be. “Well, Jesus is a humble king, He didn’t come in power, the first will be last and the last will be first!”8 This, however, overlooks and cheapens the profundity of Christ’s life, of the mystery of Incarnation and Resurrection. Christ “although being in the form of God, did not consider His equality with God as something to be exploited for His own advantage, but emptied Himself, by taking the form of a slave,” however, as a result of Christ fulfilling His mission, “God has highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name [title] that is above every name [title]” (Phil. 2:6-7, 9).9 Christ was the eternally begotten Son of God, royal in His majesty from before the foundation of the world, but entered time and space by taking on the form of a slave, humbling Himself, but through the power and glory and vindication of His Resurrection He has returned to the right hand of the Father to reign over the Creation as king:
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation, for all things in heaven and on earth were created in Him—all things, whether visible or invisible, whether thrones or dominions, whether principalities or powers—all things were created through Him and for Him. He Himself is before all things and all things are held together in Him. (Col. 1:15-17)
Christ was hailed as king (Jn. 12:12-19), adorned in purple (Jn. 19:2; Mk. 15:17), given a crown (Matt. 27:29; Jn. 19:5), and then exalted high above His people (Jn. 12:32; cf. Isa. 57:15). Therefore, “if you have been raised with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God” (Col. 3:1). Now look at Him, the poor Nazarene vagabond, the Incarnate Son of God: “a throne was standing in heaven with Someone seated on it! And the One seated on it was like jasper and carnelian in appearance, and a rainbow looking like it was made of emerald encircled the throne” (Rev. 4:2-3). The theology of Christ the King is profound (liturgically, this is recognized in the Feast of Christ the King, on the last Sunday of the church year [20–26 November]), yet it’s also profoundly obvious, so much so that it must be true that our cultural blinders have prevented us from seeing what this entails of us, what we are called to by virtue of this royal splendor we are witnesses of,10 that we serve a King!
If, then, we presume to call ourselves the household of God, His house ought to be worthy of Him. This is an ancient understanding, going back to the days before Sinai and the religion of the ancient Semites, to the later days when Israel dwelt in the Promised Land under David: gods, and in our case the Supreme God Yahweh of Israel, are infinitely greater and mightier than any mere mortal, and they must be revered and treated appropriately, and their dwelling places must be resplendent to complement their otherworldly glory. Our God is no different; in the wilderness, He commands the Israelites to make tithes so as to provide the materials to make Him an ornate and elaborate dwelling place (the Tabernacle), providing detailed lists and exacting instructions (Ex. 25-27), and when Israel came to dwell in the land and fulfill her holy duty it was blessed King David who realized the absurdity of the situation as it stood in his day: “Here am I, living in a house of cedar, while the ark of God remains in a tent!” (2 Sam. 7:2). David resolves at this moment to rectify this imbalance, a mere mortal having more splendor than a God, and God proceeds to laud and bless David for his actions, but refuses to have the temple built by David, not because God disapproved of the Temple, but of David being a man of war, as God wanted to dwell among His people when they had fully taken hold of the land and had peace, which is why Solomon would ultimately be allowed to go ahead with the construction (1 Chr. 22:8-10; cf 1 Kgs. 5-6).
God delights in beauty, and need this really be defended? Do we really find ourselves, especially as Christians, in such a decadent age that we can’t even understand the significance of beauty? Perhaps that is the case, and I could make it, but despite how dreary and cynical I may seem I still can’t bring myself to accept this apparent phenomenon that people actually don’t think beauty matters. Even if it’s a perverse beauty (“She’s beautiful,” when speaking of the provocative raiment of a harlot; “Oh, this is so beautiful,” when speaking of the “wedding” of Sodomites) beauty in some way still seems to be valued.
And it makes perfect sense why. Jonathan Pageau has commented on this, pointing out how every space we enter will act on us to either elevate or lower our spirits. Poignantly, he points out how in our own homes we do, or ought to, take caution in adorning it and making it our own. The home is a wonderful place, and it’s made wonderful because we infuse it with our personality, we recognize it as where our lives occur, it is where our children will grow and mature, and where we will watch that happen. While the “metaphysics” of home-owning may be greatly hampered due to the social and economic climate of modernity militating against it11 the fact remains, and is possibly easier to see for older persons, that the home elevates our spirits. Where would we rather be: a drug house or your own home? Better yet, which one would elevate your spirits the most? Clearly it’ll be your house, for it is yours, it reflects you and it provides you rest and privacy, whereas the drug house is dilapidated and often enough a danger to you, and will lower your spirits. The world is full of beauty, and we ought to cherish this. We don’t want to give into what I’ve taken to calling an “aesthetic Gnosticism,” where we unwittingly buy into the heretical dogmas of the Gnostics and delude ourselves into thinking the material Creation is somehow fallen due to its materiality, and thus apply this thinking to the pleasing and sublime formations of its materiality found within. Mountains are beautiful, rivers are beautiful, the birds of the sky are beautiful, and recognizing or capturing this (in art) is not wrong, because nothing earthly is wrong! God made it, let us delight in it! “From Zion, the most beautiful of all places, God comes in splendor” (Ps. 50:2), “The heavens declare the glory of God; the sky displays His handiwork” (Ps. 19:1). If we can value an ornamentation in our own house that’s gilded, why would we not afford the same honor to a king? And that’s exactly my point: the localized Church is God’s home, His temple,12 and why should we not seek to make it fit for Him? Gold, emerald, ivory, jade, silk, purple, red, stained glass, archivolts, crystal, cornices, all these things are due Him as they imbue His home with His personality, which (as I’ve thoroughly documented) is one of majesty, glory, and splendor: “And this is the contribution that you shall receive from them: gold, silver, and bronze, blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twined linen, goats’ hair, tanned rams’ skins, goatskins, acacia wood, oil for the lamps, spices for the anointing oil and for the fragrant incense, onyx stones, and stones for setting, for the ephod and for the breastpiece. And let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst” (Ex. 25:3-8).
Beauty also plays an important role in witnessing to the Christian worldview, which deserves being fleshed out further, especially in a world wherein such witness is greatly needed. We live in a profoundly ugly age, which many of my readers are probably able (and willing) to understand, and because we understand now that beauty is a wondrous thing, inextricably bound up with the nature of God, we know that all people need beauty. As we are told by the wise Qoholeth, “also He hath set eternity in their heart” (Ecc. 3:11). Deep within, always gnawing at us, is the sense that something is wrong, this is the prevenient grace with which God acts upon all Creation, seeking to draw it nearer to Him to be redeemed. Yet, it’s often misunderstood, but, when it’s properly manifested and channeled, in particular by those who know (us), those who are still in ignorance can be shaken to the core. So, in this age of hideousness we need more beauty. In fact, the only way to combat ugliness is through beauty, and isn’t that just obvious? The writer
, who I’ve found such a wonderful rhetor, made some potent comments to this effect that I wish to reproduce now at-length:When we asked him [Terekhin’s son] what kind of “awareness” they [his son’s school at some sort of assembly] raised, he told us a bunch of stuff that was not easy to listen to. One might say, “But this is life. The child needs to know all these things to be prepared.”
Like many medieval thinkers, Dante sincerely believed that a person cannot see hell until they have seen enough Paradise. To be prepared to see evil, one must spend most of their time in Paradise.
In Divine Comedy, Canto 28, Dante, speaking of Beatrice, says: “She imparadised my mind.”
Quella che ‘mparadisa la mia mente.
It turns out there is no such word in Italian. Dante invented it to show what Beatrice did for him. She placed his mind firmly in Paradise — “imparadised” his mind. Only with Paradise imprinted deep in our minds are we prepared to face the Inferno.
We knew that the school wasn’t doing for our son what Beatrice did for Dante. They don’t imparadise his mind. The “raising awareness” idol demands that children be placed right into hell to be prepared for hell. There is no preparation for hell in hell. It’s a soul-contaminating mechanism.
The best way to be prepared for darkness is to have enough experience of light. The best way to be prepared for hardship is to have enough experience of joy. The best way to be prepared for the earth is to have enough experience of heaven.
That’s what Franco Nembrini, a famous Italian pedagogue and a director of a private school, told a father who kept telling his son that life was a bunch of bull****. When Franco asked why he kept telling him that, the father was surprised: “Because it’s true! He must know that.”
Franco paused and said, “I agree. Life is often bull****. But since, as you say, you are already there, it makes no sense to dive deeper into it. I can promise you that even if you are head and shoulders into this thing, you will see a speck of light if you only look up. Let it be your guide. Go up, not down. If you follow that speck of light, it will lead you out of that thing. Teach your son to look at the stars.”
We have forgotten what medieval thinkers knew instinctively — you must not look at evil until your mind is imparadised. Evil will break you and corrupt you. We believe in raising awareness about hell but not Paradise. Hell does not prepare you to face hell; it prepares you to become part of it.
When we find ourselves in BS, it’s time to look up, not down. One of the best metaphors for the power of looking up is the experience of ancient Israelites in the desert. They were in a bunch of BS of their own making after incessant complaining about eating manna every day. Poisonous snakes came out of nowhere and started biting people.
God told Moses to make a bronze serpent and set it on a pole. Anyone who would look up at the serpent would be healed from the snakebites. When you see a bunch of problems down below, the hardest thing is to look up. It’s hard to take your eyes off of your BS. It takes a leap of faith to look up.13
I can’t stress enough that this is intuitive, or at least that it used to be. Beauty is soothing, it’s, well, imparadising.14 Since we might be desensitized to visual/material (e.g., architectural) beauty, let me utilize something still common: auditory beauty. Need I explain the truth that still gets taught in colleges to this day that classical music is marveled at not just because of its intuitive auditory grace and antiquity, but because of its genuine psychological benefits? If beauty is divine, then aesthetics (the philosophy and composition of beauty) is a means of communing with the divine. As Hugh of St. Victor once wrote, the artistry of men is the “weaving together of visible forms to show forth what is invisible,” and in this day and age, what better work can the Church commit itself to than shewing forth the invisible Father to a generation of outcasts?
We should see by now that we do ourselves no favor through an absurd commitment to “simplicity,” because that doesn’t at all mean “ugly,” yet since ugliness is what we have “simplicity” is not necessarily what has been pursued. All that “simple” means is “not composed of many parts.” This can be ugly, or it can be beautiful; a murder can be simple, only requiring one part, a bullet, yet it’s hideous. Yet beauty can also be simple: the smile of a baby. There are values in either phenomena that determine their aesthetic quality: hatred colors murder, and so it’s simply ugly; innocence and love colors the baby’s smile, and so it’s simply beautiful. It’s not like I’m calling for ostentation on the scale of the Strasbourg or Clermont-Ferrand Cathedrals, or anything like a cathedral for that matter (although I think such scale is fine and appropriate for the contexts such wonders were built in), but rather I’m only asking to simply appreciate what millions of Christians who for hundreds of years helped build thousands of churches understood: beauty is divine.
The funny thing is, while the great cathedrals of Europe were being built for centuries, the small village churches that only took a few years to build often could match or complement them in their beauty, if not on the outside then the inside, especially in the design of their sanctuaries (which is where the Lord would reside in the Blessed Sacrament). Here’s the truth: every church before modernity was beautiful, that’s a bold claim I’m more than willing to make,15 and the awful thing about this is that it wasn’t even done intentionally! Church architects and parishioners weren’t conscientiously thinking, “Oh boy, we better make this chapel absolutely remarkable, otherwise our society’s going to begin taping bananas to walls!” Rather, they were operating on second nature, they just understood without a thought that churches were beautiful! It didn’t need to be proved, argued, justified, it just was. However, in this age of decadence I understand quite well that we need to be sober and mindful, we need to know what our enemy’s schemes are, and fight pitched battles of rhetoric (2 Cor. 10:3-5).
Beauty is a way to make the divine tangible, and it’s tangibility that’s so essential to Christian worship. Thus, we find the answer to our initial question. Beauty, this seemingly esoteric concept, bears such power which when yielded in the service of glorifying the King of Kings can make Him manifest to the hearts and minds of those who cry out to Him in love and hope, “Abba, Father!” It’s not just notions of antiquity or curiosity that draw people to Cologne or Marseille or Rome, not at all, but rather it’s God, God still calls out from the stone of Cologne’s mighty spires and from the wood of Rome’s numerous trusses, and what more do people need, or must the Church embrace, than amplifying God’s voice to be heard by all the lost wretches of modernity? Art, in other words, is a most profound form of mission-work. How shall we play our part in it?
Which is not a problem, of course, one’s philosophy shouldn’t merely be an intellectual abstraction you parade before others, which would be untoward and uncouth.
This derives from the interaction of various sources I’ve studied, not any one in particular. However, for a survey of options, see N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope; J. Jordan, Through New Eyes; M. Heiser, The Unseen Realm; N. Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace.
This can be seen in that while the saints will be made higher than the angels and heavenly host, we will not become immaterial beings, and the crux of the Christian hope is that our bodies will be raised incorruptible (cf. Heb. 1:13-14; 2:7; Ps. 8:5; 1 Cor. 6:3; 15). Therefore, “heavenly” doesn’t dictate materiality or immateriality.
We need to draw out the biblical distinction in English between “flesh” and “body,” because in the biblical languages different terms with distinct semantic values are used for these as well. The “flesh” (sarx) is the postlapsarian aspect of our being which holds us back and tempts us, while the “body” (soma) is the biological/physical aspect of our being which God Himself “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Ps. 139:14) and is an essential and wondrous part of what and who we are as humans.
M. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God; B. Blackwell, Christosis; Khaled Anatolios, Deification through the Cross.
There is a lot of profound biblical symbolism at work in this theology: as J. Jordan has written, the biblical symbolism of trees depicts them sometimes as ladders to heaven, and since altars are also connections to heaven, trees can be seen as altars. As he says,
In this connection it remains only to note that since both altars and trees are ladders to heaven, a tree can be an altar. The illustration of this is the cross of Christ, whose four extremities correlate to the four horns of the altar. As blood was put on the four horns of the altar (the four corners of the earth), so the blood of Christ was on the four ends of the cross (head, hands, and feet). The cross is our altar, and our ladder to heaven. (Through New Eyes, 89-90, emphasis added)
Given that, note how in Western Christian liturgy we say the sursum corda (“We lift our hearts to the Lord”) at the opening of the Eucharistic celebration, and what may be observed from that is that our hearts are raised into Heaven through our crucifixion with Christ, through us being lifted up with Christ and offered to God (Mk. 8:34; Rom. 6:6). So our liturgical lives are cruciform and are facilitated through the tree that Christ was crucified on, and it’s the Eucharist, as a union of heaven and earth and a participation in the Crucifixion (1 Cor. 10:16-17), that is key to this, and thus why it’s always been the centerpiece of Christian liturgy.
This, of course, is why I find it so integral for a church to rediscover the Eucharist and the reverence due it.
An observation I’ve made about this dominical teaching: when one thinks on it the formal logic entailed in Christ’s teaching on humility proves…illogical. If the first are last and the last are first, then those who are first (who, as it’s usually understood, are the powerful and mighty [cf. 1 Cor. 1:27]), become the last. However, if they are last, they are now first, which means everyone ends up where they began or continuously loop between first and last, first and last. Clearly, as with Christ’s numerous hyperbolic and parabolic teachings, this isn’t to be a formal arrangement but a disposition within His Body: that those who’ve been given by God power, skill, and wisdom are to use these attributes in service to others and their lessers, “just as the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many” (Matt. 20:28).
For this translation as well as an excellent exegesis of the Christ Hymn found in Philipians see Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God, 9-39 (here pp. 11, 12).
“But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession” (1 Pet. 2:9); cf. J. Jipp, “Sharing the Heavenly Rule of Christ the King: Paul’s Royal Participatory Language in Ephesians,” in “In Christ” in Paul, eds. M. Thate, K. Vanhoozer, and C. Campbell, 253-80.
M. Dawn, A “Royal” Waste of Time, 31.
I should address what I expect to be a response to my high view of the “physical” church: “We are the church!” Yes, I know this, I’ve heard it endlessly. But I don’t get what that’s supposed to prove. If there’s something wrong with cherishing the building: (1) why do we have one, (2) why do we treat our own buildings (homes) more preciously than we do the Church (which matters a whole lot more), and (3) why did God make one for Himself? We have one because we are going to commune as a body, that’s unquestionable (Heb. 10:24-25), and more often than not we’d like to have a roof over our head when doing so in case it rains, but also to put a roof over the heads of the needy, to have a kitchen as part of it to feed the hungry, to store the alms gathered for the poor, etc. I.e., to ask why we have the church is to ask why any human in the history of civilization built a building, which is to look absurd. But my points stands even if we had an open-air church, which I personally would not oppose (I like nature), but I ask you this: what’s more befitting of a setting for the glorification of God, an industrial wasteland, or a luscious valley? The latter would respect the beauty of God’s Creation and most certainly serve as a great setting, but the prior would constitute the devastation of God’s order and it would be grossly indecent to praise God through it. (I mean this specifically in the sense of seeking out this setting and acting as if this were normatively beautiful; the martyrs who praised God in the Colosseum or German death camps weren’t seeking to be in these gross settings, but “in any and every circumstance [they] have learned the secret of contentment, whether [they] go satisfied or hungry, have plenty or nothing” [Phil. 4:12]). Secondly, we treat our own homes with care because we do understand intuitively what I’m talking about, that our dwellings, and beauty, matter greatly, and we wish to curate spaces that raise up our spirits. If we can do it for ourselves, we can do it for God. And, thirdly, God made Himself a home because He deserves one; kings dwell in temples, and God is king. So even if we abstracted a physical building from the equation aesthetics would still be important as we would still be worshiping a king! If, then, we return to and accept a physical building, then we’re back where we started, which is contemplating what type of building best befits a king.
I talk a lot more about beauty in “Whose Eye Beholds Beauty?”
And believe me, I’ve looked and tried to disprove myself! Those medieval peasants were just that good!
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