False Colors Painting Truth

For too long the church has compartmentalized the primary three virtues of truth, goodness and beauty. Today, I wonder if beauty and truth aren’t so far removed.

Here’s what I mean. In the church, we separate these three virtues, often at the expense of beauty. We so emphasize knowledge of the truth, of the bible, that we forget the beauty of the greatest story ever told. We hope that if we can just get people to know enough truth (i.e. passages of scripture), then they will automatically become good.

This simply is not the case. Instead, I think people achieve goodness, not because of some new knowledge, not because of some great epiphany concerning the truth. People become better because of the freedom of the gospel, a gospel of love and grace. We become better because we are in love with Jesus our Lord and Savior. So, I believe that our call as Christians mirrors Jesus’ greatest two commands, to love God and love our neighbor. Jesus’ primary calling to His people is to love.

And God created us to love the beautiful. That’s what He meant when He said, “it is good” in Genesis 1.

Why does this matter?

Because beauty is short supply in the modern church. We meet in warehouses, sing mediocre Christian pop songs, and rarely display beautiful paintings. Art has nearly vanished from the Christian church because we have devalued beauty. Our quest for knowledge has left our minds heavy and our hearts empty. Therefore, lasting change, lasting love is seldom found in the Western Church.

Now, I am not trying to conflate (unnecessarily combine or confuse) the two ideas of truth and beauty. I am not trying to describe what many postmodern and relativistic philosophies espouse in their mantra, “If it is beautiful, then it must be true (at least true for that person).” I want to distance myself from such thinking, since it can become a slippery slope towards hedonism, towards doing whatever feels good, whatever provides the most pleasure and happiness.

Instead, I am suggesting that maybe truth and beauty are two sides of the same coin. That there is truth in beauty and beauty in the truth. Here’s a great example.

“I had never seen a painting made from the beginning. I thought you painted what you saw, using the colors you saw…Instead he painted patches of color—black where her skirt would be, ocher for the bodice and the map on the wall, red for the pitcher and the basin it sat in, another for the wall. They were the wrong colors—none was the color of the thing itself. He spent a long time on these false colors, as I called them.”
–“A Girl with a Pearl Earing” by Tracy Chevelier

This passage helps us see that reality is not as we perceive. Good art helps us show us not only the truth, but helps us see our misconceptions. We (falsely) think that clouds are only white, the sky is only blue. Any artist or photographer could tell you differently. There’s other, subtler, hidden colors, colors we would never see were they never captured by the imagination and creativity of an artist.

Here’s my hope and prayer for our church. I pray that we encourage and enjoy, cultivate and curate great art—art that shares the truth through its rich beauty. I pray that our hearts would be captivated by the beauty of creation and creator alike. I have a dream that the next generation of disciples not only knows the Lord, but loves beauty found in Jesus their savior.