Dance, Dance, Wherever You May Be
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

Having just received from the hand of our gracious God a beautiful new baby girl, I am rather puzzled how it came to pass that beauty has become the weak sister of the great triad of virtues, goodness, truth and beauty. While evangelicals over the last decades have manned the ramparts in defense of goodness and truth, against the incessant assaults of relativist barbarians, beauty has, by and large, been left undefended. It would be bad enough had she been captured by our enemies. Instead, she has been violated by them, right out there on the battlefield, while we just watch.

We may have given up because we feared we had lost her before the battle even began. That is, as the Reformation spread across Europe, Rome was awash in foolishness instead of truth, and gross immorality instead of goodness. Beauty, however, lived in her cathedrals, and in her liturgy. Our Puritan fathers, I suppose, figured they might drown if they went searching for the beautiful baby in that ocean of bath water.

It may be that we just went with our strengths. Having hung Rome out to dry theologically, having parsed and refined our doctrine, we found ourselves comfortable in the world of the mind, and so closed our eyes. We fought the enlightenment on their own turf. We won, of course, since we had truth on our side. But we lost as well, because we answered the fool according to his folly.

In the twentieth century it may be that we found that only those who had given up on truth and goodness within the Protestant church, were interested in beauty. It was the mainline churches that maintained a sense of gravity and decorum in their worship, to gloss over the sad fact that the Spirit had departed. Lest we be confused with the whitewashed tombs of the brownstone edifices of the old denominations, we built our own whitewashed tombs out of clapboard. We no longer praise our majestic God with the majestic songs of our fathers, but now sing praise choruses like "Majesty" to the music of our worldly children.

So what do we do? Jeremiads aren't known for their beauty. Neither should we whimper about the wimpy music of the day. Surely we do not go back to apostate churches, whether they left us four hundred years ago or forty years ago. What we do is take it back, and to do that, we have to go way back.

We begin by repenting. We got in this mess because our fathers led us here. And because we are one with them, we too must repent. We must recognize that our failure to uphold the beauty of beauty is not merely a sin of weakness in the culture war, but is a sin against God, who is beauty. We must repent, in short, of idolatry. Both iconophilia and iconoclasm share in idolatry. The first suggests that the beauty of God can be captured by men, the other that it should be destroyed. We must affirm that beauty is objective because we must affirm that God is beauty. We must affirm this because the Bible tells us so. It also tells us that He pronounced His divine benediction on His creation, and that it was He who made everything beautiful in its time. In denying the beauty of beauty then we have denied the Godness of God, and the truth of His Word. These are high crimes, and call for deep repentance.

The fruit of this sin, of course, is that God gave us over to the philistine depravity of our hearts. He has allowed us to live in the ugly world we have created, to lust after the ugliness we have chosen, and to be ignorant of how to find our way back. In short, because we lost our desire to see beauty, we have become blind to it. We do not know how to recognize beauty.

I know this because I live here. I bemoan our ignorance, because I am chief of the ignorant. My debates on the issue always run something like this. "Who are we to judge," the sincere aesthetic agnostic suggests, "what is beautiful? I mean, I like Stryper, and you like Bach. There is no right or wrong on this. Some people like chocolate, some vanilla." I retort, "Well, what about when God calls something beautiful? Is it just beautiful to Him, or is it beautiful? And what about God Himself? Does the failure of the heathen to see and/or appreciate that beauty make it less than beautiful?" Now my opponent begins to sweat a little bit. It's one thing to reduce Bach to mere, "Beautiful to you," another thing altogether to do the same to God. And so their last resort is to change the subject, "Alright Mr. Highbrow, if beauty is objective, then what is the standard? How do we judge rightly?" And I murmur, embarrassed to have my own ignorance exposed, "I don't know, but it has something to do with the marriage of harmony and complexity."

I need to do better. We need to take the care with which we study theology, and apply it to the study of aesthetics, which in the end, is still the study of theology. Here is a field in ruins, that all the world denies even exists. How much more must we seek to rebuild the garden? And to do this, we must go ad fontes, back to the sources, and relearn what we have lost. We must do the works which are fitting for repentance.

Step one then is to recognize our ignorance. Step two is to seek to undo that ignorance. But even these are but baby steps. My daughter Maili not only cannot walk, she cannot understand that there is such a thing as walking. As I hold her close she doesn't realize that I can cross a room, while she must depend upon me to do the same. Once she learns what walking is, however, she still doesn't know how to walk. And all the studying in the world will not get her legs to move. She needs to actually do it.

In like manner, we haven't found our way back home when we are able to explain why Bach is outstanding and Stryper is an embarrassment. We aren't done with our work when we are able to distinguish the beautiful from the ugly. We have only healed our wounds slightly if we burn our Precious Moments, and hang instead Rembrandts. We must not only recognize beauty, but cultivate it.

That doesn't mean that no person is a complete Christian until he or she is able to play an instrument, or write great poetry, or paint a landscape. (Such, of course, wouldn't be a bad idea at all, and could only help, but it is not required.) There is so much more to beauty. That we relegate beauty to the arts is one more sign that we have not yet learned to walk. It does mean that we must labor to reflect this attribute of God in all that we say and do. My beautiful wife, in her column in this issue, for instance, explores Peter's own exposition of the beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit. When Peter says such is beautiful he isn't using the word as a mere synonym for "a good thing." Neither is he saying such is a good thing merely because God is patient. Instead the argument is that this is true beauty, and as such reflects the beauty of God. And one need not travel to Venice to study with the masters to learn this art. All it takes is some prayer, a dependence upon the Spirit of God, and some labor. Anybody can do it.

In like manner, a well hoed row of bush beans, is a thing of beauty. We do not plant in rows merely because such is more efficient, but that our gardens would reflect the order of the original garden. We blend together harmony and complexity when we do the dance of tending that garden, marrying the labor of breaking up the dirt, with the tender high notes of dropping the seeds, the baritones of pulling up weeds, and the contralto of the picking. Then we make still more beauty when the beans join the dance of the supper table, a harmony of plenty, as we enjoy the fruit of our labor, both that which we eat, and that which we rear. And like Bach, we declare Soli Deo Gloria with our prayers of thanksgiving. The beauty is always there, if we will but hear it and see it, and rejoice in it.

It is a mistake and a misnomer that those who aspire to live the simple life sometimes refer to such as the plain life. Our goal in simplicity is never to paint our lives in a lifeless drab green. Rather, it is a happy and fitting providence that the tune of Tis a Gift to Be Simple mirrors the tune of Lord of the Dance. To be simple is to have our eyes focused on the one thing, God Himself. And there, there is no boredom, only joy. There we study at the feet of the Master, and learn to recognize His copies in His creation. The simple life means seeing the astounding marriage of harmony and complexity that goes into a mess of fresh beans.

Herein also lies that which sets us apart from the world. No one really believes in relativism when it comes to truth and goodness. Every man's relativism always stops when they are lied to, or wronged. But everyone believes that there is no beauty. We are the Sons of Him who is Beauty, ought to stand out like a Vermeer in a museum of fingerpaints. We ought to be known as a people of beauty. Jesus tells us that they we will know we are His when we love one another. That love must drink deep from three-fold fountain of goodness, truth and beauty.

When Jesus calls us out from the world, He calls us to a place of beauty. When we enter into His presence we step out of the jungle and into His garden. He who makes the blind to see, likewise gives us eyes to see and ears to hear, so that we might rejoice in the created order that shouts, in perfect pitch, the glory of the Creator. We alone can see the dance of the stars for what they are, not the smooth working of a machine, not the neces­sary interaction of time and energy, but the fluid ballet of great balls of light.

And once more, it only happens when we change our thinking, when we are deliberate. This is not a psychological game, a form of self-hypnosis, but is the very waking to the dawn of the new creation. We were dead in our sins. But the Lord of the Dance has bid us to wake. We not only grieve the Spirit, but grieve ourselves when we cover our eyes and ears and demand still more sleep. There is beauty all about us, if we will but accept His invitation to come and to feast in it.

We are doing the work of building the kingdom when we seek to purify the bride of Christ. We are doing the work of building the kingdom when we seek to bring justice to the exercise of the sword in the culture of death that surrounds us. We are doing the work of building the kingdom when we tear down the strongholds of this world, lofty pretensions of goodness and truth. We are building the kingdom when we exercise dominion over the created order, in our daily labor. But we are likewise building the kingdom when we tend to that beauty which is the garden. Jesus Himself, on the first day of the new creation, stepped out of the tomb, and into a garden, as the first fruits of the new creation. May we add to that fruit abundantly, bringing beauty before Him, and for Him.