Beauty: Our Way into Divine Presence

The Trinity invites us in . . .

It’s a special thing to call God "beautiful," isn’t it? None of us would hesitate to say that word in reference to God, but when pressed on it, we might struggle to fill the silence with explanation. And that happens for two reasons.

First, the Bible says many things about what God is like, but it uses the language of "glory" far more than "beauty." There are exceptions, such as when the psalmist says that he longs to "gaze upon the beauty of the Lord" (Ps. 27:4). And of course the things in the world that we describe as beautiful are reflections of God's beauty. But as one of my favorite Dutchman wrote, "for the beauty of God Scripture has a special word: glory” (Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:254).

We're more used to seeing that word in the Bible, and so it might seem more poetic than biblical to call God beautiful. And yet Herman Bavinck is quick to claim that "the pinnacle of beauty, the beauty toward which all creatures point, is God" (2:254). God is beautiful. But that leads us to the second reason for our silence.

What does it even mean to be beautiful? We can all nod our heads when David Bentley Hart says something like: "beauty is a category indispensable to Christian thought; all that theology says of the triune life of God, the gratuity of creation, the incarnation of the Word, and the salvation of the world makes room for—indeed depends on—a thought, and a narrative, of the beautiful" (Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, 16).

Yes, but what is beauty? If we don't really know, then we might as well say nothing. The point of an adjective is to describe. If we don't know the descriptor, what are we doing?

Here's where things get really exciting. When we define words, all we're doing is relating what we don't know to what we do know. Understanding, at root, is about relationships. And so we're called to relate beauty to something else we know. And the psalmist actually does that for us in Psalm 27:4, right after saying he wants to gaze on the beauty of God. "One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life." To gaze upon the beauty of the LORD is to be with God, in his house. Beauty is God's personal presence. It captivates. In enraptures. It overwhelms. And it satisfies our deepest longing. As my friend and former teacher puts is, "in seeking communion with God, the psalmist is also seeking the beauty of God" (Poythress, The Beauty of the Trinity, 3).

Beauty is unimpeded divine presence.

But maybe you'd like an artist's or poet's take on this. I have one for you—but it ends at the same mysterious mansion. The poet David Whyte once described beauty as presence.

Beauty especially occurs in the meeting of time with the timeless; the passing moment framed by what has happened and what is about to occur, the scattering of the first spring apple blossom, the turning, spiraling flight of a curled leaf in the falling light; the smoothing of white sun-filled sheets by careful hands setting them to air on the line, the broad expanse of cotton filled by the breeze only for a moment, the sheets sailing on into dryness, billowing toward a future that is always beckoning, always just beyond us. Beauty is the harvest of presence. (Whyte, Consolations, 20)

Perhaps Whyte is talking about the harvest of time—where somehow the past, present, and future all seem to meet and mingle for a rare moment. What was gathers to what is and whispers of what will be. But even there, isn't it striking how God describes himself in Revelation with the same trinity of terms: the one who was and is and is to come (Rev. 4:8). The Greek uses ēn, ōn, and erchomenos. There's more letters in the future than there are in the present or the past. And yet they all describe the same beautiful God, the one whose presence the psalmist pines after. Beauty is the unimpeded presence of God—the wielder and wonder of past, present, and future. But this glorious rabbit hole runs deeper still.

The Emic Trinity: Love and Relationship

I sometimes call God the emic Trinity. Emic (ee-mic) means "insider," so calling God "the emic Trinity" means he is an insider community all on his own: Father, Son, and Spirit. God is his own insider. But that also means community, relationship, and love are central to who he is, that communion is the white light pulsing eternally in the being of God. David Bentley Hart ties this to God's beauty, drawing in an ancient teaching on the Trinity known as perichoresis, the mutual indwelling of the Father, Son, and Spirit: "The Christian understanding of beauty emerges not only naturally, but necessarily, from the Christian understanding of God as a perichoresis of love, a dynamic coinherence of the three divine persons, whose life is eternally one of shared regard, delight, fellowship, feasting, and joy” (Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, 155).

This has implications for both what the world is like and what it means to be a true insider. Let's start with the latter.

Christopher Watkin wrote recently, "God is not a Robinson Crusoe deity, all alone on a precreation island, who only afterwards enters into relationships; his being is relational from before the very beginning” (Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory, 41).

If God is essentially relational, three divine persons in eternal and unbroken fellowship, then love is primary. When John says, "God is love" (1 John 4:8), he's not just listing another divine attribute; he's calling us to marvel at the being of God. The Trinity doesn't just perform acts of love; God is the home of love itself, without beginning and without end. All acts of love we've experienced emerged from the threshold of God's holy and timeless fellowship and self-giving—what Hart calls his "primordial generosity."

In the eternal fellowship of Father, Son, and Spirit, there is ceaseless love and boundless personal knowledge. Love is self-giving (as we can infer from John 3:16), so the Father, Son, and Spirit are constantly giving themselves to each other as unreserved and beautiful gifts. Every moment, the divine persons are opening the wonder of each other. It's eternally Christmas in the Godhead. But with that self-giving comes complete and exhaustive knowledge of each other. We're told that the Spirit searches the deepest fathoms of the Father, setting the treasures before the Son (1 Cor. 2:10–11). In fact, Paul says a few verses later that the Spirit we receive helps us interpret spiritual truths. But if truth is what the Spirit gathers in the fathoms of the Father, then he's ultimately gathering the Son, who is the truth (John 14:6)!

In short, deeply personal love and knowledge burn in the center of God. There is nothing held back in the Godhead's giving and nothing unknown. And we noted earlier that being fully loved and fully known lie at the heart of an insider community. God is this insider community—the emic Trinity—in ways beyond our ability to dream. As one of my favorite theologians put it, "within the Trinity there is completely personal relationship without residue" (Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge, 211).

I love that phrase "without residue." There's nothing outside of personal relationship in God—not a crumb, not a speck. Personal communion, love, and knowledge are the constant currency of exchange in the life of God. And there's nothing left over.

So, when I use the word "emic" in reference to God, I'm talking about trinitarian communion, and more specifically about the exhaustive love and knowledge the divine persons have of one another.

But because God is God, he also has exhaustive knowledge of us. He sees us through his emic eyes, far better than we could hope to see ourselves. And that means being in relationship with him is being fully known and fully loved.

Living in relation to the God who knows and loves himself perfectly also means living in relation to beauty. We defined beauty as the presence of God. That's what the psalmist pined after. But in many ways we've lost this pining in the modern West. Ironically, we still pine for something given the name of beauty. Who do you know that would not want to behold beauty—through a person, a song, a landscape, a secret, a story? Beauty will always draw us.

The problem is that many people have detached beauty from its deeply personal trinitarian roots. They pick flower heads and gaze at petals while leaving the animating life in the ground. Charles Taylor would say this is what happens in a secular world, when impersonal law and order rule the day and the personal God is forgotten. There has been in the West what he calls an "anthropocentric shift" (Taylor, A Secular Age, 290).

Things have become so human-centered that God seems like an old myth we only tell children until they come of age and see for themselves how Godless the world is. That is a terrifying tragedy, and it's false. The world is and always will be God-centered. There's nothing we can do to change that. And so beauty, no matter how hard we try, can't ever be fully torn from the Trinity. In fact, that's why beauty is powerful in the first place: it's an echo of the overwhelming presence of God.

A Way in

What we need is a way in to beauty again, a door. C. S. Lewis gets at this in his essay "The Weight of Glory." And what he says has a striking tie to the insider language we've been using.

He doesn't start with the insider God as I have—the emic Trinity. He starts with a more open admission: we all carry an unspoken secret. He says, "The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret" (Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 40).

In other words, we carry the secret that we're outsiders—not fully known or loved but longing for that more than anything. Our greatest fear is to remain outsiders,

repelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored. On the other hand, we can be called in, welcomed, received, acknowledged. We walk every day on the razor edge between these two incredible possibilities. Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no more neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honor beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache. (41-42)

Ah . . . the longing to be inside. Have you felt it? And ultimately the inside is the insider God, the beautiful one.

And so beauty—all the countless flower heads we go picking throughout our days—is a call, a call to go inside. As Lewis writes, "We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it” (42).

Sounds much like divine presence, doesn't it? And like the psalmist, we pine for it, to dwell in the house who is God. But our pining for this is what makes us aware that we aren't there yet.

At present, we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in. (43)

I assume you want to get in, to live by faith within the walls of the beautiful God—to be an insider. And if you proclaim faith in Christ, who called himself "the door" (John 10:7), then you are in—though you have not fully become what you will one day be. As John wrote, "Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is." Yes, as he is, on the right side of the door.

For now, I leave you with a poem.

Beauty Is a Home

Beauty gives us wings—though we don't know where to fly.

We catch a current, arch above the marble earth,

Survey the checkered land, drift in the boundless sky,

Before descending, and then wonder at our birth.

What will we give, and where will we live?

There are things: soft skin, golden apples, rain and dust.

We long to live inside the scents, the sights, the touch.

Though we can't seem to enter in, we say we must.

We carry on as homeless, use every beauty for a crutch.

But what will we give, and where will we live?

There is an inside; there is a home for flyers,

A country giving birth to softness, gold, and rain,

A house where the homeless settle their desires

And look to persons standing in a hallow plain.

There we will give, and there we will live.

Beauty is a home . . . made of persons we can't see.

What gives us flight on earth are fallen scraps compared

To the great hall of persons we call Trinity.

There live the holy eyes behind all we have shared.

Beauty will give, and beauty will live

Because it is a home.

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Something big is coming. Stay tuned.

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