Deconstructing: “The New Christians”

I just had to take a break from tree hugging to post this latest dispatch from field correspondent Audie Thacker, who challeneges Tony Jones’ notion that beauty is a delivery mechanism for truth. Having “sat under” some very ugly school teachers, I might be inclined to challenge the notion myself, but the trees will not wait…
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“Beauty, you may say, is a delivery mechanism for truth.”

Tony Jones, The New Christians, p. 160

Favor is deceitful, and beauty is vain:

Proverbs 31: 30

I approach this with some amount of caution, because I think that I can partially understand what Jones is trying to say here, and I’m not really against parts of it. But I must approach it, because I cannot agree with some of what he is saying here, and it is important.

In an earlier section of the book, Jones makes two claims. They can be found on p. 103. Here is the first.

Good theology begets beautiful Christianity.

And here is the second, which follows from it.

Bad theology begets ugly Christianity.

There is a large degree to which I can almost agree with this. It is bad theology, for example, that has plagued us with the Word of Faith and Prosperity Gospel.

But I’m also a bit leery of this, too. For example, can one really say there was no beauty in the Prosperity Gospel? Didn’t the TV sets looks nice, and the people dapper in their suits and dresses? Didn’t they sound authoritative when they spoke, didn’t they sing well, didn’t they seem to have it all together? Weren’t their lives the successes that we all wished we had?

If one wants to ask “But is that really beauty”, then we are getting into deeper questions. Perhaps the most important ones for this discussion are “What is beauty?” and “What is beauty’s relation to truth?”

Making decisions on what is beauty and what things are beautiful can be tricky, and are in most cases subjective.

I recently spent time in another country, and while walking with a friend in a park, we heard many different kinds of musical performances. Passing by a woman singing in what I supposed to be the country’s operatic style, I made a remark to my friend which was something like this, “I think that kind of singing is an acquired taste”. She, also not being a native of that country, agreed.

To my ears, and I would guess also to the ears of my friend, such singing was not very pleasant. Assuming, though, that the singer was a good and skilled representative of that country’s style (in reality she could simply have been a bad singer in any style, though there were several others in the park singing in much the same way), would the people of that country have considered her as unpleasant as we did? Very likely, they would not.

Musical styles can vary greatly from country to country, and even within a country. I think it is India that has a music that is very intricate in regards to rhythm, much more so then the common 3 and 4 beats that dominate in western music. Some places have more notes then western music does, and western seems to be one of the more harmonically complex systems I’ve come on, though my knowledge is limited.

All that to say, music that is considered beautiful in one place may be considered unpleasant in another. In that sense, there is a certain relative aspect to beauty.

Nor is beauty always a nice thing. I remember in college a friend who struggled with things like bulimia. The sad thing was, she was already a perfectly attractive young lady, but for whatever reasons she still struggled with those things. One could probably find other examples, such the old Chinese practice of foot-binding, where the pursuit of feminine beauty would take on an aspect that could be considered tortuous.

This isn’t an easy thing to write about, because I do consider beauty to be a good thing. I can remember the first time I heard the first few minutes of the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and how moved I was by it. I consider the second movement to Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto to be on the most beautiful pieces of music I have ever heard. The book “Cry, The Beloved Country” is one of the most beautifully written books I’ve read. As I’m writing this, I have on my computer’s desktop a photo of a young lady whom I consider very beautiful indeed, both in her physical aspect and in the type of person she is.

But beauty isn’t everything, nor is it the most important thing. If I knew a woman who was physically stunning, but whose character was wicked, while I may acknowledge her physical beauty, I would not call her a beautiful person, and in the end would consider that her physical beauty is only a facade to her inner ugliness. And I think that is what the Proverb at the beginning of this entry is getting at, that the physical aspects of a woman can deceive and are merely surface things, but her character if she is one who fears God is what is truly valuable. In her middle years and old age, she will not be as physically attractive as she was in her youth, but her beauty of character will still be there.

Or let me apply this to music. I will admit that musically Lennon’s “Imagine” is quite nice, but in regards to its message, I can only consider it an evil song, and any value in its musical beauty is of at best academic concern. The fact that it sounds nice does not make the message any less ugly.

Now, let’s consider what Jones said, that “good theology begets beautiful Christianity”. Perhaps someone else who reads the book may find what he means by ‘beautiful Christianity’, but I admit that I do not, at least not in an explicitly stated sense. In reading the book as whole, though, it may well be that what he considers beautiful would be something that I cannot considered beautiful.

And that is the point. At the beginning of this entry, I quote Jones having written “Beauty, you may say, is a delivery mechanism for truth”. But is it? Is the truth always beautiful, and the beauty always truthful?

This entry has gone long enough, and I think I’ve partially answered some of that here. I’ll try to pick it up again in a later entry, hopefully soon.

~ Audie