Category Archives: Beauty

Beauty, Culture, scripture, theology

The Results of a Simple Theological Truth

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. (Psalm 139:13-14)

Dad: We made a beautiful daughter

(4 year old) Daughter: God made me, and you are not God.

As I was walking out of Church on Sunday, the above-mentioned father related the above exchange with his precocious daughter. While it was an amusing exchange, it also reflects a correct, and I would say, very useful understanding of theology.

I can only pray that both father and daughter remember it.

I pray that dad remembers it when in a few years his daughter begins to show her intelligence and beauty to the world, and he thanks God for her, instead of pegging his own value on how well she performs in the world.

I pray he remembers it when this same daughter cries at some failure, which will seem huge to her. That he then avoids piling on to her disappointment, and instead reminds her that the good and wise creator of the universe made her, and he does not make mistakes.

I pray he remembers it as she rejects him at different times. First as she leaves him for her new friends, and later as she rejects him for being embarrassing in her teenage years, and finally if she walks down the aisle to begin a life together with another man.. He will need to remember the gift of God that she is, and that she was his gift only for a time.

I pray she remembers the truth at the same time, when she realizes that her dad is not perfect, and he will let her down, but she is made for greater things than simply her father’s decision or desire, and while her genes are a mix of her dad and her mom, they are not simply random ones.

I pray she remembers it as she gives birth to her first child, who will be beautiful, and full of potential, and yet blemished and imperfect in some eyes in the world. God will have made her child too.

I pray also that she remembers it (by God’s grace) many decades hence, when with tears in her eyes she buries the earthly father who loved her well, confident that the God who made her and him, and brought them together for a time by his grace, is trustworthy to take care of him until time ends and all tears are wiped away.

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Beauty, Blogging, Coffee, Culture

Culture Shocking

Okay, I know I’ve spent time here before.

The problem is that this time I recognize a lot, and yet still everything is a little alien. 

It’s a little like the feeling an expat gets when he returns to his home country, save that at least here everybody expects me to be a little out of it for a while.

So tonight I’m wandering around the downtown of my new city. There are still foreigners here, though they are less common than in Seoul. Koreans here are more likely to try out their English on me, and you can tell that the clothing styles and the accent are all slightly different. 

I guess that comes from being in a “small” town (about the same population as my entire home province, as opposed to the combined population of Canada’s 5 largest cities). I only hope that they’re friendly here for more than English practice. This is going to be a long 3 years if I can’t make some friends down here.

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Beauty, men, theology

Beauty in the Beastly

For some reason, I’ve begun to hear two different, but equally disturbing misunderstandings of orthodox Christian theology when it comes to self image. In the first place, when I affirm that I am in fact a beautiful person physically (which I believe myself to be) some people think that I am at that point lacking humility. At the same time, others believe that when I speak about my own sinfulness, and lack of inherent worth, that I must have an amazingly low self-image.

uchr_05_img0508.jpgIt’s an important question, especially in the world we find ourselves. I know far too many Christians, women and men, who find themselves subject either to a low view of their own beauty, or an unnecessary fixation on the physical. Both are to be avoided.
So I think I should explain what I mean when I say that a person ugly in their own sin, is at the same time beautiful physically and spiritually definitionally.

I also feel the need here to say I’m not aiming at some pseudo-psychological love fest. While I am going to say that everybody is objectively beautiful, I am not going to say that we are beautiful in the same ways. Indeed, some of the things we see as most beautiful in ourselves may be the most ugly.

Beauty
At the risk of being super obvious, I believe that God is beautiful. I think this is true in an absolute sense, and that if you see God for who He truly is, you could not help to worship Him. We can see that God is beautiful partially through creation.
In my role here as captain obvious, let me also point out that as a Christian I believe that humans are a special revelation of God. Genesis 1:27 tells us that we (male and female) are created in the image of God.
This means that God is revealed in us, the very image of the beautiful God. From this perspective, to call ourselves mainly ugly is a form of blasphemy, as it can claim that God is ugly. The determinative point of humanity is not that we are corrupt (which is true), but that we are made in the image of God. Thus definitionally, as a human, YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL. But this beauty is not based on your relative beauty when compared to other humans, but on the objective fact that you are an image of God. Our beauty is different from one another, but insofar as we are created in the image of God we are beautiful
I am handsome, simple fact. I cannot be arrogant in that, because it’s through my being an image of God, thus in the only comparison that matters (me and Jesus), I’m less beautiful.

The Beastly
l026a.jpgOf course, there is more to the Bible than that. We as the image of God fell into sin, and became subject to corruption. Some of that extends to physical beauty. Even the most beautiful person you can imagine is still less beautiful than what a perfected human looks like in the kingdom to come.
The reason is simple. Imagine a work of art damaged. Despite how beautiful the work might be, no matter how well it reflects a scene, the damage makes the art less beautiful. The same is true of us. When we fall, our beauty (all of it) is marred. In a sense, we are more ugly, because we are very beautiful as created, and the damage takes away from that beauty.

Sanctification: Beauty and the Beastly
This is where Christ comes in. When we are saved, God begins the work in us of perfecting that which once was marred. Indeed, many of the things we thought our beauty become revealed as ugliness, and are changed so that we can be seen as more beautiful; better reflections of a beautiful God.
Thus we do not have the right to call ourselves ugly, we are the reflection of a beautiful God, and thus objectively beautiful whether anyone sees us that way. God sees us that way, because in us he sees the image of Christ, the image of God. Thus whether any woman ever deigns to see my handsomeness, I am. Whether any woman is ever called a supermodel and makes it to the cover of a magazine is immaterial, she is beautiful.
We work to maintain beauty, we may diet, we may go to the gym and use various beauty products, but Christians do it differently. It is not primarily to make us look more like the world’s idea of beauty, but to reflect the beauty of God.
Similarly, we cannot be arrogant about it. We see beauty in ourselves and others as an image of God, not something to compare ourselves or others to. Ideally, we come to rejoice in the beauty of others as they reflect God.

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