This Saturday our meetup discussion group is discussing BEAUTY together.
I’ve enjoyed preparing for this discussion and thinking about it a bit. Here’s some of the questions we’ll be thinking through together:
1. When we say a thing is beautiful, what do we mean?
2. What makes a thing beautiful and a thing ugly?
3. Is beauty solely in the eye of the beholder, or a category that has both objective and subjective elements to it?
4. If beauty were purely subjective, what would be the ramifications? How do we grow in our appreciation and experience of the beautiful?
5. Does anyone actually live as though beauty were purely subjective?
6. What role does beauty play in our everyday lives?
7. How has beauty played a role in your life?
8. How does your worldview inform how you think of beauty?
9. Is BEAUTY a concept invented by humans or something that is real and transcends humans?
10. How do you account for the universal desire for and promotion of beauty?
11 Is there is a right or wrong way to approach beauty? According to what standard?
12. What role does beauty play in considering the future?
My own thoughts: God is a God of beauty and has made a beautiful world that has turned from his beautiful design, but in his beautiful grace has made a way to bring about a beautiful redemption through Jesus Christ and call his people into a beautiful new earth where they will experience the beauty of knowing God forever.
The invitation to become a Christian is not one to forsake beauty but to experience true beauty and to have our hearts remade to see that which is truly beautiful. It’s an invitation to be freed from approaching beauty in a sinful way, one that leads to our own destruction.
In the gospel we see a ravishing beauty: God the Son, pure and without blemish or sin, in love and grace comes to save a people who have rejected God and care nothing about him (Rom 5:8). God rescues us and makes us a new creation, he washes us clean and gives us new desires, he makes us children of God and fills us with the Holy Spirit. He gives us a new identity and gives us good works to do which are beautiful.
He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. – Ecclesiastes 3:11
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 and to inquire in his temple. – Psalm 27:4
