Beauty will save the world

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s enigmatic declaration in The Idiot that “Beauty will save the world” is the title of a book by Pastor Brian Zahnd in which he asks: “Where is the beauty that we know we cannot really live without?”  Western society has technology, convenience, security, and a measure of prosperity; the Christian Church claims to know truth and goodness.  But where is the beauty?   

Zahnd’s responds in seven chapters about form, wonder, the world’s axis, civilisation, the future, astonishment and shelter. He asserts that beauty has a form, and the beauty of the Christian Gospel is cruciform.  The greatest wonder of all is that the Word of God was made flesh, and he did so in order – through the Cross – to shift the world’s axis away from power enforced through violence to love expressed through forgiveness.  His purpose was not to annihilate human civilisation but to bring it to its full God-intended potential, which is why the vision presented in Revelation is of a thriving garden city that is home to the full diversity of nations.  Followers of Christ are in that sense from the future: called to show the world they live in today what is already becoming.   
 
The Gospel is astonishing but we have too often failed to proclaim it in favour of trying to explain it and how to apply it.  “We turn the beauty that saves the world into a utility for self-improvement.  We figure out what people want, and then offer them a Christianized version of it. We do it in the name of church growth, but it is really the betrayal of a sacred trust … We are not the architects of the faith; we are the trustees.” 
 
Picking up Isaiah’s metaphor, Jesus concludes his Sermon on the Mount with the image of a house that provides a shelter from the storm for beleaguered humanity – for those for whom he has announced good news in the Beatitudes at the beginning of the Sermon.  Instead, his most enthusiastic followers have too often given quite the opposite impression.  When Zahnd invited a Muslim friend to his Evangelical church, he was hesitant saying: “Those are the kind of people who hate me.”

“How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news.” (Romans 10:15 after Isaiah 52:7)