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Perverting Beauty Perverting Truth and Perverting Truth Perverting Beauty
Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four
God and Beauty
God is one. All truth, goodness, and beauty proceed from God. Since God is one, His truth, goodness, and beauty are one. You can’t take away from one of these three without taking away from the other two. Each of those relate to God, so their perversion perverts an understanding of God, creates a false god or false gods, and/or takes glory from the one and true God.
God is beautiful and beauty itself also issues from Him. He defines beauty both in His essence, in His acts, and in His creation. Man made in God’s image, functioning according to His likeness, produces or generates beauty and beautiful works. Of course, sinful man operating in his flesh does not do that; only his performing according to the image of God. This requires regeneration. After conversion, he can, and should generate only beauty and beautiful works, but still must submit to God to do so.
The production of beauty and beautiful works means the skillful formation or formulation of what reflects God’s nature and achievement. One judges the formation or formulation according to standards aligned with revealed truth about God and what He does. A believer can know beauty. He can know he forms or formulates it. He can know when someone else does. How does he know? He knows based on the testimony and application of God’s Word.
How Do You Know Beauty?
Scripture states in a sufficient manner truth, goodness, and beauty. A believer then applies these to the world. God enables believers to do that. I call this truth, goodness, and beauty in the real world. Believers don’t just know these three in the Bible. They know them also in the real world.
God’s Word says a truth such as “flee idolatry,” “flee fornication,” or “let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth.” It assumes that you will understand the application of that truth in the real world. You can’t say that you didn’t know that. You can also understand and apply, “think on whatsoever things are lovely” or “worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness.”
When Proverbs 7:10 says that a young man met a woman “with the attire of a harlot,” the passage doesn’t explain the attire of a harlot. It assumes you know already. People are still responsible for things that God does not explain. Lack of explanation does not permit dressing like a harlot.
Like many other applications of the Bible, music and art require honesty and setting aside lust or self-will. God gives the necessary capacity for judgment. As is so often the case, the problem isn’t with intelligence, but volition.
Departure from Beauty
The Standard for Beauty
Does someone leave the truth when he departs from beauty? Or does a departure from beauty stand alone, totally isolated, disconnected from the truth? Does leaving beauty start with a flight from the truth?
The view that beauty was neither true nor false, that it made no pronouncements about the world, that it just reflected the mind or feelings of an artist was a completely novel view when it appeared with the origins of modernism in the late 18th to the early to mid 19th century. Truth was true in itself, goodness, good in itself, and beauty, beautiful in itself, separate from the judgment of any man. All of this came from God. If someone can criticize beauty, it could only be because there is some objective standard outside of the object by which to judge it.
Absolute beauty requires principles by which to judge them. If not, then beauty is meaningless. Beauty must be beautiful in itself, not from a mind or feelings, Its judgment comes from external criteria. The standard of beauty transcends the beautiful thing. For something beautiful to exist, something not beautiful also must exist.
Kant and Mill and Beauty
Immanuel Kant in his 1790, Critique of Judgment, introduced the concept of subjective beauty, beauty in the eye of the beholder. He said concerning beauty, that it was
a judgment of taste . . . not a cognitive judgment and so it is not a logical judgment but an aesthetic one, by which we mean a judgment whose determining basis cannot be other than subjective.
John Stuart Mill, English philosopher, later in the 19th century popularized the notion that art was nothing more than the intrinsic personal feelings of an artist. Beauty was just an expression of subjective emotion. An assertion of a thing as beautiful described the state of mind of the one asserting. Beauty did reflect reality, but now only a person’s perception of reality.
You can see how that man dethrones God when he decides what is beautiful. Man becomes final arbiter of beauty. Value becomes subjective based on his thinking or feelings.
Beauty Doesn’t Care About Your Feelings
God and Science
Some might say subjective beauty is a matter of freedom. You can say what you like or don’t like. You’ve heard the phraseology, especially made popular by Ben Shapiro, “facts don’t care about your feelings.” How does that relate to beauty?
Isaac Newton, believer in God, and others like him stand as the foundation of scientific progress of the last three hundred years, which started with God as the standard. God’s Word inspired science. It did not disregard man’s senses. In accordance with God’s Word, Newton and his colleagues recognized the place scripture gave to man’s reason, his senses, and evidence. This was different than elevating man’s thinking and his feelings to the only source of truth. They must function in subjection to God within His world.
Empiricism: Senses as the Source for Beauty First and then Science Second
Kant and Mill established a secular approach to beauty. They elevated man’s senses as the sole source for beauty. Empirical beauty. Not long after, empirical methods became the sole source for truth, a philosophy called empiricism. A secular approach to knowledge and truth followed a secular approach to beauty. Sensory experience formed the basis for both and it started with beauty.
Very often today, Christians say that truth is objective with the Bible as final authority, but they judge beauty with their feelings as the standard. They might confuse the feelings with a mystical experience from God or the moving of the Holy Spirit. Long ago many churches ejected to various degrees from objective beauty. Today we see many of those churches capitulating in objective truth and goodness. This follows along the pattern of the first effect of empiricism on the arts with Kant and Mills and the second with science.
View of Beauty Shapes View of God
When someone starts with God on beauty, he will have the right view of beauty. He will produce, support, and endorse only the beautiful. However, the opposite is also true. Someone’s view of beauty shapes his view of God. He might have God in his doctrinal statement, but his imagination of God will accord with his depiction of beauty. The view of beauty and the view of God will both match.
Easily the world deceives on beauty to pervert the imagination of God. The non-beautiful or what is ugly will draw someone away from the true God. At the same time, he thinks he has or sees God. The two views cannot coexist.
Two people might say they are Christians. They should be similar, shaped by the transcendent view of truth, goodness, and beauty. Their standard is the same.
If two professing Christians’ thinking on beauty is different, their Christianity will seem like two different religions. They are. One has the true God. Very often, depending on the extent, the other does not. He has God on his doctrinal statement, but he imagines a different God, not in fitting with the God of the Bible. What I’m explaining occurs today by far more than it ever has in my lifetime.
So Which Is It, Truth or Beauty? Authenticity
One can say that truth is beautiful and beauty is truthful. When you look at beauty, actual beauty, it is true. It is real. If it is not beauty, it is not true or is in error.
If it is beauty, it is not just someone’s imagination or feelings. Very often today, when it is feelings, people call that authentic. They say it’s authentic, because from the perspective of the performer, it is how he feels. However, it may not and probably does not represent the truth, which mean it is not authentic.
I think I can say the following is ironic. Authenticity isn’t authentic anymore. Authenticity is now a lie.
In the past, authenticity meant true. It wasn’t leather. Instead, it was naugahyde. It wasn’t a diamond, but it was cubic zirconia. If it is not beautiful according to the nature of God, then it is not authentic. In this way, it is not true.
If the lie starts with beauty, treating the non-beautiful as beautiful, that spreads to the judgement of truth. This is where our world is today. You can’t say something is true, but that started with eliminating objective beauty. Today your truth can be your truth, but for a longer time, your beauty is your beauty.
Flood Lore and Divine Interventionism
In 2012 David Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, wrote The Rocks Don’t Lie, which he says is a geologist’s investigation of the Noahic flood. I talk about the flood at least every month, sometimes every week. It’s important enough for evangelism and apologetics to talk about all the time.
Peter in his second epistle and chapter three uses the flood as a historical argument for Divine interventionism and against uniformitarianism in a defense of the second coming of Jesus Christ. He writes in 2 Peter 3:4-6:
4 And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. 5 For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: 6 Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:
Peter is saying that things don’t continue as they were from the beginning of creation. The world, that then was, perished, because of a worldwide flood. Ignorance is a willing ignorance, so volitional, not intellectual.
The second coming is a problem for unbelievers, because they will not get away with whatever they do. They will give an account to their Lord. They may try to explain it away with uniformitarianism (things just continue as they are without divine intervention), but the Bible (2 Peter 3:1-2) and flood history (2 Peter 3:5-7) discount their view of the world. God will intervene and He has intervened.
One bit of evidence outside the Bible for the flood people call, “flood lore.” I do not know if “lore” is the best term for it, but it refers to the flood story found in numbers of cultures.
A youtube notification sent me to a Harvard speech by David Montgomery, saying that it was seven years old. In a thirty minute drive, I listened to twenty minutes of his speech and then stopped, because I knew where he headed.
Montgomery grew up in a religious family that went to church. It sounded like a liberal church that taught the Bible was a book of moral stories. When someone asked him to come to Tibet to help with a project as the geologist, he went. While there, he saw damage from a very large flood. He knew it. He saw it was a lake made from a glacier damming up a river. A glacier does not do that well. Its poor blockage ability led to a gigantic flood.
While in Tibet, Montgomery interview the locals, who already knew about the flood and talked about it. This surprised him, because he just saw it himself. This sent him the direction of thinking about local flood lore. This stories occur all over the world. At this point, I turned off the speech. I arrived at my destination, but I didn’t want to hear any more. I knew what he was doing. You have maybe started reading a story where the ending becomes obvious and you can’t continue.
To discredit flood lore, explain each story away with an account of a local flood. Or, do that enough times to say that these individual smaller events explain the stories of the big one. They don’t, but men know how a worldwide flood hurts their world view.
Men look at the present world in a uniformitarian manner. They know things happened, but they must use a natural explanation. They say the world is billions of years old. The flood can and should change that explanation. It disturbed the crime scene, so to speak. With tremendous power, God transformed the topography of the earth. They are not seeing the same world as the one before the flood. The pressure God brought on everything in the world affected what man theorizes that he sees.
The world originating by natural causes justifies men being their own bosses. God will not intervene. He hasn’t. Yet, He has, and He will again. Peter makes that argument in 2 Peter. Flood lore agrees with this divine interventionism. Everyone will give an account to God.
The Regular History of Clever New Interpretations, Teachings, or Takes on and from Scripture: Socinianism
One way to get a Nobel prize in something, you’ve got to break some new ground or discover something no one has ever seen. In the world, the making of a printing press or light bulb changes everything. People still try to invent a better mousetrap. It happens. The phone replaced the telegraph and now our mobile devices, the phone.
Everyone can learn something new from scripture. You might even change or tweak a doctrine you’ve always believed. On the whole, you don’t want to teach from the Bible what no one has ever heard before. The goal is the original intent and understanding of the Author.
From the left comes progressivism. The U. S. Constitution, just over two hundred years old, means something different than when it was written. Loosely constructed, it has a flexible interpretation into which new meanings arise. Hegelian dialectics say a new thesis comes from synthesis of antithesis and a former thesis. Everything can be improved.
Early after the inspiration and then propagation of the Bible, men found new things no one ever saw in scripture. Many of these “finds” started a new movement. People have their fathers, the father of this or that teaching, contradictory to the other, causing division and new factions and denominations. Some of these changes become quite significant, a majority supplanting the constituents of the original teaching.
At the time of the Reformation, it was as if the world first found sole fide and sole scriptura. Men often call justification the Reformation doctrine of justification. This opened a large, proverbial can of worms. Many could read their own Bible in their own language. Others now dug into their own copy of the original languages of scripture. Skepticism grew. “If we didn’t know this before, what else did they not tell us?” It became a time ripe for religious shysters and this practice hasn’t stopped since then.
Socinus
The Italian, Laelius Socinus, was born in 1525 into a distinguished family of lawyers. Early his attention turned from law to scripture research. He doubted the teachings of Roman Catholicism. Socinus moved in 1548 to Zurich to study Greek and Hebrew. He still questioned established doctrine and challenged the Reformers. Laelius wrote his own confession of faith, which introduced different, conflicting beliefs. They took hold of his nephew, Faustus Socinus, born in 1539.
Faustus rejected orthodox Roman Catholic doctrines. The Inquisition denounced him in 1559, so he fled to Zurich in 1562. There he acquired his uncle’s writings. His doubt of Catholicism turned anti-Trinitarian. The Reformation did not go far enough for Socinus. His first published work in 1562 on the prologue of John rejected the essential deity of Jesus Christ.
Socinus’s journeys ended in Poland, where he became leader of the Minor Reformed Church, the Polish Brethren. His writings in the form of the Racovian Catechism survived through the press of the Racovian Academy of Rakow, Poland. His beliefs took the name, Socinianism, now also a catch-all for any type of dissenting doctrine.
Socinianism held that Jesus did not exist until his physical conception. God adopted Him as Son at His conception and became Son of God when the Holy Spirit conceived Him in Mary, a Gnostic view called “adoptionism.” It rejected the doctrine of original sin.
Socianism denied the omniscience of God. It introduced the first well developed concept of “open theism,” which said that man couldn’t have free will under a traditional (and scriptural) understanding of omniscience.
Socinianism also taught the moral example theory of atonement, teaching that Jesus sacrificed himself to motivate people to repent and believe. His death gave men the ability to be saved by their own works, who weren’t sinners by nature anyway.
Unitarians
The work of Socinus lived on in the belief of early English Unitarians, Henry Hedworth and John Biddle. Socinian belief was helped along also by its position of conscientious objection, a practice of refusing to perform military service. This principle was very popular with many and made Socinianism much more attractive to potential adherents. The First Unitarian Church, which followed Socianism as passed down through its leaders in England, was started in 1774 on Essex Street in London, where British Unitarian headquarters are still today.
As the Puritans of colonial America apostatized through various means, Unitarianism, a modern iteration of Socinianism took hold in the Congregational Church in America. After 1820, Congregationalists took Unitarianism as their established doctrine. The doctrine of Christ diminished to Jesus a good man and perhaps a prophet of God and in a sense the Son of God, but not God Himself.
Spirit of Skepticism
I write as an example of the diversity in the history of Christian doctrine and why it takes place. When you read the beliefs of Socinians, you easily see them in modern liberal Christianity. They influence on religious cults that deny the deity of Jesus Christ.
A limited amount of skepticism wards away the acceptance of false doctrine. Better is a Berean attitude (Acts 17:11), searching the scripture to see if these things are so, and what Paul wrote in 1 Thessalonians 5:21, proving all things, holding fast to that which is good.
As I grew up among fundamentalists and independent Baptists, I witnessed regular desire to find something new in the Bible. Many sermons espoused interpretations I had never heard and didn’t see in the text. A preacher often said, “God gave it to me.” You should know God used the man because no one had seen such insights into scripture.
The same spirit of doctrinal novelty continues today in many evangelical churches. The same practice led Joseph Smith in his founding of Mormonism. Many cults arose in 19th century America under the same spirit of skepticism of established historical doctrines.
The Temptation of Novel Teaching
The temptation of novel teaching preys on anyone. Faustus Socinus accepted many orthodox doctrines of his day. He rejected Christ as fully God and fully human because it was contrary to sound reason (ratio sana). This steered Socinians toward Enlightenment thinking, where human reason took the highest role as arbiter of truth.
Warren Wiersbe wrote that H.A. Ironside, longtime pastor of Chicago’s Moody Church, said, “If it’s new, it’s not true, and if it’s true, it’s not new.” Elsewhere I read that Spurgeon first said that. I don’t know. Clever new interpretations, teachings, and takes on and from scripture corrupt and overturn scriptural, saving doctrines in the hearts of men. They condemn them through all eternity.
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