The Good, the True, and the Beautiful

It is the longing I first remember. I desperately wanted to be good. Of course, I tested the boundaries tightly drawn around parental definitions of good and bad, approved, condemned, and censored. It was usually clear that I was not lining up with these oft-voiced thoughts of the good. Yet somehow this didn't seem to enter into my childhood account of the virtue. I wanted to be good. Good in a manner far beyond parents and teachers (though I seemed more eager to please the latter than the former). Good in a way that altogether overwhelmed the inane legalisms and relative pieties around me. Good in a way that somehow reached the source itself.

It was Plato who famously argued that we should struggle out of the dark caves of ordinary human existence and towards the eternal Forms--of which the supreme Form is the Good. The pull of goodness was for me the first step toward the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (whose very name indicates the first step was not my own). I desperately longed to be good, to know Good, to somehow become united with it. Yet unfortunately, when climbing out of dark caves, churchly regulations and narcissistic perfectionisms look much like the thing you think you are seeking, and the terrifying God who demands perfection (Matthew 5:48) seems the terrible schoolmaster who will not have it any other way. No matter how many A's my adolescent efforts were able to manufacture, no matter the good deeds for shut-ins, the outrage at local racism, the attention to ethics in history and in school, God seemed a teacher I could not please.

My pursuit of the good no sooner became an impossible undertaking than it became my most devout undertaking. The God I followed through high school and college was one I feared, though at the time it was not the kind of fear that comes from the force of great beauty, but more the terror of insatiable expectation. I did not yet have the words to voice what C.S. Lewis's Orual managed in Till We Have Faces, when she finally had her chance to state her case against the gods. And yet, the first time I heard her words I knew they were my own: "That there should be gods at all, there's our misery and bitter wrong. There's no room for you and us in the same world. You're a tree in whose shadow we can't thrive."

Nevertheless, I resigned myself to this God. Whether I saw myself more as the wry opportunist keeping one's enemies close or the sad duckling eating out of the hand of the one who plucked all her feathers, in those days God was never far from my mind. I wanted to be good, I wanted to please, I wanted to meet God's approval, I wanted to be united with it. I knew I was failing, but new formulas for success, much like the latest self-help manual, appeared as often as I needed them. I prayed religiously. I read daily. I fasted and served. I changed my major to religion. I went to Jerusalem. I went to seminary. Only then did I resign myself to failure.

It was in the throes of giving up my defeated attempts to please this divine terror and pursue his Good that his face began to change. Images of good kings, gentle fathers, and untame lions, childhood hopes, and fairytales long forgotten, began to appear in thoughts and dreams. I found myself suddenly startled by the troubling idea that I was angry--not because I couldn't reach the higher good myself, nor at the ravenous headmaster who demanded it. No, I was maddened at the thought that the Father who demands perfection could be good Himself. This was troubling to me, first, because my fury was real, but second, because it simultaneously seemed foolish. I was angry at the possibility of a good God's mere existence. Goodness had long seemed so unattainable that I willed the Source had to be evil or only a myth. It was far more disconcerting to consider that God might be both good and true.

It would be nearly a decade after this awakening of sorts before I would hear the term "apologetics," but it was in that glaring, undeniable realization of my own illogic that my journey towards the One Who is True began. Now, far too often the field of apologetics is seen (both by its critics and its lauders) as the discipline that allows one to climb Mount Zion and nearer to God with the shining tools of reason. I have no such misconception in my own apologetic journey. I would still be content with my first angry contradiction had the mount not come to me. It is God who is in the business of moving mountains; reason is only God's occasional means.

But it was God's means with me. Up until this point, most of my life had been spent wholly unconcerned with truth as a philosophical category. This is not to say that I went about declaring reality purely relative or truth non-existent. It was far less conscious than this. The idea of following God because of some good this following would afford me, the idea of following God out of fear, dread, legality, or even hatred--this somehow made sense to me. But the idea of following God because the story was true, because a good God was really there,   The God I followed through high school and college was one I feared, though at the time it was not the kind of fear that comes from the force of great beauty, but more the terror of insatiable expectation.   because Christ was indeed who he said he was--this had never entered my mind. Apologetics was like learning a foreign language, but at once a language that filled in the fuzzy abstractions and missing pieces of my own. What if it was all true? It was not unlike the rousing of self Annie Dillard describes as strangely recognizable in An American Childhood--"like people brought back from cardiac arrest or drowning." There was a familiarity in the midst of the foreignness. I woke to mystery, but so somehow I woke to something known. It meant entertaining a new starting point; it meant admitting that I might not have been seeing with all the facts in the first place. It meant that God was there all along.

Of course, it did not mean that my angered questions gracefully bowed out at the thought that they might be premature or even nonsensical. Reason has very little to say to the child who wants to know why her father left; words are not what she is looking for. My initial discovery of truth had to give way to something beyond ideas and logic, and it did not take long for this to become apparent. If Jesus is who he says he is then Christianity is indeed not a matter of preference or pedigree; but this hardly suggests that the pilgrimage is void of questions that cannot be answered or existential struggles wholly unsatisfied by human thought. The apologist who remains at the level of words and arguments is no more instructive than the religious leaders who wanted to pelt the crumbled adulterer with stones. When our truth is as flat as a formula or a book--even holy formulas and books--our discipline is a delusion, as Jeremiah once said, our god something less than God. And we fall miserably short of being ready to give the truest account of the hope that is within us (1 Peter 3:15).

As I learned to see myself as a truthseeker and truth-teller in the midst of ordained ministry, I had to learn that truth is not simply something passive that we intercept, like the outcome of a CSI episode that leaves us entirely certain of "what really happened." Truth certainly has this definitive element, to be sure;   Apologetics was like learning a foreign language, but at once a language that filled in the fuzzy abstractions and missing pieces of my own. What if it was all true?   the Logos which became flesh is God's definitive account of truth. But this is something far deeper and more dimensional than hard, unresponsive facts and verses, as further evidenced in John's description of Christ as one full of grace and truth in himself. There is a corresponding, interactive quality to truth, which cannot be merely argued in words, but is best understood by engaging its depth and character within a world of impersonal, simplistic alternatives. For if truth is personal--indeed, a person--it demands a lifetime of shared engagement with the one who is truth and the Spirit who actively leads us into a discovery of this truth. Sadly, the mystery of the Christian religion is far greater than many often leave room to discover. Paul's description of Jesus is as full of inscrutable truths as it is compelling evidences: "He was revealed in flesh, vindicated in spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among Gentiles, believed in throughout the world, taken up in glory" (1 Timothy 3:16). Evidences of the heights and depths of this divine truth can indeed be received as factual, definitive fingerprints. But so they are clues that point to a multi-dimensional, inexhaustible person full of grace, and truth, and beauty.

Such an idea is perhaps set to narrative in the characters of The Idiot, in whom Fyodor Dostoevsky sets forth the bold assertion that "beauty will save the world." The sheer number of ways in which this quote has been taken from the prince who uttered it and handed to lessdiscerning philosophers attests to the risk inherent in the idea, and perhaps inherent in beauty itself. Even in the story, the prince's grand pronouncement is immediately the subject of interrogation--"What sort of beauty? " But Prince Myshkin affirms in response it is who will save the world. Dostoevsky, too, entertains the proclamation in a person, in Myshkin himself, who lives the quality of beauty as if distinctive of his very soul. It is Myshkin who chooses again and again to help rather than to harm, to give mercy rather than malice; he forgives tirelessly, though surrounded by people who do not. In fact, it is this group that labels Myshkin the "idiot" because he refuses to participate in the withering ugliness of their own ways. In Dostoevsky's analysis, if beauty will save the world, it will indeed be a Person.

For those waking to the light of truth, for those speaking to the light of truth, there is a temptation to overlook the personal in the midst of the philosophical. When Plato said that beauty is the splendor of truth, he had in mind the Forms, literally Ideas. Comforting though it is to those who instinctively sense we were not meant for the darkness of caves, the truth he had in mind is inherently different in substance and character than the God-Man who looked his troubled friends in the eyes and said, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." Here we find not words, but the Word enfleshed, the transcendent in person. He is goodness, truth, and beauty incarnate, beckoning us out of the darkness to follow, to die, to become as he is. As it turns out, my old desire not merely to be good but to somehow become united with it was not my own thought after all.

Herein, much of my ministerial passion now finds expression, hope, and flesh itself. For if the incarnation is a call to participate in the glory of God as persons who imbibe that glory, then there is most certainly in beauty the potential to save, for God is both the Source and the Subject. This is why I write, why I minister, why I defend the hope that is within me. God is not merely interested in goodness; he is goodness in a body, stepping near enough to consume us, but offering instead a paradoxical alternative: "Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him" (John 6:56). Thus, as a soul or a neighbor, as a minister or an apologist, I cannot afford to omit the possibility of God reaching out to the world in beauty, mystery, or transcendence, in goodness or kindness, in truth, logic, or reason, but I labor to show the hope of each possibility. For He is all three in person--the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. And like Myshkin, I, too, can attempt to rise above the ugliness of this world, having the courage to risk beauty, living as one who recognizes the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, and so choosing to boldly reflect this goodness, truth, and beauty in a world that would have otherwise.

In the end, I believe the Good, the True, and the Beautiful will indeed save the world. But He will not stop with mere rescue. "For if we have been united with Christ in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his" (Romans 6:5). This, like the kingdom both present and coming, is a reality we can spend a lifetime imagining, fostering, commending.