Tuesday, December 21, 2010

"Created Beauty" - from The Beauty of God

I'm currently reading a book given to me, called The Beauty of God: Theology and the Arts. It's a series of essays and the first one is entitled, "Created Beauty," by Jeremy Begbie. Here are a few of my favorite excerpts:

"The deity celebrated in Christian faith is not an undifferentiated monad or blank "Absence," but a triunity of inexhaustible love and life, active and present to the world as triune and never more intensively than in the saving life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. " (Begbie; p. 21)

"We are not overpowered by God as a sublime truth; we are romanced by God as pure beauty." (Rosty Reno, quoted by Begbie; p. 24)

"...a theological account of created beauty will speak of creation as testifying to God's beauty, but in its own distinctive ways. Much here turns on doing full justice to a double grain in Scripture's witness: the Creator's faithful commitment to the cosmos he has made, and his commitment to the cosmos in its otherness. Creation testifies to God's beauty, but in its own ways; or better: God testifies to his own beauty through creation's own beauty." (Begbie; p. 25)

"The vision is rather of the artist, as physical and embodied, set in the midst of a God-given world vibrant with a dynamic beauty of its own, not simply "there" like a brute fact to be escaped or violently abused but there as a gift from a God of overflowing beauty, a gift for us to interact with vigorously, shape and reshape, form and transform, and in this way fashion something as consistent and dazzlingly novel as the Goldberg Variations, art that can anticipate the beauty previewed and promised in Jesus Christ." (Begbie, p. 44)

*I think I will update this with more quotes as I continue to read the rest of essays in the book.*

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