theology

Some writing news . . .

/ Paul Burkhart / Leave a comment

I just wanted to plug a new website that I am now contributing to.  It’s a site from the newest fellow Westminster dropout I’ve met, Allison Quient.  It’s a site called “By Whose Authority?” and it’s an ecumenical blog where people from varying theological perspectives write and discuss their respective views.  From the site:

This blog is devoted to addressing questions of Church authority and other doctrinal issues surrounding the Protestant, Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. Our hope is to foster a charitable and winsome dialog in the pursuit of God’s truth.

I haven’t written anything yet, but I’ll try to put up a post on the site in the next couple of days.  You can be sure I’ll let it be known here on this blog when that happens.  But in the meantime, please go and read some of the posts that have been put up so far.  They are pretty phenomenal.

Beauty: The Complete Series

/ Paul Burkhart / 14 Comments

screen-captureIn 2009 I did a seminar at my old church, Epiphany Fellowship, on the topic of Beauty. I spent about nine months doing research, reading, talking, and thinking before offering it to the community. I then separated my overall talk into the series of blog posts you’ll see below. A year later, I updated the main manuscript with some expanded thoughts. Those blog posts represent the material before the update.

On this page you’ll find the audio from the talk and the updated manuscript,, as well as a special appendix I put together offering a complete breakdown of every word in both Greek and Hebrew that the English Standard Version of the Bible translates as “beauty” or “beautiful”, broken down by frequency.  Along with those words (and all their forms), I’ve offered the most literal definition of each so you can easily see the huge range of meanings that the Biblical words for “beauty” carry. I hope it’s helpful. You don’t need any knowledge of Greek or Hebrew to understand it or get something from it.

Series Table of Contents

Resources for this series:

[photo by David Schrott]

The Outline for the Entire Series:

Resources for this series:

[photo by David Schrott]

The Gospel is Beautiful{12} | it is finished

/ Paul Burkhart / 4 Comments

Rembrandt-Return of the ProdigalWell, it’s done. This is the end of the Beauty series. I won’t say too much, because this part is long enough already. I would just remind all of you of two things. Firstly, this whole piece began with the story of the most beautiful thing I have ever seen: the city of Edinburgh as I stood above it on top of a hill in the city. Secondly, our definition of Beauty: Beauty is the attribute of something that expresses complexity, simply. It what takes the complex strands of the world, reality, experience, or God and weaves those complexities into a simpler tapestry which we can perceive with our physical and spiritual senses. The more complexity expressed more simply, the more beautiful something is. And with that, let’s finish this thing out. What’s coming next? I have a post ready for that that I’ll post up in a couple of days. We pick up right where we left off…

In conclusion, I want to talk about the thing that ties every one of these things together. The thing in which there exists in a glorious and beautiful harmony between all the different things we’ve talked about tonight. The last part of our text tonight, Ecclesiastes 3:15 says “That which is, already has been; and that which is to be, already has been; and God seeks what has been driven away.” “God seeks what has been driven away.” In conclusion, the Gospel is Beautiful. The Gospel, in short, is the story and message of Christianity. It comes from the Greek word meaning “good news”. So what is this good news for us? The news that God did the ultimate act of beauty. The ultimate act of condescension of filling this finite world with the most Infinite of Beings for the sake of knitting it together again, and actually ultimately filling it with Himself. You see, God began History and ordered it in such a way that it was beautiful. He filled this simplicity with the marks of Himself, so all things pointed to Him and reflected Him perfectly. Humans came on the scene and were made in His image so that they as well truly and purely reflected, represented, and “Imaged” (that would be the theological term) this God on earth. But sin entered into the world, and made this world fallen from its original place of beauty. And we have followed suit. You see, sin is not finding certain things, people, or places beautiful. It’s that we find them more beautiful than God and these responses that are due God, we give to other things. We worship and “image” and express fallen simple things rather than the Holy complex God. We all have done this. I have done this. You have done this. You have soiled your beauty and abandoned it to your lusts! You no longer represent the One whom you were meant to mirror and reflect and therein find your beauty! You merely represent the world. The lowly fallen world. Fallen people imaging fallen things. There’s no beauty in that.

But God, being rich in mercy. Though we have abandoned God’s beauty and our own true beauty, God has not abandoned them. He loves His Beauty. And He loves the Beauty of His creation. So this God, for the sake of the worship His own beauty, and our own own joy in His Beauty, comes. The most perfectly knit together tapestry in the universe chooses to come and express the most Holy Complexity in the most intimate simplicity. This perfectly woven tapestry walks the earth, lives the perfectly woven life, and then stares into the cup of God’s perfectly woven wrath reserved for all things and people that are not beautiful in this world. And he drinks it. This perfect tapestry of complexity expressed simply goes to the cross willingly and allows the tapestry of His soul to be torn apart strand by strand by strand as the wrath of God that hung over everyone who would believe was gathered by God and poured it on Himself. That wrath that hung over many of us in here. That wrath that hangs above some of us tonight, that will be poured out on something. Either on Christ at the cross, or in you in Hell. Did you know that Hell is beautiful? Not for those that are there, but it is. It is pure, white, Justice and Wrath poured out on all that was wrong in the world. So God’s wrath will be poured out either in Hell or the Cross.

And history revolves around this cross. Because at the same time that Christ, Beauty Itself, was literally being torn apart, he was reconciling all things to Himself. In other words, he was taking every stray strand in the universe – every bit of evil, suffering fallenness there will ever be in history – and reserving its proper place in the final tapestry of History that we call heaven. He was making Himself the common glorifying thread that would reknit the broken fabric of a broken creation. And so we live now in the process and story of God putting all those strands in their proper place. As more and more beauty floods the earth He is still inviting his people to join Him in this epic story. He is calling his people to praise Him and draw near to Him, and out of the overflow of that to proclaim His Beauty to others and make more beauty, so as to usher in this new creation – or to put it in our terms tonight – the New Tapestry of Creation. Better than before. It is the one that has woven in it the purpose for all pain, sickness, death, and dying that God has ordained and allowed to take place so that this tapestry might make good on it all to the praise of the Beauty of God’s name.

And we, His people, His Bride, those that are “in Christ”, that are simple people Imaging and expressing the most complex of Beings, are woven into that tapestry that is Heaven and the New Creation. We’re not just going to live in it, we are part of it. Second Corinthians 5:17, in most Bibles reads: “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” But that’s not what it says in the Greek. It doesn’t say “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation”. There is no “he is”. The Greek literally says “If anyone is in Christ: new creation!” More accurately, I think it should be translated “If anyone if in Christ, this is the new creation. he old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” I remember an old professor at Westminster named Richard Gaffin. He used to go up to students, stop them, and just say to them “you are just as resurrected now as you will ever be”. We often forget that. Yes, we will get new bodies and the penalty, power, and presence of sin will be done away with, but as far as our souls go, we are as resurrected now as we will ever be.

We are the new creation. The new tapestry. We have been woven into the fabric of this ever-increasingly redeemed world that is being flooded with the Beauty of God. The new has come in Christ. Through the Gospel. The good news of our salvation is that all that has been ugly with the world and in ourselves has been conquered. Beauty is here, and Beauty is ever increasingly filling the earth, and this Beauty is our salvation from ugliness and sin. George Marsden in his incredible biography of Jonathan Ecdwards ends the whole book with this summary of Edwards’ view of all of life and salvation. He says that

“[Edwards believed that] God’s trinitarian essence is love. God’s purpose in creating a universe in which sin is permitted must be to communicate that love to creatures. The highest or most beautiful love is sacrificial love for the undeserving. Those. . . who are given eyes to see that ineffable beauty will be enthralled by it. . . They will not be able to view Christ’s love dispassionately but rather will respond to it with their deepest affections. Truly seeing such good, they will have no choice but to love it. Glimpsing such love . . . they will be drawn from their self-centered universes. Seeing the beauty of the redemptive love of Christ as the true reality, they will love God and all that he has created.”

The Gospel, this salvation, is beautiful.

And we receive this salvation by seeing its Beauty, turning our stirred affections toward this God, and trusting that we cannot reknit our own souls but Christ has reknit them for us. And as our affections are further stirred we press into Him ever increasingly as He draws ever-nearer to us. I pray, I plead, that those in here tonight that have not done so, would trust this beautiful God to have accomplished for them what they could not do for themselves. Please, consider this story, this message. See if it is not the most beautiful thing you could ever conceive. Just for a moment, see if something in you is stirred for this God. Even if you don’t believe He exists, or that He is this particular God that I have spoken of tonight, is there something in you that at least wishes it were true? Wishes it were this way? Wishes that God did in fact arrange everything to make it all beautiful in its time? Even if you won’t admit it, if that’s true, if you did wish this were the case, don’t ignore that. You have been designed to long for the Beauty of this Gospel, this story. Don’t ignore it. Sovereign, Beautiful Father, Lover, and Lord, save people that read this.

In conclusion, I’m going to break every rule I learned in my preaching class this last semester about how to end a message and end mine tonight with a poem. But not someone else’s poem. This is a poem I wrote in one take one particular afternoon through broken tears standing on top of a hill looking out over the city of Edinburgh as I was taken over by the most beauty I’ve ever seen. Let this encourage the weary saints reading this blog post, and let it perhaps woo those that have yet taste what these words are about. You can find the poem here, or just click in the section above entitled “The Site”.

Here are the links to the full manuscript and the full audio of my presentation of this material:

Click for Manuscript Pdf

Manucscript

Click here for sermon audio

Audio

Proclaiming & Producing Beauty{11}

/ Paul Burkhart / 2 Comments

Sandorfi - KalfonariumThe next post after this will be the last in this series.  But today, we are finishing up the section on how we respond to Beauty.  As I stated earlier, there are two fundamental ways we respond to Beauty: we contemplate it, and we enjoy it.  But, within the enjoyment piece, I think there are four main ways to to that: we praise, participate in, proclaim, and produce Beauty.  Once more, our working definition is Beauty is the attribute of something that expresses complexity, simply.  It takes the loose strands in reality and weaves them together into a tapestry that out senses are able to perceive.

Now, let’s pick up right where we left off:

Proclaim

But the process is still not over. First we praise the thing as beautiful, then we participate in its beauty on its own terms. Thirdly, we proclaim it as beautiful. Proclamation is not the same as praise. I believe it was C.S. Lewis that something along the lines of this: joy in something is not complete until it is shared with someone else. Proclamation is the telling of the Beauty of this thing to someone else. It is sharing in this affection with someone else. Here we start seeing something about Beauty that will lead into our final response: Beauty longs to be known and spread – almost like a virus. It wants to inspire you to tell others about it, so that those people might participate in it as well. For creational Beauty this is done in many obvious ways like reviews and just telling someone else about it. For divine Beauty, this is typically referred to as preaching. Speaking of this God should be the natural response to someone who has praised and participated in the Beauty of God. It is out of the overflow of this in someone’s heart that they should speak. Not out of begrudging compulsion or sheer white-knuckled obedience. We tell others about the things we find most beautiful. Should this not also apply to the highest of all beautiful people – God?

Produce

This brings us to our last part in the process of responding to beauty. It’s very much tied to the previous one and has to do with Beauty replicating itself. God, in His love for us, calls us to respond to beauty not only by proclaiming beauty in word, but also producing beauty in deed. Produce is the last way we respond to Beauty. We are built in the Image of a God who doesn’t just desire, delight in, and display Beauty, but a God who also does Beauty. We, likewise, all have abilities to produce beauty. Not only that, our response to beauty is not complete until it has inspired us to likewise create beauty. Every musician in here knows what it’s like to be at a show or concert, seeing someone play the instrument that you play and suddenly having your mind swirling with musical ideas you want to try out when you get home. There’s an entire field of art history that tries and find the obscure pieces that inspired some of the greatest pieces of art we adore today. It works off the assumption that nothing that beautiful exists without inspiration before it. The longer I live, the more I am convinced that everyone has some creative ability in them. I don’t care how “uncreative” you think you are. You are built in the image of a Creator God! You have not only the ability, but I fully believe the responsibility as well to bring forth more beauty in this world and further participate in God’s “re-knitting” of the universe. Now this “creative” ability in all will look different in everyone, so don’t think you have to stick to conventional forms of “creativity”. Really, anything that makes beauty does this. It can be gardening, serving, counseling, or raising your kids, even. I would argue all those take a certain type of “artistic eye” to do them well. We all have it. Find it. Do it well. Do it often. And do it as a response to the Beauty that is around you in both God and Creation.

This also shows itself in the Christina life (and in our text) as holiness, or “doing good” as the author of Ecclesiastes puts it. Seeing the Beauty of God should inspire us to holy living and loving of others. Serving those around us in order to share with them and replicate the Beauty of God that we have seen.

Click for Manuscript Pdf

Manucscript

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Audio

Baptized in Beauty{10} (Enjoy, Pt. II)

/ Paul Burkhart / 4 Comments

Schrott1

photo credit: David Schrott

For those that have followed this series on Beauty, you will know that we have hit three major sections so far: “Why do we long for Beauty?“, “What is Beauty?“, “What things are Beautiful?“, and now we’re in the “How do we respond to this Beauty” section. I am in the process of laying out four “stages” of an appropriate and full response to Beauty. The first stage of this response is a contemplation of the Beauty.  The second is our enjoyment of it.  The first step in that process is Praising Beauty, which we talked about last time. In this post, we talk about the next step. This also happens to be my favorite part of the process of responding to Beauty. It’s when we are joined to Beauty and are swept up in its complexity and nuances. I love this feeling, I love this experience, and I loved writing and talking about it. I hope you enjoy reading it. Once again, the full manuscript and audio of the lecture I gave on this is below. We pick up right where we left off, saying that we must praise Beauty.

______________

Bur praising is not enough. Seeing something beautiful and calling it such does not complete the purpose for which that beauty exists. Beauty has an attractive quality. It draws you toward it at a very deep level. The next step, after acknowledging this beauty is to allow it to suck you in. I call this “Participating” with the Beauty of that thing or person.

Practically, this looks lots of different ways. With other people, it’s a drawing near to that person. Conversing with them. Viewing more of the nuances of the Image of God in them that makes them beautiful. For art, it looks like accepting the art on its own grounds and letting it draw you in in whatever way it’s asking of you. For plays and films it’s that idea of “suspension of disbelief”, where you allow yourself to forget that you technically “know” this isn’t real, and you let yourself get sucked into this beauty. Other forms of art tend to ask us to get lost in the object itself and explore its nuances. Closing your eyes during a musical piece and hearing every note; letting the words of a poem get inside of you and change the vocabulary you use to describe its own beauty or the world around you; letting distractions fade as you stare at a painting and see every stroke, every color (anyone who has seen a piece in real-life by John Singer-Sargent or Vincent VanGogh knows this feeling most definitely). Have you ever cried because of Beauty? This is participating with it. In the contemplation stage of this process you ask yourself “what is the beauty of this thing asking of me? It’s drawing me to itself, but to what end?”

But what about God? What about Divine Beauty?  This is where His Beauty shows especially brilliantly. All other forms of beauty can only draw you near to itself. God can and does actually draw you into Himself and Himself in you. We can participate with Him in a way that every other form of beauty only faintly strives for. How? Well, He takes the first step upon changing someone by actually sending his very Spirit to dwell within His people.

But God not only let’s us participate in His Beauty spiritually, but also physically.  After He draws near to us, we do what the Bible calls “abiding” in Him, where we draw near to Him through various things the Bible calls “means of grace”. These are traditionally called sacraments.  They are physical things that we participate in and by faith He meets us there. One of the clearest examples is Baptism.  It is where we are brought into union and participation with Christ in response to his faithfulness and action toward us.  Another is Communion. Just think of the word: “Co-mmunion”. It’s where we “commune” with God. That bread and wine is a symbol, but not just that. It is in those elements that we His people are actually drawn further into God to “commune” and participate with Him in His beauty. This is why Communion is such a big deal in the Bible. God kills people – even Christians – because they misuse this beautiful thing. He will let no one lightly and trivially participate and be drawn into His Beauty.

This should lead us to a “sacramental” view of life, where God is using all things to communicate Himself to us and communicate His Grace to us. Let everything: every good-tasting piece of food, every sunset, every cool breeze, every joyful moment all be moments where God communicates Himself and His grace to you so you might participate and be joined to Him in His Beauty and we further praise Him even more. Historically, the Christians that do this well have been referred to as “mystics”. They are the ones that say seemingly crazy things. Brother Lawrence was a 17th century monk and he said: “I have at times had such delicious thoughts on the Lord I am ashamed to mention them.” John Owen, my favorite Puritan, says

O to behold the glory of Christ…Herein would I live; herein would I die; herein would I dwell in my thoughts and affections…until all things below become unto me a dead and deformed thing, no way suitable for affectionate embraces.

Oh that we longed in that way for God. There is a participation in the Glory, Beauty, Majesty, Goodness, and Love of God that is at hand for those who believe and far for those who don’t. Please, I beg of you, if you are not a believer, seek the Beauty of God, for it’s only suitable response is to be drawn into into and know his intimacy in this way. He, the fountain of all good things, the One for Whom your soul was made, does not disappoint those who seek to know Him. Participate in Beauty.

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Manucscript

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Audio

“Seminaries & the Nature of Truth” – GoingToSeminary.com

/ Paul Burkhart / 3 Comments

Hey, just wanted to write a quick note letting you all know that my new article is up on GoingToSeminary.com.  This is Part 2 of a very unofficial series I’m doing on Truth and Doctrine.  The first part went up about a week and half ago, and had some great feedback on it.  This article is getting mostly positive feedback, though maybe I wasn’t as clear on this one.  I would love some more feedback.  By the way, Beauty Part 10, should be up in the next few minutes.  Here’s the link to the GtS article:

“Seminaries & the Nature of Truth“

Check out the rest of my Going To Seminary posts.

“Letting Seminary Doctrinally Change You” & Controversy – GoingToSeminary.com

/ Paul Burkhart / 2 Comments

Remember “that” article I was talking about last week?  The one that may begin some “controversy” at GoingToSeminary.com?

Well, it’s up now.

It’s part one of two on a little series I’m writing on doctrinal changes while in seminary.  As I said then, I’m more concerned about this next article than this one.  If it even comes out.  In an hour and a half I have been called upon by the “Vice President of Advancement” and “Associate Professor of Systematic Theology” of Westminster Theological Seminary, David Garner to grab some lunch.  I have no idea what the topic of conversation is (and the one time I’ve asked, he never answered), but I’m optimistic.  He has always been one of my favorite professors I ever had and has one of the most pastoral, worshipful, Christ-centered hearts I’ve ever seen in a man.  I look up to him greatly as a pastor, preacher, teacher, husband, and father.

But, he is very much on the side of the issues at Westminster that I am not.  So I’m wondering what this is about.  I haven’t been that vocal against WTS have I?  I feel like whenever I have I’ve always made it clear that this is my opinion and I that I know I’m still young, arrogant, and don’t know anything.  I don’t know.  We’ll see.  I may let you all know.  But, in the meantime, read and enjoy the article “Letting Seminary Doctrinally Change You” at GoingToSeminary.com.  Here it is:

“Letting Seminary Doctrinally Change You“

Check out the rest of my Going To Seminary posts.

The Contemplation of Beauty{8}

/ Paul Burkhart / 6 Comments

Picasso - The Old GuitaristSorry for the brief hiatus.  I don’t quite know what happened.  Probably just getting used to work and a new schedule and everything.  I have a few “lighter” articles in the works for the next couple of days, plus I’m working on more substantial things for other sites.  I’ll let you all know.  But now, back to beauty.

Last we left the Beauty series, we were discussing the proper way in which to respond to it.  Though there’s no absolute “most proper” way to respond, I used our main Biblical text that we’ve been looking at, and an idea developed by C.S. Lewis to break down our response into two useful categories: contemplation and enjoyment.  Before we enjoy, we contemplate.  This is not to say we can’t enjoy anything apart from comprehensively knowing it, but it does say that a contemplation and exploration of things helps us enjoy them more fully; and to be enjoyed to the fullest is the ultimate desire of Beauty itself.  But what does this contemplation look like in real life?

Let’s recall our defintion of Beauty as the attribute of something that expresses complexity, simply.  It’s what takes the complex unwoven strands out there in reality and weaves them into a tapestry that we can perceive with our spiritual and physical sense.  The more strands are woven more simply, the more beautiful that tapestry is. So in its most basic form, the contemplation of Beauty is thinking through what “strands” or what “complexity” is being represented in the thing in front of you.  So what does it look like? Well, formally, in philosophy, this endeavor is called “Aesthetics” or “Metaphysics”. It’s the philosophical study of Beauty and Beautiful things.

In the real world, for the rest of us, I thought of two ways this could look. First, when presented with something that your senses find beautiful, ask yourself, “What is it that’s actually being stirred in me?” Is it romance? Sorrow? Reminders of childhood joys? That stirring is your soul resonating with the strands that are in the tapestry in front of you. This is what art critics are really good at doing: teasing apart the strands that make up any given piece of art. The second way I could see this look is when you are encountered with something or someone that everyone seems to think is so beautiful but you just don’t get it. Maybe it’s the Mona Lisa. You may think: “Yeah, it’s a good painting, but what’s the big deal?” Maybe it’s some piece of abstract art that everyone else is swooning over but you. Maybe it’s a book, poem, or song you just don’t understand. In this case, I would encourage you to do research, read criticism, and try and understand the complexity behind the tapestry that others are noticing, but not you. It seems like people that know Music theory really well seem to like Jazz and Classical more than others. It seems like trained poets like weird abnormal poetry. The better you can understand the complexity in something, the easier it is for you to appreciate and ultimately enjoy the fullness of its beauty. This is why I would encourage all of you to be very curious about as many topics as possible. It’s not for the sake of more knowledge, but so that you can better enjoy the world around you and see it’s Beauty in everything.

Now, what I just went through is more for our everyday use and understanding of subjective, created Beauty. But more importantly, we must learn what it means to contemplate the Beauty of God. In Christianity this endeavor is called “Theology”. If Theology is (as most people know) “the study of God”, then it by definition is the study of Beauty Itself. This is what Theology was meant to be. It’s the kind of theology God calls us to do. Theology is the contemplation of the various complexities and revealed “strands” of God in order to better enjoy Him. John Calvin talks about this in his Institutes of the Christian Religion. He says that if your quote-on-quote “theological study” isn’t leading you to greater praise and enjoyment in God, then you’re not really studying theology! At that point it’s just studying literature – getting a better idea of this “character” named God in this “novel” called “The Bible”. This is why I had to leave seminary. I was in the midst of such beauty and I was numb to it! I was too immature. I didn’t have the spiritual infrastructure to see it for how beautiful it was! This infinite complexity being placed in front of me day in and day out was not leading me to enjoy Him. How many of us live day in and day out surrounded by the objective beauty of Christ and it does nothing to us? This contemplation of the Beauty of God can help us. Just yesterday our brother Marc Savage sent that group text (I have no idea how many of you got it) with this quote from Charles Spurgeon: “There is something exceedingly improving to the mind in a contemplation of the Divinity. It is a subject so vast, that all our thoughts are lost in its immensity; so deep, that our pride is drowned in its infinity. No subject of contemplation will tend to more humble the mind, than thoughts of God.”

May I challenge all of us to press in and seek the complexities of Who this God is and how He has revealed Himself? Understanding the beauty of God is of the utmost importance to the Christian, because His beauty is completely pointless. It can’t be manipulated, used, or abused. It can only be enjoyed. Something I’ve learned over time: whenever spirituality of any kind goes awry and goes off track, the Beauty of God is one of the first things to go. The inability to accept the mysterious complexities of God is the beginning of all heresy. You can’t have a right enjoyment of the Beauty of God and be a legalist, libertine (someone who abuses grace), or a hypocrite. Seeking to enjoy the Beauty of God is a guard against all these things. In my reading, one of my favorite things I came across was from a Catholic theologian named John Navone. He says in his book Toward a Theology of Beauty that Christian theologians (which I would argue should be all of us) are people given the task of articulating and putting into words how everything in life is given to us by God. Navone calls this the “givenness” of life and selfhood. This means that all of life is grace – unmerited favor; and that even things that are usually seen as secular (types of visual art, media, culture, jobs, and types of “non-Christian” music) are actually things that “mediate the mystery of the dawn of Christ’s Kingdom, as epiphanies or manifestations of grace. We as theologians [(and I would argue as artists and beholders of beautiful things)] are charged with the task of ushering in and articulating the mysteries of beauty which we will rest in forever.” That’s amazing. He goes on to say that “Theologians [(and I’d say even Christian artists)] are engaged in a dialogue, not only with their public, but with the object of their contemplation.” This should be one of the distinguishing factors between artists that are Christians, compared to those that are not: non-Christian artists can only use their art to dialogue with other people (speaking horizontally) and other art (speaking down). Only the Christian can make art with the confidence and hope that it also speaks and dialogues upwards to a God pleased to see, hear, or watch it.

Now what if you’re hearing all this, but you wouldn’t say you’re a Christian. First, if your interest has been piqued, but you just don’t get it, I’d give you the same encouragement I gave to those earlier that don’t understand the Beauty of things that others find beautiful. Learn about this God. Stick around. Ask questions. Seek answers. Try to see the infinite complexity of this God and how simply he has revealed Himself. Look into how He has revealed Himself and start to pick apart the strands of the incredible tapestry he has revealed Himself as. Secondly, let me encourage you: there is objective Beauty. You heart yearns for it and longs for it, and it is out there. Objective beauty is when the fullest possible complexity is expressed to us. So God – infinite complexity – is that objective Beauty Itself. But people don’t know full objective beauty before they know God. This complexity cannot be comprehended until God changes someone to comprehend it. If you’re not there yet, that’s fine. Pray. Ask God to change you as He has changed many of us. Contemplate this God. Contemplate His world. Contemplate all Beauty.

Why?  So we can enjoy Beauty.  I’ll see you next time.

Here are the manuscript and lecture that this series is based off of.

Click for Manuscript Pdf

Manucscript

Click here for sermon audio

Audio

Controversy, Controversy, Controversy at GoingToSeminary.com

/ Paul Burkhart / 8 Comments

old lady

Update: The two posts mentioned in this article are now up. “Letting Seminary Doctrinally Change You” and “Seminaries & the Nature of Truth“.

Yep, it’s a double-post sort of day.  (let’s just say I’m making up for Labor Day.)  But this is a personal one.  I’m asking for some prayer.

At publication time for this post, the site GoingToSeminary.com is currently changing servers, so it’s down.  It was just bought by the somewhat Lutheran and fully online Rockbridge Seminary, sold by my good friend (and former campus minister) Ryan Burns of Design Simple.

As some of you know, I am a Contributor for the site, and my articles have tended to be pretty weighty.  I don’t know why.  It hasn’t been purposeful.  I suppose when I think of seminary it tugs at my urgent pastoral heart more than the light, fun, twentysomething heart; and this has been evident in the posts.  From what I can tell, my last article “Realizing Seminary’s Not For You” has received more comments than any other single article that I can find on the site, and those comments were fiery.  I got blasted from every side (and defended by many – thank you all, by the way).  A couple of people even compared me to an unfaithful Israelite who saw the giants in the Promised Land and got scared.  Another, in light of my severe disappointment in Westminster Theological Seminary as an institution, said that apparently I don’t know good doctrine when I see it.  In short, it caused some controversy.  I really try not to seek such controversy, and I never thought that post would spurn such heated discussion.

But –

Tomorrow’s another story.  Tomorrow my new article is going live on the site and I’m fairly sure this one will ruffle some feathers.  In fact, I’m shocked Rockbridge went ahead and decided to post it.  Kudos to them.  It will be very easy for this article to be misunderstood on both sides: those that think I go too far, and those that think I don’t go as far as I am in fact trying to go.

The article is a discussion of how to let seminary doctrinally change you.  To do this, I very consciously employ postmodern thought into my own thinking and advocate others do so as well.  It’s very touchy and I am not wholly confident that I phrased myself as articulately as a more experienced writer may have been able to.  I guess we’ll see over the next couple of days.

But, I’m actually not as concerned with this article as I am with the follow-up article I am about half-way through writing.  In the first article I lay out the responsibilities for the seminarian in this respect; in this second one, I talk about the responsibilities of the healthy seminary institution.  And in doing so I am directly taking Westminster to task for how they have abandoned the principles I lay out in this first article.  I’m sort of doubting Rockbridge would run it on the site, but who knows?  Westminster’s a competing institution and Rockbridge is marketing themselves as a seminary for the 21st century, so we’ll see.

All that to say, look for my article tomorrow at GoingToSeminary.com, and please pray for me if you could.  I’m still young and arrogant, and I need the spiritual support.  I’ll also link to the article tomorrow.  Until then . . .

Review: John Navone’s “Toward a Theology of Beauty”

/ Paul Burkhart / 3 Comments

In my attempt at writing shorter and more frequent posts (rather than feeling the burden to produce daily meaty posts), I thought I’d put up this little review of a little book (91 pages) I just finished called Toward a Theology of Beauty by John Navone (1996, The Liturgical Press).  I had originally started reading it for the Beauty message I gave, but I never finished it.  As time went by, though, the things I had read in this book began creeping back into my thoughts, so I decided to finish it, and let me tell you, that was a good call.

This is an incredible book. I’m still in awe of it. It seizes your soul and takes it to the highest realms of the mind and heart of the Beautiful Triune God. I have almost an entire journal filled with notes I have taken form this book.  I will look over these notes often for years to come, to let myself get swept away by the ideas present here.  Navone doesn’t have progressive outline, so it’s difficult to lay out exactly everything he talks about.  The best thing one could do is shoot over to the Amazon.com page for the book and “Look inside” to peer at the Table of Contents for his topics.  Suffice it to say, the book is theologically comprehensive.  It doesn’t answer many of the more practical questions we may have about art, human beauty, and such, but it does help in a much greater understanding of the more ethereal and abstract realities of Beauty, especially as it originates in and delights God Himself.

I guess my only critique is a common one I had with most things I read during my preparation.  It assumes the validity, and authority of ancient Greek philosophy, especially the distinction between the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.  He uses this Hellenistic concept throughout.  Many things I read used this “trinitarian” framework to shape and organize their thoughts.  I don’t know how valid this is and I would argue this limits us in many ways.  but this is minor, and doesn’t really take away from the wonder and awe of this book.

Navone is a Catholic theologian, and if I learned one thing from reading this book, it’s that Catholics understand Beauty in a way that only 2,000 years of thought and reflection can provide. We Protestants can learn a lot from our Catholic brothers and sisters. Heck, after reading this, I’m practically Catholic now myself.

Navone’s writing is beautiful, his thoughts profound, and theology rich. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to increase their worship of a Beautiful Transcendent God.

Eternity in Our Hearts: The God of Beauty, the Beauty of God

/ Paul Burkhart / 12 Comments

Sargent - Madame Errazuriz-smallThis message was seven months in the making, and this past Friday I finally delivered it.  So, as promised, I’m posting both the audio and the manuscript here.  You can also find a general outline on my Sermon site, and you can also find it at my Podcast.

Click here for sermon audio

Click for Audio

Click for Manuscript Pdf

Click for FULL Manuscript

This is the message I gave at Epiphany Fellowship. The topic was Beauty. The attached manuscript is the full manuscript. It is 43 pages long and contains far more information than I was able to give in a 40 minute message. It includes an appendix where every form of every word in the Greek and Hebrew translated as “Beauty” or “Beautiful” in the English Standard Version of the Bible is ordered by frequency and includes the literal meanings and lexical range of each word.

I really cannot stress how much more is in the manuscript than was preached.  Every section has huge amounts of thought and prayer in it that was not able to be included in the final message.  That’s why throughout the next week or more, I’ll be blogging about every section of this manuscript.  Each post will focus and discuss the fuller version of each section.  If it gets to be too much I’ll spread it out as need be, but we’ll see.  This is where your thoughts and insights will be so helpful and needed, but if you have a question now, don’t feel like you have to wait for that blog post to come to ask.  Engage with any and everything now.

I hope this blesses all of you as much as it did me.  The feedback that evening was more than I knew how to handle and perhaps I’m still processing it.  Thank you all for your grace and affirmation.  For those that came out, I thank you. I very much enjoyed both preparing and delivering this message, and I look forward to further chances to do so.  If you’re interested in giving me such a chance, feel free to use the contact email on the sidebar to the right (or just click here).

Enjoy, and feel free to let me know what you think, and please at least look through some of the manuscript.  Until next time . . .

One small final note: on most every site and post I’ve used to discuss this message I’ve used the attached piece of art.  It is a piece called “Madame Erraruriz” and it is by my favorite American painter John Singer Sargent.  I got to see this painting in an exhibit of his at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and ever since seeing the brushstrokes in this simple painting and seeing the nuances and the subtleties that don’t quite come across from this digital shot, I have long found it to be one of the most beautiful paintings I’ve ever seen.  It is for that reason I have chosen it as the picture that has constantly been up for all these posts.  A few years back I even wrote a poem based on the piece called “Extended Engagement”.  I ended up writing two versions, one less structured than the other to better mirror the feel of the piece, but on this blog you can read both Version 1 and Version 2.  Let me know which you prefer.

“For your life – Flee!” by Sean Brendan Stewart – Reform & Revive | a Plugfest

/ Paul Burkhart / 1 Comment

sorry, no y-axis this time

sorry, no y-axis this time

[Thank you to spectacular photographer and friend David Schrott for inspiring this post]

Okay, due to a few recent articles I’ve written, the number of people visiting my blog has increased by over 4000% in the past week.  It’s pretty nuts.  That’s why everything has seemed to be about Derek Webb and his new album, Stockholm Syndrome.  So, I just wanted to take this chance to put in a few plugs for some of my other projects.

I have web magazine called Reform & Revive.  It looks at the intersection between faith and culture, politics, art, the church, and just life in general.  These Derek Webb posts would perhaps have been more appropriate on that site, but the readership here jumped up so fast (I’m actually on the first page of most Google searches having to do with the album).

Anyway, friend, brother, and fellow impassioned writer, Sean Brendan Stewart, just put up a special article that seems to have a similar message as the new Webb album.  It’s some commentary from him, then a very brief manuscript of some audio from a Carter Conlon message.  After that, feel free to look at our more regular full articles from our Contributors.

Lastly, I have my own personal site, Prodigal Paul, that acts as a hub for organizing other blogs, Bible studies, sermons, and such that I have produced over the years.

That is all.

Philosophy & Theology {II} | “Christian” Existentialism [2]

/ Paul Burkhart / Leave a comment

A couple of days ago, I laid out some reasons why “Christian” Existentialism was not the end-all-be-all philosophical orientation for the Christian. But, as I explained in my first post in this series, Philosophy is not the enemy of theology. Rather, it can help us understand other finer points of theology by giving us new categories to think in. So, I proceeded to give three ways that Existentialism can inform our theology. The first way was that it helps us see sin in regard to our personal orientation to God. This post continues with two more ways:

Secondly, a big discussion in Existentialism the relationship between our “existence” and our “essence”.  I pointed out in the previous post that when god was asked by Moses “what’s your essence?” God answered “I exist”. This is the way it is with God. His nature and being are equated with His existence. He simply “is”. The big question concerning these two things in Existentialism is “which comes first?”. Classic Existentialism holds that our existence comes first and our essence is formed and shaped by our existence. This brings up some problems for the Christian. The Bible talks about our essences being known by God before we ever existed, but it also says that there’s something of our essence that is corrupt at its core. When God “knows” us before we exist, does he know our corrupted selves? Does God create us depraved? The Bible seems fairly clear in its representation of the nature of God that He doesn’t create and form our essences as corrupt, so it look likes the question is a bit more complicated than just “which comes first”.

Best I can figure, it looks like both essence and existence have narrative frameworks and are seen as whole things that are shaped through eternity past and future. In short, the story goes like this: God knows and forms our essence-1 (S1), which is pure and good in his sight. He then creates the world of existence-1 (X1) which is made good but then falls and gives way to a different realm of existence, existence-2 (X2).  At the moment this essence-1 enters into existence-1 (X1), it comes into the fallen world and becomes essence-2 (S2) which is corrupt. Christians, then, at conversion are changed at the very level of their essence such that they then become pure in essence (essence-3) living in a corrupt existence (existence-1 still). The rest of the life of the Christian is a slow work by God and others to bring more and more of this Christian’s life and existence in line with their now pure essence-3 (s3), to prepare them for existence-3 (X3). Existence-3 is when this created world/realm within which we exist is restored and glorified and finally our pure essences-3 are able to live in freedom and peace in pure existence-2 in glorified eternity.  Here’s what it looks like graphically:

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screen-capture

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Lastly, there is a very important service that Existentialism lends to the spirituality of the Christian life. In Existentialism, there is a loss of the objectivity of knowledge. All we know is our existence, and that is a very small sphere of knowledge indeed. What this tenet of the philosophy does is create a very strong sense of angst. Existentialists carry the reputation for being very depressed people, seeing as they can know nothing more than (1) they exist, and (2) they can’t know more than that. We can be sure of no other knowledge. This makes you feel very small in a world of chaos that you can do nothing to change. This sort of worldview should make people very despairing, and it has for people such as Samuel Beckett and Albert Camus. But for others, like Jean-Paul Sarte and Soren Kierkegaard, Existentialism seemed to create a humble sobriety that actually allowed these men to enjoy life in a way many Christians could learn to do.

The Christian life is angst. It’s messy. It’s sloppy. That’s why it’s lived by faith – i.e. “trust”. Reality is such that we will be forced to have to trust our Creator to save us, because there really are no objective grounds (that we can know) upon which His salvation is based. This is because God knows He is the greatest of all things and our tendency is to drift from Him. It’s His love that makes us need to draw near. But, when we do, it shows us even more where we fall short and we cry out to God more. He draws even nearer and we are able to experience that One for whom our soul was made. Faith is not neat. Faith is not tidy. Faith is not naive. Faith is not imbecilic. Faith is having the courage to admit your finitude and inadequacy in order to be joined to and in communion with the Joy of joys, Peace of peaces, King of kings, and Lord of lords.

As one friend put it: “I will not resolve to embody that kind of [naive] faith ever again. So, I will read Scripture, asking God to communicate to me what in me is broken, what is unreconciled, what needs restoration, liberation, salvation. And I will sit at the foot of the cross, in the pain of who I am. And I will ask God for reconciliation, restoration, liberation, salvation. On the other side of it all, I will trust Christ more deeply. This is sanctification. This is working out my salvation in fear and trembling. And then, hopefully I will have caught my breath, and it will all begin again.”

Existentialism helps us recapture the “fear and trembling” part of working out our salvation (hence the title of Kierkegaard’s famous work).

I’ll end with perhaps my favorite set of quotes I have ever read. These have had such a profound impact on me and so reflect how I understand these things to be. These words are from the poet Joe Weil in an interview with Patrol Magazine. I leave you with these words that could have been written by the most quintessential existentialist:

“I once described faith as something I got on my shoe and can’t kick or wash off. I’m stuck with it. My poems are the trespasses and blasphemies of a malpracticing Christian, one who can’t stop ogling an attractive leg, or wanting to be first, who is venial, foolish, seldom at peace, horny and lonely, and so far from the kingdom of God that his whole life becomes the theme of that distance, someone knowing he is in deep shit. It’s the perfect place to be, where you can’t fool yourself into thinking you’re on the right track…The only thing I have to offer God is my sins. I am interested in mercy when it appears in places where you would never expect it. I am interested in love that shovels shit against the tide. I am interested in grace…It is better to be annihilated and crushed by God, if you are in love with God, then it is to have no relationship at all. Better God smite you then merely be absent. God does not ‘tolerate’ me. God loves me.”

Philosophy & Theology {1} | The Basics

/ Paul Burkhart / 2 Comments

Photo 56bOver the next few posts, I want to share some brief elementary thoughts and philosophy and theology. In this post, I just want to flesh out a basic worldview I have concerning philosophies and how they fit into a Christian perspective. All posts in this series will then be various applications of these ideas. Looking at things this way has certainly helped me wade through the waters of philosophies that all seem to be right in some respect and the confusion that follows. I hope this helps others out there.

My basic thought is this: as humans made in the image of God, the true parts of any “worldview” or “philosophy” will resonate with us. We are made to resonate with the truth of the Gospel, therefore any worldview we construct tat is appealing to us in any way must touch on some thing we know to be true and long for. I just don’t think that humans are able to come up with a worldview that in some point isn’t actually true. We can only work with what there actually is in the world. Sure we can pervert and distort true things, but they will still be based on true things.

Anyway, what this means is that any particular philosophy can help us recast the Gospel and talk of it in different terms that may increase our worship. For example, with existentialism (where the big question is what comes first, essence or existence?), when Moses is talking to God at the burning bush, Moses pretty much asks Him “what’s your essence?” God answers “I exist” (“I AM”). Existentialism can give us new categories to plum even more depths within this one encounter and ultimately lead to more worship of God. The Bible helps answer the questions of philosophy and philosophy can help us see greater truths in Scripture.

[More on existentialism in an upcoming post . . .]

Orthodox Christianity does not hold (and never has) that the Bible is the sole source of knowledge about God. It says that the Bible is the ultimate and authoritative source of knowledge about God under which all other sources are submitted. The brief example above (hopefully) showed a benefit of bringing existentialism under the authority and clarity of the Bible in order to help us answer (or better understand) questions that the Bible is silent about. Problems in this area arise when people try to submit the Bible to existentialism. It just doesn’t work. The Bible just isn’t the Bible apart from it being the authority and rule of faith in all theology.

I have found the study of secular philosophy very helpful to birthing in me greater worship of our God. But (going back to my first point), though that is the case, I don’t think any one philosophy has the market cornered on theology. All philosophies (from Platonism to Aristotelianism to Humanism to Atheism) have some bit of truth in them. Lower things really are corrupt versions of purer forms; we really do understand history by looking at its final purpose; God really does love humans such that he acts for their benefit; and there really is a freedom and autonomy that man enjoys when they give way fully to their innate rebellion and deny the very existence of God. That’s why I don’t find it helpful (or biblical) to say that “I’m a Christian _________” (fill in the blank with whatever philosophy or worldview you like). To me it’s like saying “I’m a Christian chocolate cake eater”. Uh, okay. I just don’t think that says much and it forces me to ask “Really? That’s how you ultimately define your worldview?” Don’t get me wrong, a good chocolate cake can make me worship God (in all seriousness), but that’s not a useful designation.

In summary: Philosophy is the study of all that is most fundamental about us. Therefore, those that have been thought to have great wisdom in this area should be studied and read because they may in fact be whispering insights to us from within the mind of God that is in seed form within His image in us. C.S. Lewis once said that it is impossible to contemplate and enjoy at the same time. We go first the the Bible to get the material for our contemplation. But then we must look up from the text to the world and reality around us and enjoy the God that has revealed Himself in those Scriptures. A fruitful place I have experienced this is in my brief, elementary study of Philosophy. Hopefully you can see it as well. Enjoy the ride.