Chapter 4: For the Beauty of the Earth

The fourth and final echo NT Wright explores draws us to beauty. The experience of beauty is fleeting. Beauty intrigues us and then eludes us. The sunset captivates our attention and then is gone. In the attempt to capture the wonder of beauty in a photograph disappoints. “…all we get is the memory of the moment, not the moment itself.” (p. 41) Beauty is exquisite, suggests Wright, but at the same time unsatisfying. Like the other “echoes of a voice,” beauty points to a fuller reality beyond itself.

NT Wright does an excellent job of maneuvering through the subjectivist trap of the postmodern worldview. He refuses to affirm that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” (CS Lewis handles this issue masterfully in The Abolition of Man.) Beauty connects profoundly with the perceiver, but it does not originate in the perceiver. He also deals well with the notion that beauty in itself somehow provides access to God, as if in the contemplation of beauty we can bee lifted to Absolute Truth. Beauty points us beyond itself but is unable to carry us to its promised destination.

After dealing with these and other related issues, Wright brings us to the heart of postmodernism’s cynicism. “If the earth is full of God’s glory, why is it also so full of pain and anguish and screaming and despair?” (p. 46) He nails it. So much of our current day invites either an abdication of responsibility for or an escape from the way things are. We can’t handle the internal tension created by our expectation that life ought to deliver more. The beauty we see is fleeting. The relationships we need are too hard. Spirituality seems a game and justice something only the rich can afford. If God exists, he is a joke or simply cruel. Therefore, God must not exist or must not matter.

NT Wright takes on the postmodern mindset with the simple suggestion that maybe the world is broken and needs to be fixed. He draws out the metaphor of the incomplete symphony with which he began the chapter:

The point of the story is that the masterpiece already exists—in the mind of the composer. At the moment, neither the instruments nor the players are ready to perform it. But when they are, the manuscript we already have—the present world with all its beauty and puzzlement—will turn out to be truly part of it. The deficiencies in the one part we possess will be made good. The things that don’t make sense at the moment will display a harmony and perfection we hadn’t dreamed of. The points at which today the music seems almost perfect, lacking just one small thing will be completed….God is the creator par excellence, he will create when the present world is rescued, healed, restored, and completed. (p. 47)

That is a high order. Will the postmodern reader receive it?

NT Wright keeps drawing us forward. “Maybe we need a different kind of knowing.” (p. 48) He is setting up his transition to the second part of the book, to the revelation of God. He makes the transition wonderfully: “We must begin to talk about God. Which is like saying that we must learn to stare at the sun.” (p. 51)

This is what I like about this book and NT Wright. He takes the orientation of the thoughtful secularist seriously. He recognizes that the postmodern reader (if he is still engaged) is dazzled. He doesn’t understand because he cannot see. It is like staring into the sun. The brilliance of it is beyond the capacity of the simple perceiver, but stare we must because there is no other good resolution to the issues that have been raised.

Nobody is going to simply think his way to God; nobody is going to see the sun by looking at it. However, we can trust that the Holy Spirit is at work. Revelation comes as we look at and ponder the glory of God and his revelation.

It is good to be reminded from time to time how amazing the treasury of truth is that has been entrusted to us in the church. The secularist is so far removed from the glory. The gospel is a wonder filled message. We can’t expect the amazing nature of grace to be easily grasped and applied as if it is one more self-help resource. Every conversion is, after all, a bona fide miracle. A new life has risen from the dead. NT Wright has taken the distance that the secularist needs to travel seriously. He’s laying out signposts and urging the postmodern reader onward. I appreciate what he’s trying to do. It’s tough to reach a crowd that has come to presume upon the blessings of Christendom while experiencing the distortions that inevitably come out of flawed believers.

I have members of my extended family who have tried church only to be disappointed or hurt. They draw the conclusion that church is just like every other social group and decide that nothing more is there. I watch their departure with great sadness and redouble my prayer for them. I realize that the only work that will reach them is the Lord’s work of revelation.

The secular way of perceiving has taken deep root. I’ve been told by missionaries and church leaders serving in Africa, India, and the Middle East how hard the spiritual climate is in America. One missionary from Baghdad told me it is easier for him to strike up a spiritual conversation with a stranger on the street there than it is in the US. The divide is wide and growing wider between the church and the lost in the West. NT Wright is working hard to communicate to a crowd that really can’t see the glory all around them.

We would do well to listen carefully to how NT Wright is attempting to engage the secular mind. How can we better help people to “stare into the sun” that they might not merely be dazzled, but see the glory that is there?

Kyle Phillips