Beholding a Beautiful God: Learning from Jonathan Edwards’ Theology of Beauty
There has been much debate throughout church history about the “attribute of attributes,” or the organizing, fundamental attribute of God. For Jonathan Edwards, the answer was clear: beauty. The transcendent beauty of God, expressed most clearly at Calvary, was the organizing principle of his theology and the truth that shaped his spiritual life.
As a young man, Jonathan Edwards was terrified of thunderstorms. He wrote that he was “uncommonly terrified with thunder” and “struck with terror when I saw a thunderstorm rising.”1 I imagine a child cowering under his blanket as lightning flashes by his window followed by a loud clap of thunder, echoing through the house. But then something changed. Edwards describes walking out into a thunderstorm, filled with excitement, watching the clouds gather and listening to the thunder roar. It was not the skies that had changed. It was Edwards. After his conversion—his new birth, to use his own language—he was enraptured by the beauty of the storms, and still more by the beauty of the God they reflected.
What Edwards Meant by Beauty
When we read “beauty” in Edwards, we must be careful not to read it the way that our culture uses the word, as a matter of surface and taste. When Edwards called God beautiful he pointed to something much weightier. He was pointing to God’s excellency, holiness, and glory. God’s beauty and his holiness go hand in hand. His moral perfection is beautiful. He is beautiful in his holiness.2 “Worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness” (Ps. 96:9, KJV). Edwards took this seriously. Holiness is not the mere fact that God does what is right. Holiness is God’s loveliness, and its opposite is not only wickedness but ugliness. Edwards saw sin in this light, as an ugly deformity. God’s holiness is a beautiful melody and sin is a dissonant chord. God’s holiness is the sweetest moment of a harmonious marriage and sin is quarreling and strife.
“Holiness is God’s loveliness, and its opposite is not only wickedness but ugliness.”
Beauty, for Edwards, is a matter of harmony, of things rightly related and fitting to one another.3 Strip that down to its core and you will find love. To incline toward one another, to be united to someone in glad accord, is simply to love. An ugly thing stands in conflict with what surrounds it. A beautiful thing stands in harmonious love with what surrounds it. The most beautiful being in all of reality is the one whose love is perfect and perfectly ordered, who loves every good thing in exact proportion and who has loved without beginning. That being is God, whose very life is the Father loving the Son and the Son loving the Father in the Spirit. In Edwards’ theology, beauty and love cannot be separated. Love is the most beautiful thing. God, as the ultimate embodiment and source of love, is the ultimate embodiment and source of beauty. To see God and his love rightly is to see that it is beautiful.
The Fountain and the Shadow
God did not become beautiful when he made a beautiful world. He was beautiful before there was a world to look at, and he would have been no less beautiful had he made nothing at all. From eternity the Father has loved the Son and the Son the Father in the Spirit, and that fellowship of holy love is the source of beauty from which all other beauty flows. God is the fountain of beauty and his creation is the overflow.
That’s why Edwards delighted in the thunderstorm. He distinguished two kinds of beauty. There is primary beauty, the spiritual harmony of holy love that belongs to God. And there is secondary beauty, the proportion and symmetry woven through the created order: the balance of a face, the colors of a sunset, the sweetness of a melody. This secondary beauty is real beauty, but it is all a shadow cast by the primary. Every lesser beauty you have ever loved is merely a shadow of God. The storm that once made Edwards cower became “the majestic and awful voice of God’s thunder” that led him to “sweet contemplations of my great and glorious God.”4
“Every lesser beauty you have ever loved is merely a shadow of God.”
From Thunder to the Cross
The storm, though beautiful, was only the beginning of Edwards’ vision of the beauty of God. Creation reveals the beauty of God truly, but at a distance. If God’s beauty is his holy love, then it is displayed most clearly where his love is its costliest. Not in a storm, but at a cross.
Go to Calvary and you see the beauty of God with the veil pulled back. At the cross we see God’s holiness that will not excuse sin and his love that will not abandon sinners. God pours out the full judgment of his wrath against sin on Christ, and in the same act pours out his love upon those who have forfeited all claim to it. This is a beautiful, perfectly ordered love that does not overlook sin or its punishment yet redeems the lost. At the cross we see God’s beauty displayed in his tremendous act of love for us. This is the beauty that Edwards built his life upon.
Knowing Is Not Tasting
A core theme of Edwards’ theology is the tremendous difference between knowing about God and truly delighting in God. In a 1734 sermon titled A Divine and Supernatural Light, Edwards illustrates this excellently:
There is a difference between having an opinion, that God is holy and gracious, and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness. A man may have the former that knows not how honey tastes, but a man cannot have the latter unless he has an idea of the taste of honey in his mind. So there is a difference between believing that a person is beautiful, and having a sense of his beauty.
You may have every right opinion about the loveliness and beauty of God, but never once have felt it. The demons may have flawless theology (James 2:19); they lack delight. “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God ... and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14). What is missing is not intelligence. It is a sense. Edwards called the remedy a new spiritual sense, a divine and supernatural light, given by God, by which the soul stops merely granting that God is good and begins to see that he is glorious. A sense of the beauty of God is among the surest signs of new birth, and a growing sense of that beauty is a mark of sanctification.
“What is missing is not intelligence. It is a sense.”
Behold and Be Changed
You become what you behold. “Beholding the glory of the Lord,” Paul writes, we “are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18). We are shaped by the beauty we gaze upon. If you fix your eyes on the small, counterfeit beauties this world offers, your soul will shrink to their size. If you fix them on the transcendent beauty of God, and his holy love poured out at the cross, you will slowly be remade into its likeness.
A Practice for the Week
Many of us read Scripture regularly, but we rarely stop and meditate on it. I would challenge you to learn from Edwards: slow down, meditate, behold God and his beauty, be transformed.
Choose one passage for the week that lifts your eyes to God. Might I suggest Isaiah 40:9–17?
Read the passage.
Then set a timer for ten minutes, put your phone away, and meditate on it. Don’t turn the page. Think deeply about the passage and behold the God it describes.
Do that every day this week with the same passage. Continue to think deeply about God and his beauty.
The next week, choose a new passage and begin again.
You will not always taste the sweetness of God’s beauty right away, but keep looking anyway. God is faithful to give you a sense of his beauty. The one who opened the eyes of a boy scared of thunderstorms is more than able to open yours, and he has promised that those who behold his beauty will be transformed.
1Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), xi.
2Dane Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), 25.
3Edwards’ own formulation was that beauty consists in the “consent of being to being.” See Roland André Delattre, Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards: An Essay in Aesthetics and Theological Ethics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), for a more in-depth exploration of this theme.
4Edwards, Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1, xii.
Drew O’Connell
Director of Admissions
Drew serves as Director of Admissions at Compass Bible Institute. He was born and raised in Orange County and has attended Compass Bible Church for over 15 years. In 2018, God saved him while he was a student in the junior high ministry. Drew is a graduate of Boyce College, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Biblical and Theological Studies, and of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he earned a Master of Divinity.
