Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

by Douglas M. Jones III

From great cathedrals and gracious chivalry to bitter crusades and beautiful cloisters, every manifestation of its presence was somehow tied to its utter and complete obeisance to Christ's kingdom and to the pursuit of beauty, truth, and goodness.

It united men with faith, hope, and love; it divided them with war, pestilence, and prejudice. It was so unstable it could hardly have been expected to last a week; it was so stable that it actually lasted a millennium.

In fact, a worldview is as practical as garden arbors, public manners, whistling at work, dinner-time rituals, and architectural angels. It is less metaphysical than understanding marginal market buying at the stock exchange or legislative initiatives in congress. It is less esoteric than typing a book into a laptop computer or sending a fax across the continent. It is instead, Wilson and Jones assert, as down to earth as inculcating a culture-wide appetite for beauty, truth, and goodness.

Modernity and its natural child postmodernity are pleased with their rejection of truth, beauty, and goodness-the three faces of culture.

Each sharp-eyed generation tires of everything except their joy of rebellion, playing it over and over again, in an endless roll. Everything is boring except their own eternal rebellion. This is their totally "new and different program for the future." This is modernity's barbarism-hollow hearts led about by sterile matter, perversely mocking those with full lives.

Sophists, ancient or postmodern, have no staying power because they tell an ugly story, all while using the rationalists' tools.

Like other moderns, evangelicals have no love of beauty; it is at most optional and indifferent, not the rhythm of life.

The Reformation was real war, and we dare not give up the victories gained there, but how do we live after the nightly air raids have stopped? That is the vision of Medieval Protestantism-a view that picks up the discussion where medievalism was silenced by a tyrannical Rome and a blinding Enlightenment.

Modernity's hatred of all things medieval should be reason enough for Christians to desire it.

Barbarism has always been with us, yet Christendom once held forth a life full of truth, beauty, and goodness amidst barbarism.

We can never know enough arguments to be omniscient, but we can judge fruit. And beauty is fruit.

Why are we so confident that beauty isn't a path to truth? More modern lies I suspect.

If beauty points us to salvation and holiness, then beauty ...

Compare medievalism to our baptized modernity. Which is more beautiful? This is a key to truth. Or even to lower the standard: wouldn't it be won...

Too late came I to love thee, 0 thou Beauty both so ancient and so fresh ..

Instinctively we do know that true beauty proceeds only from Deity. Our problem is that we have deified ourselves and have assumed, contrary to the visible results, that whatever proceeds from us must be beautiful.

Sound theology leads always to the love of beauty. When there is no love of beauty, we may say, reasoning modus tollens, that there is no sound theology.

Our point is simply that a love for the triune and holy God is the foundation of any true love for beauty.

The only possible conclusion is that the Church has forgotten the holiness of her God. He alone is true, and He alone is good. If we understood this, we would understand how beautiful His holiness is, and we could not be kept from writing concertos and building cathedrals. As it is, we are content with thumping on the guitar like a million other aspiring artists headed for Nashville, and we erect crystal cathedrals which look like an upscale gas works.

Our Lord came in order to make His blessings flow as far as the curse could be found. Like a warrior in one of the old stories, He fell upon the adversary. The strong man was bound; his house was sacked like Troy. Only folly would return to that house, thinking to find any treasure there now. The treasure has been taken away and is now numbered among countless trophies in the house of the Lord. We may indeed boast when we remember there was a time when we were taken into exile, and all the articles from our Temple were taken away with us, and set up in an unholy city. Our music then was desolate as well, and our harps silent on the willows. Now, in the goodness of God, the situation is turned on itself; back in the sunlight, we may pour our libations to the Most High with golden cups which once were raised idolatrously in the dark places.

While the goodness of all our Lord's adversaries had vanished away with their initial rebellion, their splendor had not. This splendor was imparted by them in various ways to the sons of men, but Christ came in order to take that kind of splendor away from us. His purpose in this was to establish another kind of glory in its place, the beauty of holiness.

The mustard seed grew; the full-grown tree was not lowered to us from the heavens. Because Jesus is Lord, Christian culture is now established in the earth. But He does not want to do everything for us all at once. The powers fell in an instant, but the cultures they supported took more time to fall. The unbelievers have not been driven out all at once lest the beasts of the field turn on us.

splendid pagan culture is really no longer a historical possibility-the Muses are gone. Any culture which desires beauty now must have the beauty of holiness.

When the travesties scattered throughout our modern art museums are set alongside the glories of ancient Greece, the Christian heart should swell with pride. Our Lord has thrown unbelievers down, and they can never recover.

The distance between Odysseus and Beowulf was great, but the distance between Beowulf and the works to cone will be greater still.

"all the wickedness in this world that man might work or think is no more to the mercy of God than a live coal in the sea."

"Pure 'Northernness' engulfed me; a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity."' This northernness is not necessarily Christian, but when turned to Christ, it is redeemed like all sinful things and stands upright. But we moderns have little interest in such redemptions or their results because the Church in our era is slack and effeminate. We do not look at an unbounded northern sky and by analogy see the eternity of God; rather, we look mystically inward to the swamps and standing puddles of our own hearts and see just what one might expect in such places-but not very much and not very far.

We owe nothing to the created world around us; our debt for life is to the living Lord.

The Church today is a stranger to victories because we refuse to sing anthems to the king of all victories. We do not want a God of battles, we want sympathy for our surrenders. We need to be taught to sing as Alfred the Great taught his men before going into battle-"Jesu, defend us."