Rembrandt Is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art through the Eyes of Faith

by Russ Ramsey

“Our brokenness has no other beauty but the beauty that comes from the compassion that surrounds it.”

This book is about beauty. To get at it, this book is filled with stories of brokenness.

It is hard to render an honest self-portrait if we want to conceal what is unattractive and hide what’s broken. We want to appear beautiful. But when we do this, we hide what needs redemption—what we trust Christ to redeem. And everything redeemed by Christ becomes beautiful.

This is how God sees his people. We are fully exposed in our shortcomings, yet we are of unimaginable value to him.

This is how we should see others and how we should be willing to be seen by others: broken and of incalculable worth.

the human desire for goodness, for truth, and for beauty.

Scripture regards these three transcendentals as basic human desires that are essential for knowing God.6 Why? Because these are three properties that define God’s nature. Good and evil point to the reality of undefiled holiness. Honesty and falsehood point to the existence of absolute truth. Beauty and the grotesque whisper to our souls that there is such a thing as glory. Goodness, truth, and beauty were established for us by the God who is defined by all three.

“These are the only three things that we never get bored with, and never will, for all eternity, because they are three attributes of God, and therefore [attributes] of all God’s creation: three transcendental or absolutely universal properties of all reality.”

because goodness, truth, and beauty are desires shared in some form by all people, they are, by nature, communal. None of them were intended to exist or be fully realized in isolation.

The pursuit of goodness, the pursuit of truth, and the pursuit of beauty are, in fact, foundational to the health of any community.

Goodness was a foundational part of our intended design from the beginning.

we’re called to be good and to do good.

we were created to live according to God’s truth—which is absolute truth with a clear divide between what is evil and what is good.9

Beauty, by definition, elevates and gives pleasure to the mind and senses.

we were created to be creative.

Creativity is a path to beauty. The creative work of naming is the work of ascribing dignity and speaking truth.

When we set out to make something beautiful, we’re drawing from that ancient instinct—however corrupted it may be from the fall—to care for and beautify Eden.

We were created to create, and to do that in the context of community for the benefit of community.

when we neglect beauty, we neglect one of the primary qualities of God.

we can pursue forms of goodness and truth largely in isolation if we want to.

we have to become legalists in the process and minimize goodness and truth quite a bit to pull this off, but we can pursue some semblance of them both in isolation. People do this all the time.

The pursuit of beauty requires the application of goodness and truth for the benefit of others. Beauty is what we make of goodness and truth. Beauty takes the pursuit of goodness past mere personal ethical conduct to the work of intentionally doing good to and for others.

Beauty draws us deeper into community. We ache to share the experience of beauty with other people, to look at someone near us and say, “Do you hear that? Do you see that? How beautiful!”

That beauty, and the ache that comes with it, is a powerful, necessary, shaping force for any who would desire to know God.

We have a theological responsibility to deliberately and regularly engage with beauty for three reasons. First, God is inherently beautiful.

Second, God’s creation is inherently beautiful. There is beauty all around us, and it points to the glory of God.

the fall did not erase the beauty of creation. It’s there to behold, if we’ll only look. And when we see it, it will teach us about the Author of beauty.

Third, God’s people shall be adorned in beauty for all eternity.

These verses are meant to draw from us a response of praise. We should engage with beauty deliberately and regularly because these are the clothes we will walk around in for all eternity.

sure my eyes were not deceiving me. Her beauty drew me to pursue her. That attraction led me to discover the woman behind the beauty, which led to more than twenty-eight years together, twenty-six of them as husband and wife.

All of this started because I was attracted to my wife’s beauty.

Not only are we drawn to beauty, we are the only creatures who engage in certain behaviors purely for the sake of encountering beauty. We use vacation days to drive to places where we can see the sun come up over the ocean. We visit art museums, theatres, and symphonies. We look at the moon and the stars. We climb to high mountain lakes to put our feet in the frigid water to feel the rush and see

the reflection of the summit in the ripples we have made. No other creature stops to behold something beautiful for no other reason than that it has stirred something in their souls. When we do these things, are we no...

They need beauty to accompany them. Without beauty, truth and goodness lie flat, and they were not meant to. They were meant to be adorned. They were meant to be attractive.

“Something you did not hold to be beautiful suddenly turns up in your arms arrayed in full beauty.”

The beauty of this dish reveals that the dour, serious life he chose as an adult was a mistake pursued for the preservation of self at the expense of joy.

Beauty corrects wrong general impressions by contrasting them with specific truths.

The more we engage with beauty, the more we train our hearts to anticipate finding beauty, until eventually, everywhere we go, we’re looking for it. Third, beauty inspires creativity.

Artists draw inspiration from other artists because beauty doesn’t just fill us with wonder; it drives us to go create beautiful things ourselves.

“Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people.”

When we engage with art, we learn about the principles of composition, design, color, and perspective.

When we create, we reflect the image of the Creator.

Beauty inspires creativity, and creativity is a pat...

Fourth, beauty arouses bel...

“Every man is almost always led

to believe not through proof, but through that which is attractive.”

are moved to worship, even if they don’t know why. God uses beauty to woo and warm hearts.

Creation testifies to a Maker who delights in beauty for beauty’s sake.

This is the perspective of a world focused on function and economics.

what is perfume for? It is meant to fill a room with its beautiful and startling aroma. In this sense, it is meant to be “wasted.”