The Beautiful Gospel

The task of the church in this ugly and brutal machine age is to tell the gospel story as beautifully as possible. Beauty will save the world. – Brian Zahnd One of my favorite words is beauty. God and beauty to me go together. One defines the other. For this reason, I sometimes begin a prayer by calling to “Beautiful God.” In some ways, beauty and God are one and the same thing. Pope John Paul II, in 1962 before he was pope and was Karol Wojtyla, wrote a whole treatise on this truth. He wrote, “we can say God is beautiful. That means, God is beauty. Everything found in the concept of beauty is found in God.” Of course, the beauty being referred to here is not surface level. Gorgeous or pretty are not synonyms for the beauty I’m talking about. The beauty I talk about is spiritual in nature. Beauty begins with the breath of God, the breath that gave way to Creation. Where there is this kind of beauty, there is God. And the opposite holds true. Where the spirit of beauty is lacking, God ...