Podcast: Interview 23, Mike Riley – The Art of Appreciating Beauty
Our post today points you to our Substack where we host the Proclaim & Defend podcast. As you may already know, we use the podcast to promote our magazine, FrontLine. We think the content is consistently good and well worth your reading.
At the podcast, we try to interview as many of the authors of each edition of FrontLine as we can. The idea is to give you a taste for what the article is about while covering more material than we could cover in the space available in the magazine.
We offer an excerpt of Mike Riley’s article, “The Art of Appreciating Beauty” below. If you want to read it in full, you can gain access by way of a paid subscription to the podcast. (If you subscribe to the podcast for a year, we will send you copies of the print magazine as well.) We want to get our magazine into as many hands as possible, and this is one way we can “shamelessly self-promote” what we are doing.
Print publications of all kinds have undergone radical changes with the advent of the internet. Yet there is still a place for printed material. We hope that you will find our combination of audio, digital, and print offerings related to FrontLine a comprehensive way of offering solid Christian writing on contemporary issues.
Now as to the subject of “The Art of Appreciating Beauty,” pastor Riley’s main point is that appreciating beauty according to God’s standard is a sanctification issue. The Bible offers guidance for understanding beauty, discerning when something beautiful is tainted by human sin, and teaches us to cultivate an appreciation for that which God calls beautiful. If we are to conform to God’s standards when it comes to beauty, we are “becoming more like Christ” which is the same thing as sanctification.
Do check out pastor Riley’s article, listen to the podcast, and think about how the Lord would have you cultivate a deeper understanding of beauty in your own life.
Here is the article excerpt:
Philippians 4:8 is often cited in discussions of Christians and the arts. In this verse, Paul admonishes us, “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”
We should draw two conclusions from this verse. The first is that aesthetic choices are not merely matters of personal preference. It is impossible that Paul’s command to think on “whatsoever things are lovely” means “think about whatever you think is lovely.” Our judgment of beauty must conform to God’s judgment of beauty. (See also “Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder?” in this issue.)
The second conclusion flows from the first: if we are obligated to think about lovely things, and loveliness is not a matter of personal preference, then we must know how to discern the things that are truly lovely. It is a matter of Christian sanctification to be able to appreciate beauty.
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Don Johnson is the pastor of Grace Baptist Church of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada.