On the December 17th, 2024, webpage ca.thegospelcoaltion.org, writer Phil Cotnoir writes an article entitled, “Why We Need Beautiful Churches”. One of the members of our church’s Decorating Committee forwarded Cotnoir’s article to the committee’s other members and me, and I will be quoting from it below. I encourage you to read the full article for yourself, but as I have driven around our city, and having visited churches in different locations around the world, I must say that my appreciation of human-made beauty has increased. If God did not want things to be beautiful, then why would He have created our world with its abundance of beautiful features in both creation and wildlife? I have come to the point in my life where I find a terrible disconnect when members of a church painstakingly make their own homes beautiful while letting their church buildings fall into disrepair and, in some cases, embarrassing ugliness. As Phil Cotnoir notes, “It is common to hear the objection that Protestants, and evangelicals especially, have the ugliest churches.” This is not something of which we should be proud! We should have beauty in our buildings, with the caveat that we should somehow not be going into debt or obsessing about the details involved in beautifying them. A balance must be embraced!
Turning more fully to Phil Cotnoir’s article now, he writes, ‘Here are two truths: cathedrals are beautiful; the gospel is beautiful. But often these two forms of beauty are often estranged from one another, for the churches which are the most beautiful in architecture are, from my perspective as an evangelical, often the ones without the gospel beauty of true spiritual life. And, in an irony that has been nagging at me increasingly over the years, the kinds of churches that would seem to have an abundance of vital spiritual life are often plain, utilitarian, and even ugly.” He continues, “I am increasingly convinced that there is something divine about architecture, that geometry and form and ratios can capture something of the organizing genius of the Grand Architect, the Master Builder of the universe…Thomas Aquinas wrote, “God, who is the first principle of all things, may be compared to things created as the architect is to things designed.”
Indeed, that is what the author of the best-selling architecture book of all time concluded. “I was led from architecture to the intellectual knowledge of God,” wrote Christopher Alexander. “It was my love of architecture and building from which I slowly formed an edifice of thought that shows us the existence of God as a necessary, real phenomenon as surely as we have previously known the world as made of space and matter.”
This resonates with what the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 1:19,20, “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.” The architect Alexander describes an experience that illustrates the above verses about as well as I’ve ever heard: “In my heart, I was always dimly aware that I did maintain an inner knowing that the best way to produce good architecture must somehow be linked to God—indeed, that valuable architecture was always about God, and that this was the source of any strength I had in being able to identify the real thing.”
It was Winston Churchill who remarked, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” I was reminded of this as I read Rod Dreher’s most recent book, Living in Wonder, which included an extended reflection on architecture and beauty. “If our buildings and our built environments look and feel machinelike and inhuman,” writes Dreher, “we are fooling ourselves if we think religion can inject meaning into architecture from the outside.” He goes on to make this provocative statement: “This is why converting everyone in the city to Christianity but leaving questions of beauty in art and architecture unaddressed, will have only a limited effect on reversing the pervasive feeling of alienation.” It may be worth noting that Dreher’s journey from adolescent atheism towards Christian faith was jump-started by an experience of transcendence as he stood inside the epic Chartres cathedral in France. For Dreher, the evangelistic power of beauty and architecture is personal.
This “pervasive feeling of alienation” is how Dreher describes the contemporary experience of so many in the modern West. Dreher argues that modernity gave us a view of creation as just “dead matter” that could be re-worked and re-shaped according to our whims. This was a radical departure from the medieval model, which saw the universe as a unified whole and an intricately designed masterpiece which reflected God as well as the whole spiritual realm. It should come as no surprise that these two fundamentally different ways of interpreting the created world gave rise to very different ways of designing buildings.
The medieval mind wanted to build something that would resonate in harmony with the deep patterns of creation, but the modern architect is taught to eschew conventions, to find some new way to be transgressive, and to find ways of manifesting in the physical building the metaphysical conviction that there is no organizing principle that gives the world its particular shape. Unfortunately for them, they must still follow both the laws of physics and local building codes.
Can we say then that beauty has an important role to play in awakening modern, disenchanted men and women? Dreher certainly thinks so. He makes his case by drawing on the work of Timothy G. Patitsas and his book, The Ethics of Beauty. Patitsas writes, “Eros is the beginning of human moral life, and beauty in art and literature are oftentimes more effective than religion in awakening eros within us. Religion can just seem like God coming down at us, scolding us, telling us to stay where we are, but just do better. But real religion must awaken the movement in the other direction, must make us come out of ourselves and move toward him, falling in love with him. It’s about beginning an adventure, becoming a pilgrim, an exile, a lover.” Patitsas argues, in a way that one rarely hears in evangelical circles, that there is something uniquely attractive both morally and spiritually about beauty which awakens desire for God. Absent this element of desire awakened by beauty, the propositional truths about the gospel message fail to set a fire of love for God in the soul.
This is closely related to John Piper’s central insight. We desire God when we perceive God’s beauty (or glory) because that is how the human soul responds to beauty. But I have almost never heard an evangelical make the connection between this and the importance of aesthetic beauty in our buildings, our worship, our homes, and our communities. Consider the staggering fact that millions of modern people travel from all over the world every year to visit the great cathedrals of Europe. Why? What draws them? What compels them? It is more than historical curiosity–it is the power of beauty. This raises an important question: have evangelicals underappreciated the spiritual and evangelistic value of beauty? I think we have, though that doesn’t mean we have to agree with all the arguments of Dreher and Patitsas, both of whom are Eastern Orthodox.
One of the things I love about our tradition is that it is always reforming, always willing to consider the spiritual and Biblical merits of a new argument or an old corrective. And as Dr. Michael Haykin loves to point out in his lectures, Baptists (and other Protestant groups) have historically placed a high value on architecture and aesthetic beauty, something which seems to have slipped during the 20th century.
What would it look like if evangelicals took this challenge seriously? Well, we might prioritize holding on to historic and beautiful buildings, as well as purchasing those that come up for sale. We might develop a network of like-minded Christian architects and builders who specialize in designing and constructing new churches that are objectively, classically beautiful and which elevate the soul. We might even prioritize the study of architecture in Christian schools and at home, not to mention other forms of art. We might draw inspiration from the wide array of beautiful Protestant (and other) churches of every size that exist all over the world, each reflecting their own era and culture, and yet each sharing that unmistakable element of beautiful design that is pleasing to the eye. It may be the case today that cathedral beauty tends to be estranged from gospel beauty, but there is no reason why that should remain the case.
So why do we need beautiful churches? The simplest answer is: because God is beautiful, the universe he made is beautiful, and the gospel of lavish grace is beautiful. To willingly have ugly churches, then, is a kind of inconsistency, if not an untruth. With God’s help, let’s make our buildings as beautiful as we can make them, and may the congregations within them be marked by the gospel beauty of the Spirit’s work, all to the glory of the Grand Architect.’
