Seeking Beauty, Finding Christ
Author: Chris Castaldo, PhD
July 19, 2023
Dissatisfaction with Protestant Christian faith is common in the uneasy America of 2023. The numbers of religious “nones”—those among our neighbors who identify with no faith in particular—have skyrocketed from basically zero in the middle of the 20th century to about a fifth of the U.S. population today. But that is not the only challenge facing the heirs of the Reformation.
We also face competition from other religious options. While it’s much more likely for a Roman Catholic to become a Protestant, significant numbers of people are “crossing the Tiber” to identify with the Roman Catholic Church.
Some of them might be our friends and family members. According to Pew Research, “2% of all U.S. adults now identify as Catholics after having been raised in another religion or without a religion.” A lot of them used to be Protestant evangelicals. Let me suggest one important—but by no means the only—reason why.
We live in a world of technological contrivance, which increasingly buffers us from the genuinely human. The superficial confines of our aggregated newsfeeds and therapeutic spirituality effectively cocoon us in a world of our own making, a world that reduces Christian faith to a commodity that’s marketed and then consumed.
Add to this the eagerness of many Protestant churches to make God “seeker-friendly,” and we are left with congregations of people wondering what exactly it was they were seeking—nothing, it seems, that they couldn’t have found in an inspiring Ted Talk or pop concert. As such souls crave divine encounter that rises above the mundane, materialistic, and digitally depleting mode of secular life, they are instead treated to light shows, projectors, and interactive “tweet-the-pastor” sermons.
Those who convert often come from this spiritually thirsty group. Hungry for a grandeur and authority from above, they wander into a Catholic Mass and hear for the first time the singing of a Sanctus, observe the reverential breaking of the bread, and are struck by the humility of bowing in the presence of God. It’s the via pulchritudinis about which Bishop Robert Barron often speaks—the “way of beauty”—found in the consecrated host, cathedrals, holy water, incense, candles, and various sacramentals that bespeak the mysterious presence of Christ.
The hunger for the beauty of Christian ritual is nothing new. Just read the conversion stories of John Henry Newman, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Thomas Merton. The issue was of no little importance in the 16th-century Reformation. Amid the breathtaking chapels, paintings, and frescoes of the period, the Reformers contended for something deeper. Brad Littlejohn puts his finger on it:
Again, it was the contention of the Reformers that the beauty of holiness in which Rome gloried even then was but a painted façade, a simulacrum of the real thing. Rather than revealing the supernatural in the natural, the extraordinary in the ordinary, their transubstantiation could only replace bread and wine with heavenly substances. Rather than granting the faithful believer access into the Holy of Holies to feast before the Lord, they left him to gawk from the outer courts while the priestly class interceded on his behalf and brought some morsels of grace out to sustain him on his weary pilgrimage. Rather than inviting the believer to blink dazedly in the blinding light of God’s presence, clothed in the righteousness of Christ, they encouraged him to rest content with a mediated access, dressed up in the hand-me-downs of the saints and apostles.
There is valuable insight here. As Grant Macaskill stresses in his book Living in Union with Christ,
Christians are not individuals trying to apprehend God—though it may feel that way in our secular
routines. We have, rather, become the very sacred spaces in whom God now dwells on account of
Christ’s finished work. From within, the Spirit redeems every dimension of our being. In addition to our rationality, God takes captive our kardia and splagchna (inner parts) from which holy affections arise (Col. 3:12; Philem. 1:7).
Such a full and robust redemption enlivens us to worship through our vocation, music, poetry,
confession, preaching, sacraments, and prayers—forms that constitute the rich birthright of our
“catholic” Christian heritage. It’s an inheritance we dare not allow to be sold for a lentil stew of fog
machines, hypnotic choruses, and biblically feeble sermons.
Whether the issue is disenchantment with today’s church scene or something else that tempts us draw us away from the biblical faith championed and rediscovered during the Reformation, we have more than enough solid and beautiful resources to keep us upright and walking confidently with our Savior.
Chris Castaldo, PhD, is lead pastor of New Covenant Church in Naperville and author of the forthcoming book, The Upside Down Kingdom, from Crossway.
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