--- title: 'Should Christians Care about Beauty?' type: text hasMedia: true requiresPurchase: false authors: - 'Ben Dunson' date: 2026-07-07 collection: 'Articles' subcollection: '2026' topics: - 'Aesthetics' - 'Natural Theology' - 'Christian Life' scriptures: - 'Philippians 4' - 'Galatians 5' - 'Psalms 19' - 'Romans 1' - 'Psalms 27' - 'Matthew 6' - 'Ecclesiastes 3' url: https://confessional.org/articles/2026/whatsoever-is-lovely --- # Should Christians Care about Beauty? In this article, Ben Dunson encourages Christians to set their minds on everything that is lovely, commendable, excellent, and worthy because all such things are reflections of the God who made them. In 1856 the Presbyterian theologian James Henly Thornwell published a book entitled *Discourses on Truth*.1 The book consisted of a series of sermons Thornwell preached in 1851 in the chapel of South Carolina College (today’s University of South Carolina) where he was a professor and chaplain. The sermons were based on the Apostle Paul’s exhortation in Philippians 4:8: “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” Thornwell’s most basic point in the sermons was that Christians are under a moral obligation to pursue truth at all times, and in every way. Even in our opinions, Thornwell insisted, we must recognize “the obligation of truth in general.” He sought to show that human knowledge, like every other realm of human endeavor, is an inescapably moral domain. “The end of every inquiry,” therefore, “should be knowledge, the aim of every investigation simple and unadulterated truth.” Thornwell insisted that “in inculcating the love of truth as a moral obligation, it is by no means my purpose to imply that all men are bound to know all truth.” No mere creature can know everything about anything, or anything about everything. But, “\[t\]here is a great difference betwixt asserting that nothing should be sought which is not the truth, and that everything which is the truth is the appropriate pursuit of every understanding.” We must all recognize and acknowledge our finitude. Only God is omniscient. Nonetheless, all of God’s creatures are morally bound to pursue truth in every endeavor, to seek, as much as we are able, to come to a knowledge of what is true in every aspect of our thinking. Thornwell’s sermons were focused on the first category in Paul’s exhortation, that of truth. But Paul also urges Christians to think on “whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable.” Each word in this sequence could become the basis for a study of the Christian’s moral obligations in this world. In this article, I want to focus on two of Paul’s other words: “lovely” and “commendable.” The word translated as “lovely” by the ESV only appears here in the New Testament. In usage outside the New Testament at the time, the word refers to things that are “pleasant” or “agreeable.” The word translated as “commendable” is also found only in this verse. It refers to anything that is worthy of praise. A Christian should have little difficulty accepting Thornwell’s argument that all men are obligated to pursue truth in the world. Christians may, however, struggle somewhat with a similar claim: everyone must pursue that which is commendable and praiseworthy in the world as well. Or they might struggle with it if I put it differently: Christians should care about beauty in the world. Paul was a pastor. The focus of his preaching was the good news of Christ crucified for sinners, for their justification and for their sanctification. As such, I have little doubt that what was uppermost in his mind in Philippians 4:8 was that believers would pursue those *moral* dispositions that could be characterized as pleasant and worthy of commendation: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Gal. 5:22–23) and “anything” else “worthy of praise” (Phil. 4:8). Can we say anything more than this? I think we can. Paul is urging Christians to pursue a comprehensive vision of goodness, beauty, and truth in their lives, to use the classical triad that stretches all the way back to Plato and Aristotle, and which has been developed in Christian terms from the early church to the present. No area of existence, no realm of life, is hermetically sealed off from Paul’s appeal. In all that we do, we are to pursue truth, honor, justice, purity, loveliness, commendability (to coin a word), excellence, and worthiness, and to continually set our minds on such things. “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psa. 19:1); God’s “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” (Rom. 1:20). God’s glory is even described in the Bible as beauty: “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple” (Psa. 27:4). We must set our minds on everything that is lovely, commendable, excellent, and worthy because all such things are reflections of the God who made them. Such things, therefore, are to be valued by God’s image-bearers who seek to reflect his beauty and glory in all they say, do, and create. The cities and buildings man designs, the clothes he wears, the gardens he grows, the food he eats, the music he produces, the books he writes, the plays he stages, his manners, deportment, and social graces, all such things should—they *must*—reflect the loveliness, the excellence, and the worthiness of God himself. As Thornwell said about truth, so should it be said about goodness and beauty in earthly things: these too are inescapably moral matters. In fact, pursuing beauty is simply another way of obeying the moral imperative to seek truth in everything, because beauty itself reveals objective truths about the world and the God who made it. What is more, every good aspect of God’s creation is a small foretaste of the consummate goodness and beauty of the new creation to come. “You see,” wrote the nineteenth-century Lutheran theologian Johann Gerhard, “anything joyful and good that happens in this life, anything desirable and lovable, all of it is set forth as a foreshadow of the blessedness and happiness of eternal life so that there may be a hint that eternal life is going to be the fullness of all good things, the treasury of every happiness, the end and fulfillment of every desire.”2 The pursuit of beauty in the world is not without danger. Beauty is not to be pursued for its own sake. If not grounded in truth and goodness, the love of beauty will descend into effete aestheticism, into a hedonistic craving for mere pleasure, as it has often done in history. As another nineteenth-century Presbyterian theologian, William G.T. Shedd, puts it: as God “never intended that this mere decoration of His works should engross the soul to the exclusion of the wisdom and goodness displayed in them, so He never intended that the sense for the beautiful should absorb and destroy the sense for the true and the good.”3 Shedd’s point, however, is not that the beauty of the world (both divinely and humanly created) is worthless, but that it *becomes* worthless (actually worse than worthless) if we do not place supreme value on the truth and goodness manifest in those beautiful things. Christians should care about beauty, then, because it displays the wisdom and goodness of God, because it “is a reflection of God, a reflection of His own infinite beauty, a genuine value, something that is important-in-itself, something that praises God,” as the philosopher of aesthetics Dietrich von Hildebrand writes.4 The “elimination of poetry from life,” Hildebrand continued, “the destruction of the beauty of nature and especially of the beauty of architecture, terribly impoverishes human existence, and indeed damages and undermines it.”5 This desecration, which characterizes so much of the modern world, cannot be a matter of Christian indifference, because it is a moral issue. Hildebrand rightly insists, > Contact with an environment permeated by beauty not only offers real protection against impurity, baseness, every kind of letting oneself go, brutality, and untruthfulness; it has also the positive effect of raising us up in a moral sense. It does not draw us into a self-centered pleasure where our only wish is to indulge ourselves. On the contrary, it opens our hearts, inviting us to transcendence and leads us *in conspectus Dei*, before the face of God.6 Beauty in the world, even that which is created by man, uplifts the soul and points it heavenward. Ugliness drags it down. And while it “is true that beauty of form does not belong to that which we must seek before all else” because “‘\[s\]eek ye first the kingdom of God and His justice, and all these things will be added unto you’ applies here also.” Nonetheless, > \[t\]his does not mean . . . that all else is useless. In this case, also, we must not say that the redeemed do not seek beauty of form before all else, but that they are first seeking the Kingdom of God, and in the same measure as they do so, will they more and more appreciate this great gift of God and understand it.7 None of the beautiful things God has given us to enjoy, and none of the beautiful things man creates as he reflects God’s beautiful image are ultimate, but they do point us to the ultimate good, God himself. God “has made everything beautiful in its time;” he “has put eternity into man’s heart” (Eccles 3:11). Therefore, “there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil . . . .” “\[T\]his,” Solomon reminds us, “is God’s gift to man” (Eccles. 3:12–13), a gift that redounds to God’s praise and glory.