Jonathan Edwards on the Beauty of the Church

This is a quote from The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. The authors are describing Edwards's aesthetics. This passage is poignant about how Edwards viewed the Church.

As the saints perceive and respond to God's beauty, they themselves acquire a beauty that is "The moral image of God in them." The beauty of the saints consists in a comprehensive and well-ordered moral and spiritual character, free from disproportion and deformity, so that they become "proportioned Christians." As Edwards noted in Religious Affections: "Another thing wherein those affections that are truly gracious and holy, differ from those that are false, is beautiful symmetry and proportion." Similarly, in Charity and Its Fruits, Edwards spoke of the concomitant development of various virtues or of "Christian graces concatenated together." Faith, love hope humility, repentance, thankfulness, reverence, submission, patience, contentment, meekness--these and all other graces of the Christian life grow together and not in isolation. The spiritual beauty of the saints consists in a complex of discrete though interrelated virtues.

As each saint responds to the beauty of God, so each responds to the beauty of other saints. For one person's consent to being is not isolated from that of another person, and "it is naturally agreeable to perceiving being that being should consent to being." As a result, there is a multiplying effect of consent and beauty within the community of the saints. Each saint not only consents to God but to the consent of other saints to God--a process that comes to consummation in heaven. The holy community, joined together in unity, is a community of consent that possesses its own special beauty. For "union is spoken of in Scripture as the peculiar beauty of the church of Christ," and "tis one of the most beautiful and happy things on earth, which indeed makes earth most like heaven." Krister Sairsingh writes: "The church is the community which re-presents the divine community of consent. And in this human community of co-consenters to being in general, the divine glory becomes visible." Conrad Cherry comments that, Edwards's "theory of virtue brought into symbiotic relation the beauty of the cosmos, the beauty of human morality, and the beauty of divine benevolence."

(McClymond and Mcdermott, pp. 100-101)

I don't fully understand these thoughts, but it interesting to ponder that Edwards had several conflicts with his contentious congregation. This congregation eventually kicked him out from his pastorate and yet Edwards sees the Church as beautiful.