Beauty, Image, and the God Who Looks at Us First

Dan Scott (blame him) prompted this thought with the reminder of a book I read a while ago called “The Beauty of the Infinite” by David Bentley Hart. This post is long…and I’m sorry for that, but it’s probably one of the most important thoughts I’ve put out there. So thank you for reading, in advance.

I asked my wife, Holly Scoggins, to find me a painting. One that is objectively beautiful and one considered to be one of the most beautiful Christian themed paintings. She sent me what is below (and I trust her because she’s brilliant and struggled with this task).The title is ‘The Transfiguration’: painted by Rafael (1516-1520). It’s an alter piece, a work that decorates the space above and behind the altar in a church.

Without further ado, here it goes:

We are never not looking at something. Our attention is ever maintained at all points in all directions by something (not someone).

Screens, mirrors, metrics, memories, and updates…did I miss anything? We scroll, curate, compare, and project what we want to be seen and known as. We construct images of ourselves and then spend an exhausting amount of energy trying to live up to them (or outrun them in some cases). And somewhere along the way, we begin to confuse the images we make with the image we were given. We manufacture an identity instead of embracing the one we’ve been given. Hammering yet another version of a golden calf into existence.

A couple of my favorite theologians, David Bentley Hart and Hans Urs von Balthasar, insist that this confusion is not merely psychological or cultural; it is theological. It is something so deeply connected to how we understand God and ourselves. To lose beauty is to lose truth. To lose the right vision of God is to lose the right vision of ourselves.

What if the crisis of identity we feel so deeply is, at its root, a crisis of aesthetic theology? And I believe that it is. Wholeheartedly.

David Bentley Hart, in “The Beauty of the Infinite”, argues that Christianity does not persuade the world by force, fear, or even argument; rather it does so by beauty. Not beauty as decoration or some other form of filigree, but beauty as the radiant form of truth itself (the infinite in the finite). The Christian claim is not simply that God exists, but that God is infinitely beautiful, and that reality, at its deepest level, is what we are intended to be partakers of.

Hans Urs von Balthasar makes a similar claim from another angle. He famously warned that when beauty is removed from theology, truth becomes cold and goodness becomes moralistic. Beauty, for Balthasar, is what arrests us. It is what makes truth compelling rather than coercive. It moves from behavior modification to lived in presence and a reframing of transformational reality.

Scripture assumes this from the beginning.

“God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31).

Creation is not evaluated morally nor functionally, but aesthetically at the very start. God looks at the world and delights in it. He expresses joy and contentment. Something we experience when we see beauty.

And then comes the staggering claim:

“Let us make humanity in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26).

Before we do anything, achieve anything, fail at anything, or curate anything; we are already an image. Not an image we construct, but one we receive. Meaning, we have a definitive identity without need to restructure or manufacture and find one elsewhere.

The scriptural narrative is expressive about our tendency to trade received glory for manufactured substitutes. We are constantly forfeiting our birthright for a lesser thing.

The golden calf (Exodus 32) is not just idolatry, it’s insecurity formed in metal. Israel grows anxious in the absence of Moses (and he wasn’t even gone that flipping long!) and decides to make something visible and impressive. A manageable god. A lesser god. A god they can see. A god they can control. A god that reflects their fear rather than the Most High’s beauty. Because infinite beauty is none of these things.

Paul later named this pattern with acute clarity:

“They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things” (Romans 1:23).

Notice the exchange. Glory for image and birthright for projection.

We still do this. We’re just using lighting, filters, and AI now. Not much has changed, really. We’ve just gotten better at it. Or lazier because of convenience. Either way, we keep building golden calves.

We create identities from performance, cultural aesthetics, outrage, productivity, sexuality, politics, or even religious seriousness. And then we ask those images to save us. To remind us and to tell us who we are, that we matter, and that we are seen. That we are a part of something. Even if it’s a dissected and dismembered something; at least we are a part of it.

But the images we create can never look back at us with love. They can’t and won’t have that beauty. In fact, they ultimately rob us of truly experiencing true beauty.

Both Hart and Balthasar insist that Christ is the decisive interruption in this cycle. The breakdown of breakdowns in humanity’s quest to find itself in something other than the One who made it. The One who formed and fashioned it. The One who breathed life into it.

Paul calls Jesus:

“The image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15).

Not a copy or a linguistic word play. But the Image and exact imprint of the Most High.

In Jesus, we see what God looks like and therefore what humanity is meant to be. And strikingly, the glory of this image is not revealed through domination or spectacle, but through self-giving/self-emptying love. We realize that Jesus is precisely what God has to say about us.

“We have seen his glory… full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Here’s that verse again…sorry. It’s just soooooo good.

Balthasar emphasizes that the glory of God is most clearly revealed in the form of Christ’s life and especially in the Cross. This is not beauty as triumphalism, rather beauty as love that goes all the way down, into the deepest pits and parts of humanity. Hart pushes this further: the Cross does not reveal that violence is necessary; it exposes the lie that it ever was. It “re-images” what we think we know.

And here is the scandal of Christian aesthetics: the most beautiful revelation of God looks, at first glance, like defeat. Like death.

And yet, paradoxically:

“God raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand” (Ephesians 1:20).

Resurrection declares that self-giving/self-emptying love is not only beautiful…it is true and the purest form of good. This is the theology of ‘kenosis’ (self-emptying).

Scripture repeatedly insists that we are shaped by what we look at. What we allow into or focal points and periphery shapes who are. We become what we worship.

“Those who make idols become like them” (Psalm 115:8).

But the inverse is also true:

“We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image” (2 Corinthians 3:18).

This is aesthetic theology with consequences.

We do not become whole by perfecting the images we present to the world. We become whole by beholding the beauty of God revealed in Christ and allowing that vision to “re-image” us. Our identity is formed in our “kenosis”, our self-emptying so that our vessels can be filled with the Spirt.

Hart would say this is how truth persuades; by attraction, not coercion. Balthasar would say this is how glory works; it draws us into participation.

Identity, then, is not something we achieve. It is something we receive and inhabit as it inhabits us. It is our true, beautiful, and good birthright.

So to live as an image bearer is not to deny brokenness, suffering, or sin. It is to refuse to grant them ultimacy. They don’t maintain lordship over us because we are choosing to live out our original vocation, under our Lord.

“For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3).

Hidden, not erased and done away with. Secure, not fabricated and made into something that it was never intended to be.

The Gospel does not hand us new masks. It removes them. It tells us that beneath the noise, the striving, the comparisons, and the fear; there is a deeper truth, a deeper good, dare we say…a deeper beauty.

The truth is that you were seen before you ever tried to be impressive. You were named before you performed for anything less than the love that was shed for you. You were loved before you learned to curate an image of yourself that wasn’t yours to have.

And that love is beautiful. That is the infinite breaking into the finite.

Not because it flatters us, but because it tells the truth about God and, in doing so, tells the truth about us.

In a world addicted to self-made images, the Church is called to be a people who live from a received glory in ‘kenosis’. A people who dare to believe that the realest thing about us is not what we project, but what God has already spoken. The decide to live out of that spoken-into-existence reality. It’s reclaiming a lost aesthetic theology and knowing that the beauty of God in Christ can save the world!

“See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God…and so we are” (1 John 3:1).

That is a beautiful reality. And it is one worth living in. Even if it means forfeiting who we think we want to be, because we are infinitely beautiful.