Beauty Before Belief

Life as a small-town priest moves in rhythm.

In Banff, where I live and pastor, the weeks unfold in the quiet patterns of church life. Sunday mornings with simple hymns sung from the heart. Children weaving through pews, sometimes giggling, sometimes crying, sometimes both in the same minute. Monday night dinners where locals and newcomers share meals and stories like they were meant to. Wednesday Bible studies where we open our worn paperback ESVs and read slowly, carefully, through old texts with fresh eyes.

These rhythms shape us. Quietly. Faithfully. But now and then, they rise into something larger, our high holy days. Easter Sunday, above all, is the summit. And preaching on Easter feels like standing at the edge of the impossible. Twenty minutes to speak to a crowd both familiar and skeptical, telling a story they’ve heard before, about a man who died and lived again.

This year, I took a risk. I brought philosophy to the pulpit.

And though months have passed since then, summer now nearly behind us, I keep returning to the thread I pulled that morning. I want to stay with it. Not to repeat what I said, but to go deeper. To linger with three ideas we all carry, even if we rarely name them. Truth, goodness, and beauty.

These ideas aren’t new. They’re ancient. What philosophers have long called the Socratic transcendentals. This goes all the way back to Socrates and Plato and the long tradition of thinkers who believed that these three: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, are not just preferences. They are not social constructs or inherited instincts. They are deep realities. They are the shape of what we are made for.

Truth is what is real, even when we resist it.

Goodness is what brings life and wholeness.

Beauty is what moves us, what awakens longing before we know what we’re longing for.

And as I look back on the conversations and pastoral work of these past months, I have noticed how beauty is often missing from moral conversations. We talk about facts. We talk about principles. We talk about justice. But beauty?

Beauty sounds too soft. Too poetic. Too fragile for the world we live in. But I’ve come to believe beauty is what opens the door when nothing else can. It reaches us where arguments cannot. It draws us toward the good, even when we don’t fully understand it yet. It stirs a kind of recognition before comprehension. The heart sometimes sees before the mind does.

Before Easter, I found myself returning again and again to this insight. Our moral conversations, especially in a skeptical or traumatized culture, often falter because they reach for truth or goodness without beginning with beauty.

I explored that in my Easter sermon, but I want to revisit it here more personally.

That became clear to me through two conversations I had earlier this year. One just before Easter. One not long after. Both with persons I deeply admire. Both circling the same question. How do we live well in a world full of competing desires, fractured truths, and fragile hopes?

The first was with an old friend on Instagram. We have known each other since we were teenagers, two kids once swept up in the same Christian group. I became a believer through that circle. He did not. These days we mostly exchange memes and game trailers. But sometimes we talk about real things.

This time we talked about morality.

The conversation started in one place, politics maybe, and slowly curved toward the bone. We traded messages while one of us wrangled children and the other played The Witcher 3. And somewhere in that wandering talk, the question surfaced. Is there such a thing as real right and wrong? Or are these just words we’ve inherited, useful and maybe even necessary, but finally invented?

My friend leaned toward the latter. He’s agnostic, skeptical in the best way: curious and intellectually honest. He believes morality is something we build. Something that emerges from the pressures of community, the need to get along, the shared desire not to suffer or cause suffering. He’s not naive about it. He sees how fragile that consensus can be. “We’re at the mercy of ourselves,” he said. And that line stuck with me, not because it was cynical, but because it was honest.

There’s something admirable in that kind of integrity. He isn’t borrowing a story he doesn’t believe in. He’s trying to make sense of what’s real with the tools he trusts. But as we talked, I started to feel the edges fray.

Because while he claims morality is ultimately subjective, that there’s no cosmic source of good and evil, he also speaks, like most of us do, with conviction. He names racism as wrong. He opposes authoritarianism and injustice. Not because they’re unhelpful. Because they’re wrong.

And I agree with him. But that raised the deeper question. Where does that clarity come from?

If morality is just a cultural agreement, then we have no language for real evil. Slavery in the American South wasn’t a failure of consensus. The Holocaust wasn’t a moral mistake. And the crimes against humanity happening right now in Gaza aren’t regrettable. If consensus is the only source of right and wrong, then those moments weren’t moral failures. They were just different social preferences.

But that’s not how we speak about them. And it’s not how we feel about them.

We say they were evil. Not evil-for-us. Evil, full stop.

That’s what I kept circling back to. There’s a tension, not just in his thinking, but in all of ours. We live as though some things are truly wrong, even if the whole world disagrees. We call that clarity justice, or conscience, or human rights. But none of those ideas make much sense if morality is purely invented. They feel less like decorations and more like furniture, solid and unmovable, something we keep bumping into.

And it’s not just injustice. Even the Golden Rule “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” carries a strange weight. My friend called it a kind of shared ethical common sense. But it’s more than that. It’s not just ancient wisdom. It’s sacred instruction. And yet it resonates across cultures and centuries. So what if it rings true not because we constructed it, but because it was true before we heard it?

This is where the loss of beauty becomes felt. Because when our conversations reduce morality to logic and consent, we miss something essential. Truth becomes cold. Goodness becomes abstract. But beauty makes truth recognizable. It shows us what goodness looks like before we know how to explain it. It stirs awe before agreement.

Especially for those shaped by trauma or disillusionment, beauty might be the only thing that can reach the soul. A moment of music, a face full of grace, a life poured out in love, these can do what argument cannot. They invite us home.

That’s why, when another friend questioned whether the Golden Rule goes far enough, it landed differently.

He wasn’t denying its truth the way my first friend was. In fact, in some ways, he was affirming it, wanting to go beyond it out of love. But if the first conversation was about whether moral goodness exists at all, this one was about how best to live it out. Whether empathy means treating someone as you would want to be treated, or as they would.

That question led to what some call the Platinum Rule: do unto others as they would have you do unto them. It sounds more generous. More attuned. And in a way, it is. It gestures toward attentiveness and the desire to love someone well on their terms. But the more I sat with it, the more I became convinced. It’s not a moral upgrade. It’s a retreat from something deeper.

Because what we want isn’t always what we need.

The Platinum Rule quietly assumes that desire defines the good. But what if someone’s desires are shaped by wounds? Or fear? Or lies they’ve come to believe about themselves? A child might want candy for every meal. A person in addiction might want to be left alone. Someone lost in shame may want to be flattered. But love says no, not to withhold care, but to give it. Not to override the other’s voice, but to call that voice back toward wholeness.

That’s what the Golden Rule preserves. It doesn’t ask us to defer to preferences. It asks us to step into the mystery of another person’s life and imagine. What would I need if I were them, not just with their wants, but with their worth, their limits, their longing to be whole?

It’s a rule built on empathy, but not on indulgence. It assumes there is a good. That love has a shape. That truth can be known, even if imperfectly. And that beauty, that deep, moral beauty, is what awakens us to all of it.

The Golden Rule calls us to embody that beauty, not merely to reflect someone’s desires, but to draw them toward a deeper dignity. Toward the good they were made for.

Looking back, I wonder if both of these friends, each in their own way, were brushing up against the same absence.

The first, in trying to make sense of morality without appealing to anything beyond us, was searching for truth. But without beauty, truth became brittle, suspect, unanchored, even implausible.

The second, in longing to love more attentively through the Platinum Rule, was reaching for goodness. But without beauty, goodness became shapeless, reduced to preference, vulnerable to confusion.

If the insight I’ve been circling is true, that truth and goodness go amiss when they are severed from beauty, then maybe what each of them lacked was not intelligence or sincerity, but a vision of moral beauty strong enough to hold truth and goodness together.

Psychologist Dacher Keltner has said that the most consistent source of awe across cultures isn’t nature, music, or grandeur. It’s moral beauty. The sight of someone giving themselves away for another. Acts of sacrifice. Courage. Mercy. Forgiveness. We are most moved not by brilliance or efficiency, but by love that costs.

And maybe that’s what Easter is.

The very infinity of God is made visible in the brokenness of Christ on the cross. And the deepest depravity of the human heart is grasped only in the light of the risen Lord.

But this is not just a religious metaphor. As David Bentley Hart writes, the resurrection does not transform Jesus into a comforting abstraction or dissolve Him into spiritual symbolism. “Christ’s life is not transformed by the cross into a symbol of religious truth,” he writes, “because he himself is the only truth, the only way, the only life.” The form of Jesus - his life, his death, his risen body - is not a placeholder for divine ideas. It is the beauty of God made flesh.

And it is a beauty the world cannot silence.

“The resurrection is a transgression of the categories of truth governing the world, precisely because it is an aesthetic event… it intrudes and invites and seizes up with its strangeness and its beauty.”

The resurrection breaks the tomb, not only as a grave but as what Hart calls the symbol par excellence of metaphysical totality. It is the end of all endings. And the beginning of a new kind of seeing.

A seeing shaped not by power, or reason, or survival, but by beauty.

A beauty that reveals the truth.
A truth that enacts the good.
A goodness that cannot die.

That’s what draws me, again and again, to Jesus. Not just as a moral teacher, but as the beauty that makes truth visible and goodness believable.

The cross is where truth, goodness, and beauty meet.

Not in power. But in love.
Not in applause. But in surrender.
Not in what we wanted. But in what we needed.

And when we see it, really see it, we don’t need to be convinced.
We know.
We’re undone.
We’re invited.

Even if we don’t see it clearly.
Even if we’ve forgotten.
Even still.