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Does it glorify God?

Does it glorify God?

Last updated on: June 4, 2016 at 4:38 pm by Morgan Guyton

Does it glorify God? 2016-06-04T16:38:03-05:00 Morgan Guyton

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I’ve been reading Emily Heath’s excellent new book Glorify: Reclaiming the Heart of Progressive Christianity. One of the things she proposes is that we replace the common question “What would Jesus do?” with “Does it glorify God?” Glory has always been an ugly word for me, since the fundamentalists use it to talk about the reason God has to torture people forever in hell or “ordain” various types of tragedy (to give “glory” to himself). Whenever I think about the word “glory” in that sense, I imagine the perfect display of power and precision in a Nazi military parade. But my friend Brian Zahnd proposes a much more helpful synonym. He says everywhere you see “glory” in the Bible, think beauty. In this sense, the question “Does it glorify God?” means “Am I making God’s beauty known?”

We live in a cynical era that scoffs at the existence of beauty. For a long time, art has had less to do with being beautiful than with being ironic and esoteric. I’m not sure it’s even possible to see beauty with postmodern, deconstructive eyes. Our world loves mocking so much more than it loves being melted and moved by sights and sounds that take our breath away. I think part of the problem is that beauty requires patience. If you’re power-walking through a park, it’s harder to see the fountains and the ducks than if you’re sitting on a bench with your cell phone securely in your pocket. There’s no time for beauty when you’re under intense pressure to prove to everyone how busy and accomplished you are.

One of the least beautiful places in the world is the Internet. It’s against the nature of beauty to meme well, because beauty is innately mysterious and particular. Beauty cannot be mass-produced or commodified like so many things that predominate the screens we look at most of our days. When we are socialized by the forces of the Internet, our souls are filled with cheap and tacky things, like selfies and memes and gifs and emoticons. None of these diminish the glory of God per se. But they help to establish a culture that is anxious and impulsive and dehumanizing.

Many Christians have a very wooden, rationalistic understanding of how to “glorify” God. Our Internet is filled with the “clanging gongs” of zealous Christian warriors who may win every argument they’ve ever had but not without making a beautiful gospel look hideously ugly. Every Christian who takes pleasure in making other people look stupid has failed to glorify God. Every Christian whose gospel proclamation is hindered by their own arrogance, impatience, callous, insensitivity, course sense of humor, fragility, stubbornness, or any other fleshly character defect has failed to glorify God.

You cannot glorify God in a conversation unless your chief concern is for God’s beauty to be revealed. I use the language of beauty because it’s too easy to be an asshole about defending goodness and truth. But you can’t be an asshole about defending beauty without making it ugly. If you want to persuade me to change my opinion on some theological point, then show me how you’re melted by the beauty you’ve witnessed instead of showing me how stupid I am.

This is what evangelism should look like: the desire to make God’s beauty known in my words and deeds. It’s not about winning arguments. It’s about sharing inspiration. Imagine how differently the Internet and all other public space would look if Christians were intentional about glorifying God with our words and deeds.

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