Elegant Christianity
When you think of the word ‘Elegant’, what picture comes to mind? Boutiques? Interior decorations? Wedding dresses? It’s a hard word to describe isn’t it? Being an engineer I have come across some uses of the word that may surprise you…
Do you remember doing theorem proofs in geometry at school? This may be hard to believe but when we got deep into maths in university the proofs of some theorems became elegant. Not all of them mind you, some got the label ‘clumsy’ if the proof was over complicated, tedious or just too long, even if it was logical! Elegant proofs on the other hand could provide mathematical platforms to describe the most elaborate and beautiful things in the universe, in just a few lines! I don’t want to sound like too much of a geek here but really elegant maths can be breathtaking! (for instance the picture on this article is a colouring of the Mandelbrot set. Check out the maths behind it!)
The Holy grail of physics for the past few years has been an attempt by scientists to marry the theory of general relativity and the theory of quantum mechanics. General relativity is the theory that Einstein came up with to describe how gravity works, which gave us the beautiful pictures of the space/time map and black holes, and led to all those fantastic time-warp movies like ‘Event Horizon’ and more recently ‘Deja Vu’. Quantum mechanics deals with the tiniest things in life, like how atoms and even smaller particles behave. These two theories are both considered pillars of modern physics, yet they do not agree with each other! It is now the number one challenge of science to find one theory that would unite the two. Lately there has been a lot of hype about ‘String theory‘ which proposes to have solved the whole problem, but has not been proven, yet. The reason it has become the biggest challenge for scientists is because they all agree, that science should be elegant. You can’t have two complicated theories competing against each other! So the search is on for the solution to the elegant universe…
So what’s up with the science lesson Rich? I think that the scientific expressions of elegance are the best. Boutiques just don’t cut it for me. ‘Surprisingly simple yet effective’ is a great definition of elegance, or to delve into a computer geek’s world even a program code is described as elegant if ‘it uses a small amount of intuitive code to a great effect.’ I guess for the non-scientists descriptions like ‘simplicity and consistency of design, focusing on the main or basic features of an object, its dignified gracefulness, or restrained beauty of style’ would also work. But you see for me that description is just not elegant…
So really, what’s up with the science lesson Rich? Well I believe Christianity should be elegant. Can I end there?
Because if elegance brings down to earth the most complex things in a manner that is graceful, then I would love to be a christian expressing faith elegantly. Because lets be honest, Christianity can be incredibly complicating! That’s why there are so many divisions and splits in the church, because we can’t agree on issues that are like Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit hole, in that as you travel down the hole it just keeps getting deeper. Some things in Christianity are just so complex! Yet the truth of the gospel should be something that can be handed down to anybody, regardless of whether they have a degree in literature and philosophy and hermeneutics etc…
But the beauty of elegance is that it never denies that the subject is complex, it just manages to express it in a profoundly simple way that any child could understand. Galileo once said that “All truth is easy to understand when discovered. The point is to discover it”. It’s something I’ve discussed at length with a musician friend of mine who compared it to a Beethoven symphony. He said that the music itself is not complicated, but to have drawn it out of thin air took genius…
That’s why elegant Christianity is so beautiful. Because it accepts that Christianity is complex, and needs to be struggled with, wrestled through and sweated over, but at the end of all of that realises that the outcome will be simple truth. Something the world can understand without a dictionary at hand. Something that shines gracefully while cutting deeply. Something that whispers beautifully while impacting powerfully.
Think of the parables of Jesus. The doctrine of grace was painted in a picture of the prodigal son. Elegant. All the works of grace in the world can’t compare to the striking power and beauty of that story.
It’s like fresh air blowing on your face on a sunny day. Which comes from high pressure regions or anticyclones which when coupled with adiabatic heating causes subsidence and the evaporation of water droplets…
It’s like God loving the world so much that He gave His only son, so that if we just believe in Him we will have everlasting life.