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Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Coulson Center, I'm John Stonestreet. A recent BBC podcast told an incredible story about a young pianist who found God through her music. Though she now goes by her baptismal name of Eleanor Yuri Wang grew up in Communist China. The stringently atheistic education she received there emphasized the importance of hard work and that reality was only consisted of the physical world. She learned technique, not about transcendent concepts like beauty, much less the God behind beauty. It was on an educational trip to Italy that Eleanor encountered the beauty of Christian architecture and also the worshipful attitude of people at prayer. Most of all, she was moved by the beauty of Gloria by composer Antonio Vivaldi. She was confronted in the musical work with phrases like Lamb of God and Son of the Father. According to the BBC article, Eleanor wanted to know more. What did these words mean? Why had composers been inspired by them for centuries? In answering her questions, a local priest pointed her to the Christian faith. In a profound realization, especially for an artist, Eleanor concluded that the simplistic narrative of her upbringing could not explain the beauty that she had encountered in the world. When asked why people are touched by the presence of God in music, she had this to say. Because in music, you no longer feel the passage of time or space. Often the moment when you're moved by beauty is a symbol of eternity. Many people were touched by this feeling because it's a kind of beauty that no language or image can fully describe. End quote. And it was in part the ugliness of the worldview in which Eleanor was raised that helps explain why this discovery was so profound for her. As Osginis has said, contrast is the mother of clarity. Consider, for example, the brutalist architecture expressed in endless gray structures of formerly communist nations. And still in China. Though some may describe this style as bold and ambitious, it's a style that wears on the human soul. Souls that were made for more. Like so much modernist art or architecture, as well as the Marxist worldview, overall, brutalism communicates that the individual does not matter, that the material world is all that exists and that appeals to beauty and transcendence are mere activities of self indulgence. Compare that to the Christian vision. Creation reflects God's artistry. He did not need to create the world, much less fill it with such delightfully unnecessary beauty. As G.K. chesterton quipped, it's possible that God says, every morning do it again to the sun, and every evening do it again to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike. It may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. And God created humans to image him as his sub creators. We do not merely consume, we imagine, we invent, we innovate. And in doing so we fulfill the first mandate from our Creator to make something of his world. As Hans Wick Macher put it in his book Modern Art and the Death of a Culture Culture is the result of man's creative activity within God given structure, so it can never be something apart from our faith. All our work is ultimately directed by our answer to the question of who or what our God is and where for us, the ultimate source of all reality and life lies. Well, this is why, just as it's so tragic to dismiss beauty, it's just as tragic to reduce beauty to mere entertainment. It's as Chuck Colson asked so many years ago, does God value beauty for beauty's sake? It seems that he does. Consider the two columns Solomon set up before the temple. He decorated them with a hundred pomegranates fastened upon chains as God commanded. These two free standing columns supported no architectural weight, had no engineering significance. As Francis Schaeffer writes, they were there only because God said they should be there as a thing of beauty, whether a piece of music or a beautiful sunset. Humans are moved by beauty. At the birth of a child or an act of athletic artistry, we wonder, beauty points us to what is transcendent about reality and what is transcendent about us. And it points us to the presence and nature of God that can penetrate even the most stubborn personal and cultural defenses. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stonestreet with Breakpoint. Before I go, I want to say thank you to Elaine of Pensacola. Thanks for being a Cornerstone Monthly partner of the Colson Center. You helped make this episode a breakthrough. Today's Breakpoint was co authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett. If Breakpoint is a helpful part of your daily Worldview diet, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And for more resources like this to live like a Christian in the cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org