day no. 15,805: right premise, wrong conclusion

"Instinctively we do know that true beauty proceeds only from Deity. Our problem is that we have deified ourselves and have assumed, contrary to the visible results, that whatever proceeds from us must be beautiful." -- Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture

We rightly understand that beauty is divine, but we wrongly understand divinity. We proclaim ourselves children of God, but not in order to honor our Father, but in order to assume His divine prerogative. When we assume a sort of sacred inner spark, we presume all sorts of sinful urges are begotten of God. Our theology falls off of our fingertips. We create and call whatever comes from inside us “beautiful” because we misunderstand who and what we are on the inside. Because we believe ourselves to be gods, we believe our creations to possess our attributes of truth, goodness and beauty. While we're right to presume that truth, beauty and goodness only derive from divinity, we're wrong to assume ourselves a source of divinity: right premise, wrong conclusion.

Human nature is not supernatural. Humanity is not divinity. But divinity by the grace of God took on humanity when the Word became flesh and as a result the flesh can be resurrected a newborn child of God.

John 1:9-14

The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.