Up to the 18th century, theologians regularly considered the concept of beauty to be central to any discussion of God.
As these theologians read the Bible, especially the Hebrew Scriptures, they were struck by various places where God is described as beautiful.
God’s beauty in Scripture
In Psalm 27.4, for example, the Psalmist asserts, ‘one thing I have desired of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord’. Here, beauty is ascribed to God as a way of expressing the Psalmist’s conviction that the face-to-face vision of God is the profoundest experience available to a human being. Again, in Psalm 145.5 the Psalmist states, that he will speak ‘of the glorious honour’ or beauty of God’s majesty. Similarly, the 8th-century BC prophet Isaiah can predict that there is coming a day when God will be ‘a crown of glory and … a diadem of beauty’ to his people (Isaiah 28.5).
