John Piper - Seeing Beauty and Saying Beautifully: The Power of Poetic Effort in the Work of George Herbert, George Whitefield, and C. S. Lewis

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BOOKS BY JOHN PIPER

Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

Brothers, We Are Not Professionals

Contending for Our All (Swans 4)

The Dangerous Duty of Delight

Desiring God

Does God Desire All to Be Saved?

Dont Waste Your Life

Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die

Filling Up the Afflictions of Christ (Swans 5)

Finally Alive

Five Points

Future Grace

God Is the Gospel

Gods Passion for His Glory

A Godward Heart

A Godward Life

The Hidden Smile of God (Swans 2)

A Hunger for God

The Legacy of Sovereign Joy (Swans 1)

Let the Nations Be Glad!

Life as a Vapor

Pierced by the Word

The Pleasures of God

The Roots of Endurance (Swans 3)

Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ

Sex and the Supremacy of Christ

Spectacular Sins

Suffering and the Sovereignty of God

Taste and See

Think

This Momentary Marriage

What Jesus Demands from the World

When I Dont Desire God

THE SWANS ARE NOT SILENT

Book Six

SEEING BEAUTY
and SAYING
BEAUTIFULLY

The Power of Poetic Effort in the Work of

GEORGE HERBERT, GEORGE WHITEFIELD, AND C. S. LEWIS

JOHN PIPER

Seeing Beauty and Saying Beautifully

Copyright 2014 by Desiring God Foundation

Published by Crossway

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Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Dual Identity, inc.

Cover portrait illustrations: Howell Golson

Cover image: Shutterstock

First printing 2014

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway. 2011 Text Edition. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quoatations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-4294-7
ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-4297-8
PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-4295-4
Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-4296-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Piper, John, 1946

Seeing beauty and saying beautifully : the power of poetic effort in the work of George Herbert, George Whitefield, and C.S. Lewis / John Piper.

1 online resource. (The swans are not silent; Book 6)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

ISBN 978-1-4335-4295-4 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-4335-4296-1 (mobi) ISBN 978-1-4335-4297-8 (epub) ISBN 978-1-4335-4294-7 (print)

1. Christianity and the arts. 2. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.)Religious aspectsChristianity. 3. AestheticsReligious aspectsChristianity. 4. Herbert, George, 15931633. 5. Whitefield, George, 17141770. 6. Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 18981963. I. Title.

BR115.A8

261.5'8dc23 2014008639

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

In memory of
Clyde S. Kilby
whose classroom poetic effort
made us savor what he saw

When Eraclius, the successor to Augustine as bishop of Hippo in AD 400, said of his awe-inspiring predecessor, The swan is silent, he compared his own voice to Augustines as a chirping cricket. He was not referring mainly to the beauty of Augustines eloquence but to the beauty and power and fullness of his ideas.

But when I say of George Herbert and George Whitefield and C. S. Lewis that these swans are not silent, I have in mind precisely the way their eloquence and their ideas relate to each other. The aim of this volume of The Swans Are Not Silent is to probe the interrelationship between seeing beauty and saying it beautifully.

GEORGE HERBERT, PASTOR-POET

George Herbert died in 1633 just short of his fortieth birthday. Late in that short life, he became an Anglican country pastor. He wrote a book called The Country Parson. But, he is known today because of his peerless combination of poetic craftsmanship and profound Christian faith. If any swan should be considered when pondering the relationship between seeing the beauty of Christ and saying it with unparalleled technical, artistic skill, it is George Herbert. He is arguably the most skillful and important British devotional lyricist of [the seventeenth century] or any other time.

GEORGE WHITEFIELD, PREACHER-DRAMATIST

George Whitefield was an English Christian evangelist who lived from 1714 to 1770. He crossed the Atlantic thirteen times and is buried, not in his homeland, but in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Along with John Wesley in England, Howell Harris in Wales, and Jonathan Edwards in Americabut more international than any of themWhitefield was a primary catalyst of the First Great Awakening.

The preaching pace he set for thirty years was almost superhuman. Sober estimates are that he spoke about one thousand times every year for thirty years. That included at least eighteen thousand sermons and twelve thousand talks and exhortations. But it is not the pace that concerns us in this book, but the powerspecifically the connections between the power of his biblical perception, the power of his natural eloquence, and the power of his spiritual effectiveness.

Jonathan Edwardss wife Sarah said that Whitefield was a born orator.

George Whitefield was not a poet in the strict sense the way George Herbert was. But his preaching craft, with all its verbal and emotional and physical dimensions, was such a work of art that Benjamin Franklin said that listening was a pleasure of much the same kind with that received from an excellent piece of music. Therefore, Whitefield provides us with a second historical seedbed for our question about the relationship between seeing beauty and saying beautifully.

C. S. LEWIS, SCHOLAR-NOVELIST

C. S. Lewis is the third focus of our study. Peter Kreeft stands in awe of Lewis and says, Clive Staples Lewis was not a man: he was a world.

Lewis wanted to be a great poet. But he admits at age fifty-six that his poetry met with little success. Nevertheless, he says,

The imaginative man in me is... continuously operative.... It was he... who led me to embody my religious belief in symbolical... forms, ranging from Screwtape to a kind of theologized sciencefiction. And it was of course he who has brought me, in the last few years, to write the series of Narnian stories for children.

This imaginative man who wanted to be a great poet remained a real poet in all his prose. Alister McGrath expressed it well when he said that much of Lewiss power was