This new title from Christian Focus Publications is an attempt to produce a layman’s version of their 2022 publication Irresistible Beauty: Beholding Triune Glory in the Face of Jesus Christ. The author, Samuel Parkison, writes that ‘too many Christian’s today are missing out: they fail to see the beauty of Christ because the Christ they conceptualize is a diminished version of the Jesus revealed in Holy Scripture and proclaimed throughout Christianity’s Great Tradition’. This book is seeking to show forth what Samuel Rutherford described as ‘the loveliness of Christ’. The taster below is from the first chapter Divine Beauty:

God’s Beauty: The Soul’s Highest Calling

…the good life is found in discovering what is objectively Good – the True, the Good, the Beautiful – and being ever conformed into that good. As Christians, we know that God is ultimate Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Augustine was right when he prayed, “O Lord, thou has made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee”. We are made for God. He is the highest Good to whom we must devote ourselves – he is absolute Truth, absolute Goodness, absolute Beauty. And he has made himself known and accessible preeminently in the person and work of Jesus Christ. The Lord Jesus Christ is the access point, so to speak, to the ineffable glory of the Trinity, wherefrom all truth, goodness, and beauty flow. As we worship him with our whole lives – with our thoughts and actions and affections all being part of the living sacrifice of praise we offer up to him (Rom 12:1) – we will continually be rearranged and reshaped and rightly ordered. This is none other than the telos – the end, the purpose – of our souls.

(Page 29-30)

The Unvarnished Jesus: The Beauty of Christ and His Ugly Rivals, by Samuel G Parkison, published by Christian Focus Publications