<i>Ugly</i>: Part 1, Ugly as a theological category

I’m always looking for new ways to cut at theological topics. Starting tonight at my church I’m teaching and hosting a five week class entitled Ugly.

Well, Ugly is what I wanted to title the class. But the feeling was that a one word title of “Ugly” wouldn’t be descriptive enough for the congregation. But I had visions of people saying to each other, “Hey, what class are you attending tonight?” with the response being “Ugly.”

So, in the end, the advertised title of the class is now The Theology of Ugly.

In this post, I just want to set forth ugly as a theological category and then sketch how that category might be used for theological reflection.

First, here is the definition of ugly (from Dictionary.com):

1. very unattractive or unpleasant to look at; offensive to the sense of beauty; displeasing in appearance.
2. disagreeable; unpleasant; objectionable.
3. morally revolting.
4. threatening trouble or danger.
5. mean; hostile; quarrelsome.
6. (esp. of natural phenomena) unpleasant or dangerous.

Also, here are some of the synonyms of ugly (from Thesaurus.com):

appalling, deformed, disfigured, foul, frightful, grotesque, hideous, homely, horrid, ill-favored, loathsome, misshapen, monstrous, repelling, repugnant, repulsive, revolting, unbeautiful, uninviting, unlovely, unseemly, unsightly, despicable, dirty, disgusting, distasteful, filthy, low, messy, monstrous, nasty, nauseous, objectionable, offensive, scandalous, shocking, sickening, sordid, sorry, terrible, troublesome, unpleasant, vexatious, vile, wicked, wretched

I hope by looking over the definition and these synonyms you get a sense of the richness of the concept “ugly” and can see the potential for using it as a theological category.

As a theological concept I’d like to suggest that ugly—as I intend to use it—has four, interrelated concepts:

1. Being flawed, misshapen, asymmetrical
2. Revolting, disgusting, aversive
3. God-forsaken, God-abandoned
4. Alien, Other, strange

You’ll note that I am leaving some associations of ugly to the side. Specifically, I’m going to be intentionally distancing ugly from “evil,” “wicked,” and “immoral.” The reason I do this is that I want to suggest in all that follows that ugly is often mistaken for sin and evil. That is, I’m going to be playing with the idea that what we often take to be “evil” or “sinful” is often just ugly. I’m going to argue that we tend to make category mistakes with sin and ugly which leads to outcomes that are not spiritually wholesome.

Let me clarify this a bit more. Let us reflect on the cross. The cross was ugly. Crucifixion was an ugly affair. As a consequence, the cross was considered to be evil and cursed. Nothing good, therefore, could be associated with the cross. But I'll be arguing that this was a category mistake. The cross was ugly, very much so. But it wasn’t evil, as commonly understood. This, according to my theory, is why the cross was considered to be so scandalous. How could God use this ugly thing for righteous ends? The cross was so ugly—so misshapen, revolting, God-forsaken, and strange—that it just couldn’t have any goodness associated with it. Ugly had to be evil. But, in fact, the ugliness of the cross was and is its claim on divinity. The ugly are redeemed in the cross.

The cross is going to be my theological lens on ugly. That is, like the cross, much in our life and in the world is taken to be misshapen, revolting, God-forsaken, and strange. Much of life is ugly. And like the ancients with the cross, we assume that something that is ugly must be evil.

This is problematic in that we mistakenly take our anxieties, discomfort, fear, disgust, and revulsion in the face of the ugly as justifications for our failures to move into the ugly and find God there. But if the cross of Jesus is our guide for Christian practice we must follow God into the ugly. Only then do we have a chance at saving ourselves and this world.