In a recent episode of ‘Ask Pastor John’, John Piper of Bethlehem Baptist Church has sparked controversy in a listener’s question about the travails of being unattractive, telling them that their ugliness is on account of the fall, and so people can see a physical representation of how ugly Satan and sin is.
Question: “Why did God make some people ugly and unattractive? How can I accept the fact that God though capable of making me beautiful or at least average looking, chose to create me in an unattractive manner?”
Piper begins with a bit of a humblebrag, sharing that he’s never really been called that before, and then explaining that being ugly is just the ‘tip of human suffering’ when compared to the breadth of physical maladies and disformities people can have.
“When I hear a question like this, it makes me groan partly because I can count on three fingers, maybe, maybe less, the people who have ever called me, ugly, or handsome. In other words, I groan because I know I’m being asked to speak to a sorrow that I’ve never tasted.”
Piper responds further:
“Very few people escape the relevance of this question at some point, I think the deepest answer to the question why there is so much ugliness, and deformity and injury and disability and misery in the world is found in Romans 8:18-23.
I think that’s the most important passage in the Bible, for our friend to think about. Ugliness and disfigurement have their roots in the origin of human sin. Now, listen carefully, because this could be so easily misunderstood. Not in a person’s particular personal sin, but the origin of human sin in Adam and Eve which infected the whole human race. In his wisdom, God decreed that there would be physical manifestations of the horrors and outrage of sin against God. This does not mean that everyone’s disability or everyone’s disease or everyone’s disfigurement is because of their own sin.”
Arguing that people are unattractive so they can serve as avatars of the unattractiveness of sin is a hot take indeed, but Piper presses forward:
“God brought the physical world, the bodily world into sync, into correspondence with the moral world. He made physical ugliness and misery correspond to moral ugliness and misery, even in some of the most godly people on the planet. Every bodily or material burden in the world should point us to the burden of sin. Every ugliness should point to the ugliness of sin and Satan. Satan is a real secondary cause under God. He is immediately responsible for many physical horrors….So all physical ugliness, and deformity and misery points to the moral ugliness and deformity of sin and Satan.”
One would be forgiven for concluding that Piper is basically saying the uglier you are, the worse the sin you are representing. For many, the notion that a child born with down syndrome is “physical manifestations of the horrors and outrage of sin against God’ is more than a little troubling.
Piper does not share how on account of sin, our standards of beauty and what is good and pleasing are compromised, but rather paints a theology where the world’s standards of beauty are assumed, rather than challenged. There’s about 10 other response that he might have said about this, and apparently, he’s gone with this one.
It’s for this reason that a man or woman with characteristics such as lazy eyes, hooked noses, buck teeth, and asymmetrical features aren’t viewed as part and parcel of God’s good design. Instead, he seems to be suggesting that all the 1-5/10 are meant to remind of us sin and the devil, with the more attractive 6-10’s/10 meant to remind of… his greatness and glory? He concludes:
Christ is most glorified in us, when we are most satisfied in him, especially in our temporary ugliness.
NATURALLY, this has garnered a fair amount of pushback, with the following tweet summarizing most the bulk of the responses.
