The Delightful Reality of God’s Happiness

How Do You See God? In an art museum in the beautiful Tuscan city of Siena hangs a five-hundred-year-old oil painting that captures nearly everything that is wrong with our view of God. It was painted in 1513 by the Renaissance artist Domenico Beccafumi as an altarpiece for a hospital chapel and entitled the Trinity Triptych.1 It consists of three panels. The right- and left-hand panels show John the Baptist and John the Evangelist flanked by the martyred twins Cosmas and Damian. In the center is a picture of the Trinity at the crucifixion with the Father holding the cross on which Christ is dying and the Holy Spirit perched as a dove on top of it. The grey storm clouds and alarming cherub-like creatures that swirl around the cross give the whole scene an air of menace. But the scariest feature of the painting is its portrayal of the Trinity. (When God prohibited people from making images of gods in the second commandment, you wonder if this is one of the things he had in mind.) Jesus is dead: head bowed, hands nailed, eyes closed. The Spirit is so small, static, and impersonal that you might initially not even notice him; I have shown this to people who have mistaken the Spirit fo...