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Study guide · Apologetics & Culture

How Do You Know What’s True, Good, and Beautiful?

Reviewed by Jude 3 Project·2 min read

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A standalone study on how we know, how we should live, and what makes things beautiful and just.

The big question

For thousands of years, people who loved wisdom kept circling three questions: what is true, what is good, and what is beautiful? Dr. CJ Rhodes walks each one, the study of knowledge, the study of how to live, and the study of beauty and justice. This study follows his map and asks how a follower of Jesus thinks through all three without losing their faith or their mind.

Key takeaways

  • Epistemology asks how you know what you know. I just know is not an answer.
  • Ethics asks how to live well. People pursue good for consequences, out of duty, or for its own sake.
  • Character aims at eulogy virtues, what people say at your funeral, not resume virtues.
  • Aesthetics asks what makes something beautiful, and it reaches into questions of justice.
  • Truth, goodness, and beauty are three doors into knowing the One who is the truth.

Scripture to sit with

1 Thessalonians 5:21. Test everything; hold fast what is good. Scripture invites the very examining epistemology describes.

Micah 6:8. Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your God. A one-verse ethics of the good life.

Philippians 4:8. Whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, think on these things. Truth, goodness, and beauty in a single command.

Psalm 27:4. To behold the beauty of the Lord. Beauty finds its source in God himself.

Quotes worth discussing

On knowledge, Rhodes says, “When you say you know something, the epistemologist says, well, tell me how you know it.”

On goodness, Rhodes says, “Ethics is the study of the good, the good life, how to be good, what is goodness.”

Borrowing from David Brooks, Rhodes says character is “not what looks good on a resume, but what people will say over us at our funeral.”

On beauty, Rhodes says, “Aesthetics is the study of beauty.”

Discussion questions

  • Pick something you say you know. If someone asked how you know it, what would you say?
  • Of the three reasons to do good, consequences, duty, or character, which most drives you?
  • What do you want said about you at your funeral? Are you living toward it?
  • What do you find beautiful, and what does that say about what you value?
  • Where do truth, goodness, and beauty meet in the person of Jesus?

Go deeper

This study comes from the Jude 3 Project’s Philosophy 101 course with Dr. CJ Rhodes. For a related conversation, see the Jude 3 episode on whether you can be good without God.

A closing reflection

Choose one of the three questions this week. Examine one thing you claim to know, or one habit you call good, or one thing you call beautiful. Ask where it comes from and whether it points toward God. The examined life is a worshipful one.

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