A Grace of Sense - theological aesthetics

The Aesthetic View of Christianity Christianity can be viewed as a non-aesthetic stance, remote from outer appearances and physical phenomena. Soren Kierkegaard is an advocate of this existentialist reading of Christianity that emphasizes the paradox. “To believe that the artistic helps one into actuality is just as mistaken as to believe that the more artistically complete the sermon, the more it must influence the transformation of life — alas, no, the more it influences life esthetically, the more it influences away from the existential.”  This view is discernible in the thinking of modern theologians like Karl Barth or Rudolf Bultmann. Basis for Christian understanding of beauty: creation and incarnation Most of Christian theology can approve the words of John Keats: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” Unlike Kierkegaard’s mistrust of the aesthetic, Friedrich Schleiermacher defines religion as an aesthetic endeavor: “Religion’s essence is neither thinking nor actin...

Having accomplished the work of creation, "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good." (Gen 1,31) This is the ultimate statement of Christianity (and Judaism, and, probably, Islam) about the world in God's sight. It is the basic conviction of theological aesthetics and its biblical ground. The word "good" might as well be read as "beautiful." In the biblical narrative it became soon apparent, that this approach to the world is problematic. On the very next page of Genesis there came the Fall. In many theological traditions (mainly Western ones) the Fall caused large destruction to the primeval beauty of the creation. Nevertheless, the mainstream Christianity (whatever it might be) has never believed in the total depravity of the Creation. According to the Church Fathers, to say that the bodily existence of ours is an evil thing, is a heresy. The most important thing pertaining to the view of God to the world is, that God never gave se...