Theological Aesthetics

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My work in theological aesthetics begins with perception. Christian theology claims that God becomes known while also insisting that God cannot be reduced to an object of human knowledge. This creates a problem that is simultaneously theological and aesthetic: what does it mean for something to appear, to be perceived, and nevertheless to exceed our possession of it?

My earliest work on this question developed through the theology of Eberhard Jüngel. The Theological Aesthetics of Eberhard Jüngel: Beauty in the Absence of God argues that aesthetics occupies a more important place in Jüngel’s theology than has generally been recognized. Beauty, image, metaphor, art, and perception provide ways of thinking about a presence that does not eliminate absence. Aesthetic experience becomes significant precisely because what appears can remain irreducible to our experience of it.

That research has led to a larger systematic question. If revelation is God’s self-disclosure, how does God become perceptible within the world without simply becoming one more perceptible thing?

My current project, Slightly Disguised for the Journey: Perception, Art and the Aesthetics of Revelation, approaches revelation through appearance, perception, image, form, and concealment. Art becomes an important interlocutor because aesthetic objects repeatedly complicate the relationship between seeing and knowing. Images reveal by concealing; metaphors disclose something by presenting it as something else; works of art become perceptible without being exhausted by their material form.

The question is therefore not merely what theology can say about art. It is what the experience of art might teach theology about revelation itself.

This work forms part of a broader attempt to move aesthetics from the margins of systematic theology toward its construction.

Theology has often treated aesthetics as a secondary field concerned with beauty, art, or religious experience. I am interested instead in whether aesthetic categories can alter how theological doctrines themselves are formulated. Perception, appearance, imagination, form, and beauty are not simply things about which theology might speak. They may also describe something about the way theological knowledge occurs.