Evangelical Theological Aesthetics: A Theology of Beauty and Perception. By Ryan Currie. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2025. 300 pp. $45 (paper).
The Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) once said of contemporary Protestant theology that it “nowhere deals with the beautiful as a theological category” (4). Although Balthasar’s statement rang true for many years, beauty has of late been making a slow return in Protestant theology,[1] with Ryan Currie’s Evangelical Theological Aesthetics being a recent example. Currie, mindful of Balthasar’s own weighty contributions to the topic, makes it his goal in this book to “build on and nuance Balthasar’s theological aesthetic in a way that coheres with the biblical revelation from an evangelical perspective.” Put differently, Currie seeks to “construct an evangelical Protestant theological aesthetic” (5), with “evangelical Protestants” being defined as “Christians who hold to historic Christian orthodoxy in the Protestant tradition” (4). Following the Introduction, Chapter 2 explores the “undeveloped and tacit” theological aesthetic found in “the works of evangelical theologians” (8); Chapter 3 surveys “the development of theological aesthetics in the history of theology” (46); Chapter 4 exposits “the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar” (110); Chapter 5 “begins the construction of a biblical foundation for evangelical theological aesthetics” by discussing “what the writings of John the Evangelist teach about the revelation of God’s glory and true perception” (156); Chapter 6, in a culmination of the previous chapters, develops an account of “evangelical Protestant theological aesthetics” (203); and Chapter 7 unfolds the implications of this account for ordinary Christian life, as well as for artists and theologians (233).
Currie successfully captures many truths about beauty that Christians should take to heart: “Beauty exists because of God’s pleasure of showing his glory to creatures” (209); created beauty is “a revealer and pointer to the glory of God” (210); “God created humans to perceive and enjoy beauty” (217). These three statements alone would be enough to upend the average person’s dismissal of beauty as a significant dimension of the Christian life, and there is much else worth absorbing, such as Currie’s discussion of the manifestation of beauty in the church’s worship and the lives of ordinary believers. But there is one major feature of his theological aesthetics that keeps it from being commendable, namely the matter of who can perceive the beauty of God in created beauty. In addressing this question, Currie adopts the framework of Jonathan Edwards, who divides beauty into two types, “primary beauty” and “secondary beauty.” As Currie explains, “Primary beauty is the spiritual beauty of God himself, while secondary beauty is a physical pointer to that primary beauty” (209). Although primary beauty is present within secondary beauty, “natural man can only appreciate secondary beauty and does not perceive the glory of God in it” (84). That is to say, according to Edwards—and Currie, who appears to follow Edwards on this point—non-Christians are unable to perceive the beauty of God in created beauty. Only those who have what Edwards calls a “spiritual sense” that comes from “the new birth” (i.e., becoming a Christian) are able to perceive the beauty of God in created beauty (223).[2] At times Currie seems to suggest the opposite, that non-Christians are in fact able to perceive God in created beauty. For example, at one point he says, “There is apologetic value to the unbeliever’s limited sense of experiencing God’s beauty in creation. Indeed, this experience may lead to an experience of Sehnsucht explored in chapter 2 that brings a person to Christ. God may work in that experience to lead the person to himself and impart that ‘divine and supernatural light’” (225). Nevertheless, occasional statements of this sort are far outnumbered by Currie’s repeated assertions to the effect that “those who respond to Christ in faith have the spiritual sense. The spiritual sense allows all of reality to be seen in light of Christ’s work on the cross and resurrection. The spiritual sense also informs the use of the physical senses and allows the physical senses to perceive God’s beauty revealed in creation” (231–32). These two sentiments are irreconcilable—either non-Christians are capable of perceiving God in created beauty, or they are not.
If the objective is to articulate a theological aesthetic that comports with “historic Christian orthodoxy in the Protestant tradition,” as Currie puts it, then restricting the perception of God’s beauty in creation to Christians alone is not an option. Protestants have historically held that the beauty of God, as with many other of God’s attributes such as omniscience and omnipotence, is part of what has been called the natural knowledge of God, “the knowledge of God the Creator given by the Creator himself in the marks of his wisdom and power in the grandeur and order of creation.”[3] A term sometimes used interchangeably with “natural knowledge” is natural theology, which is traditionally defined as follows:
‘By nature,’ that is, just by being human beings, men and women have a certain degree of knowledge of God and awareness of him, or at least a capacity for such an awareness; and this knowledge or awareness exists anterior to the special revelation of God made through Jesus Christ, through the Church, through the Bible.[4]
Natural knowledge of God is made possible by the fact that there is some correspondence between God and His creation, a doctrine known as the analogia entis or “analogy of being.” This means that created beauty is to some degree like, even as it is simultaneously and infinitely unlike, the beauty of God. Hence, in perceiving the beauty of creation, all people (not just Christians) are able to know that God, too, is beautiful, or rather, Beauty Itself. Moreover, the idea that people can come to know God in this way does not constitute a “theology of glory” (something Currie, drawing on Luther, is keen to oppose in his own account of beauty)—it does not infringe upon or usurp Christ’s preeminence as the revelation of God, for Christ Himself, “the Logos through whom the world was made is the source of humanity’s natural knowledge of God in the order and majesty of the universe (though that knowledge is corrupted by sin).”[5] All of this—the analogia entis, natural theology, and beauty as part of the natural knowledge of God—has been affirmed by the Protestant tradition, past and present,[6] whereas the idea that humans are now so dead to the world that they have not eyes to see, nor ears to hear, God calling them back to Himself in story, in tapestry, and in song, is utterly putrid, a misbegotten attempt at piety. It typically arises, as in Currie’s case, from the desire to uphold a strong doctrine of sin and the Fall, but such a doctrine in no way requires us to maintain that the beauty of God in creation is lost on non-Christians. It is enough, rather, to say that while all may perceive the beauty of God in created beauty, many will indeed reject it or fail to respond to it appropriately. So it is written, that those who see “God’s invisible qualities…from what has been made…are without excuse” (Romans 1:20 KJV). Yet some, quickened by the Spirit of God, will be led from their experiences of created beauty to a fuller encounter with Jesus Christ who is Beauty incarnate. As noted above, Currie himself says as much at one point, and in this he is absolutely correct, but it cannot be so if non-Christians are unable to catch a glimpse of God in created beauty, as Edwards insists.
It is imperative, then, that we follow the tradition and heed not the outliers, for at stake is the very raison d’être of beauty—is it merely an extra treat for those who are already Christian? Or is it God’s ongoing call to those who are lost, that they might be found and, as if lightningstruck, find that the distant echoes that touched their hearts have swelled into a chorus all around them, whose earthly reflections have sounded since the world began and will continue until the new world is nigh? Any account of beauty that is closer to the former than the latter lacks a major element of what beauty is for. Accordingly, Currie’s evangelical theological aesthetics, though its merits are real, is ultimately inadequate.
Notes
- See, e.g., Jonathan King, The Beauty of the Lord: Theology as Aesthetics (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018); Junius Johnson, The Father of Lights: A Theology of Beauty (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020); Samuel G. Parkison, Irresistible Beauty: Beholding Triune Glory in the Face of Jesus Christ (Ross-shire, UK: Mentor, 2022); and James Clark, “The Witness of Beauty,” in James Clark, The Witness of Beauty and Other Essays (Omaha, NE: The North American Anglican Press, 2024), 43–120, https://northamanglican.com/the-witness-of-beauty-an-introduction-part-1-of-3/. ↑
- See Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections, ed. John E. Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), and Jonathan Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960). A similar account of beauty has been attributed to Martin Luther, although Luther referred to the two types of beauty as “creation beauty” and “gospel beauty.” See Mark C. Mattes, Martin Luther’s Theology of Beauty: A Reappraisal (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017). ↑
- Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 71. ↑
- James Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 1. ↑
- Duby, God in Himself, 167–68. ↑
- On the analogia entis, see Richard A. Muller, “Not Scotist: understandings of being, univocity, and analogy in early-modern Reformed thought,” Reformation & Renaissance Review 14, no. 2 (2012), 127–150, https://colinsmothers.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/not-scotist.pdf; Gregg R. Allison, Roman Catholic Theology and Practice: An Evangelical Assessment (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013), 74; and Jack Kilcrease, “Johann Gerhard’s Reception of Thomas Aquinas’s Analogia Entis,” in Aquinas Among the Protestants, ed. Manfred Svensson and David VanDrunen (Hoboken, NJ; Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), 109–128. On natural theology, see Michael Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 9–40; Nathan Greeley, “Early Modern Protestant Philosophy,” in Philosophy and the Christian: The Quest for Wisdom in the Light of Christ, ed. Joseph Minich (The Davenant Press, 2018), 314–25; J. V. Fesko, Reforming Apologetics: Retrieving the Classic Reformed Approach to Defending the Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019), 1–69; Duby, God in Himself, 95–103; and David Haines, Natural Theology: A Biblical and Historical Introduction and Defense, 2nd ed. (The Davenant Press, 2024). On beauty as natural knowledge of God, see, e.g., Peter Martyr Vermigli, Common Places, trans. Anthonie Marten (1574), 10–11, quoted in David Haines, “Natural Theology in Reformed Orthodoxy,” in Minich, Philosophy and the Christian, 285; Stephen J. Grabill, Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 161; John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008), Bk. I, ch. 5, § 1, 16; and Johann Gerhard, Sacred Meditations, trans. C. W. Heisler (Ithaca, NY: Just and Sinner Publishing House, 2020), 34. ↑
