A Review of Ryan Currie’s Evangelical Theological Aesthetics
A good friend called me late one evening a few years ago to tell me that beauty couldn’t be one of the transcendentals. I brushed him off as I was about three minutes from going to bed. As we traded clichés about the nature of beauty, I noticed an earnestness in his voice that reflected a real concern over beauty’s status in our cultural metaphysics. Over the next few days, two things happened. First, I found myself less and less sure of beauty’s transcendental status. Second, I began to understand my friend’s earnestness.
Fast forward two years. I am attending a panel of evangelical approaches to beauty. One of the panelists, an OPC minister, wrote a dissertation on beauty in response to watching droves of college students leave their Protestant upbringing for Catholicism on aesthetic grounds. His stories of aesthetic conversions reminded me of a meme comparing the art of Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism. The Orthodox have a beautiful icon; the Catholics, a glorious cathedral; and the Protestants, VeggieTales. While the meme brushes past the high achievements of Protestant artists, it still strikes a little too close for comfort.
This OPC pastor and my friend share a real concern with beauty: It appears to be fickle, subjective, and sometimes deceptive in relation to truth and goodness. The philosophers tell us it transcends all categories. The theologians tell us it finds its source in God. The heart tells us it is desirable. Meanwhile, Protestants fall under criticism for producing kitsch art. How should the Evangelical Protestant reckon with beauty? Is VeggieTales the culmination of Protestant aesthetics?
In Evangelical Theological Aesthetics: A Theology of Beauty and Perception, Ryan Currie takes on these questions. Beauty and perception refer to the subjective encounter with God’s objective glory. Currie asserts that in aesthetics, “glory refers to the objective aspect, while the concept of beauty emphasizes the subjective aspect of perception and delight” (206). In other words, glory emphasizes the objective perfection of God while beauty emphasizes our subjective perception of God’s glory. Discussions of aesthetics must begin with God’s glory in order to understand the manifestation of glory through creation.
Currie describes two relationships between theology and beauty. Aesthetic theology studies the created world and the human world as sources of revelation of God. In contrast, theological aesthetics pursues a “theology of the perception of splendor of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ and all reality in him” (2). While aesthetic theology moves from creation to the Creator, theological aesthetics begins with the Creator’s revelation of his glory in Christ. Currie’s distinction between aesthetic theology and theological aesthetics frames the whole book.
This distinction may also explain the concern many Evangelicals have with beauty. Man’s natural inclination is to pursue aesthetic theology: we encounter things which we consider beautiful and, assuming that our feeling determines what is beautiful, make the further assumption that the object has revealed something of God to us. Our subjective tastes of what is beautiful imposed themselves onto truth. In other words, the created object as general revelation has been placed over the specific revelation of God. The OPC minister witnessed college students making decisions about who God is based on aesthetic judgments rather than conforming their aesthetic judgments to who God reveals himself to be. A theological aesthetic, by contrast, demands that our perception of God be corrected before examining and judging created beauty as a source of revelation.
Currie builds much of his own work on the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Balthasar’s theological aesthetics focuses on the perception of Christ. In this Christological approach, created beauty is a secondary matter. The primary object of beauty is Christ because it is in Christ that God’s glory is revealed most fully. Balthasar argues that God’s glory is further revealed through creation. Currie asserts that Balthasar has much in common with Protestants but that his low view of sin causes him to overestimate the ability of man to perceive God’s glory through creation. While God’s glory may be perceived through all that he has made, fallen man stops at created beauty and worships the creation rather than the Creator. While Balthasar (and Catholicism generally) suggests that man can eventually perceive Christ through creation on his own, Protestants emphasize man’s absolute inability to perceive God on his own. God must restore man’s spiritual sight so that he can perceive God through the world.
Luther’s theology of the cross emphasizes man’s inability to know God through general revelation. In order to perceive the created world properly, man must first be crucified and raised up with Christ. The theology of the cross argues that man’s senses are too broken by sin to be a proper standard for beauty. The cross offers the ultimate expression of beauty, although it appears ugly. Thus, God’s glory is revealed in the very place it is hidden: Only by God’s grace can the individual see the glory of God in the cross.
This theological aesthetic does not deny the ability of the unregenerate to experience beauty: “Wonder is not unique to the believer. It is an expression of common grace. However, for the believer, wonder does not end in puzzlement as to the meaning of wonder, but in worship” (230). Without spiritual sight, beauty becomes a self-referential system with no outside meaning, similar to modern and postmodern linguistic theory. The spiritual sight of the believer allows him to see a beautiful object and God’s glory conveyed through the object.
The encounter with God’s glory draws the believer toward worship by which he is conformed to the image of God. The liturgy of worship is itself a work of art which reenacts all of life. However, in their discussion of liturgy, Protestants must emphasize the Holy Spirit’s work through it. Just as a man cannot perceive God’s beauty on his own, liturgy alone cannot conform him into the image of Christ. It is the Holy Spirit working through beauty and liturgy that conforms the believer to the image of Christ. As the Holy Spirit conforms the believer to the image of Christ, the believer’s life becomes a work of art itself, reflecting the glory of God. Currie describes the life of Lilias Trotter as an example. Trotter turned down the opportunity to study painting under John Ruskin and pursued mission work instead. While her art never reached the technical heights it may have under Ruskin’s tutelage, the beauty of her life adds a new depth to her work.
Currie introduces the term “theo-drama,” which describes “God’s action in the history of redemption that invites the audience to participate in this drama and play their own part” (234). Theological aesthetics meets the theo-drama in the liturgy as man encounters and responds to God’s glory in worship. The theo-drama also affects the interpretation of art. Currie asserts that “art ultimately can only be understood considering its broader embeddedness and the part that the artist and the art itself plays in the theo-drama” (245). Currie accompanies this claim with a distinction between art and beauty. While art is a man-made form of communication, beauty is a revelation of God’s glory, which may appear through art. Because art may be a vehicle for God’s communication, beauty cannot be reduced to a strict interpretation of the artwork itself. Lilias Trotter’s paintings may not be as beautiful, technically speaking, as some of her contemporaries. However, understanding the life and work out of which these paintings came may allow the paintings to convey more beauty (more of God’s glory) than a technically better piece with a different context.
Currie develops this idea further by employing biblical hermeneutics as an analogy for the experience of art. While a grammatical-historical interpretation searches out the context of the human author, the divine inspiration of Scripture requires the reader to consider not only the human author’s intention but the unfolding of God’s authorship as well. For Currie, similar principles apply to art. We can try to understand an artwork according to the principles of art alone or even through the context of the artist; however, Christians can also interpret the artwork through its place in the theo-drama.
Currie’s argument provides an explanation for subjective encounters with art. His theological aesthetic implies an objective meaning of an artwork while also recognizing that God may communicate through art. He provides an explanation of this process:
In the general revelation of art, God always transcends and at times contradicts the message of a human artist…The spiritual sense enlightens the physical senses and teaches the believer what God wants to communicate to him through his physical senses. In this way, the communication between God and the believer in that moment is intensely personal. What God communicates through a beautiful object to one believer may be different than what is communicated to another believer. This does not turn into mere romanticism or projection of meaning onto the beautiful object because the Holy Spirit is leading the spiritual sense to perceive true communication from God through a beautiful material object (247).
Currie essentially gives an authentication of the subjective experience of art without validating every subjective experience. If it is true that we are able to perceive the form of Christ in beautiful objects, then we may very well glimpse something in an artwork which the artist did not intend. Further, Currie suggests that God can override artistic intent in order to communicate to believers. But it must be God who communicates himself to the believer; the believer must “test the spirit” to see whether it is from God.
Concerns over the subjectivity of beauty, while understandable, assume an aesthetic theology rather than a theological aesthetics. These concerns implicitly accept that an individual’s perception of beauty determines what is beautiful. As Luther reminds us, our senses may deceive us. It is not beauty that deceives but our senses. As a manifestation of God’s glory, beauty is an objective quality. The subjectivity is in our perception. By God’s grace, the believer is crucified and raised with Christ. The cross transforms his perception, allowing him to see God’s glory revealed in Christ and in creation.
Evangelical Theological Aesthetics suffers from two drawbacks, which both stem from the scope of Currie’s project. Currie draws upon a wide range of thinkers and ideas from across history. The wide range of his source material causes him to repeat similar ideas frequently throughout the book, so that the reader often thinks, “I’ve read this before.” Additionally, the connections between each idea could be tighter and clearer. In Currie’s defense, given the scope of his project, the repetition does emphasize the central ideas to the reader.
It isn’t often that I read a work of theology which immediately changes the way I perceive the world. A half hour before writing this conclusion, I was looking out of the window at a beautiful Tennessee home under the shade of strong, old trees. For a moment, I perceived in the beauty framed by the window God’s revelation of himself to me. I suddenly felt that if I kept watching intently, the world would open up and God’s glory would break through it and shatter me. I don’t think I would have known to watch, to recognize God’s glory through his handiwork before reading this book. Currie’s work has given me a way to understand my own encounters with beauty, and has transformed the way I look at the world. Creation is charged with the triune glory. Praise be to God that in his mercy, he gives us eyes to see.
