9
A second way that we can recover beauty as a theological category is to dialogue
with and digest the works of non-evangelical Christians.
26
The great theologian of beauty
of this century is Hans urs Von Balthasar, who was a conservative Roman Catholic.
Richard Viladesau, another Catholic, has written on beauty from a Rahnerian
perspective.
27
On the Protestant side Frank Burch Brown has written several articles and
two books.
28
These authors raise several issues for the Evangelical theologian to
consider. These are the authority of theological beauty, the sources for theological
beauty, and the formulations of theological beauty. First, the Evangelical theologian
must decide if they will pursue a theological aesthetics, aesthetic theology or some other
hybrid form of aesthetics and theology. Balthasar advocates a theological aesthetics. By
that term he means a form of theology that uses theological methods to derive its
aesthetic categories from the data of revelation and not from "the extra-theological
categories of a worldly philosophical aesthetic."
29
Balthasar believes that only an
aesthetic derived first from revelation will be useful for theology because revelation is the
and the Platonic overtones of his conception of beauty, he certainly challenges us to consider afresh how
we think of God.
26
Wayne Grudem, in his presidential address at the 51
st
meeting of the Evangelical Theological
Society in 1999, suggested that "God may want many of us to pay less attention to the writings of non-
evangelical scholarship," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 43:1 (2000): 16. Grudem is
concerned that Evangelical scholars are bothered with an "intellectual inferiority complex" and want to
prove themselves by being acceptable to liberals (16). The reason that I advocate that we should read and
ponder non-evangelical scholars critically is that I think they have something to offer. The motive, as
Grudem notes, is everything (18). Evangelical scholars should not quote non-evangelical scholars to be
trendy but only if non-evangelical scholars have something substantive to offer. I do not think that being a
non-evangelical scholar categorically excludes one's theological viewpoints. If we can plunder the
Egyptians (and by that term Augustine meant non-Christians) then we should be able to plunder other
Christians.
27
Richard Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics: God in Imagination, Art, and Beauty (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999).
28
Frank Burch Brown, "An Essay on Aesthetics and the Theologian," The Arts in Religious and
Theological Studies 3 (Fall 1990): 11-14; "The Beauty of Hell: Anselm on God's Eternal Design," Journal
of Religion 73 (1993): 329-356; Religious Aesthetics: A Theological Study of Making and Meaning
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics
in Religious Life (New York: Oxford University, 2000).