“Reformed Aesthetics”: bringing the “poetics of everyday life” back into focus

My online profile for years has begun with the following statement: “‘We are His workmanship,’ His ποίημα (poiema), His ‘poetry.’ If you’ve ever studied poetry, or struggled to write a poem, you understand the care God takes to ‘work all things together for good’ in our lives. For this reason, and many others, I believe in the Sovereignty of God.” The beauty of the world around is not something I take for granted.

Stephen Wolfe has published his first blog article at Reformation500.wordpress.com, entitled simply “Reformed Aesthetics – Introduction” . He explains:

My contributions to this site will be an attempt to formulate a Reformed view of aesthetics. Though Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox think on these things regularly, Reformed Christians rarely discuss issues in art, poetics, music, and other things with the form and felt qualities of meaning. One would struggle to find any detailed discussion of these topics in most systematic theologies. This is a mistake. The aesthetic dimension of life is vital to worship and life….

I’m not advocating for the use of icons, images of God the Father, and statues in churches. Nor am I arguing that we satisfy the latest craving for a “sacramental worldview” found in the neo-platonism of the medieval period and in the Radical Orthodox movement…. With most of the Reformers, I deny this. Beautiful things are not beautiful because they “participate” in the divine. While creaturely beauty is an analogy to the beauty of God, it is not an analogy by virtue of some added divinity. There is no nature/grace dualism. Just as God’s moral character has been created or brought into creation as the moral law, God’s beauty has been analogized into creation as the creaturely standard of beauty. The standard of beauty is purely creaturely, not something creaturely with some supra-creaturely or divine addition.

This view precludes serious consideration of the alleged magical qualities and powers of human artifacts (icons, relics, church buildings, holy sites, etc.). But this refusal to recognize magical qualities in icons and ancient bones, or, for that matter any superadded divine attributes to created things, does not necessitate nominalism and aesthetic relativism. One can have a legitimate aesthetic experience; and aesthetic standards exist. But these standards are natural standards that were ‘brought in’ by analogizing the beauty of God. But more than an analogy, every experience of aesthetic pleasure is a foretaste of eternity. We will never behold God’s essence, but when the New Jerusalem is brought to earth by Christ we will experience God’s beauty in the fullest possible creaturely way. What we experience now is a foretaste of that. All of life, even the mundane (especially the mundane), is sacred.

I’ll encourage anyone interested to read the rest of his article. Follow the blog to get Stephen’s updates. WordPress has a good system for that.

Stephen is a PhD student at Louisiana State University, Political Science, and an Officer Candidate School Instructor with the Louisiana Army National Guard. He is a 2008 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point.