Jonathan King. The Beauty of the Lord: Theology as Aesthetics. Lexham, 2018. See here to purchase the book.
Jonathan King has a Ph.D. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
and lectures at the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the Universitas Pelita
Harapan in Indonesia.
This book is about how beauty relates to Christian doctrines,
including the divine nature, creation, the incarnation, the cross, and
eschatological recreation. King brings into the discussion such
theological luminaries as Irenaeus of Lyons, Anselm of Canterbury,
Thomas Aquinas, Herman Bavinck, Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and
Jonathan Edwards.
This review is subjective. All reviews are, of course, but this one
is especially subjective because I recognize that others may read it and
have a different impression.
Overall, I thought that the book contained a lot of basic Christian
concepts that I have encountered before, albeit couched in academic
language. Christ is the creator of beauty and recreates people as
beautiful. Penal substitution. Christ manifests glory as the incarnate
one, even when he was not transfigured. The usual debates about what the
divine image is: the human role as God’s representative, some
characteristic of humans, etc.? I do not want to convey that I lack
appreciation for these concepts. Perhaps showing rather than telling may
have enhanced these concepts, as far as the book goes.
Although I was not floored by any of the book’s insights, it did
contain some interesting discussions. Can God be simple and have
attributes? Do humans still possess the divine image when they are in
hell? How the eschatological recreation is indeed recreation but does
not exactly destroy the old creation. The concept of the divinization of
humans, as they see God through God in the eschaton, was a helpful way
to conceptualize how Christians will know God. The contrast between a
soulish body and a spiritual body was also fairly effectively fleshed
out. The discussion of beauty was abstract but was deep: what is beauty,
and how do we identify the beautiful?
This book was not entirely my cup of tea, but it had some good things.
I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher. My review is honest.