Artful Creation and Aesthetic Rationality: Toward a Creational Theology of Revelatory Beauty

Abstract

Much as we come to understand the world through “images” displayed aesthetically in advertisements or body language, we come to know something of God through creation’s beauty. Our knowledge functions through this sort of emotive and imaginative (yet rationally disciplined) communication, and such communication is rooted in creation’s aesthetically rational structure, or logos. As we become attuned to creation’s logos both aesthetically and epistemically, we also develop our ability to know God through the world’s beauty. This understanding of natural revelation prepares the way methodologically for a more extensive creational theology of revelatory beauty.