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Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) was a preacher and philosopher of beauty. Beauty, relational in nature, was understood and expressed by him in such relationships as proportionality, symmetry, harmony, and love. Edwards articulated ideas about God as Trinity, Christ, the Holy Spirit, soteriology, being, community, and ethics in aesthetic terminology, a language of beauty. For Edwards, beauty was the structure of being, authentic communal life, and genuine religious experience.

A theology of the vicarious humanity, not just death, of Christ provides a fresh way to ground theological aesthetics in the reconciling life of Christ. Theological aesthetics can also bring a new perspective on the atonement as including the “Godward” movement of the Son to the Father, a movement of beauty that humanity has been invited to participate in, an act of both solidarity and substitution. This response reveals the uniqueness of Christ's beauty, a vicarious not analogous knowledge of beauty, thus creating a wholeness and openness to the beauty of the grace of God's creation.

There were two major waves of Byzantine iconoclasm–an outbreak that led to Empress Irene's Nicea II in 787 and one that led to Empress Theodora's triumph of Orthodoxy in 854. This essay shows that, whereas the initial theological defense of icons formulated by John of Damascus in response to the first wave of iconoclasm clearly falls within the scope of John Calvin's censure of images, the more sophisticated theological defense of icons formulated by Theodore of Studios against the second wave clearly does not, thus opening the possibility of a Reformed appropriation of images, properly understood, for worship or personal devotion.

Hans Urs von Balthasar's unique approach to theology took the form of a trilogy of works focused on the beauty, goodness, and truth of God: Theological aesthetics, theo-dramatic, and theo-logic. Rejecting the conventional binaries of both modern liberalism and traditional conservatism, as well as eschewing the radical perspectivalism of postmodern theology, Balthasar developed his own phenomenological view of Christian life, focusing on the inherent attractiveness of God's splendor, initial human response to that beauty, and the truth revealed only in and through that human response. His extensive, creative theology leaves many theological fruits on which contemporary thinkers may continue to feast.