ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests the growing field of theological engagement with the arts, whatever its ultimate significance for theology and, for contemporary cultural self-consciousness, is precisely what Hans Urs von Balthasar calls aesthetic theology rather than his carefully distinguished notion of theological aesthetics. Instead of grand anticipation of a theological aesthetics, theology would do better to linger, to spend time, to risk wasting time, with the world, with artist's efforts fumbling and inadequate as they often are to open up that world in material, verbal, and noetic transformations as the space-time of human dwelling. For all the ferment of the last generation of theological scholars, it is perhaps not yet time for a theological aesthetics. The place of the theological reflection is still even in the midst of the affluence manifested in the culture industry more truly describable as poverty-stricken, and people will have to spend more time among the ashes if they are, once more, to give birth to diamonds.
