Wonder’s Call: Anti-Theodical Aesthetic Judgment in Brian Brock’s Theology of Disability

Abstract

Abstract The standard theological treatments of theodicy deal in privation, measuring out the fallen creature’s diminution from an ideal. The same concept belongs to an older tradition of aesthetics, which measures beauty according to ideals of formal proportion, with ugliness lying at a distance from the ideal. The grammar of “wonder” Brian Brock adopts in his theology of disability troubles both theodicies of diminution and the aesthetics of declension. The author proposes that such accounts of beauty and its declensions have regularly been problematized by the cross of Jesus Christ, requiring theology to revise its concepts. Beauty measured by form opens up questions of irregularity and deformity. The author argues that the form proper to beauty lies not within the constituent part of any particular being, but rather within the relation of the creature to God.