The core of Christian theological aesthetics is the religious experience of reestablished communion with God, mediated in this case by aesthetic structures which create, facilitate or sometimes even require a triune meeting between the work of literary art, the spiritually awakened human person, and the divine life of God revealed by faith and reason.
From Christianity and Literature: Philosophical Foundations and Critical Practice
In their book on Christianity and literature, David Lyle Jeffrey and Gregory Maillet argue that Christians experience the communion above through literature when they apprehend the true, good, and beautiful in what they read.
At the core of this experience is mimesis, literature’s imitation or representation of human life.
Jeffrey and Maillet spend an entire chapter arguing for a correspondence view of truth over and against coherence and pragmatic views. The correspondence view holds that a verbal statement is true insofar as it corresponds with external reality. The way that literature’s “fiction” can claim truth is through aesthetics, its participation in the expression of the beautiful.
Beauty is an important theological concept, one that is not ultimately subjective but, as they argue, “is intrinsically linked, inseparably interdependent, with the intellectual truth and moral beauty existent within the life and presence of the Christian God.”
All this is crucial to explaining to my students what literature is and how it fits into God’s work in the world.
My next two questions are this: what are the biblical presuppositions undergirding literature’s use of representation (conceptual), and what are some concrete ways I could teach these abstract ideas (pedagogical)?