Abstract:
This article will demonstrate why beauty is an important value for the Christian faith. This is done by investigating how beauty has been developed as a theological concept by Hans Urs von Balthasar and Gerardus van der Leeuw. Beauty is an indispensable value because the holy encompasses the beautiful. Beauty belongs to the joy of shalom, to the joy of the coming Kingdom of God. The argument for beauty deals further with three questions: the relationship between the secular and the religious experience of beauty; the place of the ugly as a contrast to the beautiful and the question of whether art is only a matter of contemplating the beautiful or whether art is primarily an instrument and object of action.
