You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, we bring you the third installment of Dan's four-part conversation with Lauren

Bethel, of the International Christian Alliance on Prostitution.

As Dan and Lauren engage questions from the audience,

Dan is invited to reflect on the theology of beauty

and on how our stories of brokenness and harm

become our greatest gift in sitting with the stories of others.

So in that sense, that's where I would go back to say

not many people are talking about a cruciform form of aesthetics.

And again, not that you need to know this and you probably won't ever use this, but a lot of my thinking has been deeply affected by the theologian Jonathan Edwards.

Jonathan Edwards, if you study some of his work, was the first Protestant

aestheticist who actually developed a view of life where beauty was more important than

truth or goodness.

If you know the three universals, truth, goodness, beauty.

And beauty has always been viewed as a rather ancillary, like what's really important is

truth, what's really important is doing right. So the study of truth, the study of ethics,

that's where the real academy spends its energy. But over the last 30 years or so, there's been

this growing movement of understanding actually beauty is first. Beauty precedes truth.

And truth actually is a infrastructure to help us understand beauty. A lot of what I'm actually putting words to comes from a brilliant, beautiful

Catholic theologian by the name of Hans Erz von Balthasar. And again, you're not going to look Balthazar up, but if you ever do,

he will take you on a long 20, 30-year ride of reading. I'm a bright man. I read Balthazar

probably every week. I've spent a lifetime so far trying to understand him, and I get about 10%.

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