The Gift of Protestantism

The following provides an explanation for my sustained absence on this blog.
I recently wrote a paper dealing with the place of aesthetics within the Protestant sect, or, to put it more succinctly, whether beauty should occupy any position in our theology. Since the paper comprises approximately forty pages, this will be an admittedly threadbare presentation of its basic content.
I begin with the sentence: "At present, regarding the arts, the Protestant church has taught us to proceed with caution, but it has not taught us how to proceed." Thus begins my basic contention, and this is in no way an original grievance. Donald Williams, the head of the humanities department at my college, has long decried the absence of any formal definition or approximation of a definition, in virtually all Protestant systematic theologies.
First, we must note that this has not been the case historically. Sir Philip Sidney's "Defense of Poecy" set out to appropriate the arts and to cast them in a peculiarly Protestant light, within the confines and the context of the church no less! We may note the illustrious litany of poets and writers that fall beneath the reformed umbrella: Milton, Spenser, Herbert, Buechner, Marilyn Robinson, John Updike, Madeleine L'Engle etc. But the fact remains that the current aesthetic anxiety is a contemporary phenomenon.
Having outlined, or at least adumbrated the problem, I go on to note that Protestantism, because of Luther's explicitly text-centered (in hindsight, one is tempted to say logocentric) approach, was left particularly susceptible to the hyper-rational subversion of modernism. The reader became textually transfixed and after the Barthian flight from natural theology, nothing remained but the text. Of course, these are generalization, but they are developed at greater length in the paper. To add to the list of grievances, I have hijacked the work of greater men and put it to use in my peculiar program. Specifically, George Steiner's notion of "real presences." At the hight of our textual criticism, the criticism itself becomes the endeavor; commentaries beget commentaries, and unfortunately, scholars beget scholars, and the true author, the "real presence" becomes peripheral, little more than a footnote. This unrestrained reductionism culminates with Bultmann's explicit statement that "beauty occupies no place in theology." This is because Bultmann has discerned that beauty resists reduction. In fact, beauty cannot be tortured into any metaphysical scheme or any recondite system. Its objectivity is unquestionable, but it remains outside of our ideological scaffolding. For a brilliant treatment of this issue, see David Bentley Hart's "The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth."
Because Protestantism has been infiltrated by this logocentrism, aesthetic asceticism abounds. We abstain--indeed we starve ourselves--and make a virtue of it, delineate the contours of our theology through suffering.
I argue in the conclusion that the specific gift of Protestantism is an art that offers a glimpse into creation that does not ignore its falleness. I argue that we must wed the callous catalog of depravity that is Ivan Karamazov with Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith. What emerges is a bruised art that portrays a relentless reconciliation whose vigor and ferocity knows no bounds. Sometimes the only proper reaction to this reconciliation is to remain disconsolate, but there is an undeniable futurity in Protestant art. We will not grasp true beauty until Christ returns to make all things new.
Admittedly, I have omitted some of my more original findings in fear of hijackers like myself, with programs of their own.