I have a minimalist aesthetic. My slogan is “less is more.” This may stem from a brush painting I saw years ago at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. It had perhaps twenty brush strokes and depicted a fisherman in a boat on a pond, with a few rushes or bamboo stalks. Almost nothing was actually painted; everything was suggested.
Here’s an example of a painting of that kind. 
Such a painting does not simply invite the viewer to think anything he wants. The painter intends to say something, but wishes the viewer to participate in understanding his meaning.
All works of art do this, but minimalist art asks the beholder to do more, in a sense to become a co-creator of the work of art. In return, the beholder is invited to personalize the tokens he uses to organize his perceptions of the art. It becomes more personally accessible without becoming less definite. By contrast, a poem like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land practically requires the reader to read Eliot’s mind to understand it—and that is part of the point of the poem. But in neither case is the recipient of the art invited to insert his own meanings as if he was the source of the meaning of the art. Doing that simply means the recipient will not benefit from the insights of the artist.
It seems to me that Christian salvation is a good example of where a minimalist aesthetic can be fruitful. Since this entire semantic domain is fraught with images and metaphors, an aesthetic approach is certainly applicable whether it is acknowledged or not. The history of theology has often involved landing on some elaborate system of metaphors and images and making it a shibboleth for orthodoxy.
An example of this is the idea of penal substitution. This is the notion that sin offended God, thereby creating an imperative (justice) for God to punish the sinner. But the just penalty for sin is death. Since this seems counterproductive, God sent his own son as a man to suffer that penalty on our behalf, thereby obviating God’s need to punish us.
As an explanation this seems to invite more questions than it answers. For example, why does God ask us to forgive without requiring that the offense be paid for? Since we are forgiven it seems we have good motivation to forgive, but in this view God’s forgiveness is different from our forgiveness, since he still gets to take out his wrath over the offense. In fact he punishes an innocent victim, thereby inviting comparisons with the idea that two wrongs make a right.
It goes without saying that, far from being the simplest and most biblical view of the atonement, there are many assumptions and ideas that lie behind it, and many of them are problematic.
However, while I find this view deeply unsatisfying, my quarrel is not so much with the view itself as with making it the touchstone of orthodoxy. I have my own views—views I think are more satisfactory, better capturing the entirety of biblical understanding. But that is not the point.
Taking a clue from the notion of minimalism, my question is “What is the minimum requirement for salvation?”
In John 6:28-29 the following exchange occurs:
Then they said to him, ``What must we do, to be doing the works
of God?''
Jesus answered them, ``This is the work of God, that you believe
in him whom he has sent.''
In Romans 10:9 Paul in similar fashion says,
...if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
Of course one can come up with cavil after cavil, saying that faith without works is dead, or that we don’t just accept Christ and get a get-out-of-hell-free card. But here the notion of a minimalist aesthetic can help us.
The distinctive of such an aesthetic is that, without being any less definite, it invites participation. We, the recipients, personalize the content of this minimalist salvation. In fact, we are instructed in the Bible to do so!
Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. (Philippians 2:12-13)
Again someone might ask, “Does this mean we can do whatever we want and call it salvation?” Again the minimalist aesthetic comes to our rescue. A minimalist view is participatory without losing its definiteness. The salvation that we work out with fear and trembling has a definite aim, and that is to know and be known by God, and, as a consequence, to love one another.
Yet again we see that love itself has a minimalist aesthetic. Everyone loves in his own particular way, but every love worthy of the name has as its primary object the good of the beloved. We love God for God’s sake—and he loves us for our sake. We love others not to fulfill our desires or to make them the means to our ends, but so that they would flourish and their lives would become as wonderful as possible—and that might mean restraining ourselves or even letting go of them.
A minimalist aesthetic is risky, but the participation and cooperation by the recipient that it invites can be fruitful in ways a more determinate approach cannot. The minimalist aesthetic leverages the creativity of the recipient as well as that of the artist. Art that can invite this kind of response while still accomplishing the artist’s goals is art of the highest order. God as the artist—the author and finisher of our faith—seems to have employed an aesthetic that maximizes our participation and freedom while still unfailingly influencing the outcome so as to accomplish his goals.