Category Archives: Hans Urs von Balthasar

Bit of Balthasar

Posted by on April 4, 2009 Comments Off

“Contemplation’s object is God, and God is triune life. But as far as we are concerned, we only know of this triune life from the Son’s incarnation. Consequently we must not abstract from the incarnation in our contemplation. We cannot contemplate God’s triune life in itself; if we did we would sink into a vacuum, a world without substance, into conceptual  mathematics or day dreaming. . . . In binding our contemplation to the humanity of his Son, God is giving more, not less. He gives us a concrete vision of triune life by involving us in it through grace and our serious discipleship of Christ. This vision is simply the inner illumination of the obedience of faith rendered to the Father, together with Christ, in the Spirit.”

~ Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer, 193.

Bit of Balthasar

Posted by on March 27, 2009 7 comments

“In the reciprocal relations between Protestants and Catholics, the most striking thing is that the latter ignore the former completely and no longer give them a thought: they perceive the Protestant principle as a minus of themselves, something they have clearly penetrated once and for all and have found to be too light, something that basically is not worth the trouble. By contrast, the Catholic is for Protestants an annoyance, a constant object of curiosity: they feel in him the presence of a plus that irritates them, something that they cannot get at and that consequently is always challenging them to produce a contradiction.”

~ Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat, 125.

Bit of Balthasar

Posted by on March 21, 2009 2 comments

“The edifying principle in Protestantism rests on a process of downward leveling: before God and from the divine perspective, all human activity, all so-called religion, is nothing but idle sin and inanity. For man, the only genuine humility that saves is for him to acknowledge this and cling exclusively to God’s grace. The edifying principle in Catholicism rests on this: that the omnipotence of grace is so great that it can take into account even man’s powerless striving, and that, although God does everything, still this never happens without man.”

~ Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat, 93.

Some (potential) Problems with Balthasar’s Ecclesiology

Posted by on January 30, 2009 15 comments

One way to understand the nature of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s “mood” as a theologian is to realize the way in which he seeks to view all of reality as fundamentally symphonic. Indeed one could characterize his whole theological career as an attempt to listen to as much of the “symphony” of creation as possible. Balthasar, throughout his work seeks to provide a vision of the divine symphony of creation and redemption that encompasses all reality without immolating any of it. Otherness, difference, divergence, all of these find their place within the broad space of God’s own symphonic drama of redemption. This overt mood, however is what I take to be Balthasar’s biggest (potential) weakness, at least in regard to the shape of his ecclesiology.

Balthasar’s ecclesiology is fundamentally determined by his attempt to integrate and synthesize the various ecclesial streams of the New Testament. This is seen most clearly in his book, The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church in which refers to the main biblical traditions as the Petrine, the Pauline, the Johannine, and the Marian. The whole of his book is an attempt to take seriously the Pauline, Johannine, and Marian perspectives, while showing how they “symphonize” within the broader Petrine structure that determines the shape of his ecclesiological thought and practice.

The potential problem I see with this is the problem of ideology. Or put more gently, it is the problem that attends all attempts at biblical or theological harmonization. By legitimating different theological trajectories of the New Testament as “exceptions” or internal animating principles within his determinative Petrine synthesis, Balthasar occludes the possibility that these other biblical perspectives might bear critically on the dominate trajectory of his ecclesiology.

In short, by snugly placing Pauline and Johannine theologies within his Petrine symphony Balthasar rules out the possibility of a Pauline or Johannine account of the church exerting any real critical pressure or challenge to his distinctly Roman Catholic/Petrine views of the church, apostolicity, etc. What makes this particularly dubious is the fact that Balthasar’s Petrine ordering principle actually can claim the least purchase within the New Testament material vis a vis the other streams which he seeks to determine via Petrine centrality.

The real problem I see with this is that serious study of the New Testament, especially the Johannine corpus reveals that these broad segments of the New Testament do indeed exist in tension with and in some cases as an overt challenge toward the sort of Petrine supremacy that Balthasar seeks to reify as his fundamental ordering principle. Ultimately I fear that Balthasar’s ecclesiological symphony may in fact be a forced harmony, or even a closed totality that attempts to situate, in advance, any and all challenges thereto. And therein lies the nadir of the ideological and theological problem.

Now, all of this is, of course a distinctly protestant objection to a distinctly Roman Catholic ecclesiology. However, that being the case should not mitigate these points in advance, though of course, ecclesiological commitments tend to function that way in theological discussion sometimes. The real point that undergirds all of this is that the vocation of theology in the church is to help discern what “shape” and mode of existence and mission are most appropriate to the gospel of the crucified and risen Lord. And so, this (distinctly protestant) questioner wonders, is Balthasar’s structure of ecclesial givenness one that takes proper account of the nature of the gospel? Should the gospel lead us into a wholeness that allows us to conceptually situate all forms of disruptive difference within an articulable harmony, or should it lead us into an utter poverty that requires us to face such disruptions and challenges without knowing, in advance how everything will turn out?

Time and Love

Posted by on October 24, 2008 Comments Off

“Time is the revealer of love through its manifoldness, through its slow unfurling of millions of possibilities. Time is the fully unfolded intensity of love, since within Time love can take on the meaning of a story, of a process. Even in a purely formal sense — quite apart from whatever happens within it — Time is God’s most glorious invention, as revelation of his patience (because there is always more Time) and impatience (because Time is irreversible).”

– Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1995), 4.

Against Being Holistic

Posted by on September 25, 2008 30 comments

Some of my favorite theologians to read are grand synthesizers who are capable of building conceptual systems of theology that are very beautiful things indeed to explore, linger, and wander about in. Two that come immediately to mind are Hans Urs von Balthasar and Thomas Torrance. Balthasar in particular is one of the greatest examples of holisitic thinkers. His thought is one of the grandest intellectual projects in all of theological history encompassing the breadth of Western philosophy, theology, and literature.

What I find most alluring about Balthasar is the degree to which his theology offers and answer to virtually everything. Balthasar’s system is able to incorporate almost any objection, perspective, insight, or particularity. It accounts for almost everything in advance. This is what makes is beautiful, impressive, and alluring. And I think it may be his greatest weakness.

I am becoming more and more convinced that there is a sort of inadvertent quest for totality at work in the thought of many theologians who put forth such aesthetic, holistic projects. David Bentley Hart strikes me as another recent example. There is a sort of Promethean longing in many theological projects for a holistic metadiscourse that is able to seamlessly situate both contesting perspectives and complimentary insights, accounting for them in advance from within. The attempt to be holistic and comprehensive in theology often mask a covert desire for conceptual neatness and security.

This is not to say that I am not impressed with or have no sympathies for these projects. They are, in fact some of the greatest pieces of theology I have read. The problem I have, or at least the lingering question I have about them concerns the degree to which they strive for a sort of premature closure that shuts out the possibility of being unsettled and disturbed by what may be discovered in the course of the theological task. The questions are all too often settled in advance. This is the haunting problem of such metatheologies. Beneath the gothic arches of these beautiful systems lurk the ghosts of forgotten voices, neglected witnesses, elusive protests subtly silenced. The quest for a holistic theology, then, is something that is suspect. To what degree does our longing for a holistic theology mask a sort of methodological Constantinianism that grasps after conceptual closure and wants to foreclose the possibility of dissonance and dislocation?

Too often I fear that theologians’ agendae are centered more on the desire to rule out disruptive difference that to cultivate the sort of Christic dispositions that would enable us to welcome such disruptions as divine gifts. The theologians’ task is not, then, to construct holistic systems that are able to situate and account for all contesting voices and challenges. Rather, the theological task is to call the church to the kenotic posture of self-dispossessive openness to the Word of God in Christ which always lies beyond us, welcoming us in the insecurity of promise, trust, and hope–the en via life of the pilgrims.

Balthasar at the Center

Posted by on August 29, 2008 7 comments

Two of my favorite books, as I’ve mentioned many times are David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite and Alan Lewis’ Between Cross and Resurrection. And, in terms of theological conclusions, you would be hard-pressed to find two books that come to more radically different conclusions. Lewis’ study is a bold attempt to seriously think the reality of Holy Saturday, the day of Christ’s death and descent into hell. Lewis attempts to take the historical reality of Christ’s triduum with absolute seriousness for how we begin to think the being of the Triune God. Refusing to go behind the revelation of God in the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, Lewis insists that the radical interval of suffering and death seen in Good Friday and Holy Saturday cannot be dismissed by the light of Easter Sunday. The light of the resurrection only lengthens the shadow of the cross for it establishes that the one who died, who experienced the ultimate terminus of descent into the fullness of death and godforsakeness was indeed God in the flesh. If this is so then notions of divine passibility, temporality, and grace must be radically re-thought without attempting to circumvent the radicality of the narrative on the basis of what we “know” is metaphysically fitting for God to be God.

Hart, by contrast paints his vision of God on the basis of God’s resplendent, infinite glory, as seen in the resurrection. It is the always-already complete reality of God’s fullness, his replete plentitude that enfolds and immediately consumes and destroys any finite interval that seeks to determine God’s life. The suffering and death of Christ, for Hart are not events which truly occur within the being of God, despite all appearances to the contrary in the economy of salvation. Rather these events are simply the event of creation being seized up into God’s Trinitarian beauty without introducing anything new into the being of God. Christ’s suffering and death are, for Hart, as for many of the patristic fathers, simply realities proper to his human nature. God as such, despite what we see in Christ, does not suffer, is not implicated in created history. Rather God enters into history out of needless, gratuitous grace, always enfolding any perceived interval of finitude, suffering, and death with his own unchanging always-already actualized life of joy, feasting, and peace.

Personally, I find both theologian’s cases beautifully compelling, both as pieces of theological writing and argument. I suppose I should come clean and admit that I find Lewis more persuasive, though I think that these two thinkers could be brought to a wonderfully illuminating meeting of the minds (were Lewis alive, that is).

However, the point I really want to introduce in describing these two thinkers has to do with their respective dependence on Hans Urs von Balthasar. One could, I contend, parse the difference between Hart and Lewis on the basis of how they differently appropriate and extend certain of Balthasar’s key theological trajectories. Lewis follows in Balthasar’s train, exploring to the furthest limits the trajectory of Balthasar’s theology of Holy Saturday as laid out in Mysterium Paschale and The Glory of the Lord (see especially volume 6). Hart however pursues the logic of Balthasar’s theology of the immanent Trinity, which for Balthasar is extrapolated from the economic Trinity and which is its metaphysical ground. The immanent Trinity is an infinite fullness of primal kenosis which grounds and enfolds the suffering and death of Christ.

The funny thing is that the most radically opposed claims made by both Hart and Lewis can be found in almost identical form being affirmed by Balthasar. For Balthasar, as for Lewis, the interval of Holy Saturday is a real interval in the life of the Trinity. The suffering and death of Christ are events in the very life of God. Conversely, for Balthasar as for Hart, God is always-already replete in God’s Trinitarian plenitude and kenosis which enfolds and grounds God’s economic activity in the world. The infinite distance and difference between the Triune persons is the holy distance into which the unholy distance of sin is transposed and apocalyptically consumed in the ardor of God’s holy fire, God’s inexhaustible life of Love. For Balthasar, God’s being does indeed include economic events, even events as radical as suffering, death, and godforsakenness. When Christ suffers and dies, we behold the true and real suffering and death of God. However God’s being is not overcome or determined by these events precisely because of the intensity of the eternal life of Trinitarian self-giving, God’s primal kenosis.  The Triune life of infinite distance and freedom is not delimited or determined by its free taking of sin and death into itself. The Triune God freely and openly allows the reality of sin, death, and nothingness a true and real interruption into the divine life, as witnessed on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, and just so enfolds it, timefully into the replete, inexhaustible plenitude of God’s life. Here Balthasar is able, beautifully, to affirm the positive claims of Hart and Lewis without being sucked into affirming the oppositional logic that seems to separate their positions. As such, it seems that Balthasar represents a site where the radical and beautiful theologies represented by Hart and Lewis could come to an even more radical rapprochement.

The Balthasar Blog Conference is Complete

Posted by on March 26, 2008 Comments Off

This year’s Balthasar Blog Conference has come to a close.  Thanks to David Congdon for a great lineup and some excellent discussions.  You can read his closing reflections on the various plenary posts here.  Next year’s blog conference on Balthasar is already in the works and it looks like it will focus on the fasinating issue of Balthasar’s interaction with Protestantism.  

Next up is the second Karl Barth Blog Conference which is slated for June, which will shortly be followed by the first Sergei Bulgakov Blog Conference and finally by my own Bonhoeffer Blog Conference.  So stay tuned to the blogosphere because there is a lot more good theological work to come!

The Balthasar Blog Conference Continues

Posted by on March 22, 2008 2 comments

If any of you have not yet been over to the Fire and the Rose to check out the ongoing Hans Urs von Balthasar conference, you should definitely take a look.  There have been some great posts and responses so far, including the most recent piece by Francesca Murphy on Balthasar’s reading of Exodus 3 and the ontological implications of the divine name.  This excellent post looks not just at Balthasar, but also at Ratzinger and Gilson’s reading of this theologically loaded text from the Old Testament. 

Also Daniel McClain’s post on Balthasar’s creational aesthetics is especially interesting, arguing that Balthasar’s theological aesthetics are primarily grounded in his theology of creation, nature and grace which provides the framework for his christological orientation. 

There is still a lot more to come, so stay tuned to this excellent blogging event which, so far has been a wonderful demonstration of the potential for academically rigorous use of the blogging medium for theological study.

Balthasar: Love, the Final Thing

Posted by on March 19, 2008 3 comments

“Christ’s new foundation, his Church is the communication to mankind of the pneuma, interior to God, which is the location, consummation and testimony of the love between the Father and Son.  Henceforth the Church exists consciously, the unbelieving world unconsciously, within the trinitarian love, which proved itself to be the final thing, the eschaton, because in the midst of its opposite — in the ‘hell’ of lost human freedom — it could be itself, as the Son’s perfect obedience of love even in the realm of the dead.”

–Hans Urs von Balthasar, Convergences: To the Source of the Christian Mystery (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1983), 93.

The Balthasar Blog Conference Begins!

Posted by on March 17, 2008 2 comments

 

 Just a note to let everyone know that as of today the first annual Balthasar Blog Conference, hosted by David at the Fire and the Rose has begun.  The first post, by Lois M. Miles is up which analyzes the relationship between Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyer’s work on Scripture.  Yours truly is actually the respondent for this post, and it should be up soon, so stay tuned.  This post and the forthcoming posts will all make for worthy reading.  Head on over and engage!

Balthasar: Being Seized by Beauty

Posted by on March 9, 2008 2 comments

“Both the person who is transported by natural beauty and the one snatched up by the beauty of Christ must appear to the world to be fools, and the world will attempt to explain their state in terms of psychological or even physiological laws (Acts 2.13).  But they know what they have seen, and they care not one farthing what people may say.  They suffer because of their love, and it it is only the fact that they have been inflamed by the most sublime of beauties — a beauty crowned with thorns and crucified — that justifies their sharing in that suffering.”

–Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Volume I: Seeing the Form (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 33.

Balthasar on the Christian Hope for Universalism

Posted by on February 21, 2008 6 comments

“Just as God so loved the world that he completely handed over his Son for its sake, so too the one whom God has loved will want to save himself only in conjunction with those who have been created with him, and he will not reject the share of penitential suffering that has been given him for the sake of the whole. He will do so in Christian hope, the hope for the salvation of all men, which is permitted to Christians alone. Thus, the Church is strictly enjoined to pray “for all men” (and as a result of which to see her prayer in this respect as meaningful and effective); and it is “good and it is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved…, for there is one God and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself over as a ransom for all” (1 Tim 2:1-6), who, raised up on the Cross “will draw all men to himself” (Jn 12:32), because he has recived there a “power over all flesh” (Jn 17:2), in order to be “a Savior of all men” (1 Tim 4:10), “in order to take away the sins of all” (Heb 9:28); “for the grace of God has appeared for the salvation of all men” (Tit 2:11), which is why the Church “looks to the advantage of all men, in order that they may be saved” (1 Cor 10:33). This is why Paul (Rom 5:15-21) can say that the balance between sin and grace, fear and hope, damnation and redemption, and Adam and Christ has been tilted in favor of grace, and indeed so much that (in relation to redemption) the mountain of sin stands before an inconceivable superabundance of redemption: not only have all been doomed to (the first and the second) death in Adam, while all have been freed from death in Christ, but the sins of all, which assault the innocent one and culminate in God’s murder, have brought an inexhaustible wealth of absolution down upon all. Thus: “God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all” (Rom 11:32).”

–Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 97-98.

More on Balthasar, Metz, and Conceptual Neatness

Posted by on February 21, 2008 2 comments

Earlier I discussed Johann Baptist Metz’s critique of Hans Urs von Balthasar on the basis of his alleged tendency to “sublate” the history of human suffering into the Trinitarian history of God in such a way that the particular historical character of such suffering is glossed over.  I think that ultimately such a criticsm of Balthasar fails to really find its target.  For Balthasar, the self-dispossessing, kenotic love of the Trinitarian God made known in Christ doest not give us a conceptual system that harmonizes the horrors of human existence and sin with the infinite redeeming love of God.  As Balthasar says in his superb little summa, Love Alone is Credible:

“We are therefore not required to bring a systematically conceived hell into harmony with the love of God and make it credible, or indeed to justify it conceptually as love (and perhaps merely as the revelation of self-glorifying divine justice), because no such system could be constructed out of a possible “knowledge” apart from or beyond love and at the same time related to it. We are required only not to let go of love, he love that believes and hopes and through both is suspended in the air so that its Christian wings may grow. Soaring in the air, I also necessarily experience the abyss below, which is only part of my own flight.”

For Balthasar, the claim that the infinite love of the Trinitarian God has entered into the fullest depths of human suffering and hell does not offer a conceptual justification for such suffering and sorrow, but rather speaks a word of vulnerable hope into the abyss of death that may be believed and acted upon.  It seems to me that Balthasar and Metz are actually after exactly the same thing, an apocalyptic proclamation of the radical newness promised in the future of the God of Jesus Christ.  Neither seek to justify or escape the abyss of human suffering, but rather seek to continue to traverse it in hope that the all-consuming love of the Triune God may be found therein.

Metz, the Trinitarian History of God, and the Nonidentity of Human Suffering

Posted by on February 20, 2008 9 comments

In his newly-translated Faith in History and Society, Johann Baptist Metz makes a great many fascinating contributions to political theology, engaging seriously with the problem of human suffering.  In the process, he makes a number of interesting observations about how other theologians deal with the problem of suffering.  Taking Karl Barth, Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann, and above Hans Urs von Balthasar together as exemplifying a distinctly Hegelian trajectory, Metz notes the trend in contemporary theology to articulate a vision of God’s Trinitarian engagement of the world in Jesus Christ as the answer to the problem of the history of human suffering.  “In light of God’s kenosis in Jesus Christ, the nonidentity of human suffering is taken up into the Trinitarian history of God.”

However, despite appreciating the claims of Balthasar (whom Metz sees as the foremost exponent of such a theological vision, drawing solely on his Mysterium Paschale), Metz argues that such a theological “solution” to the history of human suffering is insufficient.  Rather, he contends that “the nonidentity of the human history of suffering cannot be ‘sublated,’ even into a theological dialectic of Trinitarian soteriology, without sundering its historical character.  For this painfully experienced nonidentity  of suffering simply is not the same thing as that negativity that belongs to dialectically understood historical process, be it even that of the Trinitarian history of God.”  For Metz, such attempts to draw the suffering of human history into the life of the Trinity through Christ’s kenosis is to replace the particular histories of suffering with a general dialectic of already-overcome negativity that is sublimated in the life of God.

For Metz this confusion of “the negativity of suffering” with “a dialectically mediated concept of distress” will always attend attempts to “conceptualize and interpret the rending of the human history of suffering within the dialectic of the Trinitarian history of God.”  Metz argues instead that “we have to rule out any conceptual, argumentative mediation and reconciliation between the redemption that has occurred in the past and is operative now, on the one hand, and the human history of suffering, on the other.  They lead either to the dualistic, gnostic eternalization of suffering in God or to an interpretive reduction of suffering to its concept.”

While I think that Metz has perhaps failed to read some of his interlocutors carefully enough (primarily Balthasar and Barth – he may indeed be right about Moltmann), there is certainly a helpful protest against any theodicy which would fabricate a kind of conceptual closure or systematic tidiness to the problem of suffering.  Metz insists that a proper soteriology that takes seriously the history of human suffering cannot be “worked out in a purely argumentative way; it must be done narratively.”  For Metz what remains essential is to narrate the dangerous, apocalyptic memory of Jesus Christ in such a way that it neither sublates or legitimizes the present, but rather calls it into question.  Metz leaves theology suspended precariously between eschatological hope and the nonidentity of the suffering world in which we live.  The theologian cannot offer a vision of soteriological closure, in which all questions are answered, but only attempt to nurture an alternative imagination which proclaims the apocalyptic coming of Jesus Christ which ever and again interrupts the world.

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