The Trinitarian Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar

Brendan Mcinerny

Description

Although scholarship has long recognized the centrality of the Trinity in the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, no sustained treatment of this theme has been published until now. In this insightful new book, The Trinitarian Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Brendan McInerny fills this gap, situating Balthasar’s trinitarian theology in conversation with both the wider Christian theological tradition and his non-Christian intellectual contemporaries. Drawing from across Balthasar’s extensive body of works, McInerny argues that Balthasar’s vivid description of the immanent Trinity provides a way to speak of how “God is love” in himself, beyond his relationship to creatures. He then shows how Balthasar’s speculation into the immanent Trinity serves as the substructure of his theology of deification. For Balthasar, what we say about the inner life of God matters because we are called to share in that very life through Christ and the Holy Spirit, to the glory of God the Father. Finally, responding to the criticisms that Balthasar’s speculations into the inner life of God are without warrant, McInerny argues that Balthasar’s bold trinitarian claims are actually a vehicle for apophatic theology. Balthasar’s vivid description of the triune God does not transgress the boundaries of theological discourse. Rather, it manifests God’s ever-greater incomprehensibility through verbal excess, oxymoron, and paradox.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la religion
• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Theology
• Religious
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Roman Catholic theology
• Jewish philosophy
• Theology
• Christianity
• History
• Trinity
• Hans Urs von Balthasar

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268107598
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE TRINITARIAN THEOLOGY OF HANS URS VON BALTHASAR
The Trinitarian Theology of
Hans Urs von Balthasar

An Introduction
BRENDAN McINERNY
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2020 by the University of Notre Dame
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020932827
ISBN: 978-0-268-10757-4 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10760-4 (WebPDF)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10759-8 (Epub)
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
For Clarey, Eilish, and Frankie
To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
—Gospel of John
Trinity! Higher than any being, any divinity, any goodness! Guide of Christians in the wisdom of heaven! Lead us up beyond unknowing and light, up to the farthest, highest peak of mystic scripture, where the mysteries of God’s Word lie simple, absolute and unchangeable in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.
—Pseudo-Dionysius
CONTENTS
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1 God Is Love: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theology of the Immanent Trinity
2 A Confluence of Diverse Tendencies: The Sources of Balthasar’s Immanent Trinitarian Theology
3 Unless You Become Like This Child: Deification as Trinitarian Adoption
4 A Blessed Wilderness: The Trinity and Divine Incomprehensibility
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
Works by Hans Urs von Balthasar
CL Cosmic Liturgy
ET 1–5 Explorations in Theology , vols. 1–5
GL 1–7 The Glory of the Lord , vols. 1–7
HW Heart of the World
KB The Theology of Karl Barth
MP Mysterium Paschale
MWR My Work: In Retrospect
P Prayer
PT Presence and Thought
TD 1–5 Theo-Drama , vols. 1–5
TL 1–3 Theo-Logic , vols. 1–3
TS Two Sisters in the Spirit
Works by Others
CD 1–4 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics , vols. 1–4
DN Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names
ST Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
TI 1–4 Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations , vols. 1–4
Introduction
God’s truth is, indeed, great enough to allow an infinity of approaches and entryways.
— Hans Urs von Balthasar , Glory of the Lord
THE CHALLENGE OF READING BALTHASAR
Any interpretation of Balthasar’s theology must contend with the profoundly ambivalent reception of his thought in the church and academy, an ambivalence caused in part by the peculiarities of Balthasar’s work itself. Throughout his academic career, Balthasar avoided or resisted the normative forms of theological writing. He began his intellectual career with a dissertation on German literature and philosophy. After he entered the Jesuits, his early theological studies were profoundly unsatisfying for him. He found the then-standard neo-scholastic theology an affront to the real glory of divine revelation. 1 Significantly, Balthasar never did theology according to neo-scholastic form or method, and in many instances he worked with a clear disregard for its categories.
In the first stage of his theological work (1929–45), he found himself transmitting primarily the thought and work of others through translation in both literature and theology. From his exposure to Henri de Lubac, Balthasar’s interest turned toward Greek patristic figures: Irenaeus, Clement, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, Evagrius, and Pseudo-Dionysius. 2 This interest in Greek patristics led to Balthasar’s first major theological monographs on Origen (1938), Gregory of Nyssa (1939), and Maximus the Confessor (1941). This association with de Lubac and his rejection of neo-scholasticism placed Balthasar outside then-normative Catholic theology.
His decision in 1940 to serve as a university chaplain in Basel, Switzerland, further isolated Balthasar and distinguished him from many of the other great midcentury Catholic theologians, such as Karl Rahner and Joseph Ratzinger. Unlike his peers, Balthasar never had students under his direction. He never had “firsthand” scholarly interpreters of his work, who in turn could form further generations of scholars. As such, by and large there is no Balthasarian theological school because there is no Balthasarian theological pedigree, even as his popularity has waxed and waned in the past five decades.
The ecclesial-academic isolation of Balthasar continued when he left the Society of Jesus in 1950, to help his close friend and mystic Adrienne von Speyr run the Community of St. John. As a result, Balthasar could find no bishop to incardinate him and was therefore “forbidden by canon law to celebrate mass publicly, to preach or hear confessions.” 3 The promulgation of Pius XII’s Humani Generis and its condemnation of nouvelle theologie also occurred in 1950. For Pius XII, “new theology” was suspect because those associated with it “destroy the gratuity of the supernatural order, since God, they say, cannot create intellectual beings without ordering and calling them to the beatific vision.” 4 The solution to this error was a renewed commitment to neo-Thomism. 5 Balthasar was now an ecclesial pariah in his native Switzerland and his theological association with nouvelle theologie , especially with de Lubac, put him under the suspicion of Rome. 6
Despite being supported exclusively by von Speyr and her husband, Balthasar continued to challenge the status quo. In 1951, he published his book on Karl Barth, whose lectures in Basel he attended and whose friendship he made. As director of Johannes Verlag, the newly founded publishing house for the Community of St. John, Balthasar had an immediate outlet for an antiestablishment theological vision. Significantly, the first books published were Hans Küng’s own work on Barth, Justification , and Rahner’s Free Speech in the Church . 7 In 1952, he published his own clarion call for church reform, Razing the Bastions . He also published works on Thérèse of Lisieux and Elizabeth of the Trinity in those years.
Though he collaborated and supported church reform before the Second Vatican Council, Balthasar was not a participant in it. In contrast to Rahner, Congar, de Lubac, Ratzinger, and many of the other leading names in Catholic theology at the time, he had no demonstrable impact on one of the most theologically significant events of the past century. Indeed, as a result of the preparation and work of the council, Balthasar’s most significant and unique contribution to theology to date, the first three volumes of The Glory of the Lord —and thus the start of his massive trilogy—fell on otherwise preoccupied ears. 8 As Fergus Kerr argues, “The shock waves that [ The Glory of the Lord ] should have had in Roman Catholic theology were overtaken by unanticipated events” surrounding the work of the council. 9 Furthermore, by the time the council had ended, and other theologians were becoming aware of the importance of this work, his contributions therein were read in light of his 1966 polemical critique of Rahner, and “liberal” theology in general, The Moment of Christian Witness . Thus, Balthasar was perceived “as the leading adversary of trends in post-conciliar Catholicism,” and perhaps even an enemy of the Second Vatican Council, despite the fact that in many respects the council’s vision of reform matched his own. 10 As early as 1967, Balthasar argued that what he saw as “liberalism” in theology was actually obscuring “the greatness of [the council’s] program” of renewal. 11 But quickly thereafter, Balthasar became for many a paragon of postconciliar theological conservatism.
For anglophone theologians, the tendency to read Balthasar as a whole through his postconciliar polemics was exacerbated by the fact that, as of 1968, the only works in English translation were his books on Thérèse and Elizabeth (1953 and 1956, respectively); Prayer (1961); Science, Religion and Christianity (1958); his work on Martin Buber (1961); A Theology of History (1963); two volumes of essays in theology (1964 and 1965); Man in History (1967); the collection of essays on the church (1967); Love Alone (1968); and The Moment of Christian Witness (1968). 12 While these are not necessarily insignificant works, they do create a skewed picture of Balthasar and his theological impulses, one that depicts him first and foremost as a reactive polemicist and writer of “spirituality,” as well as, perhaps, not a worthy theologian in his own right. By the time his major works, such as his book on Barth (1971, abridged) and the first volume of The Glory of the Lord (1982), were translated into English, Balthasar was perceived as little more than “a Barthian, a mystic, a papalist.” 13
Even with access to Balthasar’s major works, the forms, style, and references of his writing serve to isolate him. As already indicated, Balthasar presented his theology in a wide variety of literary genres. He wrote in aphorisms, prose poetry, meditations, and polemical pieces; theological, historical, and literary studies of individual authors; essays and short monographs; and massive multivolume scholarly works. The variety of literary genres, many of which provide Balthasar’s positions at best indirectly, encourage a disjointed reading of his thought. Moreover, even when Balthasar was working out his own arguments, he rarely presented his positions in a linear manner. His preference was rather to address something cyclically, contemplating a single theme again and again on new, ever-deeper planes. In the description of Lucy Gardner and David Moss,
There can be little doubt that reading Balthasar’s work is to read an intensely “compacted thinking,” which is to say that part of the remarkable achievement of his great theological oeuvre is p