Hans Urs von Balthasar's Theology of Representation

Jacob Lett

Description

This penetrating study makes a case for the centrality of the concept of representation (Stellvertretung) in Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological project.

How is it possible for Christ to act in the place of humanity? In Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theology of Representation, Jacob Lett broaches this perplexing soteriological question and offers the first book-length analysis of Balthasar’s theology of representation (Stellvertretung). Lett’s study shows how Balthasar rehabilitates the category of representation by developing it in relationship to the central mysteries of the Christian faith: concerned by the lack of metaphysical and theological foundations for understanding the question above, Balthasar ultimately grounds representation in the trinitarian life of God, making “action in the place of the other” central to divine and creaturely being. Lett not only articulates the centrality of representation to Balthasar’s theological project but also demonstrates that Balthasar’s theology of representation has the potential to reshape discussions in the fields of soteriology, Christology, trinitarian theology, anthropology, and ecclesiology.

This work covers a wide range of themes in Balthasar’s theology, including placial and spatial metaphors, a post-Chalcedonian Christology of Christ’s two wills, and theories of drama. This book is also a text of significant comparative range: Lett considers Balthasar’s key interlocutors (Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus, Aquinas, Przywara, Ulrich, Barth) and expands this base to include voices beyond those typically found in Balthasarian scholarship, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Dorothee Sölle. The overall result is a deeply probing presentation of one of Balthasar’s most significant contributions to contemporary theology.

Balthasar’s patristic studies (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor) are examples of how a linguistic representative dramatically exchanges with its historical linguistic partners. Similarly, his narratives of the saints (Thérèse von Lisieux, Elisabeth von Dijon) parabolically exhibit the dramatic existence of the Christian life. In these, Balthasar witnesses to the present through his synthetic method with the past. Part of one’s place is not simply its immediate context, but the church’s tradition. Balthasar’s patristic studies and narratives of the saints re-present tradition by moving forward with it; a shared place between the tradition and a linguistic representative is inhabited in the present. Bieler says it this way, “This philosophy [metaphysics as re-enactment] makes clear that the goal of such a metaphysics is not to cancel out the others thoughts; instead, it represents the charge given to each of us to carry the burdens of others (Gal 6:2), interpreted even and precisely as the philosophical task.” This is why I am suggesting that one cannot receive Balthasar without understanding his dynamic relation to the tradition and his mentors and friends.

Furthermore, D.C. Schindler describes the importance to which Balthasar gave to his present social context in his theological formation and how it challenges Kilby’s critique of Balthasar noted in Chapter 3:

But Kilby has clearly not been to visit the archives in Basel, where decades have been spent trying to bring order and accessibility to the mountains of substantial correspondence Balthasar wrote in his lifetime. Rather than being narrowly obsessed with his own writing, Balthasar occupied the first hours of every day—the most important time for work—with the task of writing letters and responding to requests from others, whether those were famous theologians or first-year graduate students. The “colleagues” with whom he discussed not just his work but the problems facing the Church and the world, the great figures of literature and art, and the central questions of philosophy and theology, were some of the greatest minds and spirits of his time. The notion of truth as fruitfulness grew not only out of his long study of the tradition, but also out of his constant dialogue with others.

Balthasar’s linguistic acts are not done in isolation, but in encounters with others from the past and in the present. Even his writing was a means to the formation of place and actors, as explicitly stated in My Work:

The activity of being a writer remains and will always remain, in the working-out of my life, a secondary function, something faute de mieux. At its center there is a completely different interest: the task of renewing the Church through the formation of new communities that unite the radical Christian life of conformity to the evangelical counsels of Jesus with existence in the midst of the world, whether by practicing secular professions or through the ministerial priesthood to give new life to living communities. All my activity as a writer is subordinated to this task.

One can see here Balthasar’s dramatic mission to act in the world through the renewal of human and ecclesial communities. The display of Balthasar’s mission can be found in his formation of Weltgemeinschaften, also known as secular institutes, where perfection in Christ is fulfilled through engagement with the world, participating in the form of the concrete analogia entis by bridging the distance between the church and the world.

Acts of linguistic representation are theotic because they take place in one’s encounter of God in the Spirit. In such encounters, the Spirit imparts new language, proliferating in linguistic ascent. The continuation and personalization of the incarnate Logos is part of the activity of the Spirit to span the distance between the incomprehensibility of God’s being and the limitedness of finite knowledge. Language is the horizontal, theandric dimension of God’s encounter with humanity in time, yet is theotic or vertical because the Spirit unites it with Christ. Lewis Ayres notes how for Gregory of Nyssa the practice of language draws one into union with God, which Martin Laird describes as the movement from “apophaticism” to “logophasis” (the word speaking): “In this instance, the bride at the zenith of an apophatic ascent, in which she has let go of concepts, images, and all manner of knowing, exhibits, paradoxically, transformed discourse.” A. N. Williams draws similar conclusions in regards to Aquinas’s silence on the theme of theosis in the Summa: Theosis may not occupy much space explicitly in the project, but it is embedded in the overall practice and substructure of the entire work. The Summa is not a

system for a sake of a system…The very orderly structure of the Summa points to a larger than systematic purpose. The import of that structure is the thesis of a mystical theology. If in its particulars the Summa undoubtedly belongs largely to the genres of philosophical and systematic theology, its design identifies it as a mystical theology concerned with humanity’s union with God and with contemplation of God.

Abbreviations

Introduction

Part 1. Theological Foundations for Representation

1. Introduction

2. Balthasar’s Mission Christology: The Theo-Dramatic Representative

Part 2. Dramatic Action: He Acts in Our Place That We Might Act in His Place

3. Dramatic Representation: Recapitulation, Suffering, Tragedy, and Liberation

4. Emplaced Theosis: The Spirit as the Continual Representative

Conclusion

Bibliography

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la religion
• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Theology
• Religious
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Jesús de Nazaret
• Soteriology
• Jesus
• Theology
• Systematics
• Catholic
• Christology
• Christianity
• Jésus-Christ

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268205010
• Langue: English

Extrait

HANS URS VON BALTHASAR’S THEOLOGY OF REPRESENTATION
HANS URS VON BALTHASAR’S THEOLOGY OF REPRESENTATION

God, Drama, and Salvation
JACOB LETT
Foreword by Cyril O’Regan
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2023 by the University of Notre Dame
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022950310
ISBN: 978-0-268-20502-7 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-0-268-20504-1 (WebPDF)
ISBN: 978-0-268-20501-0 (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]
To my Grandma and Grandpa Lett
CONTENTS Foreword by Cyril O’Regan Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction PART 1. Theological Foundations for Representation CHAPTER 1 A Trinitarian Metaphysic and Representation: Divine and Creaturely Pro-Existence CHAPTER 2 Balthasar’s Mission Christology: The Theo-Dramatic Representative PART 2. Dramatic Action: He Acts in Our Place That We Might Act in His Place CHAPTER 3 Dramatic Representation: Recapitulation, Suffering, Tragedy, and Liberation CHAPTER 4 Emplaced theosis : The Spirit as the Continual Representative Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
FOREWORD
The swell of monographs, dissertations, and essays on Hans Urs von Balthasar continues to rise across a huge variety of languages (German, French, English, Spanish, Italian, Polish, etc.) and across continents (mainly Europe and North America, but also Central and South America and Australia). As a theologian who is captivated by the ground of reality as replete and fecund, Balthasar’s work is a parable of the divine creative origin or original creativity that he would intimate rather than conceptually capture. The result is a massive volume of interpretation that seems to be the only way to capture the richness of his enormously expansive—perhaps even explosive—oeuvre of more than 100 books and more than 500 essays and translations produced over a sixty-year span of almost tireless literary activity. Because of the perceived novelty of this work—which novelty is entirely unintentional—a large swathe of interpretation has been expository in form, but in the case of the five-volume work by Aidan Nichols, which naturally tends toward its own redundancy, it has proven to be enduring and necessary and thereby has risen to the status of a classic. A not insignificant portion of the commentary material has focused on particular aspects of Balthasar’s work, whether his particular use of analogy (Junius Johnson), truth (David C. Schindler), theological aesthetics (Anne Carpenter, Francesca Murphy), eschatology (Nicholas Healy), Christology (Marc Ouellet, G. De Schrijver, Giovani Machesi), God (Gerald O’Hanlon, Pascal Ihde), the Trinity (Rowan Williams, Christopher Hadley, Thomas Krenski, Angela Franks), theological anthropology (Thomas Dalzell, Michele Schumaker), sacramental theology (Jonathan Ciraulo), spirituality (Mark McIntosh), saints (Matthew Moser), Mary (Brendan Leahy), tradition (Oleg Bychkov), political theology (David L. Schindler), theology of religions (Anthony Sciglitano), or ethics (Christopher Steck). In addition, there have been a number of studies of Balthasar’s relations either to particular Christian thinkers, such as Irenaeus (Kevin Mongrain), Maximus the Confessor (Anne Carpenter, Cyril O’Regan), Aquinas (Matthew Levering, Aidan Nichols, James Buckley, Joshua Brotheron), Luther (Rodney Howsare), Ignatius of Loyola (Jacques Sevrais), Barth (Stephen D. Long), Hegel (Matthew Levering, Cyril O’Regan), Bulgakov (Katy Leamy), Charles Taylor (Carolyn Chau), Sobrino (Todd Walatka), and Ferdinand Ulrich (David C. Schindler), or to some broader-based studies on Balthasar’s relation to Protestantism (Rodney Howsare), modern Russian religious thought (Jennifer Martin), liberation theology (Todd Walatka), literature (Christopher Denny, Francesca Murphy, Michael P. Murphy), and modernity (Graham Ward, Carolyn Chau, and Cyril O’Regan). With the rise of Balthasar’s reputation, recent years have seen a sharp rise in criticism, from a traditional Thomistic perspective (Guy Mansini, Joshua Brotheron), a revisionary Thomistic perspective (Fergus Kerr), a Barthian perspective (Ben Quash), a Rahnerian perspective (Karen Kilby), and finally a feminist perspective (Tina Beattie, Michelle Gonzales). As it goes with the reading of Balthasar, so it goes with the reception of Balthasar in thinkers such as Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Yves Lacoste, and Jean Louis Chrétien, who, all inspired by Balthasar, continue his thinking either by clarifying and developing his philosophical commitments in a postmodern register (Marion, Lacoste) or by broadening Balthasar’s reflection on prayer (Chrétien, Prevot) and liturgy (Lacoste), and deepening his reflection on figures such as Augustine and St. John of the Cross, with respect to which his interpretation regrettably fell somewhat short.
Now, it would be tempting to force these different kinds of interpretation of Balthasar into a temporal-developmental scheme moving from exposition, through studies of particular aspects of his thought and comparative analysis limited to a particular thinker, to large-scale analysis that either involves complex comparative analysis or places Balthasar in a broader thematic of his complex critical engagement with modernity and postmodernity. Yet, this would be illusory. The interpretative output resists being reduced to a simple chronological scheme. Even if there is some discernible shift to the wider-angle view, more criticism, exposition, interpretation of a topic and/or of a particular band of his texts continue apace, as does more local comparative analysis. Indeed, many of these studies are truly splendid, and a number irreplaceable.
How then to place Jacob Lett’s Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theology of Representation: God, Drama, and Salvation in our general mapping? In one respect the answer is easy: we are dealing with the study of a particular concept, that is, “representation” ( Stellvertretung ), which enjoys pride of place in Balthasar’s soteriology and constitutes a decision with regard to the available soteriological options, even if it is not intended to be exclusive of them. However, it is not an exaggeration to say that this study is not simply one particular study among others. Representation is not only a key concept in Balthasar’s articulation of theo-drama, but, with due deference to the achievements of his theological aesthetics, it is responsible for one of his more original—even constitutive—theological contributions. Balthasar’s Theology of Representation is a book that is long overdue.
In another and more important sense, the answer is not so easy. Lett’s ambitions seem to go well beyond a local study of Balthasar and do so for precisely Balthasarian reasons. That is, if representation is at the center of Balthasar’s soteriology, by the same token it informs and is supported by Balthasar’s post-Chalcedonian Christology of Christ’s two wills and is similarly supported by Balthasar’s articulation of the Trinity. Moreover, for Lett, when we are talking about how representation both informs and is supported by the doctrine of the Trinity, we are not simply talking about the economic Trinity in which Christ is the incarnate or enfleshed Son who bears a filial relation to the Father and whose saving earthly activity is made possible by the Holy Spirit, who is also sent. On the basis of the immanent Trinity being the ground of the economic Trinity, and more particularly that the creative, redemptive, sanctifying activity of the triune God expresses the persons of the Trinity and their relations, Lett concludes that a proper account of representation necessarily involves a discussion of the shape and dynamism of self-giving and self-receiving in Balthasar’s articulation of the immanent Trinity. Aware that Balthasar’s depiction of the trinitarian tradition has been critiqued as being florid and baroque when it has not been criticized for its failure to stick to the limits of creaturely knowledge, Lett suggests that when speaking of the relations between divine persons, Balthasar is always aware of the analogical nature of his discourse while, nonetheless, insisting that the activity of the persons as sent is expressive of what the divine is in se.
In his deeply probing and enormously informed book, Lett is suggesting nothing less than that representation is both a theological keynote and a theological lever in Balthasar’s theology, which, if not systematic in a modern sense, nonetheless is always faithful to the matrix of doctrines and the interconnection of the excessive reality they intend. Lett draws attention to the capacity of representation to function as a theological lever when it comes to presenting the Christian understanding of the person as irradicably other, rather than self-centered, indeed, when not incapacitated by sin, grounded in a pro nobis that finds its archetype and empowering cause in Christ and its basic pattern in the radical giving and receiving that characterizes the divine life. For the same reason, representation is carried forward into the church as the exemplary—if always imperfect—site of the prolongation of Christ in the mode of representation and the Trinity in the mode of the ultimate condition of its possibility, with the consequence that the church is to be judged with how well it performs its mission of giving and receiving and self-emptying rather than by its use of and access to power.
From the above it is obvious that Lett considers his textual responsibilities to extend far beyond Theo-Drama 3 and 4, which is the main textual site for Balthasar’s reflection on Christ and how his representative activity involves going into the extremes of iden