The Student's Companion to the Theologians

Ian S. Markham

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781118472583
• eBook ISBN: 9781118496442
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

"As browsable as it is useful, this encyclopedic volume reads like a leisurely conversation among old friends. It will refresh professors, inspire students, and delight all who love the church. This is a book that will be fun to read in the short term but will last a long time on your library shelf."
—Stephen H Webb, Wabash University

This two-volume companion brings together a team of contemporary theologians and writers to provide substantial introductions to the key people who shaped the Christian story and tradition.

• Comprises over 75 entries on the most important and influential figures in the history of Christianity, written by an international team of nearly 50 contemporary theologians
• A to Z entries range from substantial essays to shorter overviews, each of which locates the theologian in their immediate context, summarizes the themes of their work, and explains their significance
• Covers a broad span of theologians, from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas, through to C. S. Lewis, James Cone, and Rosemary Radford Reuther
• Accessibly structured around five periods: early centuries, middle ages, reformation period, the Enlightenment, and the twentieth-century to the present
• Provides profiles of key Catholic, protestant, evangelical, and progressive theologians
• Explains the technical details of theology in accurate and accessible ways, and includes a variety of student aids, including a timeline to orientate the reader, reading lists, and a glossary of key terms

Twentieth Century to Present

Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–88)

Mark McIntosh

Few such major theologians of the modern era have understood their tasks as broadly as Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–88). Theology in the more academic sense was for him always a collateral enterprise, something he developed in service to his work as a spiritual director, publisher, and leader of a religious community. Von Balthasar chose never to hold an academic teaching position in spite of numerous prestigious invitations over many years.

From the time of his youth he had an enormous love for music and literature, and his doctoral training was in the field of German literary studies. In 1928 he completed his dissertation at the University of Zürich, examining the changing interpretation of human ­destiny in German literature and philosophy. The following year, after a profound sense of calling during an Ignatian retreat, von Balthasar entered the Jesuit novitiate. After the wide-ranging and interdisciplinary nature of his doctoral work, he found the academic neo-scholasticism of his Jesuit training to be fairly constricting. The theologian-in-making took refuge during this period in a massive revision and extension of his dissertation, later published in three volumes (1937–9) as The Apocalypse of the German Soul. This critique of German idealism and its more ominous tendencies was presciently aware of its times; the final volume bore the subtitle The Divinization of Death.

As the war began, von Balthasar chose to take up work as a student chaplain in Basle. He had been exposed during his Jesuit training to the efforts of French Roman Catholics to recover and ­reappropriate the patristic sources of Christianity. Now he began a similar though even broader task which was to become a lifetime’s publishing work, an almost ­continuous project of translating, editing, and ­anthologizing Europe’s cultural heritage and its Christian roots. Until his death, von Balthasar remained involved in various series of such publications, always seeking to make available to the present the best of the great tradition in literature, drama, poetry, philosophy, and religious thought. Especially notable in this area are his ­translations of the poets and dramatists Péguy and Claudel and his lengthy books on such novelists and writers as Georges Bernanos and Reinhold Schneider. The more overtly theological side of this task of ­exploration and recovery was manifested in his ­translations and original books on Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor. Central ideas from each of these thinkers developed into crucial insights in von Balthasar’s later work.

During the 1940s a close theological friendship and discussion began to develop between von Balthasar and Karl Barth, fostered perhaps by their mutual love of Mozart. Barth’s christocentric impulses were abidingly fruitful in von Balthasar’s thought, and while neither thinker converted the other (and von Balthasar was famous for effecting conversions), their respective theologies are perhaps more reciprocally illuminating when studied together than any other pair of ­twentieth-century theologians. Another encounter, undoubtedly the most significant of von Balthasar’s life, also began in this period, namely his spiritual ­partnership with Adrienne von Speyr, one of the first woman physicians in Switzerland. Her conversion and subsequent baptism by von Balthasar in 1940 was widely noted. Thereafter von Balthasar’s role as her spir­itual director led him deeply into a ­life-transforming ­mission. Her spiritual gifts were authentic and ­overwhelming in von Balthasar’s eyes, and together they founded a religious community and a publishing house as vehicles for sharing and ­mediating von Speyr’s spiritual insights. Von Balthasar spent countless hours recording Adrienne’s dictations, eventuating in some 60 volumes of her work. In 1950 von Balthasar took the painful step of leaving the Society of Jesus in order to continue this theological mission with von Speyr. Part of the difficulty stemmed from the Society’s ­concern that it would not be able adequately to ­support the Community of St John which von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr had founded. This community was to remain at the center of his life’s work. An institute for laypersons who ­continued to hold regular secular jobs, the Community is a place of spiritual formation and contemplative mission. Many of the most central themes of von Balthasar’s theology are crystalized in von Speyr’s thought and in the Community’s objectives, which were designed to give concrete form to those insights: in particular one notes the christological vision of obedience to mission, the silent but often costly ­readiness to allow the gospel to become luminous in the world by means of the ­vehicle of one’s own life. Von Balthasar’s brief, potent, and ­lyrical work The Heart of the World provides a vital introductory glimpse into the mutual theological vision that continued to shape his life and work long after von Speyr’s death in 1967.

The remaining 20 years of von Balthasar’s life ­continued to be hectic and overwhelmingly busy with lectures, retreats, endless correspondence, work for the publishing house and the Community, and a ­debilitating series of illnesses. Amazingly, it was during this period that his greatest theological work was ­written: the 15-volume trilogy in which theology is orchestrated according to the three transcendentals of the beautiful (The Glory of the Lord), the good ­(Theo-Drama), and the true (Theo-Logic). The Dominican Cornelius Ernst once wrote that “­theology is an encounter of Church and world in which the meaning of the gospel becomes articulate as an ­illumination of the world.” This would be a valuable way of understanding von Balthasar’s great project. In each “panel” of the triptych, the writer is concerned to show how the most fundamental patterns and ­structures of human culture are purified, redirected, and consummated in God, how the world is ­illuminated precisely as it is taken up into a lived exposition of the gospel.

So, in The Glory of the Lord, von Balthasar examines the processes of human esthetic perception in order to lead the reader to an awareness of the enrapturing power of Being; and this is made concrete, visible, and actually achieved in the living, dying, and rising of Christ: the visible form (the Beautiful) of the concrete universal (Being), which can only be perceived in the world we have made as the One who is despised and crucified. Similarly, in Theo-Drama, the dramatic structures of human life are exposed to illuminate the real goal and purpose of human freedom, as that becomes enacted precisely in terms of the infinite self-giving of God (the Good) in Christ. Finally in Theo-Logic, von Balthasar analyzes the ways in which human understanding and the apprehension of truth are embraced within and transformed by God’s speaking and self-understanding (the Truth) in Christ and the Holy Spirit. Or, in his own most lapidary ­formulation: “A being appears, it has an epiphany: in that it is beautiful and makes us marvel. In appearing it gives itself, it delivers itself to us: it is good. And in giving itself up, it speaks itself, it unveils itself: it is true (in itself, but in the other to which it reveals itself)” (von Balthasar, 1993, 116).

In the later years of his life von Balthasar relterated an abiding theme in his work, the intrinsic ­connection between theology and holiness. In interpretations of mystical figures such as Thérèse of Lisieux and Elizabeth of Dijon, in a variety of theological analyses of prayer, and in the context of countless retreat ­presentations and brief essays, von Balthasar stressed the inherently objective, social, and theological ­significance of Christian spirituality. In an important later work, The Christian State of Life (Christlicher Stand, 1977; English translation 1983), essentially a ­theological explication of the theme of vocation, von Balthasar draws on years of work with the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius to free the self from a Cartesian incommunicado and a Kantian disjunction between consciousness and reality. For von Balthasar the unity of the self with the world is guaranteed by the radically relational structure of human selfhood. In his view, human personhood and identity come to fulfillment precisely as the person is called forth into a communal mission in the world—a movement, even an ekstasis, that is itself grounded in the trinitarian processions that constitute the Divine Persons. The differences between this perspective and the transcendental analysis of human subjectivity that plays so important a role in the thought of Karl Rahner some­times led to disagreements between the two sons of Ignatius.

One of von Balthasar’s most astute commentators has remarked that “for all their mutual esteem,” Rahner and von Balthasar “never understood each other at a really deep level. Rahner’s starting point was Kant and scholasticism, while von Balthasar’s was Goethe and the Fathers” (Henrici, 1991, 38). This also helps to explain von Balthasar’s concern that theology not understand its present task as necessarily falling into either a grim retreat to bureaucratic pronouncements (he had already argued vigorously against such a trajectory in 1952 with Razing the Bastions) or else an overly optimistic accommodation to modernity’s most basic tendencies (an option he criticized very sharply in 1966 with The Moment of Christian Witness). Instead von Balthasar was tireless in advocating a ­confident missionary engagement with the world. He frequently approached this task by employing a Goethe-like genealogical taxonomy of cultural forms and ideas, showing how the Christian pattern of life and thought intersected and swept up human history into an utterly unforeseen yet ­overwhelmingly apt fulfillment. It is significant for contemporary theology that by adopting this approach von Balthasar offers a phenomenological, cultural, even political alternative to the kind of universalizing metaphysical claims about which postmodern thought has begun to raise many important questions.

Hans Urs von Balthasar died on June 26, 1988, as he was preparing to celebrate daily Mass. Two days later he was to have been elevated as a cardinal.

Theological Habits of Mind

Certain key motifs can be found throughout von Balthasar’s thought and a brief survey of them may prove a useful tool in navigating his theology. Generally speaking, these are habits of von Balthasar’s theological mind and they tend to shape his approach to most questions, but they should only be taken as pointers toward what is always a lively and flexible approach to theology.

The ever greater

This theme, drawn from von Balthasar’s study of Gregory of Nyssa and his Ignatian spiritual heritage, emphasizes the infinity of God’s trinitarian life. Because God is an eternal activity of self-giving among the Divine Persons, reality and being are best understood in terms of event and act rather than essence. The eventful character of being is therefore always in motion. Creation, revelation, the ­incarnation, are all extensions in time of the ever greater ­trinitarian activity of self-giving love. What takes place in Christ, for example, is not simply the figural representation of something that is always already everywhere true ­anyway, so that once having grasped the meaning of the (symbolic) historical event, one might no longer need an actual event in time (Kant). On the contrary, for von Balthasar the kenosis of Golgotha is grounded in the eternal mutual kenosis of the Divine Persons, and as such has a new, eventful significance even for God; it is a particular, actual unfolding of the infinite possibilities inherent in the trinitarian relationality.

Inclusivity

Since all particular beings are created within the activity of the ever greater trinitarian life, all realities and especially all forms of human relationality are never simply overcome or transcended but can become apt expressions of the divine relationality. Creaturely forms such as culture, language, social ­solidarity are all natural conversation partners with theology. The ultimate significance of cosmic life and human personhood become apparent as creaturely existence is drawn not into a completed, static divine silence that negates the creaturely, but precisely as the creaturely is included within the divine trinitarian super-expressivity which is the mutual life of the Divine Persons. In this way the creaturely becomes more alive, more itself, by being embraced and included as an element, a “part of speech,” within the “speaking” that is God’s own life.

The objectivity of form

Human understanding of God is not primarily a correlate of innate human insight or a supposed transcendental quality to human knowing and willing. Rather is it the response to the concrete and objectively present forms of God’s self-disclosure. Von Balthasar is uniformly suspicious of any reading of human interiority that might tend to isolate it from the other and especially to ignore the power of objective form to shape and even enrapture the knower. The process of human understanding is therefore irreducibly relational and social. Thus both contemplation and action in the world are forms of attentiveness to Christ; they are not the search for an inner truth but the means of interiorizing and apprehending by personal interpretation the public truth of God’s work in the cosmos. Hence for von Balthasar human growth and knowledge emerge as one places oneself at the disposal of the other, above all in loving obedience to Christ. The objectivity of the divine self-disclosure is not less objective for being unfolded and interpreted organically in the life of believers.

Calling and mission

Von Balthasar understands the call to participation in the divine life as fundamental to creaturely existence. Central to his theology is his vision of the trinitarian Persons as constituted precisely by their relational processions. And the particular processions of the Word and Spirit include but are not reducible to their missions in time and human history. For von Balthasar this is what it means to be a person, to be in relational self-giving with the other. And human personhood is itself most consummately achieved as every individual participates uniquely in the trinitarian mission of the Word made flesh. Jesus comes to a full recognition and enactment of his personal identity as God’s Beloved as he is drawn to respond to the Father’s love by radical availability for the human other. In this sense von Balthasar sees the ever greater call of the human other as the sign and beckoning of the divine Other, and it is by faithful response to this calling that human beings become who they are created to be. This becomes most clearly enacted as the church fulfills its mission as the Body of Christ, the Spiel-raum, the playing space or stage upon which every human life discovers its true meaning and fulfillment through participation in the mission of Christ. Through the process of discerning and following one’s call within the mission of the eternal Word, every human person makes the crucial transition from mere role-playing to authentic personhood; and at the same time the meaning of the trinitarian missions becomes ­luminous in concrete lives of human persons. The openings here for dialogue with various forms of phenomenological thought, perhaps that of Levinas in particular, are very intriguing.

Plurality and synthesis

Von Balthasar certainly believes that theology is not simply a reflection upon states of human self-transcendence nor propositional speculation about divine truths. The infinite fruitfulness of the trinitarian life means that theology is always drawn beyond itself into the mystery of God’s own life. Because of the infinitely new and unfolding expressions of self-giving in the Trinity, the creaturely apprehension of trinitarian fecundity is quite naturally plural and variously concrete. The participations of the saints and mystics in the interior mystery of Christ are not to be overlooked in the task of theology. Theology’s goal is not to reduce this plurality of silence by a process of rational abstraction but rather to render all the concrete forms translucent to their ever greater and ever ungra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Timeline
• Early Centuries
• Middle Ages
• Reformation Period
• Enlightenment and Modern Period
• Twentieth Century to Present
• Glossary
• Index