God and Difference

The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Finitude

Linn Marie Tonstad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317383628
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

God and Difference interlaces Christian theology with queer and feminist theory for both critical and constructive ends. Linn Marie Tonstad uses queer theory to show certain failures of Christian thinking about God, gender, and sexuality. She employs queer theory to dissect trinitarian discourse and the resonances found in contemporary Christian thought between sexual difference and difference within the trinity. Tonstad critiques a broad swath of prominent Christian theologians who either use queer theory in their work or affirm the validity of same-sex relationships, arguing that their work inadvertently promotes gendered hierarchy. This volume contributes to central debates in Christianity over divine and human personhood, gendered relationality, and the trinity, and provides original accounts of God, sexual difference, and Christian community that are both theologically rich and thoroughly queer.

Part 1

1 Dramas of Desire

No one has worked harder to connect the trinity with sexual difference than Hans Urs von Balthasar, so it is appropriate that a book on that connection begin with him.¹ One of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century, his astounding output has had significant impact across the theological field, particularly on theologies of the body and theological aesthetics. Although recent studies have recognized the centrality of sexual difference to Balthasar’s theology,² critical assessment of his approach has focused primarily on whether and to what extent Balthasar is straightforwardly sexist,³ without asking the further question of the adequacy of Balthasar’s main object, the trinitarian theology that grounds sexual difference. Despite the challenges of Balthasar’s account of sexual difference, some queer and queer-friendly theologians have found theological resources in him. Graham Ward, for example, reads him with Julia Kristeva in order “rethink [the] doctrine of the Trinity in terms of sexual difference.”⁴ Such a project, through and beyond Balthasar, will constitute the salvation of the world and of sexual difference: “There can only be salvation with Christ, through Christ, if there is sexual difference. Difference, thought theologically, is rooted in the difference of hypostasis in the Trinity.”⁵

Rowan Williams’s assessment is similar to Ward’s.⁶ For him, Balthasar’s account of sexual difference takes “the genderedness of human existence with complete seriousness… . [W]hat makes [Balthasar’s] analysis tantalizing is a central unclarity about how far sexual differentiation really can be said to partake of the differentiation of the trinitarian persons, a differentiation in which there is no unilateral and fixed pattern of priority or derivation but a simultaneous, reciprocal conditioning, a pattern of identity in the other without remainder.” This “tantalizing unclarity” involves closer and more distant relationships between divine and sexual differentiation: if distant, Balthasar’s hierarchy of male and female may not image the trinity very well, allowing Balthasar’s sexual hierarchy to be dismissed as peripheral to his theology. If closer, sexual difference is given theological significance by its participation in trinitarian patterns of identity and difference, which would then allow Balthasar’s trinitarian theology to overcome any apparently patriarchal remnants in his theology of sexual difference. Williams continues,

To engage with this aporia in Balthasar, we need more than an enlightened outrage at a rhetoric of sexual differentiation apparently in thrall to unexamined patriarchy. Balthasar is not so easily written off. What is needed, rather, is a response within his own rhetoric, within the terms of the simultaneous and reciprocal difference that his account of the trinitarian relations and the relation of God to creation insists upon (and I say ‘insists upon’ rather than simply ‘allows’, because it is so clear that his entire theological enterprise falls if these relational distinctions can in any way be reduced to a system of co-ordination and subordination).⁷

Williams ties together the relevant elements with admirable economy: Balthasar’s theology stands or falls by the success of his intercalation of trinitarian relations, God–creation relations, and sexual difference.

Williams considers it unlikely that Balthasar’s theology fails; after all, his project is great enough that “even a theologian of his stature is unlikely to realize it with uniform fidelity.”⁸ But note the assumptions that structure Williams’s (and as we shall see, Ward’s) assessment of Balthasar. First, the intercalation of trinitarian and sexual difference that the latter undertakes holds out the possibility of achieving a theological account of difference, particularly in terms of gender. Second, his intercalation will correct mistaken accounts of sexual difference through trinitarian difference, which demonstrates “no unilateral and fixed pattern of priority.” Third, the promise of intercalating trinitarian and sexual difference is such that we must read charitably rather than critically when we encounter what merely seems like patriarchy. (We can only hope that theological patriarchs will be generous enough to inform us when we are encountering actual patriarchy and when some more subtle, nonpatriarchal analysis is in play in a theologian.) Fourth, it is possible but unlikely that Balthasar’s project fails—but if it introduces coordination or subordination into the trinitarian order of difference, the whole system collapses.

These assumptions depend on the assumption that successfully achieved trinitarian difference can correct sexual difference if the latter turns patriarchal or hierarchical. Notably, the Christian theological tradition seems to have discovered the anti-patriarchal potential of trinitarian theology only at the point at which feminists discovered the patriarchal character of the Christian theological tradition. The basic assumptions in play in Williams are, importantly, just the sorts of assumptions that structure myriad attempts in the contemporary theological scene to relate the different forms of human difference to trinitarian difference.

Williams’s challenge deserves a response—a response that reads sexual difference from the trinity, as Balthasar’s theology requires. Rather than arguing—as do Balthasar’s more appreciative readers—that any remnants of a hierarchy of sexual difference in Balthasar’s theology depend on a natural or secular rather than theological order of sexual difference, I will argue in this chapter and the next two that sexual difference in the Christian imaginary is thoroughly theological, in ways that suggest the inadequacy of these theologies of the trinity and of difference more broadly. Balthasar serves as a first test case.

One form of testing described in the prelude—the use of over-literalization to make visible how a theology works, how it achieves its effects—can be applied to the illuminating character of Balthasar’s use of metaphors and analogies of sexual difference in his trinitarian theology. Such testing uncovers the structures and associations—origin, paternity, personhood—that permit the trinitarian imaginary to function, and to function in ways that go beyond its stipulative content. Indeed, what is used as illustration or analogy may turn out to be as illuminating as what is stipulated.⁹ Or in more technical terms, the identification of something as an analogue of the trinity may tell us more about the vision of the trinity in play than it does about the analogue. The second form of testing—for internal adequacy—depends on assumptions I share with the theologians in question: that there can be no degrees of divinity, that God is one, that the fundamental criterion of adequacy of a trinitarian theology is that it recognize the fullness of God in Christ. The second form tests probability rather than offering decisively probative evidence, since the affirmative structures of theology—the rules for coherent theological speech—offer a technical escape route: oppositions belonging to the created order should not be read as oppositional in God. For instance, whereas change and stasis are oppositional attributes in the created order, in the vibrant fullness of God, stasis becomes self-identity and consistency, whereas change indicates the liveliness of divine life.

I argue that there are some pairs in which one of the terms should not be read into the divine life, however stipulatively restricted; I will support that argument by showing the distortions of trinitarian theology that result when the paired terms are introduced and assigned to different aspects of trinitarian relationality. In Balthasar, for instance, versions of activity and passivity apply to the intra-trinitarian relations. The fundament of that distinction is the notion of passive spiration—that the Spirit is passively breathed out by the Father and Son. Passive spiration is a technical designation intended as a placeholder for a relation not directly named in scripture. It should not indicate anything like passivity on the part of the Spirit—but in Balthasar, terms like activity and passivity are read in over-literal ways to indicate the shape of intra-trinitarian relations, the modes of divine life. Activity and passivity also have gender connotations, made entirely explicit by Balthasar, but I contend that such gender connotations are symptomatic: the fundamental problem is not merely that Balthasar uses terms with gendered connotations but that contrasts between activity and passivity should not be applied to the immanent trinity.

The Theodramatic Nature of Difference

Balthasar’s Theo-Drama¹⁰ exhibits a mutual funding of a hierarchical ordering of the relation between “man” and “woman” and a hierarchical ordering of the relation between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.¹¹ The two hierarchies explain, illustrate, and support one another. Balthasar’s oscillation between hierarchy and equality, particularly in the divine case, results in a tortured understanding of personhood where being in relation means handing oneself over to another with the threat of death always present. Further, difference is reduced to repetition in the mode of reception, which poses a serious challenge to Balthasar’s account of divine and human being. The point of connection between divinity and humanity is found in his account of the inner-trinitarian relations of origin and their extension into the world in the coincidence of infinite and finite freedom in the relation between Christ and Mary.

Kenosis and “supra”-sexual difference are coextensive in the relation between the Father and Son in the trinity. The nature of trinitarian decision-making shows that the order of the processions determines the concrete shape of the divine persons in their eternal relations to each other in such a way that “something like” death and sacrifice belongs to the very being of God; that “something like” intertwines with the distribution of activity and passivity, action and consent, supplication and command, and self-offering and obedience to different trinitarian persons in the divine life and its theodramatic enactment in the world. Balthasar’s treatment of sexual difference illuminates and repeats the imagery of kenosis and submission that structures his account of trinitarian relations; it is thus a fundamentally theological account even though it also participates in biological literalism projected into God. Finally, the connections between sexual difference, trinitarian difference, and kenosis prefigure the cross; thus we encounter for the first time the cross that stands at the origin of the trinity.

Balthasar locates the possibility of difference—and its goodness—in the relation between the Father, Son, and Spirit. The Son proceeds from the Father and is his perfect image, equally divine, yet utterly different. The difference between the Father and the Son becomes the basis for the possibility of all other differences, specifically, the difference between God and creation which is imaged in the difference between men and women. Jesus connects divine–divine difference (the hiatus between the Father and the Son and their union in the Spirit) with human–human difference (sexual difference and its union in heterosexual marital fruitfulness). Balthasar’s methodological starting point is the unity of Jesus’ identity and work, which offers an epistemic ladder into the being of God.¹² Because Jesus is the performative presence of God in the world, both in his own identity and in his relation to the Father and the Spirit, it is in him that the eternal being of God is enacted and opened up to the world. Jesus is “the One Sent” (TD3:149–50). All other roles in the theodrama are secondary, as other human actors exist “before” they are given roles in the theodrama. Being an individual and a person are different: individuals are mere individuals, not yet significant in their difference. When God addresses one, one becomes a person with a role to play in the theodrama. But in the incarnate Logos, identity and role coincide: he is the Son of God present in the world.

Jesus, the only person whose role in the theodrama coincides with his identity, brings together human and divine in a single story: “the Son’s missio is the economic form of his eternal processio from the Father” (TD3:201),¹³ so he provides the Anknupfungspunkt between the biblical narratives of the life of Jesus and God’s inner determination as trinity. The sending of the Son into the world is the extension into time and history of his eternal coming forth from or being begotten by the Father, while the Spirit guarantees their unity and thus the inclusion of the world in the theodrama. The patterns of the economic trinity follow from the immanent, although the two cannot be strictly identified with each other (TD3:157).¹⁴

This person, Jesus, acts as one who is utterly faithful to his mission. Jesus does not have a monadic identity with defined boundaries; his identity is from the beginning relational. His very identity depends on his relation to the Father and the Spirit: who Jesus is in history is determ...