The following is an link index to my recent series on Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Love Alone is Credible:
§ 1 Apologia and the credibility of love
§ 2 Theological aesthetic and perceiving truth
§ 3 The incarnation as the form of love
§ 4 Grace and perception
§ 5 Overcoming reductions and divisions
The turn to the subject in Kant and later in Schleiermacher to justify Christian belief, what von Balthasar calls the anthropological reduction, is precisely what Karl Barth reacted against. Von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics treads a path that appears to be both a departure from the cosmological and anthropological reductions. His approach places God’s self-revelation in Christ, a revelation that appears as love, at the center of his apologia. Of course, Karl Barth was both critical of both Schleiermacher on the one hand and the cosmological reduction on the other. The result for Barth was also a retrieval of a radically Christocentric theology that placed God’s Word at the heart of any presentation of the Christian faith to the world. There is no doubt that von Balthasar and Barth diverge on many points which cannot be overlooked. Nonetheless, it is immensely beneficial to see their convergence on perhaps some of the most important aspects of their work. Indeed, both argued that the form of God’s self-revelation in Christ is primary for theological reflection and shapes our understanding of humanity. Like Barth, von Balthasar does not advocate a “translation” of the truth of the gospel into more “neutral” philosophical terms. In other words, there is no appeal to “natural” reason in von Balthasar. For von Balthasar, the preaching (and embodying) of a particular form of love, that is, the love of the Son for the Father, appears to be more fundamental and persuasive than any form of natural reason. For these reasons both von Balthasar and Barth stand as correctives to elements of their respective traditions.
Von Balthasar’s “third way” attempts to carve out an apologia, a justification for the Christian faith that escapes both the reductionism of the older cosmological approach and the modern anthropological appeal to “consciousness” and “religious experience.” The result is a radically Christocentric approach to theological knowledge that seems to share striking affinities with the Reformed theologian Karl Barth. Of course, this should not be terribly surprising, for von Balthasar wrote extensively and favorably (though not uncritically) on the theology of Karl Barth. From an ecumenical perspective, however, Love Alone is Credible offers us an insightful and useful contribution to the Roman Catholic/Protestant divide about issues such as the relationship of nature and grace, creation and redemption, and the question of natural and revealed knowledge of God. Above all, perhaps, von Balthasar’s work is most useful for the preaching of the gospel today, as it presents a promising way of defending the credibility of the gospel in the face of the challenges posed by (post)modernity.
According to von Balthasar, in order for the revelation of the Creator’s love to be perceived by the creation, there must already be some “glimmer of this love” within humanity, for “love can be recognized only by love” (75). In von Balthasar’s view, the love of God, which is grace, “necessarily includes in itself its own conditions of recognizability” and so brings the possibility of perception with it (75). To be sure, von Balthasar wants to maintain that the human response to God’s love is always free. In other words, it is, in fact, the creature who responds to God by her “own nature” and “natural powers of love” (80). Still, this is only made possible by God’s free gift of grace. God’s self-revelation which is love comes to “meet” us and “invites” us, and indeed “elevates” us to “an inconceivable intimacy” (57).
As von Balthasar points out, the Reformation (and later Karl Barth) questioned the legitimacy of raising the question of the Word’s “credibility,” for such an attempt seemed to lower Christian truth to the terms of human reason (21). Von Balthasar rightly notes that nothing could have weakened the credibility of the Christian faith more than a hopelessly divided church (22). As a result of the division in the church, von Balthasar argues that the place of the “theological credibility” of Christianity took second place next to what became rigorous rationalism. Von Balthasar carefully charts the rise of so-called “natural religion” and the ever deepening division between nature and grace. He attributes to Herbert of Cherbury the “severing of knowledge and service of God from their Christian roots” (26). Indeed, because of the hardening divisions between nature and grace, after the collapse of Catholic Romantic theology and with the arrival of neoscholasticism, Christianity could no longer justify the credibility of the faith (30).
As the condescending incarnate Logos, God expresses himself as Love, a love that is divine and therefore glorious, free, absolute, and unconditional. Precisely because the incarnate Logos is revealed as love, Christ not only fulfills but transcends the Hellenistic search for a cosmic reason (55). However, the plausibility of God’s love is not apparent to us by reflecting on our own human experience of love; rather, it is “illuminated only by the self-interpreting revelation-form of love itself.” Von Balthasar employs the aesthetic category of “glory” and “majesty” to convey the beauty, radical otherness, and irreducibility of God’s love. In the Spirit, the Son interprets the Father as divine love. This divine love is so overwhelming that “its glorious majesty throws one to the ground; it shines out as the last word leaves one no choice but to respond in the mode of pure, blind obedience” (57). Von Balthasar warns against the search for a greater “truth” lying behind or above the “appearance” of God’s kenotic love expressed in the form of the incarnate Logos. In doing this, von Balthasar rightly emphasizes the fundamental irreducibility of the form of God’s self-revelation.
Love Alone is Credible provides us with a brief sketch of von Balthasar’s larger theological project, which is more fully developed in his multivolume work The Glory of the Lord. Von Balthasar refers to his work as a “theological aesthetic” in the sense of “a subjective theory of perception and a theory of the objective self-interpretation of the divine glory”(11). For von Balthasar, “aesthetic” is something distinctly and “properly theological” in that it is an act of reception of the “self-interpreting glory of the sovereignly free love of God” perceived with the “eyes of faith” (11). He locates his “theological aesthetic”within the tradition of the great saints of Christianity including such figures as Augustine, Bernard, Anselm, Ignatius, John of the Cross, Francis de Sales, and Thérese of Lisieux (12).
After discussing the shortcomings of the cosmological and anthropological attempts to provide a credible justification for belief in the Christian gospel, von Balthasar presents his “theological aesthetics” as a “third way,” which attempts to escape the reductionist pitfalls of the common approaches. In his view, the compelling plausibility of the gospel is best captured in the “experiences of extraordinary beauty” (52). To illustrate the power of aesthetics von Balthasar uses the example of Mozart’s Jupiter. The finale of Mozart’s symphony is not something that can either be anticipated or derived on the basis of anything within me, rather “the symphony possesses its own necessity in this particular form, in which no note could be changed, unless it be by Mozart himself” (53). The beauty of Mozart’s symphony draws me in and compells me to listen to the finale; yet, it remains something other than what I have conjured. Although the aesthetic appeal of a symphony is limited to “worldly nature,” for von Balthasar, it stands as a valid sign of how Christian truth can be perceived.
Over the course of the next few days I’ll be posting a series of reflections on Hans Urs von Balthasar’s book, Love Alone is Credible.
Here is the first installment:
Over the course of the history of Christianity, by a variety of means and methods, thinkers in the church have attempted to articulate the logic and truth of the gospel in such a way as to persuade and even overwhelm the many “logics” of the world. Compelled by the Holy Spirit, the church offers her apologia, her defense of the logic of faith, in order to provide justification for her faith in the living Logos of God, Christ Jesus. The New Testament authors fervently claimed that all of the hopes, dreams, and expectations of the people of Israel, and indeed the entire world, had been fulfilled in a Galilean peasant. According to the earliest witnesses the person and work of Jesus Christ was “in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3-4). Further, in the ancient and medieval world the logic and credibility of the gospel was presented with reference to cosmology and world history. When these arguments became increasingly less persuasive to the modern “enlightened” mind, Christian apologists turned to the individual subject, appealing instead to our shared “religious experience.” However, as Hans Urs von Balthasar cogently argues in his magnificent work, Love Alone is Credible, both of these approaches ultimately fail, “for neither the world as a whole nor man in particular can provide the measure for what God wishes to say to man in Christ”(10). Instead, von Balthasar claims that the “logic” of the gospel is only credible as love, that is, “as God’s own love, the manifestation of which is the glory of God” (10).
I just came across an old review of Greg Boyd’s The Myth of a Christian Nation by James K.A. Smith that I wanted to share. As Smith rightly points out, although Boyd’s book is peppered with citations from Stanley Hauerwas and John Howard Yoder his approach to politics is a lot more Lutheran than Anabaptist. For instance, his stark dichotomy between the “kingdom of the sword” and the “kingdom of the cross” “lacks insight” and indicates both an “indequate theology of creation and an under-developed imagination.” Although Boyd rightly challenges the Constantinian underpinnings of the Christian Right, his alternative is a resurrection of “pietist withdrawal.” Check out the review here.
Since my last post on O’Reilly vs. Dawkins has generated such a good discussion, I thought I’d continue to post on the subject of atheism. I thought I’d direct you to Terry Eagleton’s review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion in the London Review of Books. It is a somewhat lengthy review but well worth reading. I look forward to hearing people’s thoughts.But, first a little snippet from his introduction to whet your appetite, “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.”
