Now we turn to one of the most positive and direct contributors to the life and work of Hans Urs von Balthasar: the great Protestant theologian, Karl Barth (pronounced "Bart") and the analogy of faith. Next post (and last!) will be about Adrienne von Speyr. Karl just took up so much space!
Karl Barth and the Analogy of Faith
Karl Barth is one of the most important theologians in the modern history of Protestantism. His goal was to throw off of Christian faith the dead weight of Liberal Protestantism that reduced Jesus to a moral teacher and wise man, rather than the Savior and Redeemer that we all desperately need. In a sense you could say that he was engaged in his own ressourcement of Martin Luther, understanding anew the judgment of God against the hopeless world made clear in his Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Though Balthasar was known as a convert maker, Barth would be the one that got away. Here was Protestantism in its most challenging and most critical phase, and the two would become both great friends and fierce adversaries.
First and foremost, Karl Barth rejected wholly the concept of the analogy of being, which was the set of philosophical presuppositions that Balthasar held to from his mentor, Pryzwara. Now, when I say "rejected" I mean this is the strongest possible way. Barth saw the analogy of being as a doctrine of the Anti-Christ, pure and simple, and as long as the Catholic Church upheld this analogy of being, then the Church is in league with the devil. This wholesale rejection would forever keep Barth out of the Catholic Church.
For Balthasar, the analogy of being remains the only answer without which no possibility in Christian thought could even begin. The reason it is possible for us to think and feel as Christians is precisely our recourse to the analogy of being, and this is the greatest difference between Catholic and Protestant theologies. The analogy of being allows one to navigate the tension between the extreme polarities of, on the one hand, complete and total identity of everything and the other extreme of complete contradiction in which nothing is the same. Applied to God, we have the identity of God and the world on one side and on the other is that complete "dialectic of opposition" between God and the world, finding in the world only evil and depravity. One elevates the transcendence of God that it robs the world of any meaning or reality, and the other is so overwhelmed by God's presence that either God absorbs the world (theopanism) or the world absorbs God (pantheism).
Barthian opposition of God to the world is appealing in its simplicity, but Balthasar finds it unsatisfactory, for he said, "That posture is finally impossible to sustain." It is impossible because you are blotting out all hope if God stands in absolute judgment against the world. There must be a common ground between God and man - being - otherwise God could not judge the world, for the world would find the divine judgment unintelligible. "Only the analogy of being" says Hans Urs, "is the contradiction of sin understood. Otherwise creation and sin would collapse together into the same thing." Just by being a living thing, in the Barthian vision, I am a condemned thing. Balthasar continues:
"Every real contra presupposes a constantly to be understood relationship, and thus at least a minimal community in order to be really a contra and not a totally unrelated Other. Only on the basis of an analogy is sin possible."
Dr. Regis Martin, commenting in his lectures about this situation, says that it is "only on the basis of the analogy of being that grace is possible. Covenant completes creation, God completes man in Jesus Christ." He continues that "in the absence of this analogy (of being), sin is not possible because creation becomes that sin. Virtue, grace, these things are only possible in an analogical universe." In other words, there has to be a real relationship between God and man for man to even sin against that relationship. For God to stand in opposition to man, to the world, there has to first be a correspondance between the two that this opposition is rooted in. God created man and all of nature to be completed in Him. God is existence, we share in that existence. Our being is solely participatory in the existence of God. This is the analogy of being that restrains the poles of absolute identification and absolute contradiction.
But all is not lost between the two geniuses! Balthasar seeks out something they can both agree upon, and this agreement becomes the mold of the rest of Hans Urs von Balthasar's theological writings: the analogy of faith centered on the person of Jesus Christ. Through the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, God himself creates a community between himself and the world he made. We can speak of this community as a saving space of grace and salvation. To the extent to which we believe this we are able to achieve this relationship with God himself. Both Protestants and Catholics believe that with my identification in Christ, something new enters the world, a distinct and ontological difference occurs in Christ. This is the analogy of faith.
For Balthasar, in the concrete order of salvation the analogy of faith comes to represent the final form of the relationship between God and humanity, and it is this relationship that God has intended from the beginning for humanity. This is due probably to the influence of Henri de Lubac's understanding of the paradox of the spiritual creature who is "ordained beyond itself by the innermost reality of its nature to a goal that is unreachable by that nature, that can only be given by a gift of grace." As Dr. Martin expressed it: "Hence is the paradox: I hunger for a food that I cannot bake. I aspire to the heaven that I cannot attain."
This goal that is at the core of my humanity cannot be attained by my humanity alone, but rather it is through grace alone that all can be attained. It is in relationship to Jesus Christ that all things are to be judged. He is the line of horizon between the temporal and the eternal, between nature and grace. Jesus sets the standard, or rather, he is the standard, the benchmark. But for Hans Urs and not for Karl, the presuppositions of the whole natural order remain in tact, and this is where the two part company.
Both grace and nature find their ultimate meaning in Christ while at the same time they remain themselves, they do not collapse into one another. There is a place for natural theology, for philosophy, for nature. Reason can accomplish great things for God and even sin cannot and does not completely displace God in nature and in the human heart. Even as sin contradicts and corrupts the relationship between God and man, it is not wholly thrown away. The doctrine of total depravity is a hopeless starting point. C.S. Lewis rejected total depravity because he thought that if the individual person was completely depraved then no one would ever accept the Good News because they would not think it was good, in any way! Nature is made for grace and when it fell from grace it was not totally obliterated.
There is room in the analogy of faith for Balthasar's analogy of being, but he puts that conversation on hold for the time being in order to honestly engage Barth in his project, which is the Christocentric revolution in theology. What each one sought to do was "to make Christ the center towards which all things tend" (Pascal). Christ himself becomes the object of all analogical predications, the still point of the turning universe. In the analogy of faith Christ still remains utterly different while at the same time we are wholly united to Christ and as such Christ identifies with everything and everyone. In him all things are united, while still allowed to remain itself. What these two men wanted in their respective theologies to do was to make the center of gravity, the most profound point of unity, is Jesus Christ.
"Not for a single moment can theology forget its roots from which all of its nourishments are drawn. Adoration in which we see in faith the heavens opened and obedience in living which frees us in understanding the truth." (Balthasar, Explorations in Theology)
Barth led von Balthasar into this Christocentric revolution in Catholic theology, which can be traced back to Barth's Church Dogmatics. There are three themes in this Christocentric revolution of the analogy of faith. First, all theology must begin with Jesus, the relation between God and man, as "the historical self-emptying of the eternal self-interpretation of the Father in the Son." Jesus is the "form of all forms" Who am I and what I must do is contained in Christ's sacred humanity, for in him the whole meaning of Adam is completed.
Secondly, Christology is at the center of Christianity and the cross is at the center of Christology. The life of the God-Man culminates in the Paschal Mystery of his suffering, death and Resurrection. Jesus always remains in obedience to the Father. The Father always comes first, and so it is Jesus who climbs the cross to overcome all alienation.
Third and finally, the theology of history has Christ as the central protagonist. Christ is the concrete expression of that universality of being and meaning which belongs to God by virtue of his being god. In his humanness, all universality and the particularity are gathered up and given weight - he saves everything in the ambit of his sacred humanity. And as God, he is the fullness of meaning. Here is Dr. Martin made this illuminating contribution to the Christological revolution of Balthasar. He said that
"Jesus is unable to be assumed under a larger rubic. All things are measured in relation to him and paradoxically, in him are absolute exclusivity and absolute inclusivity."
Thus in the work of Karl Barth on the Christocentric revolution of Protestant theology, Balthasar, his friend and adversary, were able to build the analogy of faith, seeing in Jesus the center point of all mediation with God. However, much to Hans Urs von Balthasar's great sadness at the end of his life, this project was not fully undertaken in the Catholic Church. There are several reasons for this that Dr. Regis Martin posits.
First, there were those theologians who found their lives and work adverse to this Christocentrism because they were too enamored with Kantian idealism. For these Transcendental Thomists, it was the turn to subjectivity that was the approach, the point of departure. Balthasar saw this as bad, for the real point should always be Christ at the center.
Second, there is the evolutionary progress in theology of Teilhard de Chardin. He swept up the thought of Catholicism after the Council with this theology, though it was presented not under theological prose, but as poetry. He was a faithful son of the Church and a friend to de Lubac, but this theology actually led people away from the Church, losing their faith, and preventing this revolution from bearing its fruit.
Third, we have Marxism, or rather, we have the imposition of ideological faith. Christ is lost, his image is exchanged for Che or Castro. Theologians became ideologues and co-opted Christ for their ideologies, not allowing Christ to be the center.
Fourth and finally, there was a tremendous loss of energy after the Council. Much of the energy was shifted from renewal to restructuring, that is, according to Martin, there was "administrative reform and not renewing her heart, not focusing on the mysteries of the faith. This drew people away from the Church."
But the analogy of faith represents for von Balthasar the pro nobis character of our Lord at the heart of the Creed.
"It was for us that the Son came down from heaven, for us that he was crucified, died and was buried. And this means not only for our benefit but in our place, taking over what is our due. If this is watered down, then the fundamental tenant of the New Testament disappears, and it looks as if God is always reconciled, as if sin is always forgiving... Then the cross would just be a symbol, effecting nothing. There would no longer be the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. ...Without noticing it we have beocme like the men of the Enlightenment, acknowledging his countenance but ignoring his anger towards sin. We run the risk of loosing sight of the integrity of that image [of the severely blood crucifix] and we view it as some Medieval exaggeration, and costly grace becomes a cheap price."
We can say that all of Balthasar's theologizing turns to this event of the Cross, and in response to this we live between the two poles of Adoration and Obedience, of Saint John the Apostle and Saint Ignatius of Loyola, of the contemplative and the active life.
"The life of Jesus was at first a life of teaching. But finally it became a life of suffering unto death. The blazing absolute character of the teaching that shine in everything he said can only be understood if the whole movement of his life is seen as a movement toward the cross; sot that the words and deeds are validated by the passion, which explains everything if one interprets the passion as a subsequent catastrophe then every word, not excluding the Sermon on the Mount, becomes unintelligible. The intelligible content, the Logos of teh teaching and everything he did, can only be read in the light of his Hour, the Hour he waited for, the baptism he longed for, the Hour of the Father, of glory." (Love Alone is Credible)
Christocentrism focuses us on Jesus and his cross. Our response to the moment of Jesus' full self-disclosure that "God is love" in the mysteries of Good Friday and Holy Saturday is adoration and obedience.
Next post we will - finally! - finish with the influences of the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar with the most important one of all, Adrienne von Speyr.
Peace,
gomer
AMDG
“God is not a sealed fortress to be attacked and seized by our engines of war: ascetic practices, meditative techniques, but rather God is a house of open doors through which one can enter…” - von Balthasar
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