The Aesthetic Collision: Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Trinity and the Cross

The relationship envisioned by Hans Urs von Balthasar between the Trinity and the events of Christ's passion and death has elicited concern from various theologians that he has muddled the important distinction between God's eternal life ad intra and his interaction with the world through the economy of his actions. This article argues that such a reading of Balthasar's theology is ultimately a serious misconstrual of his work since it overlooks the aesthetic categories established early in The Glory of the Lord through which his narration of the cross‐event must ultimately be interpreted. By interpreting Balthasar in this manner, this article clarifies the content of what is perhaps Balthasar's most important theological contribution, and provides a creative alternative for how best to situate the relationship (oft‐discussed in twentieth‐century theology) between the Trinity and the crucifixion.     

A Compelling Trinitarian Taxonomy: Hans Urs von Balthasar's Theology of the Trinitarian Inversion and Reversion

In trinitarian theology, the problematic place of the Holy Spirit in the taxonomy of the immanent Trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) does not seem to correspond to what is revealed in the economy (Father, Holy Spirit and Son). Because of this pneumatological problem, some theologians have abandoned the traditional trinitarian taxonomy. This approach, however, does not provide a finally convincing answer that is consistent with both the biblical witness and the theological tradition. In this article, I argue that Hans Urs von Balthasar's theology of the trinitarian inversion and reversion does provide a convincing answer to the trinitarian taxonomy problem. After supporting my thesis by first referencing the traditional trinitarian taxonomy offered in Augustine's de Trinitate and then examining the possibility of abandoning the taxonomy given by Jürgen Moltmann and Leonardo Boff, I will offer von Balthasar's solution as the most compelling trinitarian taxonomy, especially in light of the ecumenical dialogue between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.     

A Cry of Dereliction? Reconsidering a Recent Theological Commonplace

Abstract: The ‘cry of dereliction’ (‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’) has often been understood in recent theology as pointing to a genuine abandonment of the Son by the Father in the event of the cross. Hans Urs von Balthasar's account of this is explored, and exegetical and theological reasons are offered for preferring a more traditional account in which the unity of the Trinity remains unbroken by human sin.     

A Sacramental Vision: Environmental Degradation and the Aesthetics of Creation

This article contends that Hans Urs von Balthasar's theological focus on seeing the form of God's glory in creation constitutes a critical resource for elaborating a contemporary Christian theology responsive to the crisis of environmental degradation. In particular, in this article Martin Heidegger's reflections on the environmental dangers present in modern technology provide the framework for analyzing the ecological significance of Balthasar's retrieval of a Christian sacramental ontology.     

The Chalcedonian Logic of John Wesley's Christology

This article addresses John Wesley's theology of the person of Jesus Christ. Against those who have discerned either a Monophysite or a Nestorian trajectory, it argues that Wesley's Christology as a whole conforms to a Chalcedonian grammar, displaying certain Alexandrian–Lutheran tendencies in particular. It does so in three stages. First, it examines Wesley's emphasis on Christ's divinity, his ostensible reservations about Christ's humanity, and his view of the hypostatic union in the context of dogmatic christological traditions. Second, it situates his christological emphases within his deistic ideological context. Finally, it briefly illuminates the connection between Wesley's thought on Christ's person and his theology of Christ's work.     

Torture and Theology of the Cross

Abstract : A theology of the cross must (1) connect Christ's cross with the reality of torture, and (2) differentiate misuse of Christ's crucifixion from its power in the struggle against torture. To meet these tasks, a theology of the cross needs to (1) refuse to separate Christ's crucifixion from his life and resurrection, and (2) recognize that the crucified Christ can only be understood in relation to all Christ's suffering sisters and brothers.     

Imitating Christ's Cross: Lonergan and Girard on How and Why

The article begins with the gospels’ admonition to take up one's cross and asks how Christians might understand Christ's work on the cross so that we might better imitate or participate in it. Using tools from recent advances in literary analysis and systematic theology, the article attempts to provide some answer to this question. It considers contemporary feminist and liberation theologians’ criticism of the common but problematic interpretation of Christ's cross, what is often called ‘substitutionary penal atonement.’ It compares this with Anselm's atonement theory of satisfaction and Bernard Lonergan's and René Girard's analysis of the cross as a communication of love that invites others into loving relationship. With these interpretations of Christ's work, it concludes with some thoughts on how Christians might take up their own daily crosses.     

ROBERT JENSON ON THE PRE-EXISTENCE OF CHRIST

In his recent two‐volume Systematic Theology, Robert Jenson offers an account of Christ's pre‐existence that is, in several important respects, an original contribution to the literature. In this article, I offer a critical interaction with Jenson's doctrine. In particular, I show that what Jenson has to say about (a) divine eternity and (b) the relationship between philosophy and theology, have important bearings on his construal of Christ's pre‐existence and, in the final analysis, skew what he has to say on the matter. I conclude that Jenson's account of this doctrine, though suggestive and insightful in several respects, is unsuccessful, indeed, incoherent, as it stands.     

“Make no provision for the flesh”: recognizing the incarnation in and after Augustine

This article argues for the importance of the intelligibility of the sexed body to incarnational theology. Building on Mark Jordan's reading of Augustine, I focus on the paradox of the incarnation as both the bodily sign (signa) of God and God Godself as the thing that the sign signifies (res). Through an analysis of the debates around Leo Steinberg's work on the meaning of Christ's genitals in Renaissance art, I explore the ways in which depicting the incarnation is a paradoxical exercise of depicting God's fully human body. I argue that attention to the paradox of the incarnation as both sign and thing can disrupt ideologies of sexual difference that force bodies to be intelligible as unambiguously sexed, while the question of sexual difference can work within incarnational theology to disturb the equivalence of full humanity and unambiguous maleness.     

Beyond Existentialism: Kierkegaard on the Human Relationship with the God Who is Wholly Other

Recent scholarship argues that, for Kierkegaard, God's absolute alterity is a consequence of sin that is overcome by the redemptive activity of Jesus Christ. On such a reading, the work of Christ delivers individuals to lives of faith that are not infinitely qualitatively different from God. This fails to recognize that the absolute otherness of God is overcome not simply by the redemptive work of Christ but in and through the person of Christ. The failure to grasp this has tied Kierkegaard to an anthropocentric theology that prioritizes Christ's contribution to existential human development. This article challenges this perception by establishing Kierkegaard's emphasis that God would remain infinitely removed from humanity were it not for the continuing mediation of Jesus Christ.     

‘The Body of Christ is Made From Bread’: Transubstantiation and the Grammar of Creation

Aquinas's theology of Christ's eucharistic presence, often identified by the term ‘transubstantiation’, can best be understood by locating it in relation to the ‘grammar’ of the creator–creature relationship. After a brief overview of Aquinas on creation, the article examines closely Aquinas's analysis of the statement that ‘the body of Christ is made from bread’. This allows us to begin to imagine how Aquinas might respond to one of the most influential contemporary critiques of his sacramental theology: that of Louis‐Marie Chauvet. In addition, such an examination casts new light on Aquinas's doctrine of creation itself.     

Unapocalyptic Theology: History and Eschatology in Balthasar's Theo‐Drama

In this essay, I evaluate the claim that Hans Urs von Balthasar's interpretation of trinitarian doctrine undermines the importance of history for the Christian God. Where other critics argue that the very distinction between immanent and economic Trinity robs the economy of salvation of theological significance, I contend that the underlying problem lies in how Balthasar restricts the theo‐drama to an event between heaven and earth on the cross of Golgotha. Through this limitation of God's active involvement in history to a single event, Balthasar's theo‐drama becomes an “unapocalyptic theology”, which devalues God's salvific history with the world and the biblical expectation of an eschatological end of history. Furthermore, Balthasar underplays the messianic‐political dimension of the Christian concept of salvation and thereby cements the status quo of a yet unredeemed world.     

Martin Luther on Preaching Christ Present

This article advances the thesis that proclamation in Martin Luther's theology illumines Christ's non‐manipulative presence and sacrament his available presence. It is demonstrated that Luther's interest in the church as Mundhaus was not advanced at the expense of an emphasis on the sacraments. Hearing and seeing as correlates of Word and sacrament advance different theological points of emphasis vis‐à‐vis Christ's sovereign yet available presence. Moreover, I suggest that these themes of Word and sacrament – held in tension – roughly correspond to the following pairs in the thought of Luther: pride and despair; redemption and creation; and forensic and effective metaphors of justification. In conclusion, some suggestions regarding the utility of the theme of real presence are advanced for understanding the world as the object of God's saving actions.     

POETRY AGAINST EVIL: A BULGAKOVIAN THEOLOGY OF POETRY1

The essay introduces Sergei Bulgakov's theology of creation and evil in order to develop a theology of language, conceiving language as the path along which humans receive their own givenness, but also participate in the creation of the world. Poetry's attention to the difficulty of language, its acceptance of artificial disciplines, and its nonrational mode of knowledge uniquely attune it to language's creative—and destructive—potential. Like a monastery for language, poetry enacts a linguistic askesis, schooling its language and its readers in conversion. The essay includes a close reading of Gjertrud Schnackenberg's poem, “Supernatural Love.” A conclusion situates the essay's program for a theology of literature in relation to Henri de Lubac's work on spiritual exegesis and Hans Urs von Balthasar's use of literature in his theology.     

The Consubstantial Otherness of God: Divine Simplicity and the Trinity in Hans Urs von Balthasar

Martin explores divine simplicity according to the twentieth‐century Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. She grants that Balthasar does not provide a traditional presentation of the attribute of divine simplicity. In his doctrine of the Trinity, Balthasar emphasizes such themes as distance, “hiatus,” and infinite difference, none of which seems to promise a robust doctrine of divine simplicity. Indeed, some have suggested that Balthasar's Trinitarian theology does not allow for traditional claims about divine simplicity. Martin argues, however, that one finds in Balthasar's Trinitarian theology the doctrine of divine simplicity, assumed as an internalized starting point and rooted in his understanding of the analogia entis. This can be seen, for example, in his various engagements with Aquinas as well as with contemporary thinkers such as Gustav Siewerth and Erich Przywara. Likewise, when addressing the issue of whether the Trinitarian Persons can be “counted” according to our normal understanding of number, he insists with Evagrius that God is simple. In the same context, he similarly draws upon Plotinus, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzen, Tertullian, Ambrose, and Aquinas. Martin therefore gives particular attention to the Theo‐Logic and to Balthasar's affirmation in his Trinitarian theology of the points that the divine Persons are fully God, the divine attributes are identical with each other in God, and the distinction of Persons has to do not with three parts of God but with opposed subsistent relations.     

Christ's Love and Borders

This article is a keynote address given at the Global Ecumenical Theological Institute (GETI) held in Karlsruhe, Germany, August-September 2022, on the theme “Christ's love (re)moves borders” and organized in conjunction with the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches. The article argues that around the world, political borders are being cemented by populist nationalisms even as pandemics, capital flows, and climate change ignore them. If Christians are to resist such ideologies, they must recover a robust incarnational theology and their fundamental identity as members of the worldwide body of Christ. Simultaneously, even as borders between people are being reinforced, the border between people and machines is blurred by transhumanist and posthumanist agendas. Such paradoxes will continue to abound in an intellectual landscape where what is distinctively human is obscured by technological hubris and philosophical naïveté.     

On the Three Kinds of Resurrection of the Dead

Resurrection has been defined, in modern theology, with almost sole reference to Jesus Christ. The future resurrection of all Christians is, rightly, understood in light of his own rising from the dead. Yet Scripture witnesses to another, third kind of resurrection that is regularly dismissed by theologians as insignificant: that of particular individuals in the Old and New Testaments. This article retrieves a sense of this third kind of resurrection as ‘types’ or ‘signs’ of Christ's and the future resurrection through interaction with premodern exegesis and theology. In so doing, it demonstrates the abiding theological significance of these events for understanding the resurrection of the dead.     

A Search for the Body: Is there Space for Christ's Body in Pannenberg's Eschatology?

Pannenberg's thought makes a constant appeal to ‘anticipation’, and this concept depends on a metaphysical proposal, temporalized essentialism, which includes an account of eternity as simultaneity of all history in God. This view of eternity has been both applauded and criticized. This article considers Pannenberg's account of the body of the exalted Christ who is in eternity. Pannenberg affirms the resurrection of Jesus, but has no account of the nature of Jesus’ resurrected body. He emphasizes the church as the body of the exalted Christ, but describes this body as lacking particularity. His account of the Eucharist does not have any place for Christ's corporeal presence or for participation in Christ's exalted body. His account of the return of Christ is oriented to the revelation of the glorified unity of all reality in Christ. The reason that Pannenberg has no account of the body of Christ is due to his conception of eternity, a conception which differs markedly from that of Paul. The Pauline heavenly realm is part of the creation, and thus has a spatio‐temporal relationship to the earthly realm as well as having a spatio‐temporal dimension in itself. Pannenberg's conception of eternity is that it is outside of the created realm and has no spatial dimension. Douglas Farrow argues that a theology that lacks an account of the exalted body of Christ fails to have a proper account of the redemption of humanity and creation, and it seems Pannenberg's view is open to this criticism.