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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
‘[T]heology in the Bible can have no fundamentally different form from later theology in the Church: each is an interpretative act of standing and circling around a midpoint that can indeed be interpreted, but is always in need of interpretation and has never been exhaustively interpreted.’
Balthasar’s affirmation of the identity between the theology of the Bible and later church theology, like so much of his writing and work, poses a fundamental challenge to powerful tendencies in the contemporary church, both Protestant and Catholic, at the same time as it claims to be in harmony with the tradition itself. Where Protestant theology from Ritschl and Hamack wants to draw a sharp line between the Bible and the theology of the early church, Balthasar claims a continuity which sees in both the same process of reflection on the relation of the ‘Christ-event’ to the history of God’s love in the Old Covenant and the same interpretative effort to express the centra! mystery in the language of their contemporaries: Jewish or Hellenistic. If Catholic ‘school’ theology wants to emphasise the nature of theology as the formulation and exposition of ‘truths to be believed’, Balthasar asserts that theology, both in the Bible and the Fathers, is part of an inexhaustible and never-ending process of reflection on the experience of grace in the encounter between the Word made flesh and the community of believers. Such an experience of the outpouring of the divine love can never be encompassed by a reading of the Bible as a collection of prooftexts or what Balthasar calls a ‘mere “fundamentalism” of facts of salvation’, for all such attempts at meditation on and expression (Auswortung) of the divine reality fall under the law of the deus semper maior they can never exhaust the, reality of the divine mystery.
1 Balthasar, H. U. von, The Glory of the Lord [GL], Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989, 103CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 GL, 7, 113‐4.
3 Preface to the Writings, Latin, Luther's Works, vol. 34, Concordia: St. Louis, 1960, 336fGoogle Scholar.
4 The fullest discussion of the notions of the revelation form and its mediating forms is to be found in GL 1, Pt. Ill, ‘The Objective Evidence’. Further important texts in Word and Revelation: Essays in Theology, 1, New York: Herder and Herder, 1964, see esp, ‘Word and Silence’, 165‐191.
5 The notion is borrowed from Pierre Rousselot, see GL 1, ‘The Light of Faith’, 131‐218, esp. 175‐6.
6 Glaubhaft ist nur Liebe, Einsiedeln:Johannes‐Verlag, 2nd ed. 1963, 34Google Scholar; see the discussion of beauty in GL 1, 18‐23.
7 GL, 7,1, ‘Verbum Caro Factum’, 33‐235, esp. the final section 5.c. ‘Hell’,
8 GL, 7.239‐385.
9 Käsemann, E., “The Problem of the Historical Jesus”, in Essays on NT Themes, London, 1964,37fGoogle Scholar.
10 Bornkamm, G., Jesus of Nazareth, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1960, 60Google Scholar. Volker Spangenberg. whose monograph Herrlichkeit des Neuen Bundes, Tübingen: Mohr, 1993 contains an extremely thoughtful account of Balthasar's biblical theology and his exegesis, has criticised Balthasar sharply at this point. ‘What makes the interpretation of Balthasar's utterances so difficult at this point is that Balthasar so to speak programmatically refuses to draw any sort of precise distinction between the historical and the dogmatic’ (53) But it is doubtful whether his method of procedure is any the less theologically controlled than that of the scholars of the New Quest, see my A Century of New Testament Studies, Cambridge: Lutterworth, 1993,89‐92Google Scholar.
11 GL, 7.212
12 For an illuminating discussion of the different understandings of grace in Balthasar's theology, see O'Donoghue, N.D., ‘A Theology of Beauty’ in ed. Riches, J., The Analogy of Beauty, Edinburgh: T.&T.Clark, 1986,1‐10Google Scholar.
13 The terms are of course taken from Lindbeck, G., The Nature of Doctrine, London: SPCK, 1984Google Scholar.
14 See his Schleifung der Bastionen, Einsiedeln: Johannes‐Verlag, 1952Google Scholar.
