Volitional imagining and religious dramatizing

Reviewed by: Christ's Descent into Hell: John Paul II, Joseph Ratzinger, and Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Theology of Holy Saturday by Lyra Pitstick Joshua R. Brotherton Christ's Descent into Hell: John Paul II, Joseph Ratzinger, and Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Theology of Holy Saturday by Lyra Pitstick ( Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), xiv + 135 pp. Lyra Pitstick, otherwise known as Alyssa L. Pitstick, the author of the provocative Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ's Descent into Hell, the fruit of her doctoral dissertation at the Angelicum, has produced another, slimmer volume critical of Balthasar's project as she sees it. The book opens with a quick review of Balthasar's theology of the descent, followed by two chapters on Joseph Ratzinger's own comments on the descent and on Balthasar's theology, one covering his statements prior to his pontifical elevation and one addressing those subsequent. The following chapter concerns the statements of John Paul II on the descent, which she contrasts with both Ratzinger and Balthasar, but mostly Balthasar. Next, she runs through the remarks of Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, a former student of Ratzinger and undersecretary at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith commissioned by Pope John Paul with the drafting of the new Catechism of the Catholic Church. Although Schönborn is a theologian in his own right, she touches on him only insofar as his Introduction to the Catechism, together with Ratzinger, is sometimes invoked in defense of Balthasar's orthodoxy with regard to the descent. Finally, she consolidates and elaborates her own comments on the respective positions of Balthasar, Ratzinger, and John Paul in two chapters entitled "The Crux of the Problem" and "The Crux, Continued," the latter of which directly addresses an issue oftentimes brought to the fore by Balthasarians: the praise lavished upon Balthasar by both Pope John Paul II and then-Cardinal Ratzinger in the wake of his untimely death (i.e., just days prior to his awaited honorary elevation to the cardinalate). These seven chapters are bookended by a very brief introduction [End Page 665] in which she laments that the International Journal of Systematic Theology declined to publish criticisms she offered of an article there published by the late Fr. Edward T. Oakes, S.J., in which he defends Balthasar's doctrine of the descent against her earlier critique in Light in Darkness, and a conclusion that simply recaps the whole, as well as a number of appendices containing short magisterial documents, and lastly, a short supplementary text she wrote in response to an invitation from a student magazine at Gonzaga University. On the whole, the book is to be commended for its valiant work in both surveying the various occasions on which Ratzinger and John Paul address Christ's descent into hell and dealing with the misbegotten attempts of some to canonize Balthasar's thought on the basis of a few accolades from the two Pontiffs, who themselves tower above so many notable Catholic thinkers in the modern era. Although somewhat repetitive, her thoughts on the differences between these three theologians echo thoughts I have harbored on the matter for quite some time, albeit with a few key divergences. The ambition of such an undertaking is laudable, but—and this may not offend the casual reader—her recourse to secondary literature is minimal. I cannot help but think that she may have benefitted from consulting major works sympathetic to Balthasar's project by authors such as Nicholas J. Healy, David C. Schindler, Rodney A. Howsare, Cyril O'Regan, Gerard F. O'Hanlon, S.J., Aidan Nichols, O.P., and John Saward, author of the curt but illuminating book of reflections on Balthasar's triduum theology, The Mysteries of March. Her only interlocutor seems to be Edward Oakes, an esteemed Balthasarian indeed, but without much in the way of direct engagement. In any case, the primary downfall of the work is a lack of theological nuance, particularly with regard to the constitution of sacred tradition and the composition of what one might call a "charitable" interpretation of Balthasar. As one can turn...

The paper seeks to draw the contours of an “Eco-Theo-Logy” in the context of the unprecedented crisis of our Common Home and with special reference to Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’ landmark encyclical on creation care. An “eco” theology would begin with the sense of awe and gratitude for Earth, our unique common planetary home blessed with the gift of life, and listen attentively to the growing “cry of the Earth and of the poor” (Laudato Si’, 49). Secondly, it seeks to articulate anew the theological understanding of an ‘in-carnate’ God, a God who enters human and cosmic vicissitudes and manifests in the pangs of creation. It also strives to a religious vision of the natural world as the “Gospel of creation”. Thirdly, it’s time to re-imagine the logos component of an eco-theo-logy, embracing an integral and relational approach, raising a prophetic theological voice in the face of profound inequalities and injustices that exist in our one common household, and adopting a decisively practice/action orientation.

This essay is an excavation of Islamic theological confluences in Hans Urs von Balthasar's theological aesthetics. It likewise demonstrates how comparative theology facilitates the de‐essentialization of religious traditions. This essay uses the Swiss theologian as a case study in exposing how someone apparently closed off from interreligious learning is still inadvertently shaped by non‐Christian traditions. Being adjacent to the work of Anne Carpenter, who seeks to save his theological project from Eurocentrism, this essay seeks to save it from theological exclusivism and Orientalism. It will argue that in the case of Christian theology, confluences of the Islamic in the past offer possibilities for future exercises in comparative theology. It looks back to look ahead by suggesting theo‐poetics as a new direction for Christian comparative theology with Islam.

While Hans Urs von Balthasar has been often criticized for a failure to deeply engage cultural and religious diversity, this essay argues his theology proves an excellent resource for comparative theology. After clarifying and explaining Balthasar’s own shortcomings in interreligious and intercultural engagement, the article presents his theological aesthetics as a paradigm for forming the comparative theological imagination. The essay demonstrates this utility by examining a passage from the Daoist text Zhuangzi in light of Balthasar’s theology.

The views of two modern Catholic figures, John Paul II and Hans Urs von Balthasar, on the Jewish religion and the State of Israel are informed by their theological reflections that go back to the Christian Scriptures. There they identify the radical newness of Christianity and at the same time its profound roots and continuing debt to the Jewish Scriptures and to the continuing existence of the Jewish people and the Jewish religion. The tortured past history of relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people and their religion apparently turned on the political exigencies of ‘protecting’ the daily exercise of Catholicism. In the modern historical period where on the one hand, the independent State of Israel exists and where on the other hand, Catholicism has no intrinsic need of a specific land, the theological principles of the need of and debt to Israel as the ‘elder brother’ and as the ‘stock’ onto which Christianity is inescapably grafted, has come to the fore and has led to a number of agreements, under John Paul II, between the Vatican and the State of Israel.

[The author initiates a dialogue between Hans Urs von Balthasar and contemporary feminist theology, focusing on three areas: theological anthropology, theological method, and Christology. Each section begins by exploring Balthasar's theological standpoint. This is followed by feminist responses to the themes and questions raised by his theology, both favorable and critical. She concludes by exploring the mutual critiques that each theological standpoint poses to the other, arguing for the fruitfulness of this conversation.]

Hans-Urs von Balthasar – the Theology of Culture between the Transcendental Theology and the Aesthetic Theology. Von Balthasar is a theologian of the 20th century who proposes an approach in the continuity of patristic traditions and schools of Christian philosophy through a translation of the concept of revelation in a language that sends us towards the aesthetic experience. God, the union of the absolute values Verum and Bonum manifests itself through a theophany that brings out the transcendental category of Pulchrum. God reveals his Glory, the aesthetic experience becoming a mystical, natural contemplation, by understanding the history of salvation as a Theo-drama that is completed by the "end game" of salvation and the fulfillment of the eschaton.

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A renewed primary focus on the person of Christ has enabled some longstanding tensions between Christians, regarding scripture and tradition, the number of the sacraments, the ordained and baptismal priesthoods, and word and sacrament, to be positively addressed in recent decades. John Zizioulas maintains that for these divisions to be properly overcome Christ must be understood as a corporate personality, the Church being his mystical body and not having a hypostasis of its own. In his view, not only does Christ constitute the Church, as theologians would readily agree, but the Church also constitutes Christ, a reciprocal understanding which he recognises as problematic for many. This paper investigates Zizioulas' view, particularly by noting that he never uses the idea of the Church as bride of Christ, an image much invoked by Hans Urs von Balthasar, which tends to a personal understanding of the Church in union with but also distinction from Christ. With many comparative references to Balthasar, the implications of Zizioulas' liturgical understanding that 'the “I” of the Church is Christ' are explored and analysed.

This essay engages in the debate in feminist theology over the adequacy of the category of kenosis for interpreting women's experience. It does so by looking at a particular exchange between two British theologians, Daphne Hampson and Sarah Coakley. The paper expands on Coakley's understanding of kenosis as “power–in–vulnerability”, through an analysis of the trinitarian theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Von Balthasar's trinitarian understanding of kenotic personhood is then correlated to situations of abuse in order to illustrate the adequacy of such an understanding toward accounting for the healing in abused victims. The final section will argue that feminist interests in otherness, specificity, diversity, uniqueness, relationality and embodiment require a trinitarian notion of kenosis as self–giving and receptivity.

This essay i) shows how certain key virtues of the practice of Scriptural Reasoning (SR) offer correctives to a mode of western rationality that regards itself as “supra‐traditional” and universally valid; and ii) illuminates those virtues with the help of literary theory which shares SR's concern with how texts and their interpretation affect possibilities for human life in any given context. It identifies four “marks” of SR (particularity, provisionality, sociality and surprise) and works with three conversation partners who use literary theory (Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mikhail Bakhtin and John Beer), to offer a positive account of SR's traditioned, critically imaginative character.

The present work examines the problematics of the role and place of paradox in dogmatic reflection based on the analysis of the works of Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar. The problem is looked upon from two perspectives. The first perspective applies to the first two chapters which deal with the analysis of individual theological paradoxes present in the thought of each of these authors separately. In Chapter I – devoted to Lubac — the reflection concerns the paradox of God’s knowability and unknowability, the paradox of the Church, the paradox of atheistic humanism and the paradox of man. In Chapter II — devoted to Balthasar — we focus on the paradox of unity and plurality, the paradox of freedom in the context of obedience and responsibility, the Trinitarian-Christological paradox of faith, hope and love, and the paradox of God’s kenosis. The second perspective concerns the meta-reflection, carried out in the third chapter, on the place of paradox within the framework of methodological instruments used by both authors. In particular, we discuss the problem of the relation of the category of paradox to that of synthesis and mystery in Lubac and to dialectics and analogy in Balthasar. These analyzes constitute the basis for the thesis that in the works of both thinkers one can talk about the emergence of a new method, referred to in this study as the “method of paradox”.

In this chapter and the next we shall consider four theologians, two Protestant, two Catholic, with whose work on the Trinity my own invites some comparison. The purpose of the exercise is partly to contextualize my work, partly to discover what can be learned from them. Then will follow the conclusion, which will sum up what I have to say at present about the doctrine of the Trinity. The Protestants are Jurgen Moltmann and Eberhard Jungel, and the Catholics, Heribert Muhlen and Hans Urs von Balthasar. What we all share is that, following Karl Barth, our reflections on the Trinity take their point of departure from the New Testament statements about Jesus Christ, Son of God, about the God to whom he prayed as Father, and about the Holy Spirit sent by him from the Father upon the Church, rather than from the psychological analogy of the Trinity pioneered by St. Augustine and completed by St. Thomas Aquinas.

La mayoría de la gente o no conoce a Adrienne von Speyr o piensa en ella como en una extraña figura mística que trabajó con el teólogo Hans Urs von Balthasar. Sin embargo, pocos la conocen como médica de Basilea entre los años 30 y 50 del siglo XX. Ejerció su profesión con una pasión inspirada por su fe, integrando constantemente ciencia y espiritualidad. El objetivo de este artículo es presentar esta faceta poco estudiada de la vida de Adrienne von Speyr, y el modo en que su actividad médica modeló su lectura de las Escrituras, en particular del capítulo 11 del evangelio de Juan. También y sobre todo destaca la originalidad de su contribución a la ética médica de su época.

This article commends the motif of patience for thinking about the Trinity. It opens with an analysis of Church Dogmatics I/1, worrying about a spare account of intratrinitarian relations but finding promise in Barth's treatment of the Spirit. It then proposes that Barth's remarks about patience could nourish constructive reflection. The divine life itself involves the exercise of patience: each Person bears the distinctions and relations basic to God's being. To nuance this claim, work by Brian Leftow, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Linn Tonstad is analyzed. A conclusion considers social trinitarianism and the “modestly speculative” character of trinitarian reflection.