(If you’re wondering why, it’s because it’s the 100th anniversary of his birth)
In method, Balthasar preferred an evocative and untidy richness over the kind of objective systematization characteristic of many great Christian thinkers. He suggested that Christian truth is “symphonic,” less a collection of positions and doctrines than an organic, dynamic and narratival display of divine love. Theology fails in its task if it presents us simply with something that is true. An adequate Christian theology must allow God’s glory—the majesty of divine love—to appear before us and strike us with its wonder, such that we find our hearts set on fire as did the disciples before us.
Yet he worried that theology no longer concerned itself with this project. In Balthasar’s opinion, contemporary culture and the Christians within it had lost the ability to see the deeper goodness of the world and, correspondingly, its transcendent and divine origin. In classical, Greco-Roman culture, the cosmos had been understood as saturated with the divine; the world was the stage on which human and divine actors together participated in a common cosmic drama. Modern society no longer saw existence in this way. Where the ancient person interpreted his life in terms of a divine drama, the contemporary person looked out upon an empty and meaningless horizon of cosmic chaos. Forgotten was the Christian commitment to a universe made sacred by Christ; the divine and the earthly had become separate realms. Reflection on the world was the exclusive domain of science; theology concerned itself only with the iteration of otherworldly truths. A “light has gone out,” he lamented.
To counter this false dichotomy of secular and sacred, a recovery of the sacramental vision found in such sources as the early fathers of the church and the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola was necessary. Christ has revealed to us a divine drama unfolding in our world; he welcomes us to participate in it.
Read Previous Post