Love Alone Recap

The presentation on Love Alone went well, despite several factors of my own making. I did record the presentation, although I think I sound really stupid, say "um, uh, ok" and alot of other dumb things. But if there's enough demand, I could be persuaded to post it, or email, or something with it. So, to recap, I gave a bit (about 15 minutes) of bio first, and then worked my way into the text (see Friday's post for my introduction to the text). Balthasar's critique of the cosmological method went over like herbal tea, which I found surprising as that's the one thing I think he dismisses too quickly; I'm holding out for a place for cosmology (I guess that makes sense as I hope to be deeply immersed in Balthasar's doct. of creation by this time next year). The group, as much comprised of by parishioners as university faculty, found Balthasar's treatment of such themes as the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and modern biblical criticism highly contestable. As I said in Friday's post, I feared as much; how does one compress a book which was already the author's compression of his own work - 7 volumes at that - much less the philosophical and theological background one needs to comprehend Balthasar on even an elementary level. Moreover, writing in 1963, vB was writing from a specific perspective, addressing a set of specific problems arising from the split with Rahner. I imagine his motivation came not only from a pure intellectual interest, but also a desire contribute to the greater movement surrounding Vatican II, seeing as how he wasn't invited to attend by his Swiss bishops. Some of the concerns raised about the critique of the Anthropological method - its gross gloss and homogenization of Reformed, Renaissance authors, and modern biblical crit - can be explained by looking to the relevant Herrlichkeit volumes for Balthasar's engagement with the primary texts. But even then, as I mentioned to a friend last night, Balthasar writing in the sixties, didn't have some of the tools we do today, with Kuhn writing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions only a year earlier. Moreover, his area of work kept him pretty firmly ensconced in either confessional theology (e.g. his attempts to dialog with Barth) or germanic literature, although he does bridge out to French literature. I don't have the breadth of knowledge to make Balthasar able to stand up under the scrutiny of modern philosophy of science or post-structuralist concerns.

That said, I still agree with him (and Hans Frei) that theology in the wake of Kant and under the Germany academy (Schliermacher>Bultmann) did kowtow to a kind of hegemony of Reason, a turn to anthropology. His explanation of how cosmology lost footing, how anthropology under a guise of natural religion stripped Christianity of more and more of its qualities until it was loosing not only quality but also substance (God's love and doxa), makes a lot of sense to me and I think it jives with a lot of what's being said today by the likes of Frei, Hutter, and my old advisor, Dan Treier. I remember the first time I heard a form of this argument was in Dan Treier's modern theology class shortly after he had read Hans Frei's Eclipse of Biblical Narrative and Types of Christian Theology.

But, back to the class, my sincerest hope is that many of the atendees came away not necessarily with a comprehensive understanding of the work, but rather two things: 1. that they see where Balthasar was coming from, both historically and theologically, as I agree with Rowan Williams that he provides a great set of resources for Anglican theology; and 2. that they understand his lament over theologies loss of doxa, of a sense of God's loving self-revelation as not only an instance, or the instance, of truth, but also and primarily as something inexhaustibly and transcendentally beautiful. "If the absolute were not love (and the doctrine of the trinity is the doctrine to assert this), then it would be a logos that either stops short before love (adventist), or in modern (and titanic) fashion over-runs it and 'digests' it--which can only be done by falling back into the sphere of 'understanding'--and implies an attetat against the (Holy) Spirit. (LA, 72)

I'll try to sneak more posts in about Love Alone as I have time this week.