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.

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Three Views of the Eucharist? (Eventual) ruminations on the place of the Eucharist in Anglican theology

Per Caritatem has an interesting 3 part series on a Reformed View of the Eucharist by Mike Vendsel that just ended last thursday. Vendsel reviews Douglas Farrow's article, "Between the Rock and a Hard Place: In Support of (something like) a Reformed View of the Eucharist". I must confess, I didn't know there was such a thing. Just goes to show the state of catechesis when I was growing up. Farrow's article basically posits two views: 1.is the "traditional" reformed view that attempts to safeguard a notion of Christ's ontological body, existing in space and time, quite distinct from the sacramental elements. This perspective reminds me of something a youth leader said to me back in high school: "We don't have sacraments; we have ordinances." At the time, I took him to be mincing words, but since then I have come to wonder if it really wasn't just an excuse to not deal with the tensions of being in a rather new tradition that has failed to articulate a metaphysic. Anyway, the problem with this for Farrow is how it radically seperates our materiality from Christ's, and the Gnostic connotation of the worshipper engaged in some mental/spiritual connection to Christ.

The 2nd view is is the RC perspective, best articulated by Thomas, summarized by Farrow:

"by virtue of His divine omnipresence and omnipotence as the Logos, Jesus is able to provide on earth a eucharistic form of His humanity under the accidents of bread and wine, making present (albeit non-spatially) the actual substance of His exalted body and blood” (p. 171)

Calvin provides the foil to this view. For Calvin, the power of the Eucharist is not in dilluting Christ's humanity, but rather in transporting us to heaven in union with Christ - a kind of beatific experience, it seems.

I won't summarize the rest of the posts from Per Caritatem here, but rather direct your attention to the links to each post: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

The series followed a post on an article on the Eucharist by Catherine Pickstock, "Thomas Aquinas and the Quest for the Eucharist." The post highlights Pickstock's work with "Desire" and the allegory of the Grail. Here's an interesting quote from Pickstock that seems to encapsulate most of the summary from Per Caritatem:

"Thus we can see that what the Eucharist is is desire. Although we know via desire, or wanting to know, and this circumstance alone resolves the aporia of learning, beyond this we discover that what there is to know is desire. But not desire as absence, lack and perpetual postponement; rather, desire as the free flow of actualization, perpetually renewed and never foreclosed” (pp. 178-179).

These posts got me thinking about how one might capture the distinctiveness of an Anglican view of the Eucharist. Rowan Williams talks about Hooker's doctrine of Christology and Sacraments in his book, Anglican Identities. A major theme Williams brings out is Hooker's emphasis of the incarnation as the redemption (or "restoration") of humanity via the work of the Holy Spirit, not simply a relationship of solidarity by virtue of his being human: "it is a relation with a humanity itself already transfigured (not annihilated)by the outpouring of a divine gift." The Holy Spirit can act upon and through us in multiple ways, including by not limited to the Eucharist - however one may theorize the relationship of Christ to the elements.

"Papist error about the Eucharist is less in the doctrine of transubstantiation as such than in the insistence on this as the only legitimate account of how Christ acts... Hooker can say, boldly, 'there ensueth a kind of transubstantiation in us (67.2, p. 358); [similarly] Herbert argues that Christ died for humanity, not for bread, so it is the former that needs changing..."

While Hooker doesn't seem to want to spend a lot of time fleshing out the metaphysics of the Sacraments, the point is clear: Christ acts on us through his gifts. "Receive the gift of divine action and the effects of divine action follow - in Christ's humanity, in the bread and the wine, in the holy person."

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Question 2: The Supernatural

Thanks Dan for starting off our conversation of Francis Hall's Theological Outlines. Lets have a go at question 2, on the supernatural. While I thought he opened clearly with his definition of theology, some confusion immediately comes in when he starts in on the supernatural , or at least some terms go by without being well explained. Of course, "the supernatural" is a huge topic, especially when we also look at philosophical concerns (which he apparently wants to do). I would like to quote this bit at the end though, and then make a brief comment: "Certain writers err in supposing that the distinction between lower and higher natures and between the forces resident in them (for this is what the distinction between natural and supernatural really means) has the effect of banishing God from nature and of reducing nature's Divine significance. It is God that worketh whether He employs the forces resident in lower or higher natures, or dispenses with the use of means." In other words, grace founds nature, as Balthasar and de Lubac stressed. And if we look at Hall's definition of supernatural, which is anything the causation of which cannot be assigned to visible or human means, then obviously men and women are fundamentally graced, and all of the natural causes which they assign and effect come from grace. Balthasar makes the same point at the end of "Love Alone" and it really grounds his understanding of universal salvation. More on that later.

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Francis Hall, 1 - On the science of Theology

Aron and I recently came up Francis Hall's Theological Outlines over at the Disseminary. Since the nice fellas over there uploaded all three volumes of the Outlines, we decided we should read them. So, until we finish them, or get tired of them, or you get tired of us, we're occasionally going to use this blog as a forum for discussion on the Outlines. We invite you to join us.
By way of introduction, let's look at Hall himself first.

Hall (1857-1933)was a priest and professor, at one time Chair of Dogmatic Theology at General Theological Seminary in NY. He was an active Anglo-catholic, and delivered a rousing essay on re-union of the Catholic Church at the 2nd Anglo-catholic Congress in 1923. From 1892-95, he wrote the three vols of the outlines. Then, from 1908-1922 he published the 10 volumes Dogmatic Theolgy.

Tonight, I'll quickly summarize the first section, a response to the question, "What is Theology?" Like any good systematician, Hall answers that Theology is a science, specifically the science of anything and everything that relates to God. Naturally, this means that not a thing falls outside the purview of theology. "Theology cannot be shut out from any sphere of being or fact, but treats of all things in so far as they are related to God and Divine purposes." Rather, theology, as our knowledge of God's natural and supernatural dealings (but especially in our world) is nourished by the involvement and findings of the other disciplines. So, while there should be a conservative element and compulsion in theology vs. a willy nilly rejection of tradition, there is also a progressive movement always happening in theology as the other disciplines and theologians make new discoveries. "Theology is a progressive science, for it can never exhaust the scientific bearings of the Faith; and is enriched by every increase in natural knowledge, in so far as such knowledge throws light upon Divine operations and purposes."

NB. Hall declares at the opening of his 4th footnote - a rather long footnote in which he outlines the history of the Systematic and Dogmatic theology tome - that "Anglican literature lacks a really complete treatise of Dogmatic Theology."


Not much has changed in over 100 years.

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