In her new book, Balthasar: A (Very) Critical Introduction, Karen Kilby aims to pinpoint both what is worthwhile and what is problematic in Balthasar's theology. Since unqualified endorsements of Balthasar's oeuvre overshadow critical resistance to it, Kilby desires to correct this imbalance by emphasizing those aspects of Balthasar's thought that should worry his readers. For Kilby, these areas of greatest concern include Balthasar's unwavering confidence in his idiosyncratic aesthetic and dramatic presentations of revelation's import (chapter 3), the holistic and climactic tenor of his theological formulations (chapter 4), his seemingly unbounded knowledge of the triune God's inner life (chapter 5), and his narrow vision of gender difference, which relies on a truncated version of the nuptial metaphor conceived primarily in terms of the sexual act (chapter 6). In turn, she shows how each of these problem areas substantiates her weightiest charge that Balthasar's theology in its entirety exhibits a systemic deficit, that of his audacious “God's eye view” of the shape and meaning of divine revelation. This methodological omniscience has a global impact on Balthasar's project, thereby canceling out the various local attempts he makes to safeguard a rightful attitude of humility and wonderment in the face of divine mystery.
In chapter 1, Kilby situates her twofold critique of content and method within the general predicament that all readers face when introduced to Balthasar. The voluminous quantity of his literary output is always a challenge to its mastery. Its extensive reach is made more inaccessible by Balthasar's unsystematic and nonpropositional manner of writing, which twists and turns through an impressive array of theological, philosophical, and literary figures and their time periods, without clear indications of where description ends and where Balthasar's theological agenda begins. His failure to elucidate plainly the fundamental arguments that govern and connect the disparate pieces of his mammoth project makes it exceedingly difficult for anyone to maintain a solid grasp of what he is about, in order to engage him in a meaningfully constructive way. Kilby endeavors to overcome these impediments by teasing out some of the themes embedded in Balthasar's meanderings that turn out to be both crucial to his theological enterprise and deservedly unsettling to the conscientious reader. She hopes that once her readers recognize how Balthasar drives all of his key (and questionable) ideas forward with the same sense of absolute certainty, they will be far less likely to proclaim his authoritarian style as paradigmatic for today's theologians.
Chapter 2 provides contextual backing for Kilby's claim regarding Balthasar's “unfettered” theological program by marking the independence that characterized his intellectual journey. Disparaging and breaking away from his neo-Scholastic training, Balthasar joined with other innovators of his day to retrieve the patristic roots of Thomism and to stretch beyond it by utilizing other philosophical and literary resources for theologizing. Kilby makes much of the fact that Balthasar's preference for a chaplaincy in Basel over a professorship at the Gregorian University in Rome enabled him to abandon himself to his autonomous theological speculations without any of the external controls that are built into an official academic post. Living in Basel, he could converse with the renowned Protestant theologian Karl Barth and with the obscure doctor-mystic Adrienne von Speyr, both of whom influenced him profoundly. Basel was also the setting for his decision to leave the Jesuits in 1950 in order to partner with Adrienne to form their secular institute, the Community of St. John. Kilby accentuates Balthasar's increasing isolation from church and academy, which culminated in his absence from the Second Vatican Council, distancing him even further from the mainstream theological discussion and removing any impediments to his construction of a magisterial theological edifice seemingly impervious to criticism.
In chapter 3, Kilby agrees that two of the most notable outcomes of Balthasar's unbridled creativity are his repositioning of beauty's role at the heart of the theological enterprise and his dramatization of salvation history that recounts the triune God's vertical intervention into the horizontal play of human freedom in order to overcome sin and death by drawing creation into participation in divine life. Balthasar's aesthetic and dramatic modes of doing theology mutually affirm the dynamic act of divine self-disclosure where God is the sole Artist and Author whose mystery is not a problem that can be circumvented by the right amount of theological prowess. Kilby recognizes that the foregoing attestation appears to undercut her avowal that Balthasar the theologian writes as Balthasar the omniscient narrator of divine revelation. She solves this discrepancy by calling our attention to a vital distinction between the Balthasar who prescribes humility before divine mystery and the Balthasar who fails to follow through on his recommendation. For example, there is a significant difference between facilitating the transformative relationship between the subject and the glorious God who captivates her, and presenting one's detailed picture of what that glory looks like while pronouncing the blindness of those who do not see it in exactly the same way. According to Kilby, there are cases where Balthasar incorporates the first stance, for example, in his smaller work, Dare We Hope? However, in his trilogy, he also regularly falls prey to the second presumptuous tendency toward a totalizing vision.
Chapter 4 examines multiple instances of two common patterns that also bespeak Balthasar's belief in the indubitable efficacy of his theological conceptualizations. First, the pattern of “fulfillment” recurs in varied contexts when Balthasar evaluates several theories to uncover their strengths and weaknesses and arrives at another possibility of his own devising that capitalizes on the advantages of other approaches while eliminating their shortcomings. Though Kilby does not equate Balthasar's “fulfillment pattern” with Hegel's Aufhebung, one can reasonably deduce that Balthasar errs where Hegel does; he writes grand, sweeping metanarratives that mistake subjective hypotheses for comprehensive understanding. Similarly, Balthasar invokes the image of a “radiating circle” with lines fanning out from a transcendent hub, the content and contours of which are opaque to most of us but which are curiously transparent to Balthasar. Assorted permutations of the “radiating circle” occur when he points to the core mystery of the Cross that is never exhausted by Scripture and the tradition's manifold interpretations of it. Yet at the same time that Balthasar seems to be preserving divine mystery by maintaining theology's pluriformity, he ironically rises above it by intimately aligning his depictions of the Cross-event with the revelatory center that governs theological diversity. At this stage, it is important to note that Kilby never accuses Balthasar of an intentional duplicity that offers mystery and then takes it away. Rather, she contends that he unwittingly subverts his good intentions with an overreaching theological method.
Chapter 5 on the Trinity is a pivotal juncture in the book, because the centrality of trinitarian theology to Balthasar's entire project makes it an excellent test case for Kilby's dual critique of its content and methodology. Balthasar looks to the Cross to see the economic Trinity's revelation of the immanent Trinity. For him, this means that Christ's suffering and death is an economic expression of the eternal, kenotic character of divine life. For Kilby, Balthasar privileges his view of the economy as one that sees through and beyond revelation to the transcendent mystery of triune life and its innermost activity. Though devised as an analogy, his concept of “distance,” which attempts to picture the relations between Father, Son, and Spirit, is misleading, because it diminishes the intimacy between the persons. More importantly, it is not readily understood what this arresting image is really meant to evoke. Given Kilby's perspective, the only thing that notions like “distance” can do is sabotage Balthasar's attempts to evade a theology of divine passibility. His is, in fact, an even more radical version of such a position that does not stop at arguing for the transformation of God through suffering; rather, it contends that there is eternally “room” in triune life for the darkness and loss of our sinful human existence.
Chapter 6 on Balthasar's interpretation of gender raises a host of questions. If, in his exegesis of Genesis 2, man is primary and woman is secondary with her role of “answering” or “facing” man, how can Balthasar still contend that woman and man are equal? What is his idea of equality? When he describes the relationship between the sexes, men are depicted as active, and women as passive or receptive. Are these postures of activity and receptivity really naturally divided between men and women? Or have they been socioculturally defined as such? If Balthasar believes that this distribution of behaviors is essential to the sexes, is he interpreting them solely through his view of the sexual act? Kilby's answer to this final question is a straightforward yes. Balthasar's predisposition to align men and women's natures with the roles he believes them to play in their marital union also pervades his use of nuptial imagery to portray the relationship between Christ and his Church. Christ is the active male, and the Church is the receptive female. At this stage, Kilby reasons that the questionable content of Balthasar's gender theory detrimentally affects his methodology. As he links his theologies of the cross and of the immanent Trinity to see a complete picture of the inner workings of divine life, so too does he unite his gender theory so closely to his speculations on Christ, Eucharist, and Church that he trusts he has uncovered the depth dimension out of which these theological truths find their meaning and coherence.
In chapter 7, Kilby reiterates her thesis regarding Balthasar's perilous method of the all-seeing eye that masterfully synthesizes and deciphers human and divine reality, and she reinforces her position by forestalling likely objections to it. First, is her critique simply an allergic reaction to the quest for continuity, unity, and completion? No, she is not opposed to a symphonic rendering of the whole, so long as God, and not the theologian, orchestrates the symphony. Second, is her opposition to Balthasar's lack of academically rigorous argumentation a denial of his reunification of theology and spirituality? No, but it does challenge the scope of Balthasar's undisputed spiritual and scholarly expertise. Third, is it not the case that all theologians are ambitious to a certain extent in their venture to speak about God in a coherent manner that shows the interlacing of God's revelatory interventions with human experience? Yes; however, Balthasar extends this undertaking to extremes of fullness and confidence that are neither advisable nor possible.
I have been heartened by Kilby's efforts to read Balthasar in a measured fashion, neither avoiding the difficulties in his thought that raise serious questions nor entirely jettisoning the value of his theological contribution. Leaning solely on either side of this hermeneutical balance leads a reader to exclude one or the other of her dual responsibilities of critical analysis and appreciative dialogue, which insure accurate interpretation of a theologian's life's work. I applaud Kilby's emphasis on wrestling with the difficult questions that Balthasar's theology raises because of the frequent absence of such queries in other expositions of his project. Chief among these questions are those Kilby asks in chapter 6 on gender and the nuptial metaphor. Balthasar's exegeses of Scripture and tradition that strictly define the nature of men as active and women as passive must be placed in conversation with feminist theologies. In addition to participating in this indispensable dialogue, I would suggest another type of interaction that can take place between the disparate portions of Balthasar's oeuvre. His conviction that God calls every woman and man to imitate Christ in a thoroughly unique way can be applied to his elsewhere narrow qualification of women's Christic imitation according to a classically feminine mold. In this way, one Balthasarian reflection can refine another. His claim for the irreducibility of each person's particular embodiment of Christ can critique his attachment to the cultural norms of his upbringing that group all women together in a universal character of feminine passivity. The tensions in Balthasar's thought that he left unresolved can be put to work in order to hone further his contribution to contemporary theology.
Contrary to Kilby's analysis, this exegetical technique of internal dialogue reveals that Balthasar's nonpropositional, reflective theological method is not an exhaustive one that explains away the mystery of the divine call to each person with a set of constraints provided by a particular theory of gender relations. Rather, Balthasar's writings evince a back-and-forth movement between divine mystery's ceaseless, immeasurable pull on the theologian through the concrete, historical moments that make up the tradition, and the theologian's perceptions of the tradition that are modulated by his precise sociocultural location. For example, in the case of Balthasar's theological anthropology and ecclesiology, he transitions from repetitions of the tradition's affirmations of God's authorship and artistry of human freedom and identity to renditions of gendered human personhood colored by his socially defined expectations for relations between the sexes. Balthasar's project never sees the end of this movement between multiple encounters with epochs and figures in the tradition and contextual understandings of these meetings. This open-endedness beckons Balthasar's readers to encounter the tradition for themselves and communicate its significance from the vantage points of their sociocultural positions that respond to and critique Balthasar's necessarily limited standpoint.
Balthasar's creative play with the trinitarian imagery of infinite distance, surprise, and eternal self-sacrifice is similarly unfinished. In this instance, he is experimenting with a combination of ideas from Gregory of Nyssa, Sergei Bulgakov, and Adrienne von Speyr, among others, to give thought and language to mystical experiences of triune love had by saints of the past and by Adrienne in the present. Though Balthasar takes the play of analogical language seriously, it is play nonetheless. As visual and literary art glimpses truth in ways that the logic of syllogisms cannot do on its own, so the practice of drawing analogies between creation's traces of the divine image and the Trinity itself gestures toward eternal truth without claiming total comprehension of it.
Balthasar's assorted attempts at phenomenological analogies of distance are reminiscent of Augustine's many tries at the psychological analogy that he repeatedly declares to be provisional. Surely, Balthasar would have done well to profess likewise the contingency of his exploratory analogies rather than to assume that we would recognize his continuity with previous apophatic theologians who reach unknowing through, and not around, kataphasis. Nevertheless, his reliance on their contemplative orientation throughout his trilogy gives us warrant to treat his meditations on the immanent Trinity as open spaces for us to question, supplement, modify, and dialogue with his hypotheses. Thus, Balthasar's theology will encourage more critical interventions like Kilby's, precisely because his theological method is spacious enough for unlimited exchanges between mutually enhancing perspectives.
