Karen Kilby's book is written with the analytical and circumspect voice of a detached observer who is simply offering commonsense descriptions of what any reasonable, fair-minded person would see if only he or she looked carefully. Yet the content of the description is, in her own words, “polemical” (13). Although she makes many skeptical observations along the way about the content of Balthasar's various theological claims (she is particularly concerned with things he writes about the Trinity and how he uses gender analogies in theology), the point of her book is not to argue with the content of his theology. Indeed, such an approach would be misguided because, as Kilby makes clear, Balthasar “does not, on the whole, make arguments. . . . [Balthasar] presents the reader with the approach he takes to be correct” (7, 48, 50, 65, 87, 90, 109). Insofar as Balthasar's writings persuade, they do so by a kind of hypnotizing, mesmerizing, and outright bullying of the reader to see things the way he does; in essence Kilby's point is that Balthasar is a sophist who uses manipulative rhetoric to hustle readers into buying his theological snake oil. Balthasar was his own publisher, Kilby reminds, and therefore was “never subjected to any external editorial scrutiny or intervention” (4). Kilby is simply aghast that Balthasar would be allowed to get away with writing what he does without regulation by some competent authorities; her book reads in many places as a reductio ad absurdum argument seeking to show the catastrophic consequences of theological anarchy. She frequently uses adjectives like “troubling” and “disturbing” to describe Balthasar's “fundamentally problematic” writings, and she cautions the reader to be “wary” (2) of his very poisonous “authorial voice.” Kilby's book is a policing action against Balthasar's wanton and “unfettered” effort to speak from an “impossible” (147, 148, 150, 151, 159, 162) theological perspective.
It is her point about this “impossible” theological perspective that gives real polemical bite to Kilby's argument. She sums up the gist of her polemic against Balthasar's writings as follows: “Balthasar frequently writes as though from a position above his materials—above tradition, above Scripture, above history—and also, indeed, above his readers. He frequently seems to presume . . . a God's eye view” (13). Her concern with this supposed God's eye view recurs consistently throughout the book, and it has close affinities with Ben Quash's opinion that Balthasar's thought, despite his deceptive feigns otherwise, is reducible to being a Catholic species of Hegelianism (13, 64). In both Kilby's and Quash's interpretations, Balthasar comes at the Scriptures and the theological tradition with nonbiblical and extratraditional prejudices (particularly with regard to gender) that he then projects onto the Bible and the tradition as if he had found them there all along. To prevent any reader from exposing his theological sleight of hand, Balthasar writes in a voice that creates the illusion that he has special access to God that none can question. “Balthasar, it would seem, is proposing to do theology in part on the basis of information not available to the rest of us, and information whose nature and value we cannot independently judge” (157). Kilby avers that her critical point about the illegitimacy of the God's eye view in Balthasar's authorial voice is not intended to be an ad hominem attack against Balthasar himself, but only against his books (13 n. 21). Nevertheless, even if she is unwilling to declare openly that Balthasar himself was a pathologically procrustean megalomaniac, she clearly presents Balthasar's writings as thoroughly plagued by a pathologically procrustean megalomania. Aside, however, from whether one finds that a credible distinction, there is no doubt that Kilby seeks to discredit Balthasar as an illegitimate and dangerous voice. She concludes her book by declaring it is “dangerous” to take Balthasar as one's theological guide, and the last line of the book states, “The one thing in my view one ought not to learn from him is how to be a theologian” (167).
What are we to make of Kilby's jeremiad? As an interpretation of Balthasar's texts it is entirely unpersuasive. It is a sneering, intellectually reckless book pretending to be a circumspect analysis. Her criticisms of Balthasar for his supposed procrustean eisegetical distortions of the Scriptures and theological tradition are merely asserted in most cases and not argued for with the necessarily detailed and precise evidence from Balthasar's primary texts and the texts he is supposedly perverting. The book is more in the genre of manifesto than scholarship. Kilby's own authorial voice is passive-aggressive, suspicious, condescending, and prone to undocumented declaration and negative insinuation. For example, in a few footnotes on pages 137 and 139, Kilby whispers Tina Beattie's opinions that Balthasar's use of gender analogies is motivated by an obsession with sexual intercourse and even a repressed sexual desire for Adrienne von Speyr. Although Kilby then asserts that this is not her own view, nevertheless the point is made, the discrediting idea planted, and she moves on with ostensibly clean hands. If one wanted to have a better understanding of Balthasar's writings, Kilby's book would not be the place to start, or to finish.
Yet Kilby's book is worth reading, even if it is not a helpful analysis of Balthasar. Indeed, it is not actually about Balthasar. As the last line of the book makes clear, this is a book about the nature of the theological enterprise itself. Kilby openly acknowledges that her preferred models for how theology ought to be done are Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth (162–65). Aquinas’ and Barth's authorial voices are strong and confident, but not unbridled and manipulative like Balthasar's. Yet the difference is even deeper. Balthasar crosses the line from strong and confident to illegitimate arrogance, Kilby explains, in his presumption to write like a “retreat director” who knows truths about God his readers do not, and who wants his readers therefore to suspend “the argumentative and critical sides of one's intellect” so as to be better instructed by the spiritual master (160–61). There is certainly a place for retreat directors, Kilby assures us, but their authority is of a different kind. What is illegitimate about Balthasar is that he fails to respect this difference: “We find in Balthasar an unusual blend of theology and spirituality . . . the conflation of two distinct kinds of authority—the authority of the spiritual guide and the authority of the scholar” (161). Yet it is at this point that Kilby's own conflation of some things that need to be kept distinct becomes most apparent.
Kilby makes an effort to explain that her point is not that theology and spirituality should not be brought together, but merely that Balthasar does it poorly, and dangerously. It seems to this reader, however, that she is not persuasive in her disavowal. It seems that Kilby holds a maximally restrictive standard for allowing sanctity a role in theology. She wants to agree in general with Balthasar that sanctity can be a legitimate source of theology, and that prayerful experience can be validly explored as a resource for intellectual reflection (155–56). But she also wants to limit the sanctity and prayerfulness studied by theologians to the past, to the lives and teachings of the dead and canonized (157). In this way sanctity and prayerfulness remain simply types of “information” accessible to all theologians, irrespective of their own sanctity and prayerfulness, or lack thereof. Moreover, if the sanctity and prayerfulness of the canonized dead are valid sources of theology, they have limited value and certainly cannot be given the wide scope and governing status that Balthasar gives them.
What Kilby finds completely vexing is the dominant influence in Balthasar's theology of the living person of Adrienne von Speyr and her mystical, charismatic experiences. So if in theory theology and sanctity can be unified, in this particular case the outcome is so noxiously presumptuous that it cannot be allowed. And this is the way Kilby's argument works: the outcome of allowing Speyr's charismatic voice unfettered control over his own theology is a set of theological positions Kilby finds so distasteful that she then decides simply to invalidate the method of arriving at these positions. In so doing, Kilby essentially invalidates much of the Catholic theological tradition, and indeed most of the writings of the biblical authors she claims to respect, as well as the writings of those given the title Doctor of the Church. Could the writings of Saint Paul or the author of the book of Revelation survive a critique based on Kilby's restricted criteria? Could the writings of Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, or Thérèse of Lisieux survive Kilby's critique? Could Bonaventure, Francis de Sales, or even Augustine survive her critique? Unlikely. What all of these people—and many more besides—have in common of course is not simply that they are dead canonized saints, but that during their own lifetimes they wrote theology in the voice of spiritual guides who knew something about God from their own prayer life that their readers did not. None of these people shared Kilby's procrustean presumption that only “information” gleaned from the writings of the dead by living intellectuals—governed exclusively by their reasonable, logical, academically refined standards—was valid for theology. They did not make this presumption because they believed the Holy Spirit could, and did in fact, call some people to a higher holiness and wisdom than others so that they would become teachers for their contemporaries. On a charitable and generous reading of her book, it is fair to say Kilby believes that too and did not intend to construct her own procrustean standard otherwise.
Two questions, therefore, are conflated in Kilby's book. First, was Speyr truly a genuine mystic with a unique relationship to God and a special vocation to know and teach about God, a vocation in which she enlisted Balthasar as an ally, or was she a fraud who has no claim on our attention? Second, is it ever valid for a Christian intellectual to be fundamentally guided in his or her own writings about God by the charismatic mystical teachings of a living contemporary, and hence to write in the voice of one who is called by God to a special teaching vocation? Kilby's book explicitly answers the second question in the negative, but she does not actually make an argument for her answer. Instead, she implicitly assumes that the answer to the first question is that Speyr is a fraud—and so too therefore Balthasar with his “God's eye” authorial voice—and then makes that answer the governing presupposition for her negative answer to the second question. In other words, Kilby's book is confused: it claims to be about Balthasar's authorial hubris, but actually it is about Speyr and her (possibly fraudulent) status as a Christian mystic; it claims to define the boundaries of what counts as legitimate Christian theology by prohibiting contemporary mystics from writing bona fide theology for their contemporaries, but actually it is simply expressing doubts about whether Balthasar was right in allowing Speyr's voice so much ruling status in his own writings. All of these are valid and important topics and questions, but Kilby's book does not help us to deal with any of them constructively and fairly.
