The last sections of Wigley’s Karl Barth and Hans Urs Von Balthasar, examine Von Balthasar’s understanding of truth. The last three volumes of his trilogy he called Theo-Logic, an exposition of truth as reasoned truth about God, revealed in Christ, by the Spirit. By now Wigley has persuaded me – Von Balthasar’s masterpiece is shaped and formed in response to the theological pressures, both attractive and disruptive, that he believed were exerted by Barth’s theology. Here is one paragraph of Wigley, expounding Von Balthasar…and as I said earlier in this series, I’m not perturbed but strangely reassured when I encounter theological writing that has to be read twice! I’d find a God who could be done and dusted in strap line prose unpromisingly boring.
In his exposition of how the Spirit works to establish the universal truth of Christ…Von Balthasar establishes the Spirit as the one who "interprets" Christ, and in so doing "introduces" people into the Christian life, using three key themes for this mission of the Spirit, namely ‘Gift’, ‘Freedom’ and ‘Witness’….He is looking to show how the Spirit is at work trinitarianly (and thus in creation and redemption) in both objective and subjective terms. In subjective terms, this witness to the truth is seen in the life of the individual Christian in prayer, forgiveness and in the gifts and of the Spirit, and in the witness of a ‘Christian life’. But equally, …it is also evidenced in objective terms, namely in the tradition, in Scripture and above all in the apostolic ministry of the Church. (Wigley, 134)
Scripture bracketed between tradition and the Church would always pose a theological obstacle for the Reformed Barth, just as Von Balthasar’s view that Barth lacks an adequate ecclesiology created inevitable distance for a mind so passionately Catholic.
What Wigley has achieved in this book is an account of two theological friends, whose differences were never negotiated away in a bland and ultimately false ecumenism. Instead, they spent their lives and their best intellectual energies, in creative dialogue carried out on a theologically gargantuan scale, each seeking to know what it might mean ‘for the Church to be the people or the place where the glory of God is revealed’.
Wigley has also shown that an ecumenical theology needn’t be about lowest common denominators, or agreed statements that understate difference. It can be discussion about the core doctrines of the Christian faith, as lived, thought and articulated by theologians from across the Christian spectrum, in which difference does not provoke defensive hostility, but evokes an exchange of truth as each understands it. Both Von Balthasar and Barth bore passionate witness to truth – together they were admirers of Anselm, and his famous dictum, faith seeking understanding.
Which brings me to a final comment on this fine book. There is a form of intellectual snobbery that thinks books about books, or theologians theologising about other theologians, lacks originality and is a kind of parasitic reliance on other people’s ideas. I’ve never shared that view. Some of the best theology I have read is by those who seriously engage the theology of others with sympathy and critical appreciation. In the past few years Bauckham on Moltmann, Mark McIntosh on Von Balthasar, Webster on Barth, Davies on Aquinas, Marsden on Edwards, Zachman on Calvin, Lohse on Luther, have represented some of the best creative and interactive theological writing. From earlier years Rupp on Luther, Wendel on Calvin, Gilson on Aquinas, Busch on Barth, Burnaby on Augustine, Bethge on Bonhoeffer, remain theological classics.
Wigley’s study of Barth and Von Balthasar is more narrowly focused because it is exploring and explaining how one theologian influenced another – and does so by allowing us to overhear, and at times imagine, the conversation of two friends, whose agreements and differences arose from their own theological integrity. And though neither would countenance convenience-driven compromise, they seldom approached each other’s thought with less than appreciative criticism. One last extract from Von Balthasar, about the penultimacy of the Church and the ultimacy of Christ the Word, demonstrates considerable overlap in theological commitment:
The Church…is the moon not the sun; the reflection, not the glory itself. Put more precisely, she is the response of glorification, and to this extent she is drawn into the glorious Word to which she responds, and into the splendour of the light without which she would not shine. What she reflects back in the night is the light of the hope of the world.
Amen, and Amen.
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