Category: Book Reviews

It occurs to me that a lot of folk who come visit this blog aren’t likely to encounter the brieze block volumes of Barth or Von Balthasar as a matter of course – and maybe wouldn’t even want to. Life is short enough, you might think, without spending some of its best days and hours poring over the lucubrations, cogitations and obfuscations of incurably literary theologians. And fair enough. But I think it is important for all of us living in the limited franchises of contemporary church experience, being sustained on a fairly predictable diet of worship content, theological range and scale, and simply unable to avoid the insistence of a culture increasingly sold on the accessible, the comprehensible, the practical, the sussable (new word I think – adjective formed from the verb, "to suss", which I define as ‘the premature conclusion that I fully understand something’.

As I started to say and got sidetracked – I think it is important for all of us to now and again encounter new and deep ways of thinking about God, and thinking about God on a scale and range vastly beyond our usual, routine conceptions, which by now are comfortably familiar, challenging but not inconveniently so, and to think way, way beyond that domesticated deity able to fit between the glossy flash covers of a less than 150 page paperback entitled God in Sixty Seconds for Busy People. OK I made that title up, but it stands for a whole genre of reductionist christian piety that wants God to fit in with, rather than collide with, our tolerated low intensity intellectual climate. What do I mean? Well, the tendency to smart package the Almighty into praise songs, or standardise the Eternal into devotional sound bytes, to so suss God that unaware of seismic detectors vibrating ominously, we ‘ve lost the capacity to sense that Holy Love that comes to us with the disruptive potential of an earthquake.

All of which is by way of saying that God transcends all our controlling mechanisms, however well meaning. And that some of the people who remind us of how untameable God is are the ones who write brieze block theologies. Whatever else Karl Barth and Von Balthasar’s theological writings do, by their sheer vastness they signal the immensity of the subject. And time reading them, or just knowing they are there to be read, is to recognise that our pursuit of God, and God’s relentless love pursuing us, takes a lifetime of expanding thought, expended energy, and tireless curiosity.

So as part of my review of Wigley’s book, I make these unsurprising observations

1. he isn’t easy reading, he is rewarding reading
2. he isn’t a devotional writer who gives me pious thoughts, but a theological writer in search of a God worth being devoted to
3. he doesn’t promise to make me feel God’s attention is fixed on me, but he explores two theological disciples whos elife work was to fix attention on the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

The book is written by an academic theologian interacting at a technical level with the God thoughts of two of Christianity’s greatest minds, and there are times when I have to mutter, ‘Sorry – you’ve lost me there’ – and I read the page again, and mutter, ‘No, still don’t get it.’ But one thing for sure – I never, ever feel that the deepest spiritual questions and longings I have, are trivialised or patronised. My failure to understand might now and again be because the writer’s expression is more difficult than it needs to be; or yes, it might be because I’m not up to the subject; but most of the time it’s because what Barth calls the Word of God, and what Von Balthasar calls the Glory of the Lord, and what they both call God, is simply unable to be expressed in words of one syllable – unless it is Love.

So those who come by this blog who aren’t into heavy duty theology, please bear with the occasional attempts here to engage with our Christian tradition at those foundational levels that need to be there for there to be much else at all. Living wittily surely means living deeply, living without all the answers, and living in the full knowledge of our smallness and God’s utter beyondness, unreachable – except as he comes to us in grace, in love, in Jesus Christ, the Word of God (Barth) and the Glory of the Lord (Von Balthasar).

Hans Urs Von Balthasar (I love that multi-syllabic name – challenge to Stuart to include it in a sermon!) wrote a major appreciation of Karl Barth’s theology. But, Wigley argues, it was a critical appreciation, and what’s more it was also a very important correction, by a Roman Catholic theologian, of Barth’s misunderstanding and misrepresentation of Catholic theology at its best. Both theologians made the decisive move of building theology around a view of Christ that made Christology decisive, central as the revelation of God. Where they differed was in Barth’s insistence that the Word of God revealed in Christ was the sole, exclusive, unparalleled revelation, requiring no supplement further elucidation from philosophy or natural theology. To give natural theology or human philosophy a foothold in Divine revelation would be, for Barth, to allow human thought ‘to lay hands on God’.

Von Balthasar argued that Barth’s radically Christocentric doctrine of the Word of God was so all pervasive in his Church Dogmatics that it left no room for other doctrines such as Creation and the a Christian doctrine of humanity created in the image of God; within this created order, dependent on God and sustained by grace, ‘human nature is not destroyed or turned into its opposite. On the contrary, the natural capacity of a human being to know God continues to function’.

If Barth pushes all knowledge of God into the Christ event which happened in eternity, Von Balthasar  fears for the significance and possibility of human history. ‘Too much in Barth gives the impression that nothing much really happens in his theology of event and history, because everything has already happened in eternity.’ A Christiocentric perspective  must leave space for a truly temporal history.

These are high-powered disagreements between two theologians both of whom agree that Christian theology must begin with ‘that which is the most concrete of all events, with God’s word in Jesus Christ’. Von Balthasar is not arguing for an independent order of nature from which knowledge of God can be derived without reference to Jesus Christ- the doctrines of creation and covenant, central to Barth’s theology, are equally integral to Von Balthasar’s view of nature. ‘Rather than any concept of a pure and independent order of nature in addition to that which is encompassed in the  order of revelation, there is only one world as it is, created and restored in the image of Jesus Christ’. (Wigley, page 38).

  Now all of that might seem rarefied, difficult to root in the practicalities of life for those of us trying to faithfully follow Jesus and witness to the Gospel. But I sense in this debate, two theological allies, working together through their mutually correcting theologies, to create a theology which does full justice to the transcendent, eternal reality of God self-revealed in Jesus Christ, and the balancing truth of this created yet broken world into which God in Christ came with redemptive purpose, as God incarnate. At this point my limited understanding of these two theological virtuosos gives way to admiration for two minds probing at the far frontiers of Christian truth. I am glad simply to overhear the exchange – and grateful to Wigley for being interpreter.

And here I have to confess my suspicion of the obsession with practicality, as if all theological truth, knowledge and wisdom were reducible to human activity, actions, practice. I understand, and largely sympathise with the Maclendon, Hauerwas emphasis on practice as proof of belief – but that’s a different question from an equally important dimension of christian discipleship – the love of God with our minds, the passion for God that exults in God’s beauty, theology more at ease with adoration than explanation, and an inner longing to know, at levels other than the practical, what it means to love God. I mean God on the scale of the picture above, my favourite image from Hubble, the Eagle nebulae, which every time I read John 1 sits alongside it as a way of reminding me of my size relative to the One who inhabits eternity!

Karl Barth and Hans Urs Von Balthasar. A Critical Engagement,

Stephen D. Wigley, (London: T&T Clark, 2007),

178 pages. ISBN:9780567031914.

(Review copy courtesy of T&T Clark)

Over many years, two of the greatest theologians of the Twentieth century, both of them Swiss, formed a remarkable theological friendship rich in conversation and mutual admiration. Hans urs Von Balthasar and Karl Barth each wrote their theology out of their own tradition, and each in reaction against what they saw as a dominant wrong turning in their respective traditions. Barth wrote from within the Reformed tradition against the liberal Protestantism of Germany, and Von Balthasar against the ‘dry as sawdust’ version of Thomism he encountered in his Jesuit training.

For years now I have been reading Karl Barth. Ive done so, not as an academic theologian, but as a preaching pastor who ‘kens fine’ where to go looking for Alpine theology, those massive themes that should undergird all pastoral preaching which doesn’t play around with people, trivialise the gospel or patronise the congregation by keeping it simple and practical. Keeping what practical and simple? Surely not the Gospel – which is not practical but eternal, not simple but the deepest mystery. Barth’s passion for God, self-revealed in Christ, Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer, is an awesome response by one mind to the Gospel. And the fourteen volumes of the Church Dogmatics, along with his sensational Commentary on Romans express both the vastness and disruptiveness of a Gospel which comes as God’s gracious gift.

  It is only in recent years I have been introduced to Von Balthasar, and by one of his earlier English speaking admirers, Professor Donald Mackinnon. Following a paper on Julian of Norwich which I delivered in Aberdeen, Professor Mackinnon then retired to Aberdeen, sent me a copy of his paper on Von Balthasar. It took some more years before I started reading Von Balthasar and developing a growing interest in his work. Like Barth, Von Balthasar was also impatient with contemporary approaches to theology; in his case those which arrogantly dismissed the riches of the Christian catholic tradition. Like Barth he has left an almost unmanageable array of written theology, but also a magnum opus of 15 volumes. The great organising principle are the three eternal transcendentals of beauty, goodness and truth: The seven volume The Glory of the Lord, is an exploration of beauty as defined by the nature and being of God; the five volume Theo-Drama explores the nature of goodness as revealed in the eternal drama of God and humanity as played out in the gospels; and Theo-Logic provides the foundational nature of truth which, together with beauty and goodness, are defined by the nature of God.

Barth’s Church Dogmatics, and Von Balthasar’s Trilogy require two metres of shelf space. I’ve no idea how much space would be required for the rest of their writings, but as Oliver Davies quipped,’Either measuring scales or measuring tape will confirm this is a very Germanic way of doing theology’.

Stepeh Wigley is a Welsh Methodist Minister. His book compares the work of Von Balthasar with that of Barth, and traces the ways in which Von Balthasar’s Trilogy is a Catholic response to the Reformed Barth’s Church Dogmatics. The central thesis for those interested in the systematic and technical merit of Wigley’s work is that Von balthasar’s debate with Barth about the analogy of being, and Barth’s alternative, the analogy of faith, was definitive and formative in how Von Balthasar worked out his great theological project. So not only was the conversation one between friends, but one between disagreeing allies. Those who want to follow this line of study, can do so in this elegant, ecumenical and sympathetic exposition of Von Balthasar, in responsive conversation with Barth.

My own review over the next few posts on Wigley’s book, will be less an analysis of the systematic and philosophical issues that united or divided these two companions on the way, but on the theological richness, spiritual rigour and intellectual vastness of their visions. I say visions, but in truth the vision was one, and it was the vision of God – the Word of God and the Glory of God, revealed in Jesus Christ, and portrayed with a lifelong passionate fascination, expressed in doxological prose. Barth and Von Balthasar are in my view, two of those rare gifts of God, profound theological thinkers whose writing is a spiritual tonic, an intellectual feast, and so big, a lifetime doesn’t exhaust it!