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The central panel in the triptych, which is Von Balthasar’s theological masterpiece, is goodness. The first panel is The Glory of the Lord and expounds beauty as reflected in creation from the beauty of God the Creator. The second and central panel is Theo-drama, a careful impassioned telling of the drama of redemption in terms of goodness, the goodness of God which is selflessly poured out in Christ, by sheer benevolence and personal expense of suffering.

It is in the chapter dealing with Von Balthasar’s Theo-Drama, and Karl Barth’s response to it, that Wigley’s book provides valuable and important perspectives on these two theological allies who differed, and despite the mutual respect and courtesy, never agreed to differ. The fundamental differences and even incompatibilities between Barth’s reconstructed Reformed perspective and Von Balthasar’s traditional Catholicism revived and revised, are brought out in Wigley’s careful detective work. In the Theo-Drama there are few explicit references to Barth, but as Von Balthasar wrestles with the immensity and infinite goodness of God as revealed in Christ, he is determined to hold the balance between the infinite and the finite, the divine and the human in Christ, and between divine freedom which is infinite and human freedom which is finite.

  [God in Christ] simultaneously opens up the greatest possible intimacy and the greatest possible distance (in Christ’s dereliction on the cross) between God and man; thus he does not decide the course of the play in advance but gives man an otherwise unheard-of freedom to decide for or against the God who has so committed himself. (Theo-Drama, Vol. 3, page 21)

Thus Von Balthasar in redressing the balance, expounds the importance of finite freedom as human response to the infinite freedom of God. The response in the drama of redemption of such central figures as Mary, the paradigmatic saints and the Church as the Body of Christ embodied on earth, is not so much a compromise of the ‘all of grace’ truth at the heart of the great Theo-Drama of God’s saving action. Human response is already written in to a creation which exists by the infinite freedom of God, that infinite freedom constricted by the free goodness of God, to invite the participation of creation, and humanity in the redemptive purposes of God in Christ. This is Von Balthasar’s response to Barth making the Revelation of the Word of God, and thus Christology, the sum of theology to the exclusion of other essential balancing truths.

Wigley is a persuasive guide, and fair-minded in allowing both voices to be heard in the conversation. So here is Barth’s response to Von Balthasar’s criticism that Barth made too much of Christology and not enough of the Church.

I now have an inkling of something which at first I could not understand: what is meant by the ‘christological constriction’ which my expositor and critic urged against me in mild rebuke. But we must now bring against him the counter question, whether in all the splendour of the saints who are supposed to represent and repeat Him, Jesus Christ has not ceased – not in theory but in practice – to be the origin and object of Christian faith. (Church Dogmatics Vol. IV.1, page 768)

And so the debate continued – and continues, as a high wire theological balancing act that’s been going on since the early days of the church. The arguments about the role of human response in the story of salvation, and whether the sole sufficiency of Christ as origin and object of faith, is compatible with making human response decisive in the drama – to which Barth’s answer is No! – and Von Balthasar’s answer is yes, if, out of the goodness of God’s heart, as Von Balthasar maintains, that human response of freedom is itself God’s intentional free gift of co-operating with God in the performance of the greatest, costliest drama in universal history.

I once heard Professor Donald Macleod preach on the ‘Glory of Christ’. He enunciated the English word ‘Glory’ with a particular Highland intensity and accent, a noticeable hushed sing-song tone, that left you in no doubt he was speaking of Reality of a different order. Von Balthasar wasn’t a Highland, Gaelic speaking Calvinist preacher, he was a Swiss ex-Jesuit Catholic philosopher theologian – but his theological and biblical fascination with ‘Glory’ as that expression of the reality and splendour of God in Christ, which captivates, ignites and ultimately satisfies human longing, was just as passionately articulate as that of the Free Church Professor in Edinburgh.

The seven volumes of Von Balthasar’s The Glory of the Lord are one long argument, meandering across and cutting deep into, a theological and philosphical landscape on the scale of the Alps. But meandering purposefully towards the conclusion that there is a divinely intended and divinely given connection, between the eternal and essential glory and beauty of the Lord, and the inherent grace given beauty of creation. And while there is a proper and necessary distinction between Creator and creature, between ‘that unique existence which pertains to God alone, and that sharing in being  which is common to the rest of creation’, there is nevertheless a divinely intended connectedness between creation and Creator, which enables purposeful and redemptive relationship to take place in this cosmic theatre within which the Lord of Glory produces and directs the drama of redemption.

The Glory of the Lord, Wigley argues, takes its inspiration from Barth’s Church Dogmatics Volume 2.1 and Barth’s treatment of ‘The Eternity and Glory of God’. I found this whole chapter, and indeed the argument of the whole book, to be convincing, but with a significant hesitation I’ll mention at the end of this series of posts.

Convincing in that Wigley has traces key points of interaction demonstrating how Von Balthasar’s theological work is constructively and self-consciously responding to what he sees as major weaknesses in Barth. Von Balthasar is offering a view of creation, createdness and creature, that allows for a God-given responsiveness in the contingent created order, answerable to the eternal transcendent beauty and glory of the Lord. For Von Balthasar, ‘The whole earth will cry glory’, is not only an eschatological statement, but expresses the purposeful generosity of the Creator anticipating the response of worship.

Barth is uncompromising in his position that theology begins and ends with the Revelation of the Word of God. Wigley has a fine section in which he shows Von Balthasar dissenting from this view, because it makes Revelation so dominant that other important theological truths are inevitably and disruptively eclipsed.

‘In light of the form of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ which unites creation and redemption through the Incarnation, there is more to theology than just revelation. There is a call to participate in the life of Christ which requires an understanding of being and the possibility of an ontological transformation of humanity….The biblical witness to God’s revelation leads to a response and participation in Christ. This means in turn that epistemology is insufficient without ontology, both in terms of the transformation of the believer and ultimately of the whole created order, as the Incarnation makes knowledge of God an engagement with being itself.’ (Wigley, page 83-4).

Wigley is a good theological intepreter, who like a well briefed interviewer, knows the relational history of those he interviews, understands the influences and the crises, knows how to interpret the important incidents that shape life and thought. And he is sympathetic to his subjects, representing them fairly and allowing them to not have to worry about the ambush question. This is a book that encourages you to like the two theologians whose friendship and differences gave us such a rich vein of Christian theology.

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!