THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO HANS URS VON BALTHASAR

Written by Edward T. Oakes SJ and David Moss (Eds) Reviewed By Timothy Bradshaw

The immensity of Von Balthasar’s output in multi-volume works, notably his The Glory of the Lord and Theodrama, makes him a rather inaccessible theologian, indeed a forbidding one. Any good quality introductions or summaries are therefore of much value, as this Roman Catholic and Jesuit theologian is one of the great figures of 20th century theology, and yet one curiously isolated as if for the dilettante sector of interest. He has long been known as a fellow Swiss and dialogue partner of Karl Barth, someone Barth thought understood him rather better than many fellow Protestants, and the common German cultural background is very evident for both. Indeed with the accession of the new Pope, this kind of German Roman Catholic thought will become important not only for theologians and church leaders, but politicians and diplomats also!

This symposium contains excellent contributions from an ecumenical range of scholars including Rowan Williams, Oliver Davies, Fergus Kerr and John Webster. There is not a weak essay in the book. The introductory essay by the editors gives us a vivid cameo of von Balthasar’s life and work. From an aristocratic family living in Lucerne, he grew up trilingual in French, German and English, instilled with music and culture. He felt a call to become a Roman priest and join the Jesuit order. He found their theological training desperately tedious and dreary, amazed at ‘what men had made out of the glory of revelation’ (3). Further studies in France and engagement with Patristic theology improved things for him. He took up chaplaincy work at the university of Basel where of course he met Barth, on whom he wrote a famous monograph in 1951 which made Rome suspicious since he went some way with Barth in rejecting the claims of unaided reason for theology. He had by this time met the Protestant doctor Adrienne von Speyr, converting her to Rome and finding her visions and insights full of theological interest. He left the Jesuits, and no bishop would license him. He was not invited to join the Swiss bishops at Vatican II as an advisor. Yet the council vindicated his theological vision. Here is a theologian ‘teeming with paradoxes’!

Having whetted our appetites, the editors fulfil their promise of a rich feast. Rowan Williams gives us a superlative and highly readable account of Balthasar’s Trinitarian theology, including his strange musings on sexual differentiation in relation to divine persons. Healey and Schindler likewise offer an excellent account of his ecclesiology, always Christologically focused, although not sufficiently so in the eyes of Barth of course! Lucy Gardiner reminds us, perhaps as an unwitting counter claim, that Mariology held a towering place for Balthasar, who could say:

Without Mariology, Christianity threatens imperceptibly to become inhuman. The Church becomes functionalistic, soulless, a hectic enterprise without any point of rest, estranged from its true nature by the planners.

One wonders whether von Balthasar really was sufficiently rooted in Christology, or whether his Christology lacked attention to Jesus’ humanity, and whether this theologian suffers from what the Eastern Orthodox call the West’s pneumatological deficit, lack of emphasis on the Spirit or Paraclete.

For all that the symposium is predominantly explanatory, articulating Balthasar’s theology rather than offering any telling criticisms, it is a great way in to the library of his works, and can hardly be bettered as an introduction.


Timothy Bradshaw

Regents Park College, Oxford