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Act and Event in Rahner and von Balthasar: A Case Study in Catholic Systematics1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Cyrus P. Olsen
Cyrus P. Olsen*
Affiliation:
355 St. Thomas Hall, University of Scranton, Scranton PA 18510
*
Email: cyrus.olsen@scranton.edu
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Abstract

In Benedict XVI's God is Love §1 humanity's relationship with God is described as an encounter with an ‘event’, the Christ‐event. I argue that this shift in Catholic theology towards language of act and event signalled a relationship to existentialism, which, taken broadly, entailed an emphasis upon subjectivity and freedom uncharacteristic of the focus upon objectivity common to neo‐Scholastic thought. As we shall see with Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar, however, this newfound emphasis on subjectivity and freedom did not necessitate an abandonment of all the elements of the more ‘objective’ perspective. Rather, the task during the ascendancy of existentialist thought became the integration of human subjectivity with the objective and independent reality of the world and God. I suggest that Rahner and von Balthasar use notions such as act and event as a way of being mindful of the role of the subject's creativity and freedom in its encounter with the world, God, and other persons, without thereby undermining the freedom and creativity of that which is other than the subject.

Keywords

ActEventRahnerBalthasarRevelation

Information

Type
Original Articles
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 89 , Issue 1019 , January 2008 , pp. 3 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © The author 2007. Journal compilation © The Dominican Council/Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

1. Introduction

In keeping with the Second Vatican Council's personalism,Footnote 2 Pope Benedict XVI's God is Love enjoins: ‘Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and decisive direction’.Footnote 3 That event is the giving of God's only Son, Jesus Christ, who first loved us (1 Jn 4:10).Footnote 4 Accordingly, Benedict continues, the ethics of self‐love and love of neighbour is now ‘no longer a mere “command”;’ since God lovedFootnote 5 us first,Footnote 6‘it is the response to the gift of love with which God draws near to us’.Footnote 7 God's self‐gift in Christ unto death gives humanity a new direction; this directional alteration is a once‐for‐all event, an occurrence in history which institutes a new ontological possibility which begins working its way into the fabric of creation: union with God, but union eternally preservative of the real distinction between Creator and creature.Footnote 8 We come to share in this newness, most intimately, though by no means exclusively, in the Eucharist.Footnote 9 When the God‐human relationship is presented as an event of personal encounter Christianity's ethical and intellectual aspects are less likely to be unmoored from their place in the larger narrative of God's pursuit of humanity.

Recall the words of Irenaeus: Christ ‘brought all [possible] novelty, by bringing Himself who had been announced’.Footnote 10 Here is Irenaeus in his anti‐Marcion mode, trying to hold together in unity the Old and New Covenant.Footnote 11 In so witnessing to the continuity of divine revelation (Christ was ‘announced’), Irenaeus also gives credence to the unanticipated, unforeseen, and truly novel aspect of Christ's coming. He fulfils what was promised, but the promise never operated as an outright prediction. It is in fact the felix culpa that further accentuates the unexpected nature of the divine self‐gift fulfilling and beckoning all of creation toward new life: humanity, although prepared by the divine pedagogue (cf. Is 30:20) for the event of the Incarnation, death, and Resurrection, never could have foreseen the superabundance given in Christ.Footnote 12 He becomes the onticFootnote 13 bond of union (vinculum substantialis) in quo omnia constant (Col 1:17).Footnote 14 Irenaeus rightly urges us to return continually to this source if we are to enter into, and so come to know, if only in shadows, the divine logic.

IrenaeusFootnote 15 and Benedict XVI remind us that we encounter Christ most fully in the breaking of bread and in the works of mercy that flow naturally from this unionFootnote 16: ‘A Eucharist which does not pass over into the concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented’.Footnote 17 The natural flow advanced in partaking of Christ is the transference of those restful ever‐active waters of the divine life (Ps 23:1–3; 42:1; Jn 7:37–8)Footnote 18 from oneself to the world and ultimately as a return‐gift to God.Footnote 19‘The Eucharist’, writes Benedict, ‘draws us into Jesus' act of self‐oblation. More than just statically [immobiliter] receiving the incarnate Logos, we enter into the very dynamic [motus] of his self‐giving.’Footnote 20 Once one enters into this dynamic, blockage of the oblative flow can only occur on the side of humanity: the ‘floodstream of the love of humanity passes through the heart of God’.Footnote 21 But notice Benedict's contrast between immobility, the static, with motion, the dynamic. A too narrow focus on the static would render union, and neighbour‐love, a mere intellectual exercise, whereas the love‐story of Christianity involves the whole person.

The English translation of this passage is a little weak. We do not simply ‘enter into’ the divine dynamic of self‐giving. The Latin word here is ‘involvimur’: it indicates a being‐rolled‐in, envelopment, being wrapped up, or covered. We become enrolled in the Trinity.Footnote 22 This enrolment is a participationFootnote 23 in the economy of divine self‐giving that draws forth from the participant a love‐response with consequences in the world.Footnote 24‘Through the Word of God, which is Christ, the whole world, in association with his taking flesh, begins itself to be God's body and word’,Footnote 25 it begins to be divinized.Footnote 26

I mentioned earlier that this way of thinking was old and new. So, you may ask, what is new? It trades on a view of revelation introduced into Conciliar Roman Catholic thought at Vatican II. Benedict XVI was a peritus of the Council and worked closely on the document Dei Verbum (‘On Divine Revelation’)Footnote 27 with, among others, Karl Rahner. In his commentary on the document shortly following the publication of the Council documents, the then Joseph Ratzinger clarified that the periti wanted to avoid one thing in composing Dei Verbum: the intellectualismFootnote 28 and doctrinalism commonly found in neo‐scholastic manuals of theology.Footnote 29 Such intellectualism can be illustrated by an exclusively propositionalFootnote 30 view of revelation as well as by a too narrow focus upon the unchanging ‘essences’ of reality.Footnote 31 Without jettisoning concepts and propositions, Dei Verbum presented revelation as an invitation by God to share in the divine life.

Dei Verbum fittingly begins on a Barthian note,Footnote 32 that is, with an accent on divine freedom, by using the words of the First Vatican Council and reformulating them in a personalisticFootnote 33 direction; it speaks of God's goodness and then of [God's] wisdom: ‘placuit Deo, in sua bonitate et sapientia’.Footnote 34 Beginning thus with God's free initiative permits the focus of attention to move from intellectual ‘assent’ to a view that RatzingerFootnote 35 fittingly calls ‘union’.Footnote 36 In the rest of this essay I shall demonstrate the distinctive contribution offered by Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar to Catholic openness to more dynamic concepts of humanity and divinity.

In the thought of Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar the notions of act and event came to play a crucial role in retrieving as well as expanding early and mediaeval Christian doctrines within twentieth century theology. Let us take the doctrine of revelation as a preliminary, and particularly illuminating, example. Both attempted to move beyond a doctrine of revelation modelled solely on the communication of ahistoricalFootnote 37 propositions.Footnote 38 Rahner and von Balthasar rather saw how a doctrine of revelation ought to reflect the finite subject's creativeFootnote 39 historicalFootnote 40 participationFootnote 41 in an encounter with Infinite freedom. Yet the objective nature of revelation could not be jeopardized lest the distinction between finite and Infinite be lost;Footnote 42 within a doctrine of revelation, the balance of the subjective and objective poles must be maintained.Footnote 43 We can call this a ‘Chalcedonian’ emphasis: ‘From the moment that Chalcedon in its sober and holy wisdom,’ writes von Balthasar, ‘elevated the adverbs “indivisibly” … and “unconfusedly” … to a dogmatic formula, the image of a reciprocal indwelling of two distinct poles of being replaced the image of mixture.’Footnote 44 The use of notions such as act and event, I shall demonstrate, gave Rahner and von Balthasar the needed parameters for developing a theology mindful of this Christological development, entailing the balancing of polarities whereby the human and the divine remain unmixed, yet dwell reciprocally within one another.Footnote 45 In an exposition of how de Lubac understood the supernatural, John M. McDermott well expresses this Lubacian inheritance: ‘In Jesus' person are held together all the tensions of the concrete universal: finite and Infinite, time and eternity, diversity and unity, natural and supernatural. This personal center [sic] grounds all the paradoxical tensions in the Church, Christ's Body and Sacrament: visible and invisible, particular and universal, human and divine, plurality and unity, etc’.Footnote 46 Christ founds the sacramental vision of Catholicism whereby the finite sign is effective in communicating the Infinite.Footnote 47

Speaking most generally, I associate an act with rational spontaneityFootnote 48 and deliberation arising from a free conscious subject whereby intellect and will operate in unison. An event indicates a moment (in time) when the conscious subject has been taken hold ofFootnote 49 by something independent (or other) than itself,Footnote 50 even if this ‘other’ is occasioned by one's own actions (a propos von Balthasar's stress on the ‘dramatic’ nature of the divine‐human relationship, which is meant to express the event‐character of this relationship, Ben Quash notes that drama ‘shows the passivity (or ‘passion’) of the subject in relation to the very deeds which he or she has authored. A deed made objective occasions effects, of which a dramatic agent may be the recipient’).Footnote 51 When treating of the doctrine of revelation, for instance, theologians directly face the paradox of maintaining the finite subject's free act before the infinitely freer event of divine self‐communication. ‘The word of revelation,’ writes von Balthasar, ‘is the Word in the mode of action: God is apprehended in the act of self‐communication.’Footnote 52 Our participation in Christ is a participation in the activity of divine condescending in the mode of self‐communication.Footnote 53 What follows fits well within discourse on the relationship between divine and human freedom, itself a topic relevant to the larger matter of a theology of revelation.

The shift in Catholic theology towards language of act and event signalled a relationship to ‘existentialism’,Footnote 54 which, taken broadly, entailed an emphasis upon subjectivity and freedom uncharacteristic of the focus upon objectivity common to neo‐Scholastic thought.Footnote 55 As we shall see with Rahner and von Balthasar, however, this newfound emphasis on subjectivity and freedom did not necessitate an abandonment of all the elements of the more ‘objective’ perspective.Footnote 56 Rather, the task during the ascendancy of existentialist thought became the integration of human subjectivity with the objective and independent reality of the world and God. I am suggesting that Rahner and von Balthasar use notions such as act and event as a way of being mindful of the role of the subject's creativity and freedom in its encounter with the world, God, and other persons, without thereby undermining the freedom and creativity of that which is other than the subject.

2. The Dilemma for the Catholic Theologian

In 1939 Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar initially collaborated upon a ‘new dogmatics’ for Catholic theology.Footnote 57 Rahner later published this work under the title ‘The Prospects for Dogmatic Theology’,Footnote 58 and admitted that he could no longer distinguish between his contribution and von Balthasar's.Footnote 59 Despite von Balthasar's departure, this dogmatic sketch nevertheless displays a remarkable convergence of ideas for the early Rahner and von Balthasar.

After a series of critical comments and concrete examples of textbooks, historical studies of Christian dogma, and theological studies of special or marginal topics, Rahner comes around to his own positive proposals, firstly by articulating the distinguishing marks of Catholic theology:

Every Catholic theology must be a theology of both essence and existence, or putting it simply, it must both look for necessary and intrinsic structures and connexions and it must report what in fact, without metaphysical or logical necessity [frei und unableitbar], took place in saving history. The second requirement needs no explanation. But the first retains its truth in spite of every kind of Existentialism. For theology is thinking; and it is quite impossible to think irreducibly atomized facts. For even what is freely posited has its nature [Wesen] and structure, its connexions, homologies and analogies. Thus in the very midst of the report that this or that took place [das geschah], it has always to be said what intrinsically it was that took place [so geschah]. And this what is never absolutely incommensurate with other things. There are structures which persist even in the most surprising novel event [bei aller überraschenden Neuheit der Ereignisse].Footnote 60

For Rahner, this ‘cooperation and interpenetration of theologies of essence and existence’ is the unity of theological ontology and historical report.Footnote 61 While such a passage may sound eerily similar to Lessing's ditchFootnote 62 that philosophy deals with ‘necessary truths of reason’ and theology with ‘accidental historical truths’, Rahner does not consider the events of salvation history to be ‘accidental historical truths’ open to the so‐called objectivity of the historical sciences.Footnote 63 Both Rahner and von Balthasar consider Christianity to be a religion bound to historical facts, but neither think ‘exact scientific method’ (exaktwissenschaftlich) can uncover the true nature and structure of those facts.Footnote 64 One needs the ‘eyes of faith’ (Rousselot)Footnote 65 to see them as truly theological.Footnote 66 Since the revealing God of Christianity is not bound by the necessity Lessing grants to philosophical thinking, but is infinitely free and also the Logos of history, the content of God's saving acts in history can be known by analogy with other worldly metaphysical and logical structures.

If the intelligibility of salvific events resides in the content, Rahner nevertheless understands this content (the ‘what’ of the event) to be more than the communication of mere information; revelatory events truly impart God's very own self to the world. This is again why Rahner and von Balthasar argue that only through participation in God's grace can we come to see history as filled with the saving acts of God. The content presenting itself in salvation history is inseparable from the ‘essence’ of God. Barth phrases the matter thus: ‘God's being is his loving’.Footnote 67 If God's nature remains the same even in the most surprising and novel event, then it is possible to apprehend those aspects of God's eternal nature which are freely revealed in history, such as God's love shown forth in the Christ‐event. Note the word ‘freely’, for Rahner, asserts that what takes place in salvation history does so without metaphysical or logical necessity. Lest Catholic theology succumb to Neoplatonic theories of the divine necessarily and uncontrollably emanating itself, Rahner justly directs us to divine freedom.Footnote 68 He further holds that the logic of divine freedom is itself intelligible. This is why he emphasises the persistence of structures even within free and spontaneous events in history.Footnote 69

As important as ‘facts’ of salvation history are, then, Rahner does not want to say that they are irreducibly ‘atomized’, dissociated from a wider socio‐historical context. To argue thus would severely hobble the authority rightly accorded ‘nature’, one of two valid orders of reality ratified by the First Vatican Council (the duplex ordo).Footnote 70 The order of nature (variously defined by Rahner and von Balthasar) provides us with material for making sense of what happens in a divine‐human encounter. Rahner's comments well represent one Catholic attempt to bring about balanced ecumenical dialogue with theologians, such as Karl Barth, who furthered event‐centred theology, which tended to devalue natural structures known outside of explicit revelation. Rahner would have been reminded of the centrality of the events of salvation history for the theological enterprise, but not at the expense of the analogous content reason could bring to the table.

In the context of Rahner's theology, ‘history’ must be taken in a particularly anthropocentric sense. In ‘The Concept of Mystery in Catholic Theology’, Rahner writes:

when we take our concepts from the history of revelation and biblical theology, we shall have to add that it is by his action[handelt] upon us that God imparts truths to us. The wider concept [than that of propositional revelation] is that of a revelation which is action and event [des Offenbarungshandelns und Offenbarungsereignisses]. This follows at once from the fact that in the actual order of things revelation, even as the communication of truth, only comes to us as the salvific action of God's grace in which he must first bestow on us the capacity of hearing his word of revelation and in which he imparts to us the reality of which the word of revelation speaks. The reality is spoken of only in the grace by which the reality itself is communicated [so daß diese Wortmitteilung über eine Wirklichkeit in diesem Falle sich immer nur ereignet in der gnadenhaften Mitteilung der geoffenbarten Wirklichkeit selbst] …Footnote 71

A revelation which is ‘action and event’ envelops us with divine reality. Revelation adopts us into the trinitarian life and makes our connaturality with the divine and our growth in grace possible.Footnote 72 As Rahner says of the revelation of Christ, the ‘ultimate meaning of this revelation is a calling of the human being out of this world into the life of God, who leads his personal life as the Being exalted above the whole world, as the tri‐personal God, in inaccessible light’.Footnote 73 Since Rahner claims that grace imparts to the human being the reality of which it speaks, this incorporation into divine life occurs here and now, and not merely in the resurrection of the dead. This incorporation is richer and in fact inclusive of propositional content.

Rahner understood Catholic theology to be tempted by the error of equating revelation solely with propositional, dogmatic, formulae. In ‘The Word and Eucharist’ he noted that the Denzinger index at that time had no entry on ‘The Word of God’. Rather, everything came to be subsumed under ‘De Revelatione’ and dominated by a propositional understanding of revelation. He found the same error in fundamental theology:

in contrast to present‐day Protestant and Catholic biblical theology, revelation is always taken in the theology of the schools as a purely doctrinal revelation couched in statements, not as a revelatory action and event [nicht als ereignishafte Tatoffenbarung betrachtet], in which God acts creatively to bestow grace upon men, uttering his word in it and for it, as in inner moment of this action on man – or in which, to put it biblically, the action is the word, because God's word must produce what it says.Footnote 74

We can see that Rahner is consciously framing his understanding of revelation in terms of ‘act and event’ in opposition to an imbalanced view propagated by the then dominant Catholic theology. In contrast, he offers the insights of biblical theology as a means of overcoming this imbalance. Yet the ‘word’, the propositional content, we might say, remains. It remains as an ‘inner moment’ of divine action on humanity.

Biblical theology, it would seem, offers fundamental theology a means for developing a theology of ‘act and event’, due to its focus upon the ‘acts’ of God in human history.Footnote 75 The particularly ‘Catholic’ theology of ‘act and event’ requires that these ‘acts’ be understood as, in some sense, theandric,Footnote 76 i.e., as an intimate union between God and the human person such that divine revelation could never be separated from a ‘mediating’ historical structure that stands in direct continuity with the ‘event of revelation’, the life‐death‐Resurrection of Christ that extends in time beyond the Ascension to the end of the ‘apostolic age’.Footnote 77

We cannot view revelation as ‘act and event’ as the negation of propositional content, for Rahner states that theology can take its concepts from the history of revelation and biblical theology, which means that conceptual and propositional content can arise from within this inclusion in God's way of being and acting. Yet this inclusion will always be more than a merely propositional relation of mind communicating to mind. This is because the whole and entire human being is involved in the act and event of revelation and never just one human faculty (e.g. the mind) artificially isolated from all the rest.

In fact, Rahner argues that the human faculty of knowledge reaches its fullness only when it is self‐transcendent. Knowledge ought to pass over into an act of love, given freely to an object that is more than knowledge.Footnote 78 Only something that is more than intellectual knowledge, that is, something infinitely love‐worthy and inexhaustible, can offer knowledge its perfection. This is because the faculty of knowledge is ordered to an object that can be known, but known only as that which is greater than the faculty itself. Rahner accordingly asks, ‘[W]hat but the incomprehensibility of mystery can be such an object of knowledge, since it forces knowledge to surpass itself and both preserve and transform itself in a more comprehensive act, that of love’?Footnote 79 If the human knower could grasp all that God is, then knowledge would not have to be transcended; knowing would simply unite the knower with God. Rahner asserts otherwise: knowing must transcend itself in loving, through which it receives itself and is renewed in its efforts to further understand the object of love. Rather than dominate and master the object of love, knowledge gives itself over to a form of loving, which is the awe and wonder of being in the presence of that which is ever greater. The fuller act, the act that somehow embraces God without circumnavigating God's eternal nature, is the act of love which encourages knowledge to see more deeply into its relationship with the God of incomprehensible mystery.

Rahner understands revelation as ‘act and event’ to be the inclusion of the human being in this relationship, though he was careful to guard against too quickly appealing to supernatural elevation or divinization in accepting the validity of such a construal of revelation.Footnote 80 Divine revelation brings to us God's very own self as mystery so that the divine‐human relationship can be one of mutual self‐gift. Rahner's version of Catholic theology thinks from within this relationship and therefore requires both essential and existential concepts to make sense of the mutual interaction between divine and human natures.

Hans Urs von Balthasar parallels Rahner's insistence on the interplay between divine and human freedom in his book The Theology of Karl Barth (1951). Remarking on how philosophical categories are to be used in theology, von Balthasar avers:

we find a certain age‐old tension between two types of theology: a more concrete and positive theology that builds upon the historical facts of revelation and thus makes greater use of the categories that apply to events[Ereignishaften] (although it is not always aware of doing so); and a more speculative theology that steps back into a certain contemplative distance from these immediate events [unmittelbaren Ereignis] and takes for its object the events' rationality or the implied connections between the individual truths of revelation …. An either/or between a theology of the actual and existential and a theology of the prior capacities and essences [Essentiellen] is impossible. For both forms overlap and condition each other: first of all, because that is the very essence of worldly being and thinking [vom Wesen des weltlichen Seins und Denkens], but then, and even more importantly, because revelation is two‐sided: action and contemplation, faith as deed [Tat]Footnote 81 and faith as vision [Schau], obedience and prayer.Footnote 82

Both Rahner and von Balthasar see revelation as two‐sided. The actual and existential are concerned with events, whereas the prior capacities and essences are concerned with the rationality of events, the intelligibility (or ‘content’) of revelatory events we mentioned earlier. Whereas Rahner tends to emphasise the persistence of structures, von Balthasar highlights the notion of mutual overlap and the conditioning of essential and existential categories. Both however draw our attention to the necessity of remaining open to the possible revision of our understanding of worldly being and thinking, not only in light of what we learn of ourselves through history, but more importantly, in light of what God chooses to reveal about God's own self in that history.

The emphasis upon the two‐sided nature of revelation accentuates the necessity of the human being involving the whole self in coming to know who God is: although contemplation of so‐called ‘static’ principles draws one deeper into who God is, Rahner and von Balthasar further stress the need to bring into play the dynamism of the will, and so, the willingness to put into practice what is learned through study, contemplation, and prayer.Footnote 83 In these spiritual motions the human person faces the event of God's revelation with his own subjectivity and strives to abide in that dialogical encounter with God, learning what the personal address of the event of revelation entails.

When divine revelation meets a person thus in his or her wholeness, it unfailingly recasts our understanding of the human person. But it never completely replaces what we have come to know prior to the historical encounter with divine revelation. Grace perfects but does not supplant nature (gratia perfecit sed non supplet naturam);Footnote 84 or in Bonaventure's terms: grace presupposes nature just as accidents presuppose a subject (gratia praesupponit naturam sicut accidens praesupponit subiectum).Footnote 85

Von Balthasar suggests that this unity of the essential and existential forms of theology need not be limited to Catholicism. (Barth used similar language to distinguish between two types of Evangelical theology within the one Evangelical church: the Lutheran and the Reformed deal respectively with dynamic and static categories.)Footnote 86 In fact, he states, ‘Here Catholic and Protestant theology find themselves caught up in the same tension: between being led on to the central event and a serene meditation on this event in contemplative distance. ‘Indeed,’ he continues, ‘the parallel cuts deeper, since the question arises of where the actual event really is to be found’.Footnote 87 According to von Balthasar, we cannot say that the event is either only in ‘history’or in the remote abstraction of contemplation characteristic of the Scholastics and mystics. The event rather arrives somewhere in between, where the concreteFootnote 88 and the universal,Footnote 89 the existential and the essential, come together in a unified tension where theology must always remain rooted: the person of Jesus Christ.Footnote 90 The real issue for both Catholic and Protestant theology, writes von Balthasar, ‘centres around what Barth tried to accomplish with his actualism: to pursue theology in the incomparable uniqueness of a theological scientia de singularibus or, as Barth says, of the concretissimum, where we get beyond the contrast of the mere historical fact and purely transhistorical doctrine; where, in other words, the essence of event as well as doctrine is embedded in the person and activity of Jesus Christ’.Footnote 91 For von Balthasar, acknowledgement of the unparalleled uniquenessFootnote 92 of the Christ‐event preserves theology from opposing essence and existence.Footnote 93 Theology should rather take the person and activity of Christ as the perfect unity of the two and seek to think from the temporal manifestation of God's eternal nature in its singular,Footnote 94 definitive form.Footnote 95 In describing the a posteriori nature of von Balthasar's understanding of the ‘singular’ in relation to aesthetics, Elisa Oberti writes that the ‘metaphysically universal, the absolute, the transcendental and the transcendent are to be grasped in the sensible itself, which must be seen in its own proper nature, and rank, in its referential character and its limitations’.Footnote 96 The singularity of the Christ‐form is the starting point of theological reflection.

Von Balthasar so emphasises this singularity that Christ's uniqueness renders him ‘without analogy’,Footnote 97 particularly in the Resurrection event.Footnote 98 Perhaps it is here that we can see into the differences that caused von Balthasar to cease collaboration with Rahner on the project for a new dogmatics. Certain aspects of the person and work of Christ remain without analogy for von Balthasar, such as Christ's descent into hell, which means that something like Holy Saturday is not thinkable in connection with other experiences. Rather, the uniqueness of Christ's objective person and activity must be entered into subjectively by each person in a mode of loving contemplative participation.Footnote 99

Von Balthasar nevertheless shares with Rahner the notion that the human being can only think theologically from within the reality itself, from within the gift of grace, and his emphasis upon contemplation makes this clear.Footnote 100 The event of Christ ‘is not mute or a‐logical but is the source of all the meaning in existence and nature, justifying and fulfilling them. And within the various interpretations of this event (best circumscribed by the category of contemplation), we find room for the use of universal concepts, categories, properties and finally of Being itself’.Footnote 101 Von Balthasar thus reminds us that all conceptual systems, all human models, all world views can be used in theology as long as they are subservient to the ‘logic’ that is ultimately presented in the revelation of Christ.Footnote 102 As he says of all human philosophical constructs and schemas, they must be judged ‘by God's own concrete dealings with history’.Footnote 103 The event of Christ continually bestows novelty in history in the form of new missions and charisms offered to individuals for the renewal of the church and the world.

3. Conclusion

Let me conclude by returning full‐circle to Benedict XVI and Irenaeus via von Balthasar. As we noted in the beginning, Irenaeus consistently directs our attention to God's concrete dealings with history; he directs us particularly to the Christ‐form. Accordingly, von Balthasar states that with Irenaeus ‘theology emerges as a reflection on the world of revealed facts’.Footnote 104 This ‘newness’, this ‘novelty’, argues von Balthasar,

means the opposite of the Gnostic ‘new’; it is that ‘ancient truth’ of God's intimacy in paradise which is now found again after all the estrangement, more welcome and better understood … What has to be seen is the creative movement of fulfilment (adimplere) … the Christian counterpart of the Gnostic pleroma. In addition to the correspondence and the intensification there is Christ's divine quality and his efforts to transpose everything verbal and symbolic into living existence and so to recapitulate it by giving it concrete form in such a way that its reality is enhanced. With this creative event in view the Father gave this ‘hour’ the character of the fullness of time. In this fullness not only the Old Covenant but also all human and physical nature is fulfilled, because now the Word is present within the flesh.Footnote 105

Here are two different types of ‘novelty’: IrenaeanFootnote 106 and Gnostic.Footnote 107 Von Balthasar's theology has been dubbed (aptly) an ‘Irenaean retrieval’Footnote 108; he sets his face against what he perceives to be the novelty of Valentinian Gnosticism,Footnote 109 a novelty that excludes the control of a guiding principle. The novelty Christianity introduces is not ‘ex nihilo’ in the sense of being disconnected from whatever has come before.Footnote 110 Rather, it is novelty continuous with recurrent themes in salvation history, a novelty understood as superabundant ‘fulfilment’.

Benedict XVI tells us that ‘Jesus united into a single precept’ the commandment to love God above all in the Book of Deuteronomy (6:4–5) and the commandment to love neighbour in the Book of Leviticus (19:18).Footnote 111 The novelty of the Old and New Covenants lies, not only in abstract notions of God, but in the divine activity, which in Christ, ‘takes on dramatic form’.Footnote 112 Christ is the exemplar of novelty, and he sends the Spirit to bring about even greater works. When we enter into this newness, in our neighbour, in works of mercy,Footnote 113 in the Eucharist, we enter into a living event of love that calls for our active participation; we cannot remain aloof, detached from this love. An encounter with Christ establishes a relationship that can be aptly described, in the words of the very early Rahner, as the ‘religious event itself’.Footnote 114 Wrapped into the heart of the Trinity, we are enrolled in the divine service wherein our transformation from glory into glory (2 Cor 3:18)Footnote 115 requires a dynamicFootnote 116 turning away from ourselves toward the face of Christ in the unity of contemplation and action. If Catholic systematics is going to make disciplined use of concepts like ‘event’, then it requires a rigorous science of the conversion to the phantasm, particularly the conversion to the image fashioned by the divine imagination.Footnote 117

Footnotes

1

Versions of this paper were given as lectures at the Universities of Bonn and Oxford. Special thanks are owed to Revd. Prof. Paul Fiddes for critical comments and encouragement.

References

2 Dei Verbum and Lumen Gentium are considered the clearest examples of this.

3 Benedict, Pope XVI, God is Love (London: CTS, 2006)Google Scholar, §1: ‘cum quis christianus fit, nulla est ethica voluntas neque magna quaedam opinio, verumtamen congressio datur cum eventu quodam, cum Persona quae novum vitae finem imponit eodemque tempore certam progressionem.’

4 Cf. Balthasar, H.U. von, The Glory of the Lord[=GL]: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. I: Seeing the Form, trans. Leiva‐Merikakis, Erasmo (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), pp. 217–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Herrlichkeit[=H]: Eine Theologische Ästhetik, vol. I: Schau der Gestalt (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1988 [1961]), p. 210Google Scholar.

5 Cf. Denzinger, Heinrich and Hünemann, Peter (eds.), Enchiridion Symbolorum [= DH], 37th ed. (Freiburg: Herder, 1991)Google Scholar, §4780; Pope John Paul II, Dominum et Vivificantem§10: ‘Deus in vita sua intima “caritas est” …’; Gregory of Nyssa, De an. et resurr. 4, 9; PG 46, 96C: ‘Love is the life of the supreme essence’; quoted in Balthasar, H.U. von, Theo‐Logic: Theological Logical Theory[=TL], vol. 2: Truth of God, trans. Walker, Adrian J. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), p. 154Google Scholar. Cf. also Balthasar, H.U. von, Epilogue, trans. Oakes, Edward T. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), pp. 93, 95–96Google Scholar.

6 Cf. Balthasar, H.U. von, Explorations in Theology[=ExT], vol. II: Spouse of the Word (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), p. 72Google Scholar; Love Alone is Credible[=LAC], trans. Schindler, D.C. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), pp. 111–17Google Scholar.

7 Benedict XVI, God is Love, §1. Cf. GL VII, p. 399; H III/2.2, p. 373.

8 Cf. GL I, pp. 472–73; H I, pp. 454–55; GL VII, p. 36; H III/2.2, p. 32.

9 Cf. Benedict XVI, God is Love, §17; Lubac, Henri de, Theological Fragments, trans. Balinski, Rebecca Howell (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), p. 84Google Scholar, n. 32, for the Augustinian background to the ‘event‐character’ of the Eucharist.

10 Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 4.34.1: ‘omnem novitatem attulit, seipsum afferens qui fuerat annuntiatus’; English translation from The Ante‐Nicene Fathers, vol. I, The Apostolic Fathers – Justin Martyr – Irenaeus, ed. Roberts, Alexander and Donaldson, James (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996), p. 511Google Scholar. Cf. GL II, p. 85; GL VII, p. 89; The Theology of Henri de Lubac: An Overview, trans. Fessio, Joseph (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), p. 61Google Scholar.

11 Cf. GL I, p. 303.

12 Cf. Mongrain, Kevin, The Systematic Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar: An Irenaean Retrieval (New York: Herder and Herder, 2002), pp. 40–41Google Scholar for the importance of divine pedagogy for von Balthasar.

13 Cf. ExT II, p. 78: Christ as ‘ontic bond’ already involves the Church, for he is no ‘private person, but rather the incarnate personality of God’.

14 Cf. Blondel, Maurice, ‘The Letter on Apologetics’ [= LA], in Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma trans. Dru, Alexander and Trethowan, Illtyd (London: Harvill Press, 1964), pp. 125–208Google Scholar, here 160; Œuvres complètes, II, 1888–1913: La philosophie de l'action et la crise moderniste (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), pp. 97–173Google Scholar, here 131. Cf. also Marie‐Jeanne Coutagne, ‘Le Christ et l'énigme du monde: La christologie blondélienne 1916–1925’, in Virgoulay, René. ed., Le Christ de Maurice Blondel (Paris: Desclée, 2003), pp. 85–115Google Scholar, esp. 93; McDermott, John M., ‘De Lubac and Rousselot’, Gregorianum 78 (1997), pp. 735–59Google Scholar, esp. 759; Cf. Dulles, Avery, The Catholicity of the Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 36Google Scholar; Gaudium et Spes§45.

15 Cf. TL II, p. 302 for Irenaeus on the Eucharist.

16 Cf. Peter Reifenberg, ‘Blondel und Balthasar – eine Skizze’, in Kasper, Walter Cardinal, ed., Logik der Liebe Herrlichkeit Gottes: Hans Urs von Balthasar im Gespräch. Festgabe für Karl Kardinal Lehmann zum 70. Geburtstag (Ostfildern: Matthias‐Grünewald‐Verlag, 2006), pp. 176–203Google Scholar, esp. 202, n. 54 for mention of this theme in God is Love and the thought of Maurice Blondel, von Balthasar, and Henri de Lubac.

17 Benedict XVI, God is Love§14. Cf. Ferdinand Klostermann, ‘Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity’, in Vorgrimler, Herbert et al., eds., Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vol. III, trans. Adolphus, Lalit et al. (London: Burns Oates, 1967), pp. 273–404Google Scholar, at 333: ‘Without this “embodiment of love”[cf. GL I, p. 575; H I, p. 553] the celebration of the Eucharist loses its innermost meaning; without it an essential feature of the community of Jesus is lacking and it is no longer recognizable as his community. And so the activity of love is the duty and the privilege of the Church, which she can never renounce.’

18 Cf. Benedict XVI, God is Love, §19; John Paul II, Dominum et Vivificantem, §1.2.

19 Cf. GL VII, pp. 421–22, 428.

20 Benedict XVI, God is Love, §13.

21 Adam, Karl, Two Essays, trans. Bullough, Edward (London: Sheed and Ward, 1930), p. 62Google Scholar; translation amended. Cf. H.U. von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy[=CL]: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor, trans. Daley, Brian E. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), pp. 339–43Google Scholar.

22 Cf. GL VII, pp. 385, 400; H III/2.2, pp. 359, 374.

23 Cf. Rahner, Karl, Foundations of Christian Faith[=Foundations], trans. Dych, William (New York: Herder and Herder, 1982), p. 201Google Scholar; Sämtliche Werke[=SW] XXVI (Freiburg: Herder, 1999), pp. 1–446Google Scholar, here 194.

24 Cf. O'Leary, Joseph S., ‘The Gift: A Trojan Horse in the Citadel of Phenomenology?’, in Leask, Ian and Cassidy, Eoin, eds., Givenness and God: Questions of Jean‐Luc Marion (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 135–66Google Scholar, esp. 136: ‘Jean‐Luc Marion's theological writings do not fuss about ontological claims of classical dogma but initiate the reader into a space, an enveloping event, something like Teilhard's milieu divin’.

25 ExT I, p. 177. Cf. GL VII, pp. 478, 506 for the eucharistic aspect of transfiguration; TD II, p. 202; TD IV, p. 333.

26 Foundations, p. 181; SW XXVI, p. 177. Cf. CL, pp. 257, 324–25, 352; TL III, pp. 161, 185–205.

27 DH 4201–35.

28 Cf. Adam, Two Essays, pp. 41, 45; Congar, Y.M.J., La Foi et la Théologie, Collection ‘Mystère Chrétien’, No. 381 [Suppl. I] (Paris: Desclée, 1962)Google Scholar.

29 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Revelation Itself’, in Vorgrimler, Herbert et al., eds., Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vol. III, trans. Adolphus, Lalit et al. (London: Burns Oates, 1967), pp. 170–80Google Scholar, here 172.

30 For trenchant and seemingly contemporary criticism of an exclusively propositional view of revelation, see Tyrrell, George, A Much‐Abused Letter (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906)Google Scholar, pp. 39, 51, 52; cited in Latourelle, René, Théologie de la Révélation, 2nd edition (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1966), p. 303Google Scholar, n. 1. Further relevant texts can be found in Tyrrell, Nova et Vetera (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1897), pp. 1–3, 169, 334Google Scholar; Through Scylla and Charybdis (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), pp. 213, 280–87Google Scholar; Medievalism (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), p. 129Google Scholar. For critical remarks on Tyrrell's relation to Rome, see Balthasar, H.U. von, The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church, trans. Emery, Andrée (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), pp. 106–12Google Scholar.

31 Rahner, Karl, Theological Investigations[=TI], vol. XX, trans. Quinn, Edward (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1981), pp. 117–18Google Scholar.

32 Cf. Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics II/1: The Doctrine of God, trans. Parker, T.H.L. et al. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1957), pp. 297–321, 337, 351–52Google Scholar. For Barth's influence on article 2 (DH 4202), see Ratzinger, ‘Revelation Itself’, p. 170. Cf. also LAC, pp. 44–46; ExT II, p. 54.

33 Cf. Latourelle, René, Christ and the Church: Signs of Salvation, trans. Parker, Sr. Dominic (New York: Alba House, 1972), p. 9Google Scholar.

34 Latourelle, René, Theology of Revelation (Cork: Mercier Press LTD, 1966), p. 458Google Scholar; translation amended.

35 Ratzinger, ‘Revelation Itself’, p. 175.

36 Cf. DH 4781.

37 Cf. Rahner, Karl, Hearer of the Word, 1st ed. [=HW I], trans. Donceel, Joseph (New York: Continuum, 1994), pp. 5, 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; SW IV, pp. 16, 22; TI I, pp. 79–148, esp. 86f.; SW IV, pp. 352f.

38 Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae II‐II q. 1 a. 2 ad 2: the act of believing ‘non terminatur ad enuntiabile, sed ad rem’; Maritain, Jacques, A Preface to Metaphysics: Seven Lectures on Being (London: Sheed and Ward, 1939)Google Scholar, p. 4; Foundations, p. 146; SW XXVI, p. 145.

39 Cf. TL III, p. 74.

40 Cf. ExT II, p. 298.

41 Cf. Karl Rahner, s.v. ‘Grace’, in Rahner, Karl, et al. (eds.), Sacramentum Mundi, vol. 2 (London: Burns and Oates, 1968), pp. 415–22Google Scholar, esp. 415; SW XVII/2, pp. 1053–64, esp 1053.

42 Cf. H.U. von Balthasar, Theo‐Drama[=TD]: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. II: Dramatis Personae: Man in God, trans. Harrison, Graham (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), p. 123Google Scholar.

43 In ExT I, p. 123, von Balthasar calls the harmonization of opposites a particularly ‘Catholic’ method. He finds the notion of holding together ‘contrary realities within the world as a symphony and harmony of opposites’ as early as Irenaeus of Lyon, Adversus Haereses II, 25, 2: cf. TD II, p. 142, n. 8; TL I, pp. 158–63; TL II, pp. 182–84, 187–218. Cf. CL, p. 91 for knowing as a ‘suspension between poles’. Rahner and von Balthasar owe much of their emphasis upon ‘polarity’ to the work of their mentor Erich Pryzwara. A very thorough examination of Pryzwara's work can be found in Betz, John R., ‘Beyond the Sublime: The Aesthetics of the Analogy of Being (Part One)’, Modern Theology 21 (2005), pp. 367–411CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Beyond the Sublime: The Aesthetics of the Analogy of Being (Part Two)’, Modern Theology 22 (2006), pp. 1–50Google Scholar. Despite the influence of Pryzwara, the notion of ‘polarity’ has an ancient, usually ‘cosmic’ pedigree in Christian theology; we cannot limit its use in Rahner and von Balthasar to the influence of Pryzwara. See the critical discussion of polarity in Barnes, Michel R., The Power of God: Dunamis in Gregory of Nyssa's Trinitarian Theology (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2001)Google Scholar, and the more positive appraisals in Engell, James, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, passim, and Niebuhr, H. Richard, Theology, History, and Culture: Major Unpublished Writings, ed. Johnson, William Stacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 12–13Google Scholar.

44 CL, p. 63. Cf. ExT II, p. 79; LAC, p. 123; TD II, pp. 201, 267–68; TD IV, p. 373, 380; Barth, CD II/1, p. 640.

45 Cf. TD II, pp. 201, 222. On the double polarity of beauty in von Balthasar's work see Paul Gilbert, ‘L'articulation des transcendantaux selon Balthasar’, H.U. von, Revue Thomiste 86 (1986), pp. 616–29Google Scholar, esp. 624. On paradox as central to Henri de Lubac's theological vision, see Chantraines, Georges, ‘Paradoxe et mystère Logique théologique chez Henri de Lubac’, Nouvelle revue théologique 115 (1993), pp. 543–59Google Scholar; ‘Henri de Lubac. Pourquoi ses œuvres nous parlent’, Nouvelle revue théologique 121 (1999), pp. 612–29Google Scholar.

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47 Cf. McDermott, John M., ‘The Theology of John Paul II: A Response’, in McDermott, John M., ed., The Thought of John Paul II: A Collection of Essays and Studies (Roma: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1993), pp. 55–68Google Scholar, esp. 68; ‘La Struttura Sacramentale della Realta’, La Scuola Catholica 128 (2000), pp. 273–99Google Scholar; ‘Dialectic Analogy: the Oscillating Center of Rahner's Thought’, Gregorianum 75 (1994), pp. 675–703Google Scholar, esp. 703; ‘Person and Nature in Lonergan's De Deo Trino’, Angelicum 71 (1994), pp. 153–85Google Scholar, esp. 183–84; ‘Maritain on Two Infinities: God and Matter’, International Philosophical Quarterly 28 (1988), pp. 257–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Karl Rahner on Two Infinities: God and Matter’, International Philosophical Quarterly 28 (1988), pp. 439–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 439, 450, 456; ‘Jesus and the Kingdom of God in the Synoptics, Paul, and John’, Église et Théologie, 19 (1988), pp. 69–91Google Scholar, esp. 70, 76, n. 15, 90; ‘The Christologies of Karl Rahner’, Gregorianum 67 (1986), pp. 87–123Google Scholar, 297–327, esp. 87; ‘A New Approach to God's Existence’, The Thomist 44 (1980), pp. 219–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 246, 249.

48 Cf. TD II, p. 224 where von Balthasar argues that Augustine understood the nature of a spiritual creature to be freedom, or what amounts to the same thing, ‘rational spontaneity’.

49 On the subject being overwhelmed by revelation, see TD II, pp. 128–30; TL II, pp. 105–07; Endean, Karl Rahner and Ignatian Spirituality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 23Google Scholar, citing SW III, p. 216.

50 Cornelius Ernst calls ‘Ereignis’ an ‘illuminating event’ in Ernst, s.v. ‘Theological Methodology’, in Rahner, Karl et al., eds., Sacramentum Mundi: An Encyclopedia of Theology, vol. 6 (London: Burns and Oates, 1970), pp. 218–24Google Scholar, here 221.

51 Quash, Ben, Theology and the Drama of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, n. 31.

52 ExT I, p. 11.

53 Cf. Barth, CD II/1, pp. 354–55; ExT I, pp. 179–80.

54 Cf. von Balthasar, Apokalypse der Deutschen Seele: Studien zu einer Lehre von Letzten Haltungen, Bd. I: Prometheus (Salzburg: Verlag Anton Pustet, 1937), p. 419Google Scholar; CL, pp. 215–16.

55 Cf. McDermott, John M., ‘Spiritual Theology and Religious Life Before and After Vatican II’, Josephinum Journal of Theology 8 (2001), pp. 51–75Google Scholar, esp. 65.

56 Cf. McDermott, ‘Spiritual Theology and Religious Life Before and After Vatican II’, p. 65.

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59 TI I, p. 14, n. 1; SW IV, p. 415.

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61 HW I, p. 5; SW IV, p. 16: Scholastic theology ‘is always essentially based upon God's freely proffered self‐revelation, upon positive theology, upon the theology that listens’.

62 Cf. Chadwick, Henry, Lessing's Theological Writings (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1956), p. 53Google Scholar.

63 Cf. GL I, p. 74; H I, p. 70.

64 Cf. GL I, pp. 75, 181–2; H I, pp. 71, 175.

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66 Cf. GL I, pp. 175–7; TD II, p. 89.

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68 Cf. Foundations, pp. 75, 78; SW XXVI, pp. 76, 79; CL, p. 316; TD II, pp. 191, 200.

69 Cf. Maritain, Jacques, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism, trans. Andison, Mabelle L. and Andison, J. Gordon (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955), p. 354Google Scholar argues that speculative knowledge ought to be grounded in knowledge of a specific person or thing, yet never exhaustive, can be traced back to the ‘true’ Aristotle; Lee, Richard A. Jr., Science, the Singular, and the Question of Theology (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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71 TI IV, p. 39; SW XII, pp. 103–04.

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73 TI III, p. 285; Skizzen zur Theologie III (Einsiedeln: Benziger Verlag, 1956), pp. 329–48, here 339.

74 TI IV, pp. 253–311, here 255–56; SW XVIII, pp. 596–626, here 598.

75 What one means by God's ‘acts’ in Scripture, i.e., if what is recorded can be considered in all cases as having literal‐historical bases, is a problem that such a view of Biblical theology would have to work out. A theology of event is perhaps more flexible in its ability to consider certain ‘events’ to be divine illuminations in a person, thus committing the theologian to a methodology less dependent upon a Rankean view of the past as ‘what actually happened’ (wie es eigentlich gewesen): Ranke, Leopold Von, The Secret of World History: Selected Writings on the Art and Science of History, ed. Wines, Roger (New York: Fordham University Press, 1981), p. 58Google Scholar.

76 Cf. CL, p. 262 where Maximus' understanding of the two wills of Christ is said to constitute a single ‘organic interpenetration’ and ‘theandric activity’.

77 Cf. TI V, pp. 219–43, esp. 231; SW X, pp. 605–25, esp. 615.

78 Cf. ExT I, p. 146; GL I, p. 175; TD II, p. 89; TL II, p. 177, n. 9.

79 TI IV, p. 43; SW XII, p. 107.

80 HW I, p. 16 speaks of obediential potency as not necessarily implying ‘ontic elevation’.

81 ExT I, p. 146: love surpasses knowledge by going beyond thought into act, the act of God in us, which is faith.

82 Balthasar, H.U. von, The Theology of Karl Barth[=TKB], trans. Oakes, Edward T. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), p. 258Google Scholar; Karl Barth, Darstellung und Deutung seiner Theologie[=KB] (Köln: Hegner, 1951), pp. 269–270Google Scholar. For further reference to the ‘event‐character’ of being, see TKB, pp. 62, 64–68, 70–2, 75, 81–5, 88, 95–113, 122–67, 170–72, 184, 189–98, 214, 222, 255–56, 258, 274, 277–78, 281, 287–89, 295–302, 309, 311, 335–43, 351–52, 363, 369, 371, 384. Cf. Bernard Pottier, ‘La “Lettre aux Romains” de K. Barth et les quatre sens de l'Écriture’, Nouvelle revue théologique 108 (1986), pp. 823–44Google Scholar, esp. 827–29; Quash, Theology and the Drama of History, p. 178.

83 Cf. Blondel, Maurice, ‘What is Faith?’, Communio 14 (1987), pp. 163–92Google Scholar, esp. 187–88: faith in God is a divinizing love.

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86 Barth, CD I/2, p. 171; it is unclear which theology is the dynamic and which the static.

87 TKB, p. 258.

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91 TKB, p. 266. Cf. TD II, pp. 270–71.

92 Cf. CL, p. 246; ExT I, p. 154; ExT II, p. 93; TD II, p. 122; TL II, pp. 311–16; Foundations, p. 277; SW XXVI, p. 264.

93 Cf. ExT I, pp. 169–73.

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98 Cf. TD II, p. 157.

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100 Cf. GL VII, p. 394; H III/2.2, p. 368.

101 TKB, p. 384.

102 Cf. TL I, pp. 128–29.

103 TKB, p. 385.

104 GL II, p. 31; H II, p. 31.

105 GL II, pp. 85–86; H II, pp. 85–86.

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115 Cf. ExT II, p. 121; GL I, pp. 242, 485; GL VII, pp. 24, 264, 293, 367, 459, 471–72, 478, 520; LAC, p. 123.

116 ExT II, pp. 106, 118; CL, pp. 329–30.

117 Cf. GL I, p. 172; H I, p. 165: the Gestalt Christi is the ‘Meisterstück göttlicher Phantasie’. See Lubac, Henri de, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), p. 13Google Scholar: Christ is the ‘masterpiece of the Spirit of God’.