Per Caritatem

Joseph Pieper, discussing the irrationality of sin writes:

“Sin is something contrary to reason, an actus contra rationem, a kind of ‘craziness.’ Yet despite that, sin is no something diseased, certainly not a ‘disease’ in the ordinary sense of what people mean by that word: something that simply comes upon a person without any choice in the matter. On the contrary, sin goes contrary to reason by a deliberate act committed with a full and clear understanding of what one is doing and with full responsibility (which is precisely what makes sin, as people say, that much ‘crazier’!)

Quite spontaneously the concept of ‘blinding’ enters the discussion here, but obviously not in the sense that people mean when they speak of blindness as an inability to see, the sheer absence of knowledge, etc. Rather, as we see in common proverbs like ‘none so blind as those who will not see,’ the notion of sin’s blinding effects includes a dimension accountability and guilt. Once again we are hit with the weirdness of it all: we get an inkling of an inner contradiction in sin, we feel its absurdity.” (Joseph Pieper, The Concept of Sin, p. 42).

Not only does Balthasar see a Trinitarian acting in the Word becoming flesh, but Ridderbos does as well (here focusing specifically on the Father and the Son). In his commentary on the Gospel of John, Ridderbos writes, commenting on John 3:16,

“Here we read not of the Son of man but of God’s only-begotten Son (cf. 1:18), so designated here as the highest gift God could give (cf. Ro. 8:32: ‘who did not spare his own Son’; Gn. 22:16). And we read, ‘gave’ in the sense of what is elsewhere called ‘giving up,’ ‘surrendering’ (e.g., Ro. 4:25; 8:32; Mk. 9:31), namely to death on a cross. All this shows how in the Fourth Gospel, as elsewhere in the New Testament, the God-given sacrifice of Christ is of central significance. This is surely the case also because in that surrender the glory of God manifested itself so clearly ‘in the flesh’ of the man Jesus, but above all because it brought to its highest manifestation the measure of God’s love for the world (cf. 13:1). [...] it is God who makes the all-embracing sacrifice for the world. There is no further analysis of why God loves thus. The text’s exclusive concern is the fact and the magnitude of God’s love. It is love that not only manifests itself over death, the death into which the world (like Israel in the wilderness) would sink: in the death of Christ it also identifies with the world in its lostness and thus imparts the deepest meaning to the great statement in the prologue, ‘and the Word became flesh.’ [...] God in his eternal love returned to the world as to his own, that he loved it in the surrender of his only-begotten Son (cf. 3:35), and that the Father loves the Son because he gave his own life (cf. 10:15) in a love that persisted to the end (cf. 13:1ff.)” [pp. 138-39].

“That the Redeemer is solidary with the dead, or, better, with this death which makes of the dead, for the first time, dead human beings in all reality–this is the final consequence of the redemptive mission he has received from the Father. His being with the dead is an existence at the utmost pitch of obedience, and because the One thus obedient is the dead Christ, it constitutes the ‘obedience of a corpse’ (the phrase is Francis of Assisi’s) of a theologically unique kind. By it Christ takes the existential measure of everything that is sheerly contrary to God, of the entire object of the divine eschatological judgment, which here is grasped in that event in which it is ‘cast down’ [...]. But at the same time, this happening gives the measure of the Father’s mission in all its amplitude: the ‘exploration’ of Hell is an event of the (economic) Trinity” (Mysterium Paschale, pp. 174-175).

Balthasar continues regarding the Father’s role, stating that not only does he send the Son into the world to save it rather that judge it, he “must also introduce the Son made man into ‘Hell’ (as the supreme entailment of human liberty). But the Son cannot really be introduced into Hell save as a dead man, on Holy Saturday. [...] The Son must ‘take in with his own eyes what in the realm of creation is imperfect, unformed, chaotic’ so as to make it pass over into his own domain as the Redeemer (Ibid., p. 175).

Though Christ has experienced and endured the deepest Hell, He can yet cross this chaotic darkness because He is “not bound by any of the bonds of sin.” Balthasar then by means of Gregory the Great calls us to consider not only the event of Holy Saturday, but the “spiritual descent of the Redeemer into the lostness of the sinful heart; the very same descensus is repeated each time that the Lord goes down into the depths of the desperata corda (Ibid., p. 176).

Yet, our story does not end here. The Apostle Paul tells us that Christ has trampled down death with death and that if Christ has not risen, we of all people should be pitied. Again drawing us to the Trinitarian character — now of the Resurrection–Balthasar writes, “The Father is the Creator who, acting at Easter in the Son, brings his work to completion; the Father in exalting his Son, also brings the Son’s mission to its conclusion, and makes the Son visible to the world, spreading abroad there the Spirit which is common to them both” (Ibid., p. 189). As he continues his contemplations on the mystery of the Resurrection and the many paradoxes that confront us, e.g, that “this event includes which includes everything within its embrace at one and the same time withdraws itself from our gaze (inasmuch as it happens in the form of a return to the Father, to eternity) and also reveals itself to us (so that we may grasp by faith the meaning of the history of salvation, that it must needs be simultaneously ‘meta-historical’ or ‘pre-historical’ and also historical” (p. 188) and the list goes on, Balthasar then points us to John’s simple yet profound expression of this Trinitarian mystery, viz., “The Word became flesh (sarx).” As Balthasar explains, “this formula allows us to understand the man Jesus–his life, death and resurrection–as the fulfilment of the living Word of God of the old covenant, shows the event of Jesus to be the definitive, superabundant consequence of the event of God himself, and interprets the Son’s Resurrection as God’s take-over of power in his own world, the fundamental breakthrough of the Kingdom” (pp. 203-204). Not only do we read of the Father’s power at work in resurrecting the Son, but the Apostle Paul likewise speaks of the “Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead” (Rom 8:11). In all of these mighty works, the Triune God shows himself as the “true and living God in whom Abraham already believed [...] And he seals his final covenant with the world, inasmuch as ‘in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself (II Corinthians 5, 19), for ‘in him all the fullness of God (in gracious activity) was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his Cross (Colossians 1, 20)” (pp. 204-205). Hallelujah! He is Risen!

Addressing the common allegations of a flesh and Spirit opposition as a hermeneutic key to understanding the Fourth Gospel (e.g., Bultmann’s gnostic interpretation), Ridderbos offers a different take. First, reveiwing briefly Bultmaann’s position, according to his view “flesh” and “spirit” denote “the radical opposition between two mutually exclusive metaphysical principles, which he then “demythologizes” and interprets utilizing terms and concepts taken from existentialist philosophy (Ridderbos, The Gospel of John, p. 130). “Flesh,” e.g., speaks of the “nothingness” and “inauthenticity” of human existence, whereas “spirit” refers to “authentic” existence in which “nothingness” ceases to have dominion. Ridderbos, in contrast, rejects an original dualism, pointing out that from the very beginning of the Fourth Gospel, we encounter the notion that the Word is the creation of all things–παντα δι αυτου εγενετο, και χωρις αυτου εγενετο ουδε εν (John 3:3). Commenting further, Ridderbos states,

“The opposition between flesh and Spirit primarily relates therefore to the creatureliness and dependence of humanity in relation to God as Spirit, Source, and Ruler of all life. In that connection, ‘flesh’ does not denote what is ‘lower’ in humankind but the whole human person, physical as well as spiritual. Accordingly, what is opposed to humankind in its ‘authentic existence’ adn threatens us as our ‘fate’ is not our existence as flesh but the radical disturbance that has arisen in that existence as the result of the self-direction that has brought us into a position of estrangement from God, of guilt and powerlessness, of transience, uncertainty, and meaninglessness. Hence, when, as here, the ‘Spirit’ is contrasted with this powerlessness of the flesh to enter the kingdom of God and to inherit the true life, ‘Spirit’ does not denote the great ontological anti-flesh principle, but God himself as the source of life (cf. 1:13) and above all in his restorative and life-renewing power as the only possibility left to humans to save them from lostness and alienation from God and to give them eternal life. [...] The alternatives ‘flesh’ and ‘Spirit’ are not ‘anthropological’ in the sense of humankind as it is and as it should become in order to rise from the inferiority or nothingness of one existence (flesh) to a higher or ‘authentic’ existence (Spirit). The alternatives rather concern humankind in its (fleshly) powerlessness over against the sovereignty of and omnipotence of God (the Spirit), who alone can transform humankind, that is, grant us the needed rebirth from above” (Ibid., p. 131).

For a delightful and provactive series of posts on the Song of Songs in light of Benedict’s encyclical, visit Jo’s blog.

HT to Ben M. at “Faith and Theology,” for bringing this to my attention.