Commentary on Moorman’s Essay
by Dan McClain
Mary Moorman begins her erudite essay with a three point outline of Augustine’s use of the nuptial metaphor in his ecclesiology (about which I admit to knowing little). I was fascinated to learn that Augustine links his nuptial imagery not only to the cross but also the creation of woman. [...]

Quando Tu and The Nuptial Creation:
St. Augustine’s Enduring Influence on Contemporary Ecclesiology
Mary C. Moorman, Ph.D. candidate, Southern Methodist University
Historians such as David Hunter have proposed that one of Augustine’s favorite popular metaphors for the Church, as we find in his sermons, is that of a virgin bride, contracted in marriage to her husband by the [...]

Corrine Crammer, in her article, “Balthasar’s Theology of the Sexes,” engages Balthasar’s views on gender and concludes that Balthasar’s theology of the sexes, though well-intended, is ultimately incoherent. If you have been following this blog for at least the last three months, you should know that I am a huge fan of Balthasar and am [...]

“Philosophy can speak of the Cross in many tongues; when it is not the ‘Word of the Cross’ (I Corinthians I, 18), issuing from faith in Jesus Christ, it knows either too much or too little. Too much: because it makes bold with words and concepts at a point where the Word of God is [...]

In my preparation for a paper that I will be presenting at Baylor this Fall on von Balthasar and Christocentric friendship, I have been thinking about the ways in which the claims of Christianity with regard to love and friendship go beyond the possibilities offered in classical philosophy, viz., the philosophy of Aristotle. Though [...]

The focus of this concluding post is Balthasar’s hermeneutical practice of interpreting the Bible as a Christocentric narrative. Here again Balthasar’s conviction regarding the canonical integrity of the Bible comes to the fore. For Balthasar, the Bible as a whole speaks of Christ, who is the climax of the one unfolding story from Genesis to [...]

As mentioned in Part I, Balthasar desired to reintroduce into the biblical hermeneutical project of his day, a number of premodern practices so as to attempt a recovery of theologico-aesthetic sensibilities that had been lost with certain modernist interpretive currents. In this post, I shall focus primarily on the first of two premodern hermeneutical practices [...]

W.T. Dickens in his essay, “Balthasar’s Biblical Hermeneutics,” notes that according to Balthasar the vast majority of modern theologians and biblical scholars (both Roman Catholic and Protestant) had thrown theological aesthetics to the wayside and as a result a distorted view of Scripture prevailed (e.g., seeing the Bible as a principally a set of propositional [...]

In chapter 2 of his book Presence and Thought: An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa, Balthasar discusses two forms of becoming. In the previous chapter he had set forth that idea that time constitutes the foundation of material being. He then adds that if this is the case, then [...]

As Balthasar explains, the “matter” or res to which Christian dogmatic formulations refer is Christ—His Incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection. In Christ, the Son of the Father, we are given a revelation of the innermost nature of the Christian God, viz., the Trinity as love. The Christian of course in his/her act of faith [...]

In a little section entitled, “Joy and the Cross,” near the end of Balthasar’s work, Truth is Symphonic, he briefly describes an insoluble paradox of Marxism and Hegelianism and then presents Christianity as that which alone weds transcendence and immanence in triune love revealed in the shape of Jesus Christ. Turning first to Marxism, [...]

“God’s presence in and absence from the world are a mystery that is impenetrable to thought and even more so to man’s senses and experience. It would seem that we can only think and speak of it in propositions that are dialectical, that is, which cancel each other out. For if we construct [...]

Before jumping into this essay, I have a special request for my readers. I have been ill for the past week, running a pretty high fever. For whatever reason, I did not respond to the first round of antibiotics, and have had to return to the doctor for additional tests and new antibiotics. I still [...]

John Webster, in his essay, “Balthasar and Karl Barth,” discusses Balthasar’s friendship with Karl Barth and the various ways that Barth influenced Balthasar’s theology. As is well-known, Balthasar, was an avid reader of Barth, lectured on Barth’s works, and even devoted an entire book to Barth’s theology, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition [...]

In Balthasar’s retelling of the history of Western metaphysics, he discerns a dialectical relation between the dialogico-dualistic world of myth and the monological world of philosophical reason. It is only when a distinctively Christian metaphysic comes on the scene—a metaphysic in which a (Triune) God existing a se freely creates and allows his creatures to [...]

Larry Chapp in his essay, “Revelation,” provides an excellent discussion of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theology of revelation [1]. Chapp begins by setting forth what he discerns as von Balthasar’s most basic assertion concerning revelation, viz., “in revelation we have a sovereign divine action pro nobis that makes God known to his creatures in a [...]

A discussion of my guest post at the church and postmodern culture is underway. The focus of the discussion is D.C. Schindler’s essay, “Surprised by Truth: The Drama of Fundamental Theology.” Please join us, if you are so inclined.

In the prologue of his book, Truth is Symphonic, Balthasar depicts creation as God’s symphony. Symphony of course literally means, “to sound together.” As Balthasar so elegantly describes it, “[f]irst there is sound, then different sounds and then we hear the different sounds singing together in a dance of sound” (p. 7). In order to [...]

The fourth Balthasarian thesis is one of my favorites, viz., that “[m]ystery is convertible with truth.” Though the Gestalt includes the appearance or surface of being (that which is immediately accessible to us), it is more than this surface: “it is the coincidence of appearance and being, taken both in their unity and in their [...]

[In order to avoid an excessively long post, I have decided to make theses four and five a separate post (part VI), which will conclude the series].
Here we begin with the third Balthasarian thesis, viz., that “the ‘locus’ of truth is the concrete Gestalt. As Schindler is aware, it at first seems odd to speak [...]