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I’ve seen a few posts about favorite things you’ve published this year. For me it’s definitely this article on Balthasar in Modern Theology. It’s one of the more important in my career, I’d say. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/moth.12649
I’d like to talk a little about why it’s important. And at one level, one of its major goals is enabling a Hans Urs von Balthasar in a de- or post-colonial directions. This is a problem less for reasons internal to Balthasar and more for common interpretations of him.
For many, if not most, interpreters of HUvB outside of specialists who talk about him (such as myself), but even within that cadre (esp. a certain generation), Balthasar is the Man of Europe, and he is either hero or villain in this regard.
So, to simplify my method (which is complex and which I do explain), what I basically do is ask Balthasar himself, “Hey, what do you think culture is and does?” And I triangulate those writings, all of which are minor essays and untranslated, with other writings from that era.
And I show something quite typical of Balthasar: not only is he not a fan of “Europe” (this we know), especially “modern Europe” (which we also know), but also he is deeply suspicious of a Christianity collapsed into identity with a culture, especially Europe-as-culture.
I then indicate how this plays out in his critique of Christianity and power in writings from the same handful of decades, all post-WW2 and pre-Herrlichkeit. He is in fact working hard to wrest Christianity away from “empire,” and this includes cultural tyranny.
I show how this means you *can’t* interpret Herrlichkeit as a re-pristinization of pretty Medieval Christianity, and certainly *not* Christendom, and certainly *not* Europe. Which people mainly take Balthasar to be doing. But he *abandons* the notion of culture as unhelpful.
It’s a lot of work, all using resources internal to Balthasar, but it’s to show that the domineering cultural monster or hero people take his theological project to be is not at all what *he* intended his project to be, and certainly not what *we* who read him can so intend.
And anyway, that’s why it’s important. And why it’s dear to me as an essay. It reveals the Balthasar I know, using hard evidence. And it also pushes hard against bad notions of the theological aesthetics, a project I am devoted to but whose abuse bothers me deeply.
