Wednesday, July 06, 2005
BALTHASAR
A reader sent in a link to a review of one of Hans Urs von Balthasar's more controversial books, Razing the Bastions. Yes...I know...it's an SSPX website. The credentials of the author require that it be taken seriously regardless of the source of publication, so don't start with a condemnation of the source. Has anyone read the book? And if you have, can you give a counter-argument? And please, don't remind me that I haven't read the book. I'm making note of the fact I haven't read it right up here.
From the review:
For the author of Razing the Bastions old is bad and the Church is undoubtedly old, the oldest of the old. The most striking mark of her dotage is "the fact that Christianity has dissolved in the course of centuries like a crumbling rock into even more churches, sects, and confessions."7 A chilling exaggeration (as well as a bit old hat) to be brought up in 1952. His solution is simply preposterous: reduce the Catholic Church to simply another sect in the mosaic of religions. This from the highest and most spiritual motives based on the discovery of “human solidarity” and the subsequent elimination of the barrier between sacred and profane, the civitas Dei and civitas tenena.8 The traditional Church has outgrown its usefulness and now represents the forces of inertia struggling against real holiness.9
Would Balthasar be in favor of United Religions Initiative? One gets the notion from this passage that he would have been.
Human solidarity. That's the prescription for peace right out of the Masonic Lodge. (It is hard to overlook the use of the word "solidarity" by our recently deceased Pontiff.)
We have seen no "real holiness" come out of the changes. And in fact, it is to the traditional Church that Pope Benedict is looking to revitalize a dying Roman Catholicism. With one exception. Ecumenism will move full steam ahead. If Balthasar did claim that the traditional Church had been outgrown, and this theory has been proven false, was he wrong about ecumenism?
Yet how can we go back to what we once believed? How can we once again condemn all those outside of the Roman Catholic Church to eternal darkness? How can we deny the holiness to be found outside of the Roman Catholic Church? I, for one, cannot deny it, and I can't go back to that old way of judgment. Yet at the same time I also recognize that the Church did, in fact, teach it; and She taught it in infallible encyclicals. We can't simply sweep that fact under the rug like yesterday's tracked in mud. If those infallible encyclicals were wrong, today's infallible encyclicals are also subject to judgment. And then how much else is, perhaps, not quite what it should be or should have been? Theology collapses like a house of cards.
The review quotes Balthasar:
Von Balthasar is convinced that the Church is living at a privileged moment. She perhaps has never been “so open, so full of promise, and so pregnant with the future at any time since the first three centuries.”1
We now know that during that very time he spoke of, the internal rot that has festered and is now being exposed to view in newspaper headlines was in place. Von B, according to the review, spoke of a new Pentecost, but we see the result of this "spirit" and his pentecost has undermined the Church. Fruits do not lie.
And there is this passage from the review:
This agenda, accompanied by bursts of esoteric language verging on the mystagogical (probably taken from the Kabbalah), adds an indefinable sense of mystery to the theses that are expounded. The “invisible fragrances of the beloved” are scattered in the most worldly parts of the world. The “outer shells" are falling away, the “shells of error” break open and release the captive kernels of truth.21This is hardly normative Christian speculation but corresponds to a process known to the Kabbalists as the “gathering of the sparks” which has ancient roots in Gnosticism and more recent ones in the Zohar, specifically the Lurianic Kabbalah.22 In any case, it is out of place in the present work and had an uncomfortable reception in Judaism because of its tilt toward pantheism.
I have not read Balthasar. Did he fall into Kabbalism? His involvement with von Speyer would seem to indicate that he did. If he did, his theology is seriously suspect! The concept of the "gathering of the sparks" is a process of self-salvation. It is the Jewish solution to the lack of a Messiah. It leaves no room for Christ, obviously, since the Jews rejected Him.
Is this Balthasar's theology?
To accomplish this the Church must imitate the Lord's kenosis (emptying) and become merely “one religion among others... one doctrine and truth among others” just as Christ became one man among others.28 This, we are told, is the “good path” devised by Providence.29
One religion among others? One MAN among others? Are we to deny the uniqueness of Christ...the Godness of Christ? A Catholic cannot go there. How is it that such notions are attributed to a respected Catholic theologian?
The article makes the connection with the theology of Joachim of Fiore, a connection that has bothered me for some time. It speaks to this new Pentecost, this Baptism of the Spirit that we have picked up from the Protestants. Now it would seem that the idea can be found in at least one of Balthasar's books if this review is correct. Perhaps this was the source of the "New Springtime" we heard to much about and are still waiting for. How much of this book is the result of a visionary experience? The source of those visionary experiences is still in question.
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!
