A (Very) Critical Introduction
Karen Kilby
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.
All rights reserved
Published 2012 by
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /
P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kilby, Karen.
Balthasar: a (very) critical introduction / Karen Kilby.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.).
ISBN 978-0-8028-2738-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 1905–1988. I. Title.
BX4705.B163K55 2012
230ʹ.2092—dc23
2012007768
Chapter Five of this work has drawn upon material from within Karen Kilby, “Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Trinity,” from Peter C. Phan, The Cambridge Companion to the Trinity (2011) © Cambridge University Press 2011, published by Cambridge University Press, and reproduced by permission.
Chapter Six of this work has drawn upon material in Karen Kilby, “Gender in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar,” from Faithful Reading: New Essays in Theology and Philosophy in Honour of Fergus Kerr, OP, edited by Simon Oliver, Karen Kilby, and Tom O’Loughlin. Published 2012 by T&T Clark International, a Continuum Imprint.
Used by kind permission of Continuum International Publishing Group.
Conor Cunningham and Peter Candler
GENERAL EDITORS
It’s not a question of whether one believes in God or not. Rather, it’s a question of if, in the absence of God, we can have belief, any belief.
“If you live today,” wrote Flannery O’Connor, “you breathe in nihilism.” Whether “religious” or “secular,” it is “the very gas you breathe.” Both within and without the academy, there is an air common to both deconstruction and scientism—both might be described as species of reductionism. The dominance of these modes of knowledge in popular and professional discourse is quite incontestable, perhaps no more so where questions of theological import are often subjugated to the margins of intellectual respectability. Yet it is precisely the proponents and defenders of religious belief in an age of nihilism that are often among those most—unwittingly or not—complicit in this very reduction. In these latter cases, one frequently spies an accommodationist impulse, whereby our concepts must be first submitted to a prior philosophical court of appeal in order for them to render any intellectual value. To cite one particularly salient example, debates over the origins, nature, and ends of human life are routinely partitioned off into categories of “evolutionism” and “creationism,” often with little nuance. Where attempts to mediate these arguments are to be found, frequently the strategy is that of a kind of accommodation: How can we adapt our belief in creation to an already established evolutionary metaphysic, or, how can we have our evolutionary cake and eat it too? It is sadly the case that, despite the best intentions of such “intellectual ...
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About Balthasar: A (Very) Critical IntroductionThe enormously prolific Swiss Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) was marginalized during much of his life, but his reputation over time has only continued to grow. He was said to be the favorite theologian of John Paul II and is held in high esteem by Benedict XVI. It is not uncommon to hear him referred to as the great Catholic theologian of the twentieth century. In Balthasar: A (Very) Critical Introduction Karen Kilby argues that although the low regard in which Balthasar was held from the 1950s to 1960s was not justified, neither is the current tendency to lionize him. Instead, she advocates a more balanced approach, particularly in light of a fundamental problem in his writing, namely, his characteristic authorial voice—an over-reaching “God’s eye” point of view that contradicts the content of his theology. |
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