The Glory of the Lord by Hans Urs von Balthasar

The Trinity is something incredibly exciting, incredibly dynamic, infinitely dynamic, infinitely active, infinitely personal, and so the personal relations between the divine Persons are far more personal than we can imagine, far more profound, far more wondrous, than anything that human history has to offer, than anything that imagination can think of. The Trinity is not just subsistent relations. Now Balthasar, what he’s really trying to do, though, is remind you that the Trinity is not just begetting-you know, generation, procession word, image, love, gift. And that’s why hell is a trinitarian event in a certain sense, surely a metaphorical sense. In other words, you have this trinitarian distance. It’s far greater, infinitely greater, than the distance between the most alienated sinner, like Satan, and God himself. The Father sends forth the Son in begetting him in a way that is like an abandonment, so the distance between the divine Persons for Balthasar is infinite. And so he does the same thing with the Trinity where he argues, for example, that hell is a trinitarian event because he says that the trinitarian Persons in their distinction are infinitely distant from each other.

He’s trying to call to your attention the imaginative greatness. Balthasar is trying to enhance the imaginative power of Christianity. When he writes about Aquinas’s version and Anselm’s, he understands partly, but he doesn’t understand, in my view, fully. Von Balthasar needed to have followed more the satisfaction doctrine, but he didn’t fully understand the depth of the satisfaction doctrine, which is different from substitution doctrine. This is not at all a Catholic understanding of the cross. And so the Son is filled with all sin and the Father pours out his wrath. And so the Father pours out his wrath upon sin upon the Son because the Son, Jesus Christ, is filled with what von Balthasar calls the “effigies” of sin. But, on the other hand, for example, when he speaks about the cross, he has a very strong substitution doctrine where Jesus endures the wrath of the Father in a profound way because Jesus really takes on sin in an incredibly profound way.

He doesn’t intend it, I don’t think, to be analogical. I know that he intends a lot of his language to be metaphorical, sort of awakening us. ML: Well, I think that his understanding of Christ’s cross and of the Trinity is kind of too much.

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The Glory of the Lord by Hans Urs von Balthasar