Balthasar’s Triune Event

Last updated on: January 24, 2014 at 12:00 am by Peter Leithart

Balthasar’s Triune Event 2014-01-24T00:00:00+06:00 Peter Leithart

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Balthasar,
writes Gerald O’Hanlon (The Immutability of God in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar), thought it necessary to re-examine the tradition regarding

immutability and impassibility because both needed to be “understood in the
context of the liveliness of inner-trinitarian love” (168).

He elaborates, “Within an analogical context (which, in attempting
to convey the uniquely personal nature of the God/human relationship, could use
language extending on a continuum from the metaphorical to the purely abstract)
it was possible to attribute some very untraditional characteristics to God,
including forms of surprise, receptivity, self-transcendence (‘ever-more’) and
something that was remotely and mysteriously like suffering. It was possible
also, to a limited extent, to specify the adjustments required when
transferring language from the human to the divine spheres; nonetheless an intrinsic
imprecision was also noted, appropriate to the partial nature of human
knowledge in respect of the abiding mystery and transcendence

of God” (168).

Balthasar used Trinitarian theology to work out “the
reconciliation of unity and difference, as well as that of state and event, and
the inclusion of the aspects of receptivity and ‘ever-more,’” all of which
expressed in Balthasar’s work “a scripturally-inspired Trinitarian ontology of
love.” This ontology “used the analogy of

human love and applied it hypothetically to God, making
adjustments to cater for the ontological difference between God and us, so that
it was possible at least to hint at the way in which various modalities of human
love could exist analogously in God as perfections, and not as deficiencies.
Within this context divine immutability was interpreted as that perfection and
fullness of free inter-personal love, intrinsic to which are the receptivity of
mutual exchange and that mysterious ontological comparative, the ever-more of
self-giving, which may be described as a supra-mutability” (169).

In all this, Balthasar insists that he is working from
the norms of traditional orthodoxy: “Balthasar means to assert that the divine
nature is one in the sense of numerical identity, and not just with reference
to generic sameness or likeness. There are not two or three gods. Equally, of
course, he insists on the real distinction of

Persons, brought out so clearly in the NT, and rejects
any Modalist interpretations which threaten the reality of these distinctions”
(111). Even his talk of a triune “event” is intended to emphasize the “liveliness”
of the Triune God. Unlike events in our experience, the triune event is not “accompanied
by a need which is a lack in perfection, but rather because it expresses a holy
love that is unchanging and groundless” (113).

This event is an event of love: “The mysterious divine nature
is constituted by this giving and receiving of love.The Father in God reveals himself by expressing himself
completely in the Son. This means that fatherhood in God is the total giving of
all that the Father is and has to the Son. In this eternally actual generation
the Son both receives his being from the Father and returns it to him in a love
which is equally without reserve. This filial love is full of thanksgiving (eucharist)
for the gift of the Father and expresses itself most properly in a free
‘obedience’ to the Father which is without the subordination of creaturehood.
And again because this event between Father and Son is eternal, and implies no
‘before’ and ‘after’, the Holy Spirit is the fruit and personification of their
love without any implication of subordination (as there is in the created
analogy to the procession of the Holy Spirit drawn from the child as fruit of
the human parents’

love).Once again that
which is most proper to the Holy Spirit, personhood, is constituted by being
utterly the love of the other two in the Trinity and thus by being in this
scene ‘expropriated’” (113). This is just what love eternally is in God; it is
not a description of the origins of the Persons who then remain immovable; it
is the eternal movement and interchange of the Persons.

And this leads Balthsar to identify an element of “ever-more,”
of “surprise” in God: “This is a love,

then, which has an inbuilt open or ontological
comparative to its nature – it is ‘ever-more’, ‘ever-greater’ than the reality
which is present to the Persons themselves in their perfect knowledge of one another.
In other words there is present in God’s love those elements of surprise,
wonder and difference which are proper to the mysterious self-giving and
inter-penetration (circumincessio) of free love and which
transcend the level of knowledge, however complete.In this sense we may say that the Holy Spirit is
constantly showing the

Father and Son that their perfect love is more than they
themselves had expected. There is no boredom in heaven” (114).

As O’Hanlon says, this is a “daring way” of speaking
about the inner life of the Trinity, but Balthasar presses further to claim
that, always acknowledging that we are not speaking univocally, “one may speak
of such immanent modalities of trinitarian love as renunciation, prayer, faith
and hope, longing and fulfilment. Within this same framework one may also speak
of those economic modalities of this love such as anger and jealousy, and even something
corresponding to pain, all of which, in turn, are modalities of the immanent
triune love within which their original images reside.” He goes so far as to
suggest that “the transcendence of God may be maintained while allowing for the
different reality of the contribution of dependent creation to the ‘ever-more’
of trinitarian love” (114).

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