By Ben Quash
How can theology imagine and discuss historical past? construction at the paintings of the most important twentieth-century theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar in addition to moving into sharp severe debate with him, this publication units out to check the price and the possibility of a 'theodramatic' notion of historical past. through undertaking discussion not just with theologians and philosophers like von Balthasar, Hegel and Barth, yet with poets and dramatists resembling the Greek tragedians, Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the booklet makes its theological ideas open and indebted to literary kinds, and seeks to teach how this kind of theology may be utilized to a global intrinsically and punctiliously old. in contrast with theologies that stand again from the contingencies of heritage and so struggle shy of the uncertainties and openness of Christian life, this book's theology is devoted to taking heavily the God who works in time.
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Extra resources for Theology and the Drama of History
Sample text
Barth emerges as a powerful proponent of the importance of time and of action in understanding the relationship between God and creatures aright. According to Barth, God acts in radical freedom, and is known in his acts. His theology is a theology of encounter – and the extent to which it tries to let the Bible speak in its own terms is a mark of his concern to show that God is known better in narrated interaction than in abstraction from such narratives. He is deeply important for von Balthasar’s own thought – and quite likely one of the main reasons von Balthasar developed his conception of theodramatics at all.
It is in the ‘interplay of relationships’ which the theatre portrays – and ‘probably nowhere else’, in von Balthasar’s view – that ‘we see so clearly the questionable nature and ambiguity . . of existence itself ’ (TD i, p. 17/ThD 1, p. 17). And this is, for him, ‘the essence of theatre’. When it is thus true to life, it has an authority which is difficult to resist. ‘[W]e are drawn to watch it’, von Balthasar says; we recognize in it ‘the complications, tensions, catastrophes and reconciliations which characterize our lives as individuals and in interaction with others’ – which is another way of describing the historicality of our existence.
His theology situates particulars in an ‘absolute’ context, but without abstracting from their historical mode of being. His is not intended to be a system dependent on timeless abstraction. Towards the end of the chapter, I hope to have shown how this sets von Balthasar in contrast with some dominant strands of postEnlightenment thought. Chapter 2 is the first of the three interrelated chapters which look at cast, stage and action. It leads to the heart of the major question of freedom (especially of individual freedoms’ dependence on a shaping environment with certain necessary, positive features), and establishes its continuing importance for the chapters that follow.