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Visualising the super-temporal vulnerability of God: Balthasar's theological use of John's biblical image of ‘the Lamb slain’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2024

Boram Cha Open the ORCID record for Boram Cha [Opens in a new window]
Boram Cha*
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Sungkonghoe University, Seoul, Korea
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Email: boram.cha@skhu.ac.kr
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Abstract

Hans Urs von Balthasar's kenotic trinitarianism and theodramatic Christology is designed to dramatise the triune God's kenotic engagement with the world without introducing a change in God. It continues to be disputed whether Balthasar ends up divinising suffering and making God into a tragic deity or succeeds in redefining and complexifying divine immutability. To engage with this question, this article critically examines Balthasar's theological use of the image of ‘the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world’, which plays a pivotal role in his kenotic and theodramatic soteriology. I will argue that his kenosis-driven understanding of John's Gospel is untenable, and his rich theological use of Revelation's image of the Lamb slain, intensified by his questionable exegesis of the Fourth Gospel, renders super-temporal suffering and death real in the life of God.

Keywords

Book of RevelationGospel of JohnHans Urs von BalthasarkenosisLamb slainvulnerability
Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 77 , Issue 2 , May 2024 , pp. 175 - 187
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Schumacher, Michele M., ‘The Concept of Representation in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar’, Theological Studies 60/1 (1999), p. 56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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3 TD 4, p. 52. See also Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Last Act, vol. 5 of TD, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1998), pp. 151, 246.

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8 Martin, Hans Urs von Balthasar, p. 162.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid., p. 179. See also GL 7, pp. 208, 226, 511.

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15 Cf. the New Jerusalem Bible: ‘And all people of the world will worship it [the beast], that is, everybody whose name has not been written down since the foundation of the world in the sacrificial Lamb's book of life.’

16 Peter S. Williamson, Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), p. 229. See also, among many, Osborne, Grant R., Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2002), pp. 503–4Google Scholar; Craig R. Koester, Revelation and the End of All Things, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2018), p. 129; Beckwith, I. T., The Apocalypse of John (New York: Macmillan, 1919), p. 638Google Scholar.

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24 TD 3, p. 515.

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29 GL 7, p. 149.

30 TD 4, pp. 325–6.

31 GL 7, p. 150 (emphasis added).

32 TD 5, pp. 74–5.

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34 TD 4, p. 450.

35 GL 7, p. 493.

36 TD 5, p. 214.

37 TD 5, p. 294.

38 GL 7, p. 298.

39 GL 7, p. 228.

40 GL 7, p. 249, n. 5.

41 GL 7, p. 226.

42 GL 7, p. 244.

43 GL 7, p. 260.

44 GL 7, p. 318.

45 Martin, Hans Urs von Balthasar, p. 195.

46 Ibid., p. 179.

47 Ibid., p. 24.

48 Ibid., p. 217, n. 80.

49 Ibid., p. 149.

50 TD 4, pp. 235–6.

51 GL 7, p. 244.

52 Martin, Hans Urs von Balthasar, p. 202.

53 Ibid., p. 179.

54 Wolter, Michael, ‘The Theology of the Cross and the Quest for a Doctrinal Norm’, in Rowland, Christopher and Tuckett, Christopher (eds), The Nature of New Testament Theology: Essays in Honour of Robert Morgan (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 270–1Google Scholar.

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63 Paul N. Anderson, ‘Foreword: John 17 – The Original Intention of Jesus for the Church’, in The Testament of Jesus, p. xxii.

64 Käsemann, The Testament of Jesus, p. 13 (emphasis added).

65 Ibid., p. 52.

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70 Ibid., p. 247.

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72 MP, p. 34.

73 Hans Küng, The Incarnation of God: An Introduction to Hegel's Theological Thought as Prolegomena to a Future Christology, trans. by J. R. Stephenson (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1987), p. 544.

74 TD 5, p. 151 (emphasis added).

75 GL 7, p. 175.

76 GL 7, p. 149; cf. p. 138.

77 MP, pp. 34–5.

78 TD 5, p. 151; cf. TD 4, p. 450.

79 TD 4, p. 451.

80 TD 4, p. 337.

81 TD 4, p. 451.

82 TD 4, p. 450.

83 TD 4, p. 451.

84 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Elucidations, trans. John Riches (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1975), p. 52.

85 Kevin Duffy also maintains that ‘the darkness and suffering of Good Friday and Holy Saturday would be coextensive with the fully actualized divine nature in such a way that God would be reduced to the very thing von Balthasar wants to avoid, a tragic and mythological deity, described in anthropomorphic terms’. Duffy, Kevin, ‘Change, Suffering, and Surprise in God: Von Balthasar's Use of Metaphor’, Irish Theological Quarterly 76/4 (2011), p. 371CrossRefGoogle Scholar (emphasis added).

86 Williams, Rowan, The Tragic Imagination (Oxford: OUP, 2016), p. 123Google Scholar (emphasis added).

87 ‘It is not that there is a heavenly sacrificial economy which can be uncovered by speculation but that the irreducibly human suffering of Christ is to be understood as the transcription in the finite order of what eternal gift means: “the economic is latent in the immanent” (191), but this is decisively different from saying that the immanent is simply a version of the economic, or that the suffering of Christ effects a change in God, or is felt in God as strictly divine suffering. Moltmann's account of the cross and the Trinity is not at all what Balthasar intends to affirm.’ Rowan Williams, review of Martin, Jennifer Newsome, Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought, Modern Theology 33/4 (2017), p. 690Google Scholar.

88 TD 5, pp. 84–5.