Quote of the Week: Hans Urs von Balthasar
The official, authoritative kerygma remains a pointer to revelation. Therefore, the believer does not actually believe in the propositions of faith, but in what these express and in everything that the living God is in Christ Jesus. For this reason, it is possible that an authentic faith can reach the living God even through insufficiently formulated, or even, in certain cases, erroneous propositions of faith, if God so disposes. The believer’s intention is directed towards God, and God’s grace can complete whatever aspect of the accurate and objective form of revelation remains obscured, through no fault of his own, for a person within or outside the Church or even Christianity. God’s unmediated manifestness in Christ and also in his Church is one thing: the adequate verbal formulation of this manifestation, through Christ himself and through his Church, is quite another. It is thus conceivable that a person could reach, not only God, but the true reality of his revelation in Christ and in the essence of the Church even while holding, through no fault of his own, the erroneous opinion that the official formulation in dogma is not an adequate expression of this reality.
–Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics I: Seeing the Form. trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis. Ed. Joseph Fessio, S.J. and John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 213.
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Is not our intuitive intellect always quite a bit ahead of our discursive ratio?
It should be, but it could be darkened, and so behind, or unformed — we must remember that doctrinal definitions help form us, as well, so that we can be aimed in the right direction, if we take them properly for what they are — but, until we realize the meaning implied by these contents in our experience, sometimes the declarations (believed in by faith) will outdistance where one’s intuition has led them.
I am a little confused. The quote says, “It is thus conceivable that a person could reach, not only God, but the true reality of his revelation in Christ and in the essence of the Church even while holding, through no fault of his own, the erroneous opinion that the official formulation in dogma is not an adequate expression of this reality.”
Is an official formulation of dogma ever an adequate expression of reality?
Is heaven a “place,” and do you have to go up (be assumed) to get there? And did those who were with Mary during her last moments on earth see her rising up to heaven? And are Mary and Jesus now physically in heaven — the only two physical beings in all of heaven?
The Assumption is just an example. I do not mean to turn the discussion to the reality of one particular dogma. We recently had a discussion on the Real Presence. Isn’t it quite possible that someone who simply believes that Christ is present in the Eucharist, and thinks substance and accidents are deeply flawed concepts that don’t tell us much about ultimate reality, is closer to the truth than the world’s greatest expert on transubstantiation?
What about Huck Finn, who does the right thing according to his heart while being convinced he is going to hell for it?
David,
Balthasar is trying to say in that quote that someone who (wrongly) thinks a doctrinal declaration is wrong (pointing the wrong wrong, so to speak) might themselves be wrong, and yet aimed the right way, because of their misunderstanding of how the statement is to be understood. So it is not just “do you believe X” from Denzinger, and the person says, “no,” that they are automatically off the path of faith.
Very interesting Henry.
I hadn’t read his aesthetics yet. Good food for pondering.
JB
The aesthetics volumes are, to me, a mixed bag — but the first volume is fundamental for his theological perspective, and well worth reading. When he does his studies on styles, I think for most readers, they will get little out of them, unless they are interested in the person under examination. But I think one could just read the first volume, and the last two volumes, and really get the meat (missing a few good sauces, to be sure, along the way).
Henry,
I see your one of your points, in that one could assent to all kinds of true propostions about God, based on blind faith, while additionally having such a darkened intellect that one sees really very little at all w/ regard to him.
Henry, I left the faith at age 18 and returned at 58. The dogma is the same and I see very little difference in how the faith is lived. I hear the statement that the Church has the fullness of the truth but in those who seem to be the voice of the truth I see little more than them being masters of the obvious.
Since each of us is created to love and be loved, and this is supported by research that shows how we thrive in a loving environment vs the ill effects of an environment influenced by something other than love, my instinctive response to leave was based on the instinctive awareness that I did not experience love coming from those who were responsible for teaching me the faith. I was taught that God loves me, but I was not taught that human beings love me. It is through human attachments that the child learns whether the faith has value or not. Dogma is either something that supports God’s love or is something that negates God’s love based on the disposition of those who teach this dogma.
Therefore, I went in search of love. I found love being expressed in Buddhism that was based on a compassionate understanding of the human condition of suffering and the cause of suffering. The strength of compassion is honesty with oneself through the process of humility in which I discovered how far I fall short of loving self and others.
So, as I reflect I find that God softened me with Buddhism and showed me that His Truth is Love and the fullness of His Love is in the Sacraments. If I were to rely on the catechism to understand the fullness of truth I would never have returned because of the bi-polar expression of truth in which the light of God’s Love is intermingled with the darkness of the human being’s interpretation of God’s Love and expressed as dogmatic truth.
I am here because of Grace and that Grace is God’s gift of Love.