Annual Update
by jhl
Several things:
1. I completed my MA Thesis and will be defending it on May 21, 2012 at Westminster Seminary, California. The title of my thesis is “De Divinis Nominibus: The Via Negativa in Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theodramatik.”
Here is the abstract:
Hans Urs von Balthasar’s controversial doctrine of God’s immutability utilizes a method of analogical predication that seemingly coincides with that of Pseudo-Dionysius and St. Thomas Aquinas; however, Balthasar evidently diverges from these thinkers in significant ways, especially as he develops his trinitarian theology in his Theodramatik. In this thesis, I explore Balthasar’s own theological milieu (specifically, the influence of four thinkers: Henri de Lubac, Erich Przywara, Karl Barth, and Adrienne von Speyr) and its effect upon his interpretation and appropriation of Pseudo-Dionysius and the latter’s most noteworthy western interpreter, St. Thomas Aquinas. The relationship between nature and grace, as well as philosophy and theology are considered inasmuch as they affect Balthasar’s explicitly trinitarian approach to the traditional via negativa. Balthasar’s negative theology is compared with that of Denys as well as Thomas; due to the overtly trinitarian nature of Balthasar’s negative theology, his doctrine of the Trinity as it is put forth in Theodramatik IV and V is compared with St. Thomas’s doctrine in order to highlight how the underlying differences in the respective theologians’ approaches to negative theology affect their divergent approaches to the Trinity. I show how Balthasar’s fundamental decisions with regard to nature and grace (de Lubac), theology and philosophy (Przywara), Christology (Barth), and Trinity (Speyr) in many ways control his interpretation of Dionysius and St. Thomas, and ultimately lead him down a path that is often diametrically opposed to that of the two theologians.
2. I was accepted into two PhD programs for Systematic Theology: Marquette and Catholic University of America. I just heard that I will not be receiving funding for the former, and am still waiting to hear from the latter. Please pray for me.
3. I was received into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church last week, on the feast day of St. Anselm of Canterbury. I began to seriously consider converting to Catholicism a little less than a year ago and I am glad to finally be able to partake of Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist. If there’s anyone who still actually reads this blog and if you have questions, I’ll be more than happy to answer them (time permitting). I will explain myself in more detail once things have cooled down a bit.
That is all for now.
i still read this blog. would love to hear more about those details once you’re ready to share. congratulations on getting into your programs, josh.
Pardon my ignorance and not getting to know you better from our one moment of conversation. May I contact you and ask you a few things over personal email and phone? Would you be open to that?
Hi Peter,
I hope you and your family are well. It has certainly been a while. I will contact you through gmail sometime soon and we can set up a time to talk over the phone. I believe you also have my email address.
Hi Josh,
Much too long. I have been busy with many things, and now looking for work. I was just layoff last Friday. I have a lot more time now. :-) I would love to talk with you, and maybe get to know you even better. Maybe we can open the word of God together.
Yes, I do have your email. Let me know over email, when is the best time for you. And if you are in the area, maybe I can take you out for coffee. I hear it is the seminarian’s drug of choice.
Peter,
I’m terribly sorry to hear that. I do hope that things work out.
Coffee sounds like a great idea. :)
Have a blessed Lord’s day with your family.
I, for one, would like to hear about your conversion. Given your knowledge of Balthasar and Barth, and your knowledge of scholastic Reformed theology (at WSC), I imagine that your insights would be more profound that I normally encounter on the web (e.g., Scott Hahn and all the very, very similar conversion stories). In particular, I’m interested in what role Balhasar’s theological aesthetics may have contributed, if at all, to your conversion. Plus, I’m interested in your understanding of Newman’s thesis on the development of doctrine and whether that contributed to your acceptance of, e.g, the bodily assumption of Mary, Petrine universal jurisdiction, and other controverted doctrines.
If you want to correspond through email, which I would greatly enjoy:
kevindavis.nc@gmail.com
Kevin,
Thank you for your comment. I don’t consider my conversion to be very unique–though I certainly wouldn’t mind if this were the case. Balthasar, Barth, and Reformed Scholasticism all played a fairly important role in this, which I’d be happy to discuss with you via email.
Very generally, however, I’d say that the role that both Barth and Balthasar played was to convince me of Protestantism’s inviability rather than Catholicism’s veracity. I don’t think one can reconcile Barth with any high church Protestantism without drastic change to his understanding of revelation. Moreover, I think Barth’s suspicion of ‘grasping’ God, if worked out consistently, backfires on Barth’s own theology–and he was aware of this. At the end of the day, it is impossible to know what God says unless God gives himself in human form, in human language–in a way that is ‘haveable.’ The analogia entis obviously plays a role in this; suffice it to say, I think Barth was completely wrong about the analogia entis. Balthasar alerted me to the problems of Protestantism, but I myself did not find much in his work that drew me to Catholicism. More generally, the issue of nature and grace was perhaps was most important to me. Here I found St. Thomas to be the most helpful.
Newman provided me with a credible way to interpret Church History. I don’t think that his understanding of doctrinal development has the force of necessity (no historical hermeneutic does–there is always room for skepticism and doubt), yet I think it is consistent. Moreover, I think that any Christian denomination or tradition that attempts in some way to have continuity with the early Church necessarily adopts a certain understanding of development whether they intended or not; I would say that among these groups of Christians, I find Newman’s (i.e., the Catholic’s) understanding to be the most consistent and, therefore, the most credible. I would argue that this is also true for anyone who believes in biblical inerrancy–i.e., one would have to acknowledge a certain type of development in order to explain seeming contradictions.
Finally, a word on Scott Hahn, et al.: I understand your sentiment quite well because I have felt it quite strongly myself. Yet, after some self-examination and some reading, I have difficulty dismissing someone like Scott Hahn and I find it troubling how easily Reformed folk are able to ignore him. Horton endorsed one of Hahn’s books on Pope Benedict XVI–this is actually how I first came to read Hahn. On a related note, Hahn actually read Balthasar (and many other modern Catholic theologians) prior to his conversion and I would even venture to say that he is probably more of a Balthasarian than I will ever be (this after a phone conversation with him). So I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss him–I think this is a mistake. He may have, in my opinion, some cheesy books on Catholicism, yet these are aimed at non-academic lay people who are seeking truth–and these books have probably done more good for the Church than a great number of academic monographs on Barth or Balthasar. That said, he is not lacking in academic biblical theological works.
I will email you in the near future, Kevin.
Hello, dear sir. I’ve read your article for my teacher, because I haven’t found any up-to-date literature about Dionysius. Even I haven’t studied this topic gradually, your article seems reliable. So, if you don’t mind, please send me citation, some sources, which are not old.
I want to help the lector, because he has been researching this topic for many years, he needs English reliable citation, but doesn’t know English. So, you see I’m Russian. Help me, please. And if you want, I can look through Russian literature about Corpus Dionysiacum, I know that it interests many Russian thinkers.
By the way, I’m Helen) I’m sorry if you wasted time reading this message. I wish you have a nice day)
Oh, have almost forgotten, my email: AnnyGerrie@rambler.ru