Reading Balthasar on Holy Saturday

For this day of Holy Saturday, between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday, I turned to a philosophical-theological meditative study by Juan M. Sara on the biblical motif, reflected in the Apostle's Creed, on the descent of the Lord Jesus Christ in his final step of abnegation into hell. Crucified, dead, and buried, Jesus Christ then descended into hell.

Of late, this blog has had much to do with the current controversy among Evangelicals on the book by pastor Rob Bell, Love Wins - a book about Heaven, Hell, and the fate of every person who ever lived (HarperOne publishers, released for sale March 2011).

This blog previously referred to how leading evangelical theologian, Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California, refused to anathematize Rob Bell, a Fuller graduate.  I referred also to the pioneer of biblical soteriological universalism, Rev. Neal Punt, a Christian Reformed pastor and theologian who was put on trial in the local council of his denomination, the CRC's Chicago Classis (as they call it), in 1985.  Pastor Punt underwent serious lengthy interrogation, he answered and as well he held the classis accountable for not removing dissent when it is a faithful possible interpretation of Scripture.  Punt did not remove the doctrine of God's wrath from our Reformed and reformational theology (as any such removal woud, among other things in faithful Christian doctrine, also have removed the Son's free entry into that wrath in crucifixion, death, and burial).  After Christ's crucifixion, death, burial, and (I woud say, in accord with the Apostle's Creed) descent into hell (descensus ad inferno) which brings at the extreme depth of descent the still point where the the call to God by that dead descent depth brings the dawn of hope and the reversal of movement, from hell back to God on earth, the resurrection.  The culminating descent, according to Roman Catholic philosophical-theologian, Hans Ur von Balthasar, is part of the Redemption of Humanity and your own salvation with our species.



I shall quote an excerpt of a study on Balthasar's contribution by Juan M. Sara, regarding the theme of the descent as part of liturgical theology for the final event on Holy Saturday, before Resurrection Sunday.  Sara's study is entitled Descensus ad Inferno, Dawn of Hope (pages 541-572); here is excerpted pages 547-549.   Dr. Sara  (PhD, Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome) is director of the Fundación San Juan in Rafaela, Argentina.  Dr Hans Ur von Balthasar (1905-1988) "attended Stella Matutina (Jesuit school) in Feldkirch, Austria. He studied in Vienna, Berlin and Zurich, gaining a doctorate in German literature. He joined the Jesuits in 1929 [age 24], and was ordained in 1936. He worked in Basel as a student chaplain. In 1950 he left the Jesuit order, feeling that God had called him to found a Secular Institute, a lay form of consecrated life that sought to work for the sanctification of the world especially from within. He joined the diocese of Chur. From the low point of being banned from teaching [becawz he had left the Jesuit Order and become unacceptable to most Roman Catholic dioceses, at Chur] his reputation eventually rose to the extent that John Paul II asked him to be a cardinal in 1988. However he died in his home in Basel on 26 June 1988, two days before the ceremony. Balthasar was interred in the Hofkirche cemetery in Lucern" (Wikipedia).  Sara cites especially Balthasar's The Glory of the Lord (III, 2, 2:211-217) for its "originality of the contemplation of Holy Saturday."  Sara also refers to the work Adrienne von Speyr (1902-1967).  The brief biographical treatment of her by Wikipedia is informative regarding Balthasar as well:<blockquote>Born September 20, 1902 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, Adrienne von Speyr was a laywoman, wife, medical doctor, spiritual writer, and Catholicmystic. Originally a Reformed Protestant, she converted to Catholicism on the Feast of All Saints, November 1, 1940, when she was 38, under the spiritual direction of the famous Jesuit theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar. After her conversion, Speyr began to have many mystical experiences ofthe Trinity and the saints.

While in a state of contemplative, mystical prayer, she dictated to Balthasar over 60 books, including commentaries on the Bible and various theological topics. With Balthasar, she co-founded a secular institute, Johannesgemeinschaft (Community of St. John). Her mystical experiences grew in frequency until her death in Basel, Switzerland on September 17, 1967.</blockquote>Here is an excerpt from Juan Sara's study (pages 547-549), citing both Speyr and Balthasar:

EXCERPT from Juan M. Sara's Descensus ad Inferno, Dawn of Hope (2005):

Holy Saturday, as Adrienne von Speyr explains, is not an additional mystery added to the Cross, but rather the latter’s “obverse.” It is the “underside” of the Cross, when Jesus’ experience of giving everything, which is distinctive of Good Friday, reaches its intrinsic fulfillment in the state of having given everything. This is a state in which Christ’s act of dying is over and now, having died, he finds himself in the situation in which every man finds himself at the end of his earthly pilgrimage. In this sense, Holy Saturday completes the descending, “incarnatory” movement of the Word into the caro peccati. The Son has obeyed the Father’s saving will to the end, and his obedience now takes the form of being dead with the dead. This being dead entails for the Son a real experience of separation from God, the “loss of glory” that without Christ would have been without exception the fate of the dead.11 The obedience of love is what expresses here the permanence of the hypostatic union in the midst of the Son’s extreme separation from the Father and under the crushing blow and incomprehensible weight of the world’s sin. By doing this in absolute purity—and neither before nor after—the obedience of love overcomes the concentrated hatred of sin.

The originality of the contemplation of Holy Saturday in The Glory of the Lord (III, 2, 2: 211–217) is rooted in Balthasar’s presenta- tion of Jesus’ experience in the realm of the dead—to the extent that this experience can be turned into words and images—thanks to the simultaneity of the two central aesthetic categories of perception or vision (Wahr-nehmung) and rapture that Balthasar develops in the first volume of the Glory of the Lord: being swept up ecstatically and lifted out of oneself (Ent-rückung—the word “Ruck” means a pull, a blow, a shaking, and so forth). Thanks to Nicholas of Cusa (who speaks of a visio mortis by means of a via cognoscentiae: a vision of [the second] death by means of an immediate experience) and, in particular, to the congenial insights gained through Adrienne von Speyr’s theological experience (in the introduction to Kreuz und Hölle, for example, Balthasar says that this is one of the two central themes of Adrienne’s theology), Balthasar contemplates how Christ in his

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11 Thanks to the loving obedience of the Son, who remains as the hypostatic subject of this experience, we can say that what Jesus does here is not suffer damnation, as if he were being rejected by God for his sins—of which he has none—but overcome damnation from within, bearing up under the experience of loss reserved for sinful man out of love and as a form of filial gift to the Father.

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descent “sees” the whole sin of the world, separated from the sinner, rejected, and condemned once for all. This vision is the fruit of the suffering of the Cross and therefore belongs uniquely to the Lord. This perception of sin as such is interpreted, using categories drawn from Irenaeus and Thomas, as an act that perceives the amorphous mass of sin and, in so doing, assumes it, takes possession of it, and conquers it. This perception is, at the same time, a being enraptured or swept away (one that, by reason of the kind of perception that is in play here, is as harsh and dramatic as possible): Christ, seeing the fruit of his passion, is drawn, “enrapt” through the horror of hell by and towards the Father, in a total, chaotic, and incomprehensible abandonment. Balthasar, basing himself on this second aesthetic aspect, always accentuates the passivity of this experience. He interprets the active verb “he went to preach to (adveniens praedicavit) the spirits that were in prison” (1 Pt 3:19) as a passive, but no less real preaching with his being, by means of his remaining dead with the dead. He finds support for this reading in 1 Peter 4:6, which employs a passive verb: “the Gospel was proclaimed to the dead” (mortuis evangelizatum est). Christ’s lacerating (subjectively: the horror of the experience; objectively: the tearing apart of the kingdom of death) passage through hell is a being placed in, and drawn through, it by the will of the Father, into whose hands he had entrusted himself without reserve.

Now, the principle that underlies the two above-mentioned theological aesthetic categories and unites them in mutual interpenetration is the (Ignatian) obedience of (Johannine) love. In the unique “space-time” of the descent, in which “vision” and “rapture” coincide in the Son’s loving obedience, the majestic splendor of the Father’s love shines forth in its opposite, in the loveless night of the anti-divine. Here, in this simultaneity, the Son becomes the “author and finisher” of every creaturely aesthetic form and experience. The Son’s obedience of love offers the splendor of the Father’s love a right and adequate form from the heart of which it can irradiate precisely in and through the amorphous horror of hell—and so conquer it as a moment of the glory of the mutual love of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit. And because this entire paternal-filial event becomes the glory of their mutual love as a circumincession of form and light in the midst of man’s second death and sin, the obscure limit that remained in the Old Testament and prevented its consummation falls away from within. There opens,

once and for all (ephápax), the New and Eternal Covenant between heaven and earth, God and the world.

This covenant, founded and realized in the person of the Son, is, as we saw at the beginning of this section, the aesthetic form par excellence. The Son, thanks to his obedience of love in the amorphous chaos of the world’s sin, is and becomes the center of the analogy of the transcendentals that obtains between God (glory) and the creation (pulchrum): the middle that harmonizes and illumines all things, the medium tenens in omnibus. This victory, which takes all thought by surprise, sheds light back onto created aesthetic form. This light falls, in the first place, on the metaphysical form par excellence: the distinctio realis, which can now be perceived and respected as a holy “space” and “time,” where the grace of the act of being in its fullness lights up and pours out on the totality of the real. Man, as an artist of being (who is both its son and its father) can perceive and be enrapt by all things, because in them being “recreates” itself as an image of the form and light of the Trinity. Created reality—in spite of the horror that often threatens existence—is worthy of being loved, welcomed with honor, co- glorified: pulchrum et esse convertuntur [being and the beautiful are convertible].  End of Sara excerpt on Baslthasar.

The problem in all this for Protestant Christians devoted to journeying spiritually with Bible in hand, as spectacles to view the world in which we live, and move, and have our being / meaning, is the metaphysics of beauty as the center of Balthasar's "the transcendentals" that seem to transcend God the Creator as, philosophically, the ontological bridge between God and creation / creatures -- namely, truth, goodness, and beauty.  If instead, with Protestant Christian philosophers Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven, we conceive of these Balthasarian transcendentals (occuring historically in the philosophical problem-line that begins with Plato), reconceives them as stabs at the creation law-order's modalities expressed more fully in our general modal theory (Dooyeweerd, New Critique of Theoretical Thought, especially volume II), then we may be able to re-frame any such Scholastic theory of transcendentals as non-transcendentals where God is the only being and the only absolute as Creator, giving law (order) intermediately to creation in all its modalities and, thus, to all creatures within that integral creation. 


My desire now is to learn as much as I can of the insite's of Hans von Balthasar, Adrienne von Speyr, and Juan Sara in order to re-frame such insites (cf Herman Bavinck's "kernels of truth") without importing the Scholastic metaphysical framework, re-frame the insites into an enriched understanding of the Interim State, the state of human death, as tawt by Scripture and further disclosed by science and a doctrinally-artful imagination.

-- Owlb