la nouvelle théologie: Sobrino and Balthasar in The Tablet

Monday, March 26, 2007

Sobrino and Balthasar in The Tablet

"Father Sobrino”, we are told, “reflects the so-called theology of the homo assumptus, which is incompatible with Catholic faith.” Moreover, the Congregation disapproves of Fr Sobrino speaking of the “faith” of Jesus, because: “If Jesus were a believer like ourselves, albeit in an exemplary manner, he would not be able to be the true Revealer showing us the face of the Father”. The issues here are complex, but that assertion is, to say the very least, questionable and its formulation tendentious.

I chose those last two examples because readers of The Tablet might care to turn to pages 327-8 of Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Volume I: Seeing the Form, where von Balthasar insists that “the man Christ” is “a human being who has been assumed into God” and that he possesses “archetypal faith”.

(Professor) Nicholas Lash

1 comment:

Fred said...: COMMENT COPIED FROM DOT COMMONWEAL:

Posted by Robert Imbelli
on March 26, 2007, 6:34 pm
As Professor Lash rightly says: "The issues here are complex;" and he quotes some phrases from Hans Urs von Balthasar that bear resemblance to points that the CDF finds problematic in the writings of Father Sobrino.

I would extend to readers of dotCommonweal Lash's invitation to consult the cited pages of von Balthasar, lest they obtain from the necessarily brief quotes a misleading sense of Balthasar's Christology.

Thus Balthasar writes on p. 328: "But, as a man assumed into God, Christ necessarily participates in the self-consciousness of the eternal Son in his eternal procession from the Father and his return to him, and this becomes reflected in the human self-consciousness of Christ to the extent that he experiences this self-consciousness of the Son interius intimo suo and that he possesses it by opening himself to it."

Moreover, "because he is genuinely man only as assumed man, he understands even his genuinely human experience of God as an expression and function of his divine person."

For Balthasar the humanity of Christ is uniquely the humanity of the second Person of the Trinity.; 19:55