What Balthasar Said about St. Paul

The Irruption of Paul of Tarsus, According to von Balthasar
Thomas Bridges at La Perruque has posted two generous helpings from The Glory of the Lord: Volume One. I confess I had these passages in my head when I wrote my previous post, not wanting to dig out the Balthasar... and yes, this passage goes right along with the theme I've been hammering away at through Dawson, Ratzinger, and Balthasar.

I cannot resist repeating one snippet: 

The Pauline tradition, on the other hand, will mean the continued fostering of Paul’s view of revelation; but, on the other hand, it will also mean the ever-new and unforeseen vertical irruption of new charisms in the history of the Church. In this (discontinuous) tradition are to be found the great charisms of mission which suddenly visit and fructify the Church, the great conversions (from Augustine to Newman), the great visions which are ‘ineffable’ in themselves (2 Cor. 12.4) and yet are poured out over the Church in words inspired by the Spirit. [Glory of the Lord 1]

St. Paul: the Type of the Charismatic Apostle

Acts 9:17 "So Ananias went and entered the house; laying his hands on him, he said, 'Saul, my brother, the Lord has sent me, Jesus who appeared to you on the way by which you came, that you may regain your sight and be filled with the holy Spirit.'" (NAB)

One wonders what would have happened had Saul (in Life of Brian fashion) had not submitted to the Church in [Damascus] and been healed of blindness by Ananias, but had started his own sect... Instead, we have a fascinating situation. The zealot confesses his blindness to the pastoral authority. The representative of the Church for his part is filled with a certain trepidation. And yet, these opponents are brought together in obedience to the Lord: the Church conquers the Gentiles, and Europe will hear the Gospel preached.

The Tension between Missionary and Pastoral Tasks in the Church

The common thinking regarding the Protestant Reformation is that it was a unique effort to renew the Church. From my reading of Christopher Dawson, Joseph Ratzinger, and Hans Urs von Balthasar, I begin to see that the Reformation was one in a series of renewal movements in the Catholic Church, one in which the tension between missionary renewal and pastoral authority was snapped. The idea of Protestantism is that the church is made up of the reformed and reforming only — a destabilizing notion. And yet, among Catholics, the emphasis is more often on pastoral unity whereas the apostolic mandate for reform, renewal, and missionary discipleship is too often ignored or dormant.

A little bit of history will help us to examine the dynamic fountain of renewal at the heart of the Catholic Church:

"The words that provide the foundation understanding lay movements in the Church are found in the First Letter to the Corinthians: 'Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit... to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good [of the whole Church] ... All these are inspired by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills  (12:4, 7, 11). Even a summary review of the Church's history will confirm this characteristic, which is astonishing because it points us back to the transcendant, incalculable origin of the Spirit's charisms, an origin that cannot be domesticated. The three aspects that this passage distinguishes and holds together — (1) the variety of spiritual gifts; (2) the fact that they are ordered to the benefit of the entire Church; (3) their spontaneous birth from the divine Spirit, not from some human calculation — are already clearly to be seen in the first few centuries of the Church: it is not in the least a flight from the world that sends the layman Anthony of Egypt into the wilderness; rather it is his desire to help the Church through prayer and asceticism; he frequently returns to the city, and a great movement of disciples is spontaneously brought to life by his existence. The same is true of the great charisms of the layman Benedict, later of the layman Francis of Assisi, and later still that of the layman Ignatius of Loyola: no one other than the Holy Spirit urges them to set out on their journey and leads them to their goal, often by lengthy, circuitous routes upon which they must allow themselves to be blindly led. If the great movements they kindled into life became partly or wholly clerical communities later on, for both internal and external reasons, nevertheless their lay and purely pneumatic origin ought never to be forgotten.

We can also see this pneumatic origin in the fact that the second element mentioned above, the visible incorporation into the universal Church — in practice, papal approbation — sometimes took a very long time, until sufficient proof had been given of the movement's genuine supernatural provenance and therefore also of its Catholic orientation. There could also be problematic cases, such as some of the movements for poverty in the Middle Ages, whose charismatic origin drove them out of the visible Church, sometimes through the impatience of the members and sometimes through a lack of insight on the part of the hierarchy, so that they were not able to bear all the fruit that was intended. The Poverello possessed both the necessary patience and an almost boundless reverence for ecclesiastical authority that were needed to ensure for his movement its proper place in the Church's structure and, indeed, to fortify this place through his own, deeply personal sacrifices."

"Lay Movements in the Church" from 

The Laity and the Life of the Counsels by 

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Ignatius Press: 2003.

A couple of notes: 

• Poverello = the poor man = St. Francis of Assisi 
  
• Pneumatic = from the Holy Spirit, charismatic
  
• The above statements are qualified a bit in the paragraphs following this beginning, so that readers will not jump to certain conclusions due to the bold strokes of this sketch of history.
  

This same history is sketched by others with a bit of a different emphasis. See the below excerpts, for example:

• "What is Apostolic Succession?" from an address that Joseph Ratzinger gave in 1998. 
  
• "Christian Renewal" - Christopher Dawson's synthesis of the history of the Church in six ages (so far) of renewal.
  

Pastoral unity is essential, and the passages from Holy Scripture and the saints, posted by Mary ought to be goads for us all to seek a stronger more certain communion with Christ, and thus with the people whom Christ has called into one body. I was reminded of this powerfully last Sunday when I heard the reading from 1 John during Mass:

Beloved:

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is begotten by God,
and everyone who loves the Father
loves also the one begotten by him. (NAB).

Adapted from a post at Broken Alabaster.

Blondel and Ratzinger on Tradition

Blondel on “Tradition” pt. 2 at After Existentialism, Light.

Joseph Ratzinger, 1998:

This sheds light once again on “spiritual” [geistlich] office in the Church and on its theological location, which the tradition has defined with the term successio apostolica. “Apostolic succession” means precisely the opposite of what it might appear to mean, namely, that through the continuous chain of succession we become as it were independent of the Spirit. Linking to the line of succession in fact means that the sacramental office is never simply at our disposal, but must be given each time by the Spirit, that it is precisely the spirit-sacrament, which we can neither create nor institute ourselves. Functional competence as such is not by itsel sufficient for that, the Lord’s gift is necessary. In the sacrament, in the Church’s representative, symbolic action, the Lord reserves to himself the permanent institution of the priestly ministry. The totally specific combination of “once” and “always” characteristic of the mystery of Christ appears very beautifully here. The “always” of the sacrament, the presence of the historical origin in every age of the Church, implies a link with the ephapax, with the event of the origin that happens once only. This link with the origin, this stake planted in the ground of the once-only and unrepeatable event, is nonnegotiable. We can never take refuge in a free floating pneumatology, we can never leave behind the ground of the incarnation, of God’s action in history. But the converse is also true. This never-to-be-repeated event imparts itself in the gift of the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of the risen Lord. It does not vanish, like something dead and gone, into the forever irretrievable past, but has the force of the present, because Christ has passed through the “curtain, that is, through his flesh” (Heb 10:20: RSV) and has thereby released what endures forever in what takes place only once. The incarnation does not stop with the historical Jesus, with his “sarx” (2 Cor 5:16!). The “historical Jesus” has eternal significance precisely because his flesh is transformed in the resurrection, so that he can make himself present to all places and all times in the power of the Holy Spirit, as the farewell discourses in John wonderfully show (cf. especially Jn 14:28: “I go and I come to you”: RSV). 

(Ratzinger, "Theological Locus," p 485-6. 
Large text for emphasis is mine)

What is Apostolic Succession?

"The office of the succession of Peter breaks open the merely local ecclesial model; the successor of Peter is not just the local bishop of Rome, but bishop for the whole Church and in the whole Church. He thus embodies an essential side of the apostolic mission, which must never be absent from the Church.

But the Petrine office itself would in turn be understood incorrectly and would become a monstrous exception, if we burdened its bearer alone with the realization of the universal dimension of apostolic succession.

There must also always be in the Church ministries and missions that are not tied to the local church alone, but serve universal mission and the spreading of the gospel.

The pope has to rely on these ministries, they on him, and the collaboration between the two kinds of ministries completes the symphony of the Church’s life.

[...]

We could even say, summing up the whole discussion, that the primacy of the successor of Peter exists in order to guarantee these essential components of the Church’s life and to ensure their orderly relation with the local ecclesial structures."

(Ratzinger, Theological Locus of Ecclesial Movements, IIC,

line breaks inserted)

In this article, Ratzinger describes the apostolic mission as the charismatic task in the Church which is responsible for spreading the Gospel and for bearing the responsibility for the universal Church instead of just local governance. As successors to the Apostles, the bishops originally had this universal responsibility, but over time they became local governors. The bishop of Rome, the Pope, continues to bear this universal task.

QUESTIONS

1. What is the relationship between ecclesial movements and ecclesial communities, i.e. Protestants communions?
2. How does this dynamic of local and apostolic tasks impact how one understands nominal Christianity, itinerent revivalists, new monasticism, etc?
3. Or, how can renewal groups renew without becoming overly divisive?