Abstract
Christopher Hadley’s systematization of distance and difference in Balthasar delivers on his stated hope to provide readers both with an introduction to Balthasar’s trinitarian theology, and also to its implications for sex, gender, and their own theo-poetic process. He identifies a fourfold sense of distance in Balthasar’s Trilogy: two that exist between God and the world (creation and sin’s alienating effects) and two that are trinitarian (the Son’s earthly mission and the Son’s eternal generation from the Father). H. interweaves these distances and identifies their reliance on one another, denoting these distances succinctly as between God-world, God-sinner, Father-incarnate-Son, and Father-eternal-Son. The thread throughout his argument is that, for Balthasar, distance and difference enable the Trinity to reveal itself both economically and immanently, which in turn enables humanity’s participation in divine life.
H. identifies Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor as Balthasar’s fellow travelers in and primary sources for charting and understanding theological distance. H. argues convincingly that, in Balthasar’s reading, these patristic theologians bridge and preserve the distance and difference that exists between God and creation. His claim of their influence on Balthasar’s understanding of distance between God and the world as positive is well supported and clear.
H.’s contextualization of Balthasar within the work of his contemporaries is similarly clear and convincing. H. identifies Balthasar’s engagement with Barth as paralleling his mentor Erich Przywara’s reinterpretation of Aquinas, offering a helpful frame for both Balthasar’s relationship to his contemporaries and the centrality of Barth’s presentation of faith and being for Balthasar’s second and third distances (God-sinner and Father-incarnate Son).
Pneumatology is H.’s chosen tool for analyzing distance’s role in Balthasar’s treatment of the New Testament’s paschal analogy. In a move that responds to common critiques of Balthasar’s presentation of kenosis, H. reconciles divine freedom and God’s engagement with earthly suffering by introducing a sense of dimension. Distance allows Christ’s kenosis to be identified with the Trinity’s mutual glorification because the Son’s obedience is understood as a gift of life offered to the Father in the Spirit. Through a hermeneutic of distance, obedience becomes triune love, not a means of self-effacement or violence inflicted on the Son by the Father.
The final two chapters are the climax toward which the fourfold symphony of distances crescendos: the fourth distance of the immanent Trinity and the consequences of Balthasar’s importation of a hierarchized masculine-feminine binary into the immanent Trinity. The monograph’s climax is characterized by dissonant chords wherein H. both affirms Balthasar’s inconsistencies while directing the reader toward other instances of consistent argumentation. While treating the fourth distance, H. claims that Balthasar’s choice to import a hierarchized masculine-feminine binary into the immanent Trinity contradicts his work on Dionysius in Glory of the Lord II, as well as his reliance on the work of Adrienne von Speyr. H. argues that Balthasar’s mapping of an absolutized and hierarchical masculinity and femininity onto the Trinity’s activity and passivity strips Balthasar’s treatment of the active and passive in the Trinity of its promise in contemporary trinitarian theology. It also contradicts Balthasar’s other theological work on the active and passive interplay of triune life. The latent Balthasarian ontological priority of male over female in his binary gender complementarity blocks Balthasar’s otherwise promising idea that a mode of existing in relation to another is receiving their self-gift, and elevates this male-female hierarchy into the Trinity’s inner life. Yet, H. believes Balthasar’s (and Speyr’s) misstep of linking hierarchy to the Trinity is destabilized by his depiction of trinitarian distance, which involves temporal and process-oriented analogies for divine life. The tension and continuity that H. finds in the Balthasarian confluence of von Speyr and the patristics permits Balthasar to constructively contribute to contemporary trinitarian theology.
H.’s presentation of distance’s fourfold Balthasarian function is compelling and clearly situates him between Balthasar’s critical appreciators and more-outright critics. H.’s attempt to harmonize the role of distance with the implications of the hierarchization of the Trinity as a result of Balthasar’s gender essentialism has a strong foundation in patristics and Barth. After establishing the contradictions and confluences of Balthasar’s trinitarian methodology and claims, H. demonstrates the fruits of other modes of applying his study of trinitarian distance. While these yield genuine possibilities for retrieval and are carefully constructed, the overtones of H.’s previously identified dissonant trinitarian contradictions continue to sound in the background. Perhaps Balthasar is fundamentally inconsistent, but my theological ear longed for H. to take a step toward resolving his trinitarian chord beyond providing a route around it. The route H. offers is well mapped, engaging other scholars, threads of the trinitarian tradition, and Balthasar’s other writings, and he artfully develops his fourfold medley of distances through the monograph’s movements. It is a text that will assist scholars in Balthasarian studies and provide authentic possibilities for the retrieval of Balthasar’s trinitarian work within contemporary systematic theology.