A Christology of history and contextualization: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s mission Christology and Kosuke Koyama’s contextualizing Christology

Koyama’s contextualizing Christology

As a Japanese missionary in Northern Thailand, Kosuke Koyama theologized “from below.” ⁵ While he did serve on the faculty of the Thailand Theological Seminary (1960–68), he does not see theology as an “academic science.” He is convinced that “‘God-talk’ is poetic, not scientific language.” Therefore, in Water Buffalo Theology, Koyama does not theorize or methodologize. The book is a performance, a “lived methodology” of the kind of contextualization that missional methodologies and theories entail. ⁶ Koyama reflects on his time in Thailand,

On my way to the country church, I never fail to see a herd of water buffaloes grazing in the muddy paddy field. This insight is an inspiring moment for me. Why? Because it reminds me that the people to whom I am to bring the gospel of Christ spend most of their time with these water buffaloes in the rice field . . . [and so] I decided to subordinate great theological thoughts, like those of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth, to the intellectual and spiritual needs of the farmers. I decided that the greatness of theological works is to be judged by the extent and quality of the service they can render to the farmers to whom I am sent. ⁷

With this in mind, Koyama proposes that theology and history are tightly interwoven, and that the task of theology is best done as “neighborology.” He states, “Our neighbors in Asia are not interested in Christology, but can be concerned with our neighborology. This means that our neighbors in Asia are ready to hear our message of Christ if we put it in ‘neighborological’ language, though they would reject Christ if we were to present him in Christological language.” ⁸ Throughout his works, Koyama is much more intrigued by theology’s encounter with persons, rather than ideas, Buddhists rather than Buddhism. ⁹

Nonetheless, in Water Buffalo Theology and in other works, it is indeed Koyama’s Christology that informs his theological practice. ¹⁰ While one can detect the subtle role of Martin Buber’s relational ontology, where a “Thou” is to be hospitable towards an “I,” ¹¹ Koyama’s neighborology is ultimately the performance of his underlying Christology of history. Influenced by Luther’s theologia crucis and Barth’s Christo-centrism, ¹² Koyama uses Christology to argue that God is not a distant and apathetic power, unmoved by history, as can be seen in Aristotle and the “anti-historical,” “no-pathos” orientations of Thai Buddhism. Neither is the work of God “superhistorical nor supernatural,” usurping history and nature. But rather, thinking with Luther, Abraham Heschel, and fellow Japanese theologian Kazo Kitamori, the God of Jesus Christ is a “God in history,” who suffers with and works within the drama of creation. The incarnation of God in Christ is his “in-culture-ation.” ¹³

Contextual theology, then, is grounded in Christ’s presence, which comes to humanity in its own history. ¹⁴ Taking the form of its crucified Lord, theology should therefore “stumble” through history, accommodating to and suffering with those it communicates to. Theology and history are always mutually related for Koyama, as a theologian or missionary seeks to “increase by participation the concretization of the love of God in history.” ¹⁵ In sum, a proper Christology shapes the way we view history and, in that light, invites contextualization and adaptation.

Likewise, Balthasar also explicitly follows the lead of Luther, Heschel, and Buber to accentuate God’s dramatic involvement in history, an involvement that leads to Christ’s cry of forsakenness. ¹⁶ One of Balthasar’s most creative contributions to theology is the importation of drama into his theological system, culminating in the Theo-Drama, the second part of his trilogy. One of the reasons he incorporates drama is to emphasize God’s positive relation to the historical, concrete, and particular. As Jennifer Newsome Martin argues of Balthasar, “Any system that privileges the universal at the expense of the personal and particular, flattening out individual freedom, ‘signals the abdication of drama in favor of a narrative philosophy of history, an epic story of the Spirit or of mankind.’” ¹⁷ In the same way that dramatic language stands between the universal factuality of epic and the individual subjective of lyric—a typology of genre that Balthasar borrowed from Hegel ¹⁸ —so a dramatic conceptualization of God’s relationship to history suggests that God’s relationship to the stage of creaturely existence is concrete, dynamic, and personal. This same mode of thought lies behind Balthasar’s critique of Rahner’s “formal” depictions of the triune life. Drama not only applies to creation but is primordially performed in the triune processions. ¹⁹

Like Koyama, Balthasar broadly believes that the incarnation of Christ establishes an others-oriented anthropology that frames the way we understand God’s disposition towards history and cultivates a sense of openness to the particularities of other faith systems. However, whereas Koyama does not address “theoretical” Christology discussions, Balthasar ultimately believes that specific formulations of the incarnation actually disrupt history by absorbing history and the “I” into Christ’s divinity. He is particularly concerned with correcting this aspect of Barth’s Christology. A brief excursus is necessary.

Balthasar’s Mission Christology

Balthasar’s mission Christology is the basis for his understanding of God’s dramatic involvement in history, and his mission Christology is intimately related to his incarnational framing of the analogia entis. In the following, I elucidate the relevant aspects of Balthasar’s Christology, while also showing where Balthasar’s and Barth’s Christologies diverge, for it is these theoretical nuances that ultimately shape theological approaches to how humanity’s salvation relates to the particularities of history and individuals.

Balthasar’s use of the analogia entis in Christology began very early in his theological writings as a response to Barth’s emphatic rejection of the analogia entis, which Barth calls “the invention of Antichrist.” ²⁰ While Balthasar believes that Barth misunderstood the analogia entis, he ultimately synthesizes Barth’s Christocentric vision with it. Balthasar admits, “Barth is absolutely right that the problem of analogy in theology must finally be a problem of Christology,” as Christ ontologically and epistemologically governs the relation between the infinite and finite. ²¹ Balthasar assumes the formulation of the analogia entis provided in the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which highlights that for every similarity between creator and creature there is an ever-greater dissimilarity, ²² but he does so on the basis of Christology. Therefore, it is not the analogia entis as a neutral theory that governs the relationship between God and creation. It is the analogia entis in Christ. Christ, “the living center of history,” is the norm of history, anthropology, and ontology.

While Christ is the norm and possibility of genuine human history and therefore any analogy between God and creation is first and foremost grounded in his humanity, Balthasar also believes that that that the unity-in-distinction logic of a Chalcedonian Christology is impossible to hold if the divine and human lack the kind of ontological and epistemological similarities set forth in the analogia entis. He asks of the Chalcedonian Christ, “How can such a union be possible given the ‘abyss’ between two different realities that have nothing in common?” ²³ Balthasar responds, “But in light of the foregoing discussion, we realize that the incarnate Word comes into ‘his own property’ (John 1:11). Hence, he does not travel merely into a foreign land (as Karl Barth says) but into a country whose language he knows; not only the Galilean variety of Aramaic that he learns as a child in Nazareth, but, more profoundly, the ontological language of creatureliness as such. The logic of the creature is not foreign to the logic of God.” ²⁴ If there were no positive relationship between Christ and creatures, no similarity between the infinite and finite, the Son’s divine nature would be incompatible with and foreign to his human nature. Either Christ’s humanity or divinity would be absorbed, changed, or destroyed. Therefore, if Christ’s human nature is to be genuine, Balthasar believes that Christology requires an implicit analogia entis, which affirms a similarity between Christ’s two natures. ²⁵

Balthasar’s ultimate concern, despite his appropriation of Barth’s Christocentrism, is to protect the freedom and integrity of creation. He believes Barth’s Christocentrism is “constricting” or “narrowing” and is more of a Christomonism. ²⁶ In contrast, Balthasar desires a Christocentrism like Maximus’s that is centered on Christ without reducing the freedom and particularity of creation. ²⁷ Balthasar protects the freedom of creation by defending the concreteness and particularity of Jesus’s human nature, and he believes some formulations—viz., Logos-sarx Christology, Cyril of Alexandria, and Barth—can potentially misconstrue the relationship between the divine and human in Christ. If Christ is completely other than creation, incarnating into a foreign land, then the kind of positive accommodation of otherness, concreteness, and particularity highlighted by Koyama is difficult to maintain. I return to this theme in the final section.

While Balthasar believes that Christology requires an implicit similitudo, he also uses Maximus the Confessor’s Christology to argue why a non-contrastive and non-competitive maior dissimilitudo between infinite and finite being is necessary to the “safeguarding” and perfection of humanity. ²⁸ Even as Christ “strides through” the ontological distance between God and creation, incorporating humanity into himself, humanity is safeguarded and ensheltered, being both Christ’s body—metaphysically one with Christ (Augustine’s Christus totus)—and his bride—ontologically and differentiated other. ²⁹ No matter the level of unity between the natures of Christ, they must remain “unconfused,” even after Christ’s assumption and deification of humanity. ³⁰ Thus, if Christ is to gather humanity into Himself, a grammar and ontology of non-competitive difference is essential to avoid the “mystical absorption” of humanity into God. Christ redeems and perfects humanity by establishing and maintaining a positive distance from it. As a result, when Christ ascends to “prepare a place” with “many dwellings” for his people (John 14:2), Balthasar speaks of it as humanity’s Einbergung in Christ. ³¹ Aidan Nichols translates this “translation resistant German word” as “sheltering engathering” and Brandon Gallaher as “ensheltered.” ³² While Christ incorporates humanity into himself on the basis of the God–creation similarity, his humanity also remains genuine and distinct from his divinity, which is possible because of the ever-greater dissimilarity between his two natures.

Another relevant feature of Balthasar’s Christology that is essential to a dramatic understanding of God’s relationship to history is the importance of Jesus’s concrete humanity. Highlighting a potential problem of Logos-sarx Christology, Balthasar states, “It was possible to emphasize this seizure of power over all flesh (Jn 17:2) through the Incarnation of the Logos to such an extent that he seemed to adopt human nature in its entirety.” ³³ Balthasar believes the certain christological formulations like Cyril of Alexandria’s and Barth’s can emphasize the universal work of Christ for humanity to the extent that the particularities of his humanity are minimized and can therefore be mistaken as an Apollinarian form of monophysitism. ³⁴ Therefore, to avoid the potential pitfalls of monophysitism and monothelitism, Balthasar couples enhypostatic Christology—the assertion that Christ’s human nature does not have an independent existence, but only exists within his divine personhood—with a concrete nature view of the incarnation, a coupling that is found in John of Damascus, Aquinas, and Maximus the Confessor. ³⁵

For John of Damascus, the Son could not have assumed human nature in the abstract, because abstract human nature does not exist. Aquinas explicitly follows John of Damascus, insisting that human nature cannot exist on its own but rather only exists in particular hypostases. ³⁶ Aquinas notes that it seems the Son should have “assumed a nature abstracted from all individuals” for his work to be universal. “On the contrary,” he responds,

Damascene says (De Fide Orth. iii, 11): “God the Word Incarnate did not assume a nature which exists in pure thought; for this would have been no Incarnation, but a false and fictitious Incarnation.” But human nature as it is separated or abstracted from individuals is “taken to be a pure conception, since it does not exist in itself,” as Damascene says (De Fide Orth. iii, 11). Therefore the Son of God did not assume human nature, as it is separated from individuals. ³⁷

Therefore, for John of Damascus and Aquinas, Christ’s human nature exists concretely, personally, and individually in its mode of union with the divine Son. ³⁸

Like Logos-sarx Christology, Balthasar believes that post-Hegelian emphases on Christ as the “central individual” or “universal human being” tend to abstract Jesus from the rest of humanity. ³⁹ Instead, Balthasar follows John of Damascus, stating that “the definiteness of the divine Sonship of Jesus is directly able to make him into a very definite, individual human being.” ⁴⁰ Whereas Gregory of Nyssa defines the “concrete universal” as the human species—thereby denying Jesus the “attributes of individuality” ⁴¹ —Balthasar prefers Maximus the Confessor’s Christology, which locates the concrete universal in the individual. Given that there is no human nature without a concrete will and activity, then Jesus must be said to have both divine and human energies. ⁴² “This idea of the balance and reciprocity of universal and particular is perhaps the most important in the whole of Maximus’s thought,” states Balthasar. ⁴³ Ultimately, in monophysitism and monothelitism the divinity of Christ is in competition with his humanity—the universal competes with the particular. Instead, Balthasar suggests that the eternal Word makes space for and personalizes the humanity of Jesus by uniting its concrete particularity to the eternal mission of the divine Son. For Balthasar, divine and human agency are united at the level of personal mission. ⁴⁴

The relationship between universal nature of Christ’s divinity and the particularities of his humanity shapes the nature of human salvation and establishes how God’s relation to humanity’s history is dramatic and personal. For Balthasar, the place or “sphere” of humanity is ultimately its ontological existence in-Christ. Paul’s “all-encompassing and many-faceted [in-Christ] formula” is “held together by a single center.” What is this center? Balthasar responds, “This center is nothing other than the sphere of life and action created by the extension of the universal mission of Jesus.” ⁴⁵ Balthasar interprets the sphere of Christ’s action as a “personal sphere of influence” (personale Wirksphäre Jesu), the “acting area” (Spielraum), and the “personal and personalising area” (personaler und personalisierender Raum). ⁴⁶ As a result, Christ’s universal inclusion of humanity is described in the following terms: “dramatic,” “personalizing,” “communicative,” “realistic,” “inner effect,” and “synergy.” ⁴⁷

Consequently, as God heals, saves, and defies humanity in Christ, he glorifies persons, in their concrete history. The humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ is no longer a specific, particular, and “closed-off object in a world of objects” but once ascended and glorified is united to the universal and infinite agency of God and invites humans and all their particularities to full participation in the divine. ⁴⁸ The incarnation is the assertion that divine agency that is “beyond all categorization and analysis unites with and actualizes the ‘most specific,’ the most particular, act of being that is a finite individuality. And in doing so—for John of Damascus as much as for Maximus—the divine allows the finite to become the means by which unlimited communion, transforming participation in the divine, is opened up to other finite agents.” ⁴⁹ This is why in his incarnational theology, Maximus states, “For the Word of God, who is God, wishes always and everywhere to effect the mystery of his embodiment.” ⁵⁰ In sum, if we follow the theo-logic of Balthasar’s mission Christology, the particularities and histories of human persons have a positive relationship to Christ’s universal salvation of humanity. ⁵¹

The spaciousness of Christ: The nature and practice of contextualizing Christ

By framing God’s involvement with history christologically, Balthasar and Koyama seek to avoid Christian exceptionalism as well as religious syncretism. When Christ’s presence encounters human history, it does so in a way that simultaneously incorporates and transforms the particularities of histories, cultures, and individuals. For Koyama, the possibility of this kind of christological understanding of history is grounded in the “spaciousness” of Christ’s presence. The “abundant generosity and spacious catholicity Christ created on the cross” generates space for the particular, personal, and cultural. ⁵² Koyama reflects, “When our mobility and space are happily harmonious, we experience salvation. The word ‘spaciousness’ speaks to me more meaningfully to me than the word ‘salvation.’ At the time of my baptism I realized, though, vaguely, that from the one who had lost his mobility on the cross came the broad space of new life for humanity.” ⁵³ According to Graham Hill’s reading of Koyama, the “local and global and particular and universal becom[e] mutually enriching conversation partners.” ⁵⁴

Similarly, Balthasar defines Christ’s relation to history as “roomy.” ⁵⁵ Humanity is not simply “redeemed through” Christ but is “essentially redeemed ‘into’ him.” ⁵⁶ Just as the trinitarian exchange of life generates a kind of roominess for the otherness of the divine persons, so too can Christ, in his representation of humanity, be seen as the “positing principle, [who] through its own self-investment (self-sacrifice), creates a ‘place,’ a locus, in which the posited ‘other can express its own self’.” ⁵⁷ Christ’s dramatic action pro nobis does not override the drama of human history, but incorporates it into the drama of the triune life. By attributing roominess, particularity, and otherness to the divine Persons, humanity’s participation in Christ’s dramatic work of redemption enables particularity, otherness, and freedom. ⁵⁸

In Koyama’s Water Buffalo Theology, we can observe the performance of how this Christo-logic of salvation operates in relation to how Christian theology relates to other religions and in how salvation relates to the “I.” Koyama seeks the Hebraization of Buddhist’s concepts (arhat, dukkha, anicca, and anatta) in a way that simultaneously relates to and transforms them. In Thai Buddhism, the holy one (arhat) escapes life’s suffering and unsatisfactoriness (dukkha) by realizing the impermanence (anicca) of life and seeking to destroy or eliminate (anatta) the “I.” Koyama notes, “The arhat is, then, an apathia-person. The arhat must become apathetic to existence including oneself.” ⁵⁹ Free from the attachments of home and ordinary life, the result is a religion of “homelessness,” “historylessness,” and, ultimately, of “selflessness.” ⁶⁰ In the Hebraization of these concepts, Koyama seeks to incorporate and transform the meanings of these terms by interpreting them through God’s covenant with Israel. The suffering of life is not caused by the “I” but by ultimate possessiveness, “when ‘I’ begin to think of my house, my ‘spacious upper rooms,’ my ‘cedar paneling.’” ⁶¹ The result of self-possession leads to an unsatisfactory (dukkha) and transitory (arhat) commitment to God. Likewise, “The doctrine of anatta, which inspires a person to eliminate ‘I,’ the source of all personal troubles, becomes a useful indicator that when the person rejects God’s covenantal faithfulness, he or she moves toward destruction and the elimination of oneself.” ⁶² Therefore, the holy one (arhat) is not the one whose “I” has been eliminated, but whose “I” has been restored and reoriented towards faithfulness to God and history. This kind of restoration ultimately fulfills the “I” and gives it a place, a home, and a history. Koyama argues that this kind of incorporation and transformation of Buddhist concepts is not syncretism but is “participation of the insights of Buddhism in the Christian understanding of history.” ⁶³

To summarize, in both Balthasar and Koyama, Christ’s presence is spacious and ensheltering, transforming history via affirmation and confrontation. Both theologians seek to establish a non-competitive relation between the universal and the particular by using resources from Christology. Koyama’s non-theoretical Christology does this by discussing how Christ’s presence simultaneously assaults and relates to the people whom he encounters. Koyama’s focus is on the drama of Christ’s presence in history. Balthasar’s mission Christology frames the discussion within the Chalcedon two-nature formula and the way in which the universal and particular relate metaphysically in Christ. While Balthasar also focuses on drama, he believes that a dramatic understanding of history requires an underlying theo-logic, which he develops through the nuances of theoretical Christology. The logic of monophysitism and monothelitism ultimately leads to Christian exceptionalism—what Koyama calls “absolute doctrine”—by absorbing human culture and history into God or to religious syncretism—what Koyama calls “uncritical accommodation”—by collapsing God into the cultural. ⁶⁴ Likewise, the logic of Nestorianism would put Christian theology and other religious or historical ideas in competition with one another, leaving them ultimately incompatible. We can see then that in both monophysite and Nestorian Christo-logics, the nature of theological contextualization is competitive. In contrast, the logic of the Chalcedonian Christ leads to a theo-dramatic encounter between Christ and history that engages culture, while also reforming, opposing, and dethroning it when it does not measure up to what Christ stands for. ⁶⁵ Koyama calls this “critical-accommodational-propheticism.” ⁶⁶ The hypostatic union of Christ’s two natures should shape the nature of contextual theology by leading to a personal union of Christ’s universal work of salvation and the particularities of histories, cultures, and individuals.

In the same way that a fully developed Chalcedonian Christology shapes the nature of contextual theology, it also informs missiological praxis. In fact, to fully flesh out the extension of Christ’s humanity to the church, a Chalcedonian Christ requires that both theologians and mission practitioners continue to contextualize and develop models of Christ. A Christology of mission that is rooted in a divine movement to creation “from above” supports and requires the work of practitioners, and “from below” Christologies illuminate and flesh out metaphysical constructions of Christ. In other words, traditional Christology and local Christologies mutually support each other. The concept of mission unites the personal missions of those participating in this work to the eternal mission of the Spirit, who continues to concretize the work the Son and extend it to the ends of the earth.

This argument presents a challenge to historical and systematic theologians who work with the logic of Chalcedon or with thinkers like Maximus or Balthasar. Many of these scholars stay within their academic discipline and fail to contextualize theologies that require fleshing out. Balthasar was indeed aware of how his theology was not global enough, and Koyama sought to overcome the dichotomy between the abstract and practical that continues to persist in theology debates by developing a “lived” theological methodology. ⁶⁷ Likewise, contextual theologians on the ground, doing theology from below, do not need to feel as if their desire to see Christ enfleshed is at odds with the tradition and creeds. Koyama notes, “The Christian proclamation seeks re-rooting whenever it comes to a new land. This is basically affirmed by the historical event of the incarnation. Incarnation means in-culturation and in-localization.” ⁶⁸ At the same time, practitioners should also feel challenged. The divinity of Christ not only affirms and accommodates human flesh, but challenges, purifies, and dethrones it when it does not measure up to God’s infinite love for humanity.

Therefore, I am suggesting that the dual-nature Christology formula leads to a dual practice of mission. The mission practitioner, as one sent to incarnate and in-culturate Christ, acts simultaneously as pastor and prophet. With a foot in the riches of the Christian tradition and the other foot in the given culture, mission practitioners pastorally discern what particularities of a culture can be accommodated by Christ’s humanity and graft them to Christ’s body, the church. Likewise, they also prophetically discern with the Spirit what does not measure up to Christ’s divinity and separate the wheat from the weeds. In these two modes of practice, the mission practitioner takes the posture of its crucified Lord, whose divine posture was that of active receptivity towards the concrete good and the concrete sinfulness of humanity. In this way, as both pastor and prophet, the mission practitioner primarily acts in the mode of receptivity towards the host culture. Koyama’s missionary practice illustrates this primary posture of receptivity. He did indeed seek to transform Buddhist concepts, but his first act was to receive, to listen, and to learn from the people, the land, and the creatures he served.

In summary, I have tried to develop the theo-logic of Koyama’s understanding of historical incarnation by examining aspects of Balthasar’s mission Christology. I have argued that Balthasar’s mission Christology offers the theo-logic for the dramatic understanding of history that Koyama is performing in his contextual theology. Furthermore, I sought to demonstrate how different metaphysical and theological understandings of Christology affect the ways theologians and practitioners contextualize Christ. In the end, I have suggested that a dual-nature, Chalcedonian Christology provides support for a dual practice of contextual theology, one that accommodates and transforms the particularities of any given culture.