The Achievement of Hans Urs von Balthasar: An Introduction to His Trilogy
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
In The Achievement of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Matthew Levering has written a book for theologically educated readers who mistrust von Balthasar or who mistrust von Balthasar’s critics. The book shows that von Balthasar’s critics can and should benefit both from the rich and wide-ranging conversations that mark his trilogy and from the critical and constructive engagement with German philosophical modernity offered by the trilogy. In addition, Levering hopes to show that those who mistrust von Balthasar’s critics need to be more Balthasarian in their response to criticisms of the Swiss theologian.
In this introductory volume, the focus is on the first volume of each part of the trilogy. This approach exhibits the main lines of von Balthasar’s trilogy in a way that allows for an introductory volume of manageable size. This approach also avoids the more controversial volumes of the trilogy. Reading von Balthasar with the goal of engaging his more controversial views is certainly justifiable, but in an introductory book, the danger is that some readers could miss the forest due to their opposition to some of the trees.
The Achievement of Hans Urs von Balthasar contributes to the healing of the internecine conflicts that, since the 1930s or earlier, have pitted Ressourcement theologians and Thomistic theologians against each other with grave consequences for the health of Catholic theology. Despite sharing a strong belief in the faithful mediation of divine revelation through Scripture and the Church, many Catholic theologians today find themselves at loggerheads with each other. Easily forgotten by the Ressourcement and Thomistic combatants is their shared commitment to the theo-aesthetic beauty, theo-dramatic goodness, and theo-logical truth of Christ’s revelation of Trinitarian self-surrendering love as our source and supernatural goal, and their shared rejection of philosophical modernity’s immanentism, historicism, and power-centered voluntarism. The present book seeks to highlight these shared commitments, while leaving room for disagreement about von Balthasar’s specific positions and approaches.
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- Proposes that Balthasar's trilogy engages critically with the three preeminent German fathers of modernity: Immanuel Kant, Georg W. F. Hegel, and Friedrich Nietzsche
- Seeks to get around the ongoing aftereffects of the lamentable mid-twentieth-century Catholic struggle between the nouvelle theologie and neo-scholastic theologians
- Offers a helpful way of entering into von Balthasar's trilogy for theologically-educated readers who mistrust von Balthasar or who mistrust von Balthasar's critics
- Theological Aesthetics: A Kantian Critique of Kant
- Theo-Drama: A Hegelian Critique of Hegel
- Theo-Logic: A Nietzschean Critique of Nietzsche
Flawless and clear writing, with a streamlined and perspicacious structure. The tripartite theme is unique and offers one of the most teachable ways into von Balthasar’s theological legacy. A prize for students and teachers alike.
Adam G. Cooper, John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, Australia
Levering's book is characteristically lucid and generous in its presentation of Balthasar's robust Catholic theological response to certain major philosophers of modernity. This indeed is one of Balthasar's greatest achievements, and I am glad to have such a wonderful treatment from the skillful mind of Matthew Levering. In a secularized intellectual milieu where the postmodern legacies of Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche remain dominant, Levering's careful study of Balthasar offers Catholic scholars a great gift. Levering's reading of Balthasar models a renewed and expanded style of Thomistic theology in which the goal is not only to retrieve Aquinas's teachings but also to imitate Aquinas's critical engagements with the philosophical currents of his day. Levering enlists Balthasar in this enterprise and does so with clarity and grace.
Andrew Prevot, Boston College
Levering has provided us with a profound appreciation of Hans Urs von Balthasar's theology written by a Thomist fellow traveler, a vision of Balthasar's trilogy marked by both warranted irenicism and critical verve. His constructive proposal for the future of Catholic theology is both significant and promising.
homas Joseph White, OP, author of The Light of Christ: An Introduction to Catholicism
- Title: The Achievement of Hans Urs von Balthasar: An Introduction to His Trilogy
- Author: Matthew Levering
- Publisher: Catholic University of America
- Print Publication Date: 2019
- Logos Release Date: 2023
- Pages: 253
- Era: era:contemporary
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
- Subject: Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 1905-1988
- Resource ID: LLS:CHVMNTHNSHTRLGY
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-25T19:21:40Z
Dr. Matthew Levering is James N. Jr. and Mary D. Perry Chair of Theology at Mundelein Seminary, and Co-Director of the Chicago Theological Initiative. He holds a B.A. from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; M.T.S. from Duke University; and a Ph.D. from Boston College. He is the author or co-author of over thirty-five books including such works as Scripture and Metaphysics, Participatory Biblical Exegesis, Biblical Natural Law, Proofs of God, Aquinas’s Eschatological Ethics and the Virtue of Temperance, Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?, The Abuse of Conscience, and Reconfiguring Thomistic Christology. He is currently at work on a multi-volume dogmatics, whose first five volumes have appeared (most recently Engaging the Doctrine of Israel). He is the editor or co-editor of over twenty books including such works as The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology, Aristotle in Aquinas’s Theology, and The Reception of Vatican II. He is the translator of Gilles Emery, O.P.’’s The Trinity. He co-edits two quarterly journals, Nova et Vetera and the International Journal of Systematic Theology. He is the past president (2021-22) of the Academy of Catholic Theology, and served as its founding Chair of the Board from 2007-2016. He has been a member of Evangelicals and Catholics Together since 2004. With Thomas Joseph White, O.P., he co-edits the Thomistic Ressourcement series for Catholic University of America Press. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the St. Paul Center, and he edits the Renewal within Tradition series for Emmaus Academic Press.