Response #8: Patrick McManus

Response to “Toward a Hermeneutic of Hope: Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Biblical Warrant for Universalism”
By Rev. Patrick McManus
Wycliffe College, Toronto

I would first of all like to thank David for a well crafted paper that nicely highlights the tensions both within the biblical witness and within Balthasar himself on the question of the biblical warrant for apokatastasis. David is succinct in his review of Balthasar’s exegesis and his critique of Balthasar while concise, gets right to the heart of some of Balthasar’s shortcomings on this long debated issue.

I must confess that I always find it easier to respond to a paper I find myself disagreeing with. However, in this case, my job is harder since David and I have similar concerns (though to different degrees) over Balthasar’s treatment—with his prioritizing of the possibility over the actuality of the Pauline ‘in Christ’, his problematic handling of the nature of human freedom, and the issues surrounding how he handles the relation between the work of Christ and the work of the Spirit. I also share in David’s desire for a hermeneutic of hope which avoids both the ‘possibility’ of apokatastasis in the abstract and also the codifying of universal hope into a doctrinal system. So, I will leave it to our ensuing discussion for champions of Balthasar to come to his defence to save him from David’s critique. I will also leave it to our following discussion to possibly engage the problematic biblical texts that David highlights. That said, I do have some issues.

I will limit my response to two: pressing David on his claims for a hermeneutic of hope and asking him to fill out for us what this hermeneutic might look like on the ground; and second, I just want to touch on David’s reading of Balthasar’s hermeneutic, as only a ‘hermeneutics of crisis’. I wonder if, in the end, this is simply reductionistic, given Balthasar’s wider theological programme (I’m thinking here especially of Balthasar’s Theo-Drama).

On the first count, to be precise, I’d like to ask how David’s hermeneutic of hope might parse the tension of the biblical witness? While I agree with David that both the mere ‘possibility’ of universal hope and the systematizing of it are equally philosophical abstractions and end up polarizing the biblical witness, it doesn’t seem to me that it’s necessary to have either a hermeneutic of crisis or a hermeneutic of hope as David seems to put the matter.

This strikes me as problematic, at least if the tension within Scripture that Balthasar highlights is a real one (as I take David to assume). It needs to be more clearly put to what extent David agrees with Balthasar’s claim (a Pauline one, surely) that the church sits under the judgment of her Lord—which negates any and all synthesizing of Scripture into a comprehensible system—and how well David’s third option complies with this theological caveat. In other words, does David’s ‘stronger form of hope’ carry with it the seed, or possibility, of this sort of synthesizing? If not, how does it account for this very real tension?

On the second issue, I will only say that to suggest that Balthasar’s hermeneutic ‘begins with anthropological existentialism’ as David seems to hint at in his second to last paragraph misses the whole thrust of his theological project and confuses it with something like Rahner’s transcendentalism. I understand that David is only engaging Dare We Hope?, a short cursive text that doesn’t really lay out for us the breadth of Balthasar’s hermeneutics, but to read it apart from what Balthasar does elsewhere might leave us with the impression that Balthasar’s hermeneutics is, at least on David’s reading, too thin. On this score, I think, if we were to press David’s caricature of Balthasar here, we would find that Barth and Balthasar are not so far apart as David has made them seem here. Both sought, hermeneutically and otherwise, in their own unique ways to draw out the universal reach of the christological particular. That, we can hash out in our discussion below.

Again, I would like to thank David for his paper and for this conference.