God's Glory Appears: Missio Christi Missio Verbi est

“FOR THIS WAS I BORN and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice." These words of Jesus, spoken to Pilate as related in the Gospel of John (18:37), are at the heart of Christ's mission to the world. In a nutshell, they define the missio Christi.  For the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, the missio Christi is so central to the person of Jesus that it actually defines him.  It is for von Balthsar something "not extrinsic to his identity," but rather, it is his "personal identity."  If Christopher Steck is to be believed:

Jesus is defined completely by his mission; he has no personal self lying outside the task of the Father. The task of expression God "through his entire being, through his life and death in and for the world, totally occupies his self-consciousness and fills it to the very brim." . . . His mission is person-constituting; it transforms him into a unique individual with an identity out of which his action and life choices flow and to which they give expression

Steck, 42-43 (quoting TD3.172).   There is a contiguity and continuity in Christ's eternal personhood before the Incarnation and after the Incarnation.  Essentially, the personhood of Christ is the same: it is only the modality that changes, and that only by the assumption of the nature of humanity into the personhood of the Son.  The change occurs not in God, but in man, who is assumed into the Godhead through the incarnation of the Son. "In the Word's Incarnation, that personhood [of the Eternal Word] continues to be fully received from the Father, but now in the earthly modality of mission."  Steck, 42.

Since Jesus is a "person," and his mission is so central to his being, it follows that for von Balthasar, the mission of Jesus may be used as "the heuristic lens for understanding what it means to be a 'person.'"*

 The Trinity Embracing Fallen Mankind

In von Balthasar's view, the notion of "person" is not an extrinsic one, one fashioned from external activity to internal reality.  It is not imposed from outside to inside.  Rather, it is intrinsic and manifests the reality that at the center of personhood is gift, the girt of the Father in the bestowal of the mission to the Son.**  It is the eternal reality that flows outward.

. . . when Jesus lays hold of his mission and fashions it, he is not obeying some alien power. The Holy Spirit who inspires him is not only the Spirit of the Father (with whom the Son is "one") but also his own Spirit. We cannot imagine his mission ever having a beginning: he has always laid hold of it already.

TD3.198 (quoted in Steck,43)

There is something interesting here.  For von Balthsar, Christ's mission is not something imposed from outside; it is not something heteronomous.  Yet is is not something autonomous.  "We cannot get behind the mission to find in Jesus a neutral moment of personal freedom."  Steck, 43.  The mission defines the person, identifies the person, and to wrest the mission from the person of the Word--whether eternally or in its aeveternal modality after the Incarnation--would be not to give autonomy to Word but to de-personify him (if such a thing were possible).  To suggest autonomy of the Word separate and apart from the mission of the Word would be to remove it from the procession (begottenness) of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity.  It, in fact, would be to posit an "isolated . . . divine person who already bore his identity at his disposal and can now hover in indecision [or autonomy] before the Father's task."  Steck, 43.  This would be to posit tear apart the Trinity and suggest not one Godhead, but two.

If Christ's mission is so intrinsically bound with his personhood, then what does that mean for Christians who are called to be incorporated into his life?  What does it mean for us to become members of his Body, the Church?  This Christological incorporation is central to von Balthsaar's ethical theory, and to that issue we will devote our next posting.

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*heuristic, from Greek eὑρίσκω, "to find" or "to discover," means a methodology, usually an experience-based technique for solving a problem, for learning, or for discovering something. Particularly when an exhaustive analysis is impossible or impractical, a heuristic method is one that allows for an intuitive, reliable judgment. In short, heuristic may colloquially be a sort of quick-and-dirty or rule-of-thumb method by which we can speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution to something that confronts us.
**This is a little troublesome: if the person of Son is defined by his mission, then is the Father or the Holy Spirit not a person, or a person in a manner distinct from the Son?

God's Glory Appears: Softening Subordinationism

FOR VON BALTHASAR, the Christian moral life is it its essence a participation in the relationship between the Father and the Son, the "eternal begottenness" which exists between Father and Son. The earthly work of Jesus the Son of God incarnate is a temporal expression of the eternal begottenness between the Father and the Son. Jesus does the will of the Father in accomplishing his mission among men.  The Word eternally does the will of the Father.  That will of the Father, which is unchanging, and which the the person of the eternal Word in both his eternal nature and incarnate human nature responds to perfectly, is therefore one and the same.  Jesus' divine will and human will are in perfect accord, so the expression of his human will is an expression of his divine one.*  Since as Christians we are called to do the Father's will, and understanding of the relationship between the Father and the Son is essential.  This, in a nutshell, seems to be the heart of the moral enterprise in von Balthasar's eyes.

The matter of the relationship between the divine will of Jesus and his human will and their relationship to the eternal will of the Father is delicate.  In identifying the divine will and the human will of Christ, there is a risk of falling into a sort of subordinationism, that is, of making the Son in his divine nature subordinate or inferior to the Father. To subordinate the eternal will of the Son to the eternal will of the Father would be an improper subordination and denial of the essential equality of Father and Son.  However, it would not be improper to subordinate the created (human) will of Jesus to the eternal will of the Father, since, in his human nature though not in his divine nature, Jesus is subordinate to the Father.**  It is important to hold to the subordinate characteristic of Jesus' human nature and will to the eternal will of the Father and the Son.***

The subordination of Christ's human will  to the will of the Father is amply testified to in Scripture:  "Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me; still, not my will but yours be done." (Luke 22:42)  "Jesus said to them, 'My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to finish his work.'" (John 4:34)  "I do not seek my own will but the will of the one who sent me." (John 5:30b)  "[T]he world must know that I love the Father and that I do just as the Father has commanded me." (John 14:31)  ". . . the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins that he might rescue us from the present evil age in accord with the will of our God and Father . . . ." (Gal. 1:3b-4)

If the earthly work of God the Son is a revelation of the eternal relationship between God the Son and God the Father,† how do we reconcile the lack of subordinationism in the eternal relationship between God the Father and God the Son (in his divine nature) with the clear subordinationsim that exists between God the Son (in his human nature) and God the Father?

To some extent, the reconciliation can be aided by removing from the relationship of the human nature of Christ and the Father all "negative qualities associated with some human experiences of obedience--for example, inequality, antagonism, power relations, and heteronomy."  Steck, 40.   (But this also runs the risk of perverting the relationship between man and God, which, of necessity is a relationship of unequals and has an element of heteronomy arising from our created nature, and indeed our created being, and its absolute reliance upon God. Our relationship with God is not a relationship of equals.)

 The Trinity Crowning the Blessed Virgin Mary by Enguerrand Charonton (1410-1466)

Modernly, the notion of subordinating oneself to another is unappetizing.  Of course, this does not mean we go about modifying our Trinitarian or Christological doctrines to suit modern, autonomous man (or modern, autonomous woman).  We are traveling on dangerous ground when we try to accommodate truth (dogma) to man, and not man to truth (dogma).

Von Balthasar seems to soften the blow of obedience by seeing subordination within the context of love and communion, so that obedience is seen as something that affirms one's being (and the other's being), and not something which deforms one's being.

[F]or von Balthasar interpersonal love includes a moment of obedience. The individual's response to the appearing form is always one of loving obedience or obedient loving. Loving the other means welcoming his or her address. In so receiving this address, the individual allows his identity to be shaped in part by the relationship with this other. His actions are realigned with the desire to "let be" this other. Thus obeying the beloved other need not be equated essentially with a submission response to outside intervention, though we recognize that all too often in human relationships that element dominates. Rather obeying the beloved can be a faithfulness to that which is already in some sense, though not entirely, internal to use because of our loving commitment.

Steck, 40-41. Relationships between persons are, moreover, principally communions--co-"unions of freedoms"--and not "monophonic exchanges."  They require that we be open to the other, that we suspend ourselves to be able to be receptive.  This obedience-as-suspended-receptivity and not obedience-as-unilateral-submission that von Balthasar stresses is what's involved.  As Steck elaborates this point:

It is misleading to describe this receptivity to the other simply as a mode or our own willing--that is, we will that the beloved's will be done. It is rather a suspended receptivity (or, indifference) to the essentially unknown and unanticipated, spontaneity and mystery of the other. This suspended receptivity, and not the element of coerciveness, is what von Balthasar underscores in his use of the language of obedience. This receptivity, we will see, is perfected in the individual's surrender to divine glory and his obedience to the Father's will.

Steck, 41. If Christ submission and subordination to the will of the Father (in his human nature) is seen as this "suspended receptivity," then we may analogize from that to the eternal "suspended receptivity" of the Son of God to the Father God.  By identifying the human "suspended receptivity" of Christ's human will as the revelation of the eternal "suspended receptivity" of Christ's divine will to the eternal will of the Father, we are further along to understanding how the revelation of the economic trinity is the revelation of the immanent trinity.  We are able, at least in von Balthasar's view, to overcome the problem of subordiationism that the Rahnerian axiom (economic Trinity as revealed in Christ = immanent Trinity as eternally existing) presents.

It is this sort of thinking that allows von Balthasar radically to appreciate what has eternally occurred in the relations within the Godhead (and so appreciate what occurs when we become participants of the divine life by grace):

The personal and total surrender of the Father in generating the Son is the ur-kenosis of the triune life and its primal shape. The Son cannot be God in any way other than by following this patter of self-giving. The kensoses of the Incarnation and of Good Friday and Holy Saturday and the regular pattern of earthly obedience are only new expressions of this triune way of being. The Father's gift of himself to the Son has its own dimension of receptivity as it includes a perfect receptivity or openness to the Son's return of all to the Father and thus something like obedience.

Steck, 41-42.

There are further effects of holding to the Rahnerian axiom that the economic Trinity reveals the immanent Trinity when we look at Christ's mission.  Is Christ's mission equally the eternal mission of the triune God? And if so, how?

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*Orthodox Christology requires us to be dyothelitist (from Greek δυοθελητισμός = "doctrine of two wills"), not monothelitist (μονοθελητισμός = "doctrine of one will"). The Church teaches that Jesus Christ had two natures, divine and human, with two wills, divine and human. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church (§ 475) states: "Similarly, at the sixth ecumenical council, Constantinople III in 681, the Church confessed that Christ possesses two wills and two natural operations, divine and human. They are not opposed to each other, but co-operate in such a way that the Word made flesh willed humanly in obedience to his Father all that he had decided divinely with the Father and the Holy Spirit for our salvation. Christ's human will 'does not resist or oppose but rather submits to his divine and almighty will.'" 
**Cf. S.T. Ia, q. 42, art. 4, ad 1. St. Thomas addresses the objection that it would seem that the Son is not equal to the Father in greatness. "For He Himself said (John 14:28): 'The Father is greater than I'; and the Apostle says (1 Corinthians 15:28): 'The Son Himself shall be subject to Him that put all things under Him.'" His response: "These words are to be understood of Christ's human nature, wherein He is less than the Father, and subject to Him; but in His divine nature He is equal to the Father. This is expressed by Athanasius, 'Equal to the Father in His Godhead; less than the Father in humanity': and by Hilary (De Trin. ix): 'By the fact of giving, the Father is greater; but He is not less to Whom the same being is given'; and (De Synod.): 'The Son subjects Himself by His inborn piety'--that is, by His recognition of paternal authority; whereas 'creatures are subject by their created weakness.'" 
***This despite the objection of feminist theologians who fear the implications of patriarchy since if Jesus' human will is subordinate to the Father's eternal will, it suggests that our human will should be subordinate to the Father's will.  Here, their horror patriarchus leads them astray. 
†This point was discussed in our prior posting, "God's Glory Appears: The Trinity's at the Heart of It," which discussed the axiom that the "economic trinity truly reveals, is, the immanent trinity."

God's Glory Appears: The Trinity at the Heart of It

WHEN WE ARE DEALING WITH person-to-person relations, there is a dynamism to be found in the encounter which distinguishes it from a person-to-thing relation.  One moves from a static response to beauty (or glory) to a dynamic interpenetrative response, from "iconic" aesthetics to "dramatic aesthetics" or "theo-dramatic aesthetics," from an "I-Thou" encounter to a "We" encounter.  In such person/beauty-to-person/beauty contact, the "perceived form" of the other is so multivalent that it involves "various parts of our lives (e.g., temporal, personal, vocational, social), illuminating different features and aspects in a manner than cannot be summed us as a single interchange."  Steck, 34-35.  At root, such person-to-person encounter is Trinitarian.

Von Balthasar's thought is intimately Trinitarian, and his view of the Trinity is deeply attached to Christ's revelation.  For von Balthasar, the "economic Trinity"--which is what revealed in the salvific economy of God as found in Christ's mission--reveals the very life of the Trinity itself, i.e., the "immanent Trinity."  Von Balthasar is "resolute[ly] committed" to the Rahnerian "axiom that the econcomic trinity truly reveals, is, the immanent trinity." Streck, 36.  They are equivalent.  What this means is that "the form of the Son's earthly relationship with the Father is itself a revelation of the Eternal Word's procession from the Father." 

Christ's relationship with the Father as witnessed in the Gospel, then, is a revelation of what it means when we say, "God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father." The relationship between Christ and the Father in the Gospels, "was not an anthropomorphic mask assumed for a time and later discarded in the course of salvation history."  Steck, 36-37.  It is this relationship that reveals, that is, the intertrinitarian love that exists between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the three-persons-in-one-God-love.

The three-persons-in-one-God we call the Trinity involves an eternal relationship between three hypostases, three "subject-centers of free acts."  It involves the mutual surrender of these three "subject-centers of free acts," which gives rise eternally to three "areas of infinite freedom" which at the same time are shared one with the other so that "each of the persons of the Trinity has that person's own mode of participating in the one freedom and subjectivity of the Godhead."  Steck, 37.

An analogy of this interpersonal love found in the Trinity is found in interpersonal relationships among human persons, and so we may learn of the internal workings of the Trinity, albeit it in an analagous manner, by experiencing interpersonal relationships (communio) and then extending that communio eminently to understand the interpersonal relationships between and among the three persons of the Trinity.  In other words, in looking and by looking at the "mutual encounter of finite freedoms" of human persons, and eliminating all that is attributed to finiteness and temporality, we distill out, as it were, an understanding of what relationship occurs within the Trinity Himself, the "mutual encounter of infinite freedoms."  Though Steck does not avert to it, this appears to be the realm of natural theology.

Understanding this aspect of the Trinity is important to understanding von Balthasar's ethical theory.  "If intradivine love is a or even the formative image of our understanding of the ethical life, we do well to reflect on what images might serve it best."  Steck, 38. 

This wonderful relationship between the persons of the Godhead is best revealed in the relationship of the Son to the Father, which is what is revealed to us in the earthly visage of God as Christ walked among men.  It is to that revelation as contained in the Gospels to which we now turn.

God's Glory Appears: Love Both Free and Obedient

VON BALTHASAR attempts to reconcile both freedom (autonomy) and obedience (to law,i.e.,  heteronomy) by focusing on the "gift" aspect of one's relationship when confronting beauty, a confrontation that demands a sort of fitting response.  For von Balthasar, there is no such thing as an autonomous self that lives apart from others.  For him, "autonomy emerges not in isolation from the other, but only in an engagement with the other."  Steck, 27.

For von Balthasar, the normative, moral framework for freedom, at least on the intramundane level, lies in the contours and dynamics of the subject/object encounter viewed aesthetically. Our self-expressiveness only becomes expression, visible as beautiful and free human form, through obedience to the normative forms of human action.

Steck,27. Beauty is what takes us out of our solipsistic shell.  It nudges us, as it were, to give a response, to act outside of ourselves, to love something outside of and extrinsic to us, and in so doing, we exercise our freedom.  Beauty, and the response it elicits, is thus "freedom-granting."  "In the 'seeing' of beauty, the subject breaks out of the self-enclosed sphere of nonfreedom into the expansive horizon of love."  Steck, 27. Therefore, the "obedience" of love is not restrictive, but exactly the opposite: freeing.  It opens us to truth, to good, and it is only in truth and good that we find freedom.

This response is at its acme when one is dealing with an interpersonal encounter, as distinguished from the encounter between a person and a thing.  It is one thing to love a painting by Cézanne; it is altogether something else to confront Cézanne himself.  In an interpersonal encounter, the response to gift is mutual and so there is a mutual increase of freedom and a mutual obedience of love.  Of course, for von Balthasar the Christian, nowhere is this more manifest than in the interpersonal relations with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Indeed, it is precisely this infinite and eternal interpersonal intercommunication that is found within man, the image of God, in a created manner.  There is within man, therefore, a shimmer of God's glory.  He enjoys a "theological beauty" which is both ontological and relational.

God's glory is found in the human person in two ways according to von Balthasar, ontologically and relationally.  First, ontologically, man's shimmer of God's glory is found in the fact that he is made in the image of God.  Within the human person, God "has 'set an image of himself over against himself,' which, because it resembles the archetype, has 'certain traits of glory . . . .  intrinsically . . . proper to it.'"  Steck, 29 (quoting GL6.15)  This glory "proper" to man is bipartite.  First, it involves a capacity for free, that is, autonomous, self-expression.  Second, it involves a sort of stewardship of "lordship" in that man becomes an agent, as it were, of God, a "'representative of God and of God's power as rule.'" Steck, 29 (quoting GL6.91)  Man, therefore, has a "theological beauty," a scintilla of God's glory.  And this "theological beauty" appears in all men irrespective of creed.  It is a natural quality, not a supernatural quality.

This gives man a certain standing before God.  "This sphere of lordship allow the human person be other before God without ever being absolute other."  Steck, 29.  Man's "lordship" is sub Deo et lege, under God and law.

The second way in which God's glory appears in man (and which is part of his "theological beauty") relational.  It arises out of man's ability to form a communion of persons, an "I-Thou" encounter.  This quality is, of course, directly tied to man as imago Dei.  It is, in fact, a necessary component of the human person.  "For von Balthasar, the human person is always a being-in-relationship; in being what we are, we are being with others."  Steck, 30.

It is the second, relational aspect of man that is "the privileged moment of the manifestation of God's glory."  The ontological aspect is in fact supportive of the relational aspect.  This is true not only in terms of natural relationships between two human persons, but eminently so in the case of a human person's relationship with God in Jesus.  Here, the contingent, created theological glory of man comes face to face with the human face of God in Jesus, a most incarnational manifestation of God's uncreated glory.  In relating to God it is created glory responding to uncreated glory.

God's Glory Appears: Beauty, Gift, and Gratitude

IN OUR LAST POST, we addressed the important point that von Balthasar's aesthetics emphasizes the relationship feature, the communicative aspect, as central to the aesthetic experience. Aesthetics involves an encounter: not an encounter of self, but an encounter of an other-to-self. There is therefore an "engagement of freedoms wherein the free self-disclosure of one is greeted and returned by the free self-offering of the other--mutual gift and self-expression joined in an intertwined emergence of the 'We'." Solpisistic aesthetics is incomprehensible. It is never only an "I" or "me," but rather it is is a "we" or an "us."

For an authentic aesthetic experience, there must therefore be a mutuality between the revealing other and the receptive and responsive self.  There is both a giving and a receiving.  There is a "dialogical dimension" intrinsic to aesthetics.

This fact is important in von Balthasar's thinking.  He sees beauty as a sort of bond between truth and good. Truth and good each have their own draw, their own attraction, but in beauty we have a relational feature which is absent in the draw that truth or good has on us. Beauty is a straddler between good and truth:

[B]eauty overcomes two different one-sided approaches. One the one hand, the object is not simply an objective truth of bare fact lacking existential import, for the beautiful form is attractive to the beholder. On the other hand, the object is not simply a malleable thing to be refashioned into some benefit by an evaluating subject, for the beautiful form is objective gift. The beautiful form draws together objective truthfulness with the striving of the beholder toward fulfillment in relationality. The agent's intentionality is directed away from worth as domestication of the other for my sake to worth as a spontaneous pouring forth of a gift. Truth and goodness, apart from beauty, threaten to condense, respectively, around the (now disengaged) objective and subjective poles of worldly encounter. Truth gets reduced to what is "out there," removed from the agent (i.e., correct laws and right ideas), while goodness becomes preoccupied with what satisfies the agent. As long as these two poles are disengaged, there can be no true encounter or harmony of freeedoms. The truth of the other (the "object") would have nothing to do with the agent's desires and, ultimately, his identity. However, with the inclusion of beauty, the two poles are bridged through the deep, ontological eros--a love that is established between they why-lessness of every appearance (its giftedness) and the rapturous response of the beholder.

Steck, 23.* Beauty, therefore, keeps us from lapsing into a pure intrinsic-ism of good or truth (what is good for me, what is true for me) or a pure extrinsic-ism of good or truth (what is objective good, what is objective truth as externally-imposed).  Beauty is what saves us from falling into a purely heteronomous notion of truth and good, or into its opposite, a purely autonomous notion of truth and good.  Beauty allows for a binomous or duonomous notion of truth or good.  Implied in this is that any attractiveness to the good or to the truth is based upon the beauty (or glory, if dealing with God) intrinsic in the truth and the good.  It is this quality what attracts.  It is what calls for a response.  It is, in the final order of things, a realization of someone giving a gift, our receiving that gift, and our thanksgiving for that gift.

The response that is prompted by beauty is closely imitative of the response that is required in moral responses."Ethical behavior," just like aesthetic experience, "takes shape as grateful response." Steck, 24.  With respect to response, von Balthasar is careful to preserve freedom.  The response that beauty elicits from us is an obligation of fittingness, of rightness.  Failure to respond to beauty "is not only an aesthetic wrongness, but a genuine moral wrongness."  This failure ought not to be seen as a violation of some duty, or some law, but as a "visible deformation of freedom's expression."  Steck, 25.  What should have been a "free, creative, loving" response is instead short-of-the-mark, "marred."  Steck, 25.

By tying the aesthetic and moral response, in particular the free response between object and subject, von Balthasar avoids Kantian coldness and dryness of "pure" reason or "pure" unimaginative submission to a universal rule without regarding to one-on-one response. It departs in two significant ways:

First the law that freedom embodies is universal but not simply uniform. That is, it subsists in the engaged, interpersonal actions of unique individuals in which personal particularity, creativity, and spontaneity so shape the course of their encounters that aesthetic rightness more aptly describes the embodiment of the moral law than conformity to universalizable maxims, where the particularities tend to be viewed as accidentals accruing to an isolable, moral core. Second, the moral law has an epiphanic dimension. It is aesthetically perceived, not just judged to be the law through an objection application of rational principles.

Steck, 25. Thus von Balthasar seeks to join both law and freedom in this aesthetic "ought."  "[T]his aesthetic ought is is softer than the binding inflexibility of logical consistency.  It invites and attracts; it does not at all cajole with the threat of reprisals."  Steck, 26. 
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*Here, and elsewhere, I have replaced the female personal pronoun with the masculine (generic sense) personal pronoun.  For me, Steck's use of the female personal pronoun (she/her) as generic is distracting and unnatural.  It may be PC, but it is not proper English.