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Von Balthasar and the Dialogue with Karl Barth
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
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Karl Barth suits the role of a kind of theological Petruchio. Petruchio, you will recall, bursts upon the stage in The Taming of the Shrew, with the ‘shrew’ herself, Katherina, in his sights. He is determined to win the right to the hand of a maiden whom he construes as hostile, just as Barth (the early Barth at least) saw the theological establishment representing all the arrogance and vanity of a liberal theology in thrall to bourgeois complacency. He invades this hostile world in the name of the Word of God; he elects to be ‘rough, and woo not like a babe’, as Petruchio puts it. And as much of the theological establishment in Europe at the beginning of the 1920s reeled back in shock at Barth’s onslaught in The Epistle to the Romans, so Katherina is thoroughly taken aback by this
‘ ... one half lunatic A mad-cap ruffian and a swearing Jack,
That thinks with oaths to face the matter out’. (II i)
Petruchio will not deal with Katherina on her own territory. He whisks her away to his own remote and inhospitable house, and then turns her every expectation on its head. This is ‘crisis wooing’. Just as, in the early Barth, for the world of the creature to cross over the threshold into the divine world would entail its destruction and immolation, because of the utter difference of God’s ways and humanity’s ways, God’s eternity and humanity’s time, God’s holiness and humanity’s sin, so Katherina’s entrance into Petruchio’s house is entry into an environment in which all her expectations and routines tire altered.
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- Copyright © 1998 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Cf. McCormack, Bruce L., Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909‐1936 (Oxford, 1995), p.231Google Scholar.
2 McCormack, p.210, n.6.
3 KB, p.97.
4 KB, p.254.
5 KB, p311.
6 KB, p.17.
7 Karl Barth to Edward Thumeysen, 4th February, 1927; quoted in McCormack, p.377.
8 McCormack, p. 130.
9 McCormack, p.67.
10 KB, p 48
11 McCormack, p.454.
12 KB, p.197.
13 KB, p.129.
14 KB, p.371.
15 Quash, Ben, “'Between the brutely given and the brutally, banally free”: Von Balthasar's Theology of Drama in Dialogue with Hegel', in Modern Theology 13:3 (1997), pp.293‐318CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 Barth wrote: 'I'm a bit startled at the title, The Triumph… Of course I used to use the word and still do. But it makes the whole thing seem so finished, which it isn't for me. The Freedom…. would have been better. And then instead of …Grace I would much have preferred…Jesus Christ.' (Quoted in Busch, p.381).
17 Cf.KB, p.186.
18 Cf. McCormack, p.405.
19 KB, p.221.
20 KB, p.208.
21 KB, p.224.
22 KB, p.244.
23 AB, p.358.
24 KB, p.354.
25 KB, p 378
26 Kerr, Fergus, Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity (London, 1997), p.41Google Scholar; quoting Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics IV/2, p.404Google Scholar.
27 KB, pp.91,94
28 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 quoted in KB, p.118.
29 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3; quoted in KB, p.112.
30 Quoted in KB, p.133.
31 Barth, Karl, Die Theologie and die Kirche (Munich, 1938), pp.374‐76Google Scholar; quoted in KB, p.96.
32 Von Balthasar says these things about Barth (KB, p. 126), but actually they say far more about his own way of articulating the question of freedom.
33 Simon, Martin, ‘Identity and Analogy: Balthasar's Hölderlin and Hamann’ in Riches, John (ed.), The Analogy of Beauty: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Edinburgh, 1986)Google Scholar.
34 KB, p.251.
35 KB, p.253.
36 KB, p.25.
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