The work of the late Alejandro García-Rivera has been overlooked as a contribution to theological engagement with science. A significant obstacle to appreciating it as such is the view that his theological cosmology marks a problematic shift from Latinx theological aesthetics to an uncritical engagement with the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. This article engages his oeuvre in response to that critique. Using Hans Urs von Balthasar’s concept of “theo-drama,” it argues that García-Rivera not only fits Teilhard into the broader mosaic of his work successfully, but that García-Rivera’s final work illumines his whole oeuvre as a “gift to science.” It shows how García-Rivera adapts his account of the beauty in the “little stories” of the pueblo to little places in the natural world, in order to help us see their beauty as an objective reality calling us to participate in their care. Thus, the article portrays García-Rivera’s body of work as a way to engage the scientifically-minded through a sensibility for natural beauty, born of mestizaje, popular piety, and the cross.

Hans Urs von Balthasar's kenotic trinitarianism and theodramatic Christology is designed to dramatise the triune God's kenotic engagement with the world without introducing a change in God. It continues to be disputed whether Balthasar ends up divinising suffering and making God into a tragic deity or succeeds in redefining and complexifying divine immutability. To engage with this question, this article critically examines Balthasar's theological use of the image of ‘the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world’, which plays a pivotal role in his kenotic and theodramatic soteriology. I will argue that his kenosis-driven understanding of John's Gospel is untenable, and his rich theological use of Revelation's image of the Lamb slain, intensified by his questionable exegesis of the Fourth Gospel, renders super-temporal suffering and death real in the life of God.

In his dramatic approach to the redemption, Balthasar takes seriously Christ's exchange of places with sinners. Christ upon the cross takes on sin itself, and not only its consequences, while remaining innocent. Balthasar critiques Aquinas for maintaining that Christ accepts only the consequences or punishments of sin. Aquinas strictly distinguishes between guilt and punishment, with Christ accepting only the latter out of charity to make satisfaction for sin. I argue that Balthasar does not get beyond Aquinas’ distinction between guilt and punishment but dramatises it for a more dynamic representation of the seriousness of sin and its redemption.

In both Theo-Drama IV and Mysterium Paschale, Balthasar suggests that the descensus existentially separates the divine hypostases of Father and Son. He also repeatedly argues that his position is faithful to the Great Tradition. While there has been much debate about Balthasar's view of the descensus, this debate has focused mostly on the issues of universalism and penal substitution, leaving the issue of trinitarian relations either to the side or without an analysis of its historical precedent. This article attempts to address this lacuna by asking whether Balthasar's view of the descensus is in fact supported by the Great Tradition, with a specific focus on second-century texts. After surveying the apostolic fathers, second-century Jewish and Christian traditions (e.g. the New Testament apocrypha), second-century apologists and Melito's Peri Pascha, the article concludes that Balthasar's position does not find historical support in the second century. His view may be in line with the Great Tradition elsewhere, but it is not grounded in this seminal century of Christian doctrinal reflection.

Is the world the site of diaphany where one encounters the ‘transparency of God in the universe’ in a Teilhardian fashion, or should one give credit to von Balthasar's insistence that the cosmos can never serve as the final meaning of revelation since divine revelation is best conceived as God's unsurpassable work of art, the epiphany of divine glory over against the cosmos and human history? This paper seeks to explore the contours of two different conceptions of the natural world as God's creation and as the site of revelation. While, in passing remarks throughout his treatment of the form of divine glory, von Balthasar is repeatedly dismissive of the Teilhardian vision, he seems to overlook entirely the real significance of the Teilhardian endeavour, which is directed towards seeing a different and yet essentially similar form, that of the Christiform cosmos. Far from representing a kind of naive ‘new naturalism’ (as von Balthasar contends), Teilhard de Chardin's theology ultimately gets very near the same via tertia heralded by his Swiss confrère.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar's lament that coincidence of the theologian and the saint has not been the norm since the Middle Ages can be emblematic of a methodological issue impacting both academic theology and the Church wholly by separation of that which as a faith tenet should be unified—word and witness. Theologians’ intent today to speak from but not be confused with their location, the theological discipline's reach for respectability in an increasingly secular academy, market forces deliberately shrinking theology's influence except in such as interdisciplinary endeavors supporting other publics’ aims, the contemporary narrow specialization of the theologian, and the sometime view that narrow tasks serving theology are theology itself all result in conflations of theology and religion. So “theology” and “spirituality,” as Balthasar identified the breach, will be separate. Yet we hope that theologians, with all others, will be saints. Does this not, particularly to students, transmit the faith? Although Bernard Lonergan's method might seem to exacerbate the separation given its numerous theological specialties and conversion types, it also offers the way of reunification—without threat to academic integrity. The theological method, with its turn to the subject, can ground a theology (and method) of pedagogy.

Many systematic theologians acknowledge the relationship between Hans Urs von Balthasar, the significant twentieth‐century Catholic theologian, and Adrienne von Speyr, the Swiss physician and Catholic mystic. There is, however, difficulty understanding the actual character and purpose of this relationship. I argue in this paper that Paul's theology of charism, particularly dealing with double mission charisms, will help us understand correctly the ecclesial relationship between von Balthasar and von Speyr. After an overview of von Balthasar's statements regarding the relationship and the three main interpretations of it, I offer my own interpretation of this relationship by using Paul's theology of charism. The ramifications will be a reinterpretation of central aspects of von Balthasar's theology including but not limited to his theology of Holy Saturday, Trinitarian theology, and theology of the communion of saints.

A sacramental ontology, informed by a ressourcement of the Church Fathers, informs the theology of the mid-twentieth-century Catholic movement of nouvelle théologie. Rejecting the neo-Thomist separation between nature and the supernatural, the nouvelle theologians focused on the sacramental presence of supernatural grace in natural realities. To be sure, differences among these ressourcement theologians cannot be denied: de Lubac and Bouillard emphasized the a-scending character of human participation in divine grace, while Balthasar and Chenu stressed the de-scent of the Incarnation into the created realities of time and space. Nonetheless, the four theologians shared a deep appreciation for the Greek Fathers, which enabled them to counter the neo-scholastic separation between nature and the supernatural with a sacramental ontology.

At the heart of Hans Urs von Balthasar's oeuvre is his preoccupation with the encounter between finite human freedom and infinite divine freedom. While Balthasar's many interpreters have assayed the meaning and implications of this preoccupation, little attention has been given to his consideration of the experiential dimension of the encounter, especially the psychological implications. This essay will address such implications by relating the experience of the encounter to the particular psychological phenomenon of anxiety. It is my conviction that Balthasar clearly identified a correlation between the increasing presence of existential anxiety in modernity with the failure of modern persons to understand rightly the encounter between God and the person. Balthasar's assessment of the relationship between the encounter and anxiety provides his readers with a stimulating and original reading that complements, indeed completes, the philosophical renderings of anxiety provided by his contemporaries. Since the phenomenon of anxiety has not abated, a retrieval of Balthasar's work on the subject is both warranted and timely.

In The Grain of Wheat, Hans Urs von Balthasar quotes St. Basil on the intent contemplation of God's works. In Letters to Malcolm, C. S. Lewis speaks of making “every pleasure into a channel of adoration”, by praising “these pure and spontaneous pleasures” as “‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.” According to Iris Murdoch, such attentiveness requires a degree of “selflessness” that resembles aesthetic contemplation and— it may be inferred — prayerful reflection. Using these passages and others by Kathleen Norris and Simone Weil, this essay offers related perspectives on the process and the effects of attentiveness, in poetry and prayer. Poets practise, and thereby teach an attentiveness that is analogous to that achieved in certain forms of prayer. Prayer, like poetry, gives thanks for the mysteries — even as it seeks to understand and respond to the injustices and sufferings — of life. Denise Levertov illustrates in her poetry an awareness of how such attentiveness can be productive, in her late religious poems especially.