“As time went on, theology at prayer was superseded by theology at the desk.” (1) Hans Urs von Balthasar’s mission was to put this movement in reverse.

Balthasar conceived of prayer, mysticism, and contemplation not only as subjects of theological interest but as the techniques and foundations of theology. In this way his work was of a piece with the mid-century Catholic school known as the nouvelle théologie, which included figures such as Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, and Joseph Ratzinger. With them, Balthasar shared a particular interest in the church fathers. Like them, Balthasar shed neo-scholastic styles of argument and disputation. But Balthasar’s diverse and copious work often goes beyond that of his confreres, stretching the limits not just of erudition but of orthodoxy. Balthasar did theology in extremis—not just in the sense that the theological establishment of his day sidelined his work and vocation (though it did), but in the sense that he strove to do theology from the farthest reaches to which his prayer could take him in union with his crucified Lord.

Balthasar’s theology issues from, and aims spiritually to initiate the reader into, a contemplation of the mystery of God’s self-giving love in trinity as that love manifests itself historically in Jesus Christ. His corpus can be organized roughly into three sorts of works: 1) a series of ressourcement projects in which Balthasar reintroduces the thought of church fathers like Origen and Maximus the Confessor to the theological world of his day, 2) a collection of spiritual works aimed at training readers in the disciplines of prayer or meditation on the Scriptures (e.g., Prayer), or which are meditations in and of themselves (e.g., The Heart of the World), and 3) constructive theological works which treat particular issues in theology (e.g., The Theology of History) or attempt an holistic accounting of Christian faith and life (foremost, Balthasar’s triptych The Glory of the Lord, Theo-Drama, and Theo-Logic). The temptation of any treatment of Balthasar is to evaluate his works, particularly of the third class, by the standards which he sought to transcend and even render obsolete—those of “theology at the desk.” We must instead evaluate Balthasar’s theology on a different primary, spiritual level. The key question is not just does it rationally cohere, but will it pray? This is not to put Balthasar beyond scrutiny, nor is it to render his theology esoteric—and that this suspicion should arise at all is a symptom of the divorce of theology and prayer which it was Balthasar’s aim to undo. But it is to insist that the only criterion that matters is whether God’s self-revelation in Christ is grasped or not through Balthasar’s elaboration of the same.

At the heart of Balthasar’s theological vision is a theology of love—in particular, an account of love as self-gift wherein the lover gives itself to the beloved in a way that makes the beloved free. This is preeminently true of God in trinity, as Father, Son, and Spirit are caught up in a perpetual circulation of self-giving love as each person participates, in a way appropriate to its particular identity, in the coming-to-be of the others. It is true also of creation, for God gives the world being in such a way that God does not fatalistically determine the world but, rather, lets the world be. Using the language of drama, which is Balthasar’s preferred analogy for describing the interface of God’s freedom and creation’s, Balthasar remarks, “It is true that, from God’s ultimate perspective on the complete play, the whole can be designated ‘very good’ … ‘it was just and right,’ it ‘had’ to be. But this final judgment by no means compels the free actor to act in one way and not in another.” (2) Christian theologians often make the point that God’s agency and ours are not in competition with one another. (3) But in Balthasar, this common Christian claim takes a distinct, Christic shape: it is in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth that God, in love, gives creation the possibilities between which it can freely choose. In Christ God opens up the “acting area” within which the dramatic confrontation of God’s freedom and creation’s will take place—foremost through Christ’s passion and descent into hell.

Balthasar’s account of the descent is arguably the most famous, and infamous, theme of his theology. On its own, Christ’s descent into or harrowing of hell is relatively uncontroversial. It’s affirmed by the Apostles’ Creed, alluded to in the First Letter of Peter (3:19), has a long iconographic history, and so on. Balthasar, however, conceives of the descent not as a triumphal entry into the realm of the dead or damned but as the drama of God’s self-alienation in Christ on the cross, made possible by the extreme sort of love and freedom which characterizes and constitutes God’s life in trinity (to which I referred above). The freedom of the world to reject God is grounded in the possibility of the same in God—in the radical sort of freedom which the Son has in relation to the Father, who gives all the Father is and has to the Son and, in this way, lets the Son be in the most total and absolute way imaginable. When translated into a world of sin and death, this triune love looks like the incarnate Son taking on the sin of the world—letting the world pile it on his shoulders, as it were—to such an extent that God the Son really and truly undergoes the condition of being rejected by God. For Balthasar, when Jesus cries, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34), he is not just piously quoting Psalm 22. He is experiencing alienation from one he called “Father.” This is God suffering God-abandonment. The Son arrives in hell not as a conqueror but as the damned. “That is not myth,” Balthasar says, “but the central biblical message and, where Christ’s Cross is concerned, it must not be rendered innocuous as though the Crucified, in undisturbed union with God, had prayed the Psalms and died in the peace of God.” (4)

This is ingenious on God’s part, Balthasar thinks, because it means the very way God opens up and preserves the possibility of the world’s rejection of God is, at one and the same time, the undoing of the rejection and its consequences. The only way to say No to God is in solidarity with Jesus’ suffering of the same. Balthasar’s theology of the descent was heavily indebted to his friend and colleague, the mystic and physician Adrienne von Speyr, whose visions and writings Balthasar cites continually when discussing the descent. In an especially revealing passage from a series of von Speyr’s visions recorded in The Passion from Within, von Speyr says, “During the Passion, the Lord … bridges the gap between ideal and reality, draws the opposition of sinners rejecting the ideal into himself in order to overcome it.” (5) In the drama of the passion, Jesus takes on the sin and suffering of the world in an act of divine self-alienation (in which creation freely participates), and by thus sharing in the condition of alienation from God, God makes said alienation a condition of intimacy with him. God lodges himself at the furthest reaches to which created freedom can plummet. Alienation from God is no longer absence from God. And because alienation from God is now and forever a site of God’s presence—because Jesus has been in hell just as surely as he is in heaven—God can and does share his life and saving power with sinners. Thanks, I think, to the fruit of von Speyr’s prayer, Balthasar can see in the drama of the descent the answer to two theological conundrums: not just the compatibility of divine and created freedom, but the simultaneous preservation of the possibility freely to reject God and the hoped-for universal reconciliation of all things in Christ. “From the outset,” Balthasar says, “[Christ] is envisaged as the consummating protagonist … he simultaneously opens up the greatest possible intimacy and the greatest possible distance (in Christ’s dereliction on the Cross) between God and man; thus he does not decide the course of the play in advance but gives man an otherwise unheard-of freedom to decide for or against the God who has so committed himself. … [Y]et Christ, through his existence, does not leave everything in indifference … he directs world history … he lends his entire impetus and that of his legacy—his Church, his word, his sacraments, his saints—to the movement toward the hoped-for and divinely willed conclusion.” (6)

Balthasar’s work has provoked the skepticism of many—from more conservative theologians regarding his theology of the descent and openness to apokatastasis (the belief that all creation will eventually be saved), and from more progressive theologians regarding his theology of sexual difference. These criticisms are just in many cases (particularly as regards the latter, to my mind), but they often proceed as though Balthasar was up to something rather more like theology at the desk than theology at prayer. Really to refute Balthasar requires not just pointing out faulty premises, logical inconsistencies, or apparent heterodoxies, but casting an alternative vision of the epiphany of God in Jesus Christ more compelling in every sense of the word. For this Protestant anyway, we ought at least to learn from the single theme of Balthasar’s work which I’ve been able to expound in this essay—the descent—the lesson that we are foolish to look for speculative solutions to problems God actively solves in history. Balthasar squares the theological circle of creaturely freedom and possible universal salvation not by thinking metaphysically about whether people can be in a state of grace without knowing it (i.e., the possibility of ‘anonymous Christianity’) but through prayerful reflection on the drama of redemption itself. Balthasar reminds us that the question of salvation has an answer, and that his name is Jesus Christ. We can commend his theology for drawing our attention to the actual drama of reconciliation worked out by God on the stage of history, a drama in which we are all players, each one of us. Would that all our ambitions were more like Balthasar’s in this respect: not just to think God, but to seek him.

1. “Theology and Sanctity,” in Explorations in Theology I, 208.

2. Theo-Drama III, 14.

3. For more examples, see Kathryn Tanner’s God and Creation in Christian Theology.

4. Mysterium Paschale, 122.

5. Adrienne von Speyr, The Passion from Within, 96, emphasis mine.

6. Theo-Drama III, 21.