Hans Urs von Balthasar on Forming Missionary Disciples

Hans Urs von Balthasar’s reputation and theological legacy have been attacked in recent years for allegedly contributing to the declining numbers of those who take seriously Catholic faith, morals, and spiritual/sacramental practice. In my judgment, enough has been said already in Atonement, prove unfounded the facile misrepresentations of Balthasar as a theologian who blithely presumes hell to be empty of human souls and claims to know with certainty that it will remain so. Of concern to me here, however, is the claim that Balthasar’s works are fostering spiritual presumption and complacency in readers as well as dulling, even disabling, missionary zeal.

For those who put in the time and effort to read attentively Balthasar’s numerous works, there is no more recognizably Balthasarian theme than the “Theo-drama” involving the Holy Trinity (divine freedom) and human beings (human freedom in need of redemption and called to divinization). Essential to this Theo-drama is a real interplay between divine freedom and human freedom. On his side, God “leaves free” human beings over against his Fatherhood of grace. “Within the Trinity, God’s all-powerful love is also pow­er­less­ness, not only giving the Son an equal, divine freedom but also giving the creature itself—the image of God—a genuine power of freedom and taking it utterly seriously.”[1] On our side, Scripture prohibits us from undermining this seriousness by saying that a definitive No to God’s deifying love is impossible.[2]

The seriousness with which Balthasar takes the role played by human freedom is best measured by his intense concern and relentless efforts to form disciples of Christ who dare to desire sanctity. He always insisted that his entire theological project had but one fundamental aim: to equip Christians to respond to the universal call to holiness, for the greater glory of God and the sanctification of the world. Far from fostering complacency, Balthasar’s writings (including his most scholarly) function as spiritual exercises for the purpose of priming believers to be effective and credible witnesses to Christ in our secular age. If Balthasar is vulnerable to fair criticism as a formator, it is due to his raising the bar of discipleship so very high—not to promoting a complacent and mediocre way of being Christian.

Like the French Catholic novelist, George Bernanos (whose work resonates strongly with him), Balthasar regards mediocrity as a major obstacle to holiness and happiness.[3] By mediocrity, Bernanos and Balthasar do not mean being average in intelligence, creativity, or religious sensibility. Rather, the mediocre life is the superficial life: a life that refuses to take risks, to make commitments, to devote oneself wholeheartedly to a cause. True greatness, on the other hand, is the willingness to risk, the ability to commit, the readiness to place oneself at the disposal of the God and Father of Jesus Christ. The painful dilemma for the human heart in our “post-Christian” era is that it retains the desire for total commitment and self-sacrifice, but can see nothing truly worthy of such risk, such total self-giving. Consequently, Balthasar dedicates himself to the task of healing the eyes of our hearts so that we can see God (to paraphrase St. Augustine): see the astounding love of God for the world made manifest in his crucified Son (Jn 3:16; 1 Jn 4:8-10), which alone is worthy of our answering self-donation.

This task undeniably guides Balthasar’s charter for the formation of missionary disciples, Engagement with God: The Drama of Christian Discipleship. Here he addresses all the faithful who, in the years following the Second Vatican Council, should have become familiar with “the universal call to holiness.” Yet insofar as the eyes of our hearts remain unhealed, we remain somewhat blind to the infinitely greater and more meaningful mission to which we are called. Thus here in his “program of mission to the world,”[4] Balthasar straightaway directs our gaze to the figure of Christ crucified. In beholding him, the discerning eye seizes on “the whole essence” of the Christian faith: “that we should understand that the love which characterizes the life of the Trinity has been manifested in [Christ], and in him has been abundantly proved.”[5] Abundantly, indeed. For Balthasar, the hallmark of the true God, that which renders the mission of Christ wholly credible as God’s definitive engagement with the world, is love that radiates the quality of “excess,” the “ever greater,” the “yet more.” Deus semper major. In the face of the recklessly self-forgetful character of God’s passion of love, the only appropriate response is summed up in the Ignatian motto “ad majorem Dei gloriam,” and in the Johannine exhortation, “so we ought to lay down our lives for our brethren” (1 Jn 3:16). The more the Christian grasps the lengths to which the Triune God involves himself for us, the greater grows one’s own ambition to live no longer for oneself; at the same time, the less satisfied one is with spiritual mediocrity or complacency. In contemplating God’s active involvement pro nobis, we are spurred to play our part in the action. “We suddenly realize that we have been created to take our part” in God’s engagement with the world. And as our graced capacity to see God in Christ increases, so “we are drawn deeper into the springing source [of divine love] and simultaneously thrust out from the source into our own channels of activity.”[6]

This means, to be sure, that the form and measure of God’s action in Christ provides the model for Christian action. Balthasar, however, is acutely aware that something more is involved. If the action of missionary disciples is to be effective as a sign and an instrument of God’s saving love, it is not enough to attempt to imitate God by standing in social solidarity with the poor, the stranger, and the oppressed. Neither the life of the Trinity nor the life of Christ is to be regarded as a mere paradigm to guide programs of social and political involvement. The crucial factor, for Balthasar, is that Christian action participates in God’s own life of Trinitarian love. Christ, through his Incarnation and the bestowal of his Spirit, imparts to us a participation in the divine freedom of his Sonship, by virtue of which we are made capable of taking part in his Trinitarian mission.

Indeed the significant factor in being a Christian is that he does all with reference to and in dependence on the ultimate source of his actions, through loving first and above all things, the God who loves us in Christ in order that he may then, by means of and together with God’s love, turn his attention to the needs of those who are the object of the love of God. Only if we start from this “Alpha” will our involvement lead us to the “Omega” of the man who is loved, only thus will we succeed in caring for him inwardly in order that he may find his true destiny, only thus will we achieve that solidarity with him which is only possible in God.[7]

Plainly, Balthasar’s program of mission to the world performs a prophetic and critical function against a “secularization of salvation.” All that it affirms about the Triune God’s self-giving is pregnant with the insight that the transformation God intends to effect in human beings is nothing less than divinization. By rousing the Christian consciousness to a renewed awareness that man’s full and final liberation coincides with his divinization, Balthasar enables us “to judge clearly how basically unsatisfying it is for man . . . to have as his ultimate goal the civilizing and humanizing of the world.”[8]

Hence it cannot be doubted that Balthasar takes seriously the universal call to sanctity. Yet what about sin? Does he take sin seriously? The only fair-minded answer is an emphatic “yes.” For Balthasar, the way of sanctity is the way of the Lamb who bears the sin of the world. Since the Church exists to bring the salvation of Christ to all, we must follow Christ’s path of “descent” into the world. This entails the willingness to glorify God by bearing sin (our own and our enemies’) in and with Christ (see Eph 5:1-2).

If, then, Balthasar dares to hope that, in the end, every human heart may let itself be moved by grace to accept the redemptive work of the Triune God (and we can disagree with him on this matter, and nonetheless draw a wealth of insight and inspiration from his corpus), still in fairness we ought to see that in him this daring hope is paired with an audacious love best exemplified by the witness of those saints (e.g., Therese of Lisieux and Teresa of Calcutta) whose vocation leads them to fill up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ (see Col 1:24). Saints (following Christ) do more than warn others away from sin. Saints dare to bear sin away on others’ behalf. Priming the Christian to respond to sin by demonstrating a love more than human, a love that both “bears all things” and “hopes all things” (1 Cor 13:7)—this is the thrust of Balthasar’s mission as a formator.

All this relates to the credibility of the Christian’s mission to the world. “For as Christ of his free love yielded himself willingly . . . to death and dereliction” for the sake of sinners,[9] so the Christian is called to be at God’s disposal in readiness to serve God’s will for others without counting the cost. The credibility of evangelical action for the sake of the world resides in its grace-engendered likeness to “the foolishness” of divine love (1 Cor 1:25). Only this form of life “can penetrate the ‘secular world’ as ‘leaven.’”[10] The costly discipleship that hazards everything is the mark of authentic Christian involvement.

I will let Balthasar speak from the heart in closing:

I am the light of the world [writes Balthasar quoting Christ]. And without me you can do nothing. And, beside me, there is no light and no god. But you are the light of the world, a borrowed but not a false light; burning with my flame, you are to enkindle the world with my fire. Go out into the furthest darkness! Take my love like lambs into the midst of wolves! Take my gospel to those who cower in the dark and in the shadow of death! Go out; venture beyond the well-guarded fold! I once brought you home on my good shepherd’s shoulders. But now the flock is scattered and the gate of the pen gapes wide: this is the hour of mission! Out! . . . Just as the Father has sent me, so do I send you. Going out from me as a ray from the sun, as a stream from its source, you remain in me, for I myself am the ray that flashes forth, the stream that is poured out from the Father. . . . Just as I radiate the Father, so also are you to radiate me. So turn your face to me, that I can turn it out into the world.[11]

EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Atonement: Soundings in Biblical, Trinitarian, and Spiritual Theology (Ignatius Press, 2022). All rights reserved.

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