Mysterium Paschale by Hans Urs von Balthasar

Author:Hans Urs von Balthasar [Balthasar, Hans Urs von]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9780898708042
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2012-09-28T04:00:00+00:00

5

Going to the Father: Easter

The whole New Testament is unanimous on this point: the Cross and burial of Christ reveal their significance only in the light of the event of Easter, without which there is no Christian faith. We place this event under the title ‘Going to the Father’, a Johannine phrase (John 16, 28), which needs to be enriched by the other available descriptions in order to be fully grasped. The Father is the Creator who, acting at Easter in the Son, brings his work to completion; the Father, in exalting his Son, also brings the Son’s mission to its conclusion, and makes the Son visible to the world, spreading abroad there the Spirit which is common to them both. That this event which includes everything within its embrace at one and the same time withdraws itself from our gaze (inasmuch as it happens in the form of a return to the Father, to eternity) and also reveals itself to us (so that we may grasp by faith the meaning of the history of salvation), that it must needs be simultaneously ‘meta-historical’ or ‘pre-historical’1 and also historical; that it can both possess the highest theological certitude and, despite that, by the manner in which it is formulated and presented, burst apart the form of profane narration, so confronting exegetes with problems never fully soluble (hence the sparking off of a ‘continuous critical dialogue between historical analysis and theological understanding’)2—all of this belongs to the a priori structure of the phenomenon. But, because the certitude of faith attaching to the achieved event engenders a multiplicity of human attempts to express it (on which exegesis can use its critical methods), this multiplicity is, in its very contrasts and even oppositions, filled with theological content of the highest consequence. And this brings us to the three chief perspectives which will give our exploration its bearings: 1. The fundamental theological affirmation, something whose unity, and main convergent outlines, we can sketch; 2. the exegetical structure, whose aporiai derive, in large measure, from the structure of the Easter event itself—and this leads exegetes looking for the clarification of these difficulties to confront certain options, which pre-determine how their investigations will proceed; 3. the development of the theological themes contained in the divergent presentations of the event—aspects, these, whose richness and importance may form the unique rationale for the way in which the dissonances between the narratives have been left juxtaposed, unresolved.

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