Hans Urs Von Balthasar's Theological Aesthetics: A Model for Post-Critic Biblical Interpretation

ALTHOUGH HANS URS VON BALTHASAR is one of the most important twentieth-century theologians, little attention has been paid to his views and uses of the Bible. W. T. Dickens critically assesses Balthasar's interpretation of scripture in his seven-volume The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. Dickens demonstrates the extent to which Balthasar's approach to scripture, while remaining conversant with historical criticism, abides by certain pre-modern interpretive conventions that helped to nourish the once widespread capacity of Christians to understand themselves and the world in terms of the images, stories, and conceptual patterns of the Bible. To the extent that the sensus fidelium was traditionally supported by such readings of the Bible, a contemporary version of this approach that retains the correctives provided by modernity's hermeneutics of suspicion may help to counteract its current disintegration. In the course of analysis, Dickens summarizes the principal hermeneutical implications of the analogies Balthasar developed between God's glory and earthly beauty and gauges the consistency with which Balthasar followed them in his exegesis. Dickens describes Balthasar's view of the proper roles and limitations of historical criticism and analyzes his actual uses of it when exegeting the Bible. In addition, Dickens evaluates Balthasar's reading of the Old Testament when defending a trinitarian view of the Bible's unity and identifies the principal ways in which the Bible functions authoritatively in the Theological Aesthetics. Innovative in both subject and approach, Dickens's work will be welcomed by theologians and biblical scholars.