Margetekst
“Communion and sacrifice are mutually constitutive.”
Eerste twee alinea’s
Hans Urs von Balthasar once suggested that the eighth chapter of Henri de Lubac’s Catholicisme: les aspects sociaux du dogme ought to be read as an anticipation of Karl Barth’s famous doctrine of predestination. What Balthasar apprehended in both de Lubac’s “Prédestination de l’église” and Barth’s Die Kirchliche Dogmatik II: Die Lehre vonGott 2 was a common objective to recover a theology of communion as integral to the mediation and content of humanity’s predestination in Christ. And yet, as this essay argues, though Barth and de Lubac are indeed commonly concerned to establish a theology of communion as internal to the doctrine of predestination, nevertheless, their respective theologies of communio are constituted by significantly divergent premises. While for de Lubac, communio is sacramentally rooted in the Eucharist that “gives” the Church; for Barth, the efficacy of eucharistic mediation and participation is decidedly foreclosed.
This essay, then, is an attempt critically to follow up Balthasar’s suggestion.In so doing, it argues that Barth’s Eucharistic minimalism leads to a poverty in his account of the concrete mode of the communio of the Church in Christ’s divine personhood. Ultimately, I suggest, this eucharistic minimalism tends toward a problematic communio abscondita. Drawing on the Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson, I propose that this tendency toward a communionabscondita is due (at least in part) to Barth’s apparently deficient pneumatology—the so-called “web of Spirit-avoidance,” according to which Jenson charges that Barth’s trinitarianism reads more like a “binitarianism.”It is thus that I offer de Lubac: if he anticipates Barth, he also provides a theological resource by which more fully to complete the Barthian project of overcoming the practice of theology in abstracto. In this regard, the attention de Lubac pays to the pneumatological dimension of the Eucharist is crucial in that it can address precisely the Barthian lacuna in trinitarian theology while at the same time specifying the mode of the intermediation of the communio of Christ in his Body, the Church. Accordingly, I propose the sublation of communio abscondita through a Lubacian pneumatological-sacramentalism, a sublation that, I hope, is both a corrective correlative and an irenic complement to Barth’s own effort christocentrically to re-center the Deus absconditus.
