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  • Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought by Jennifer Newsome Martin
  • Anne M. Carpenter
Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought by Jennifer Newsome Martin (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 310 pp.

Jennifer Newsome Martin’s Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought is an incredible achievement. It serves both as an elegant scholarly study of controverted yet ill-explored areas of Balthasar’s work and as a crucial evaluation of the very foundations of Balthasar’s theological speculations. For Martin, to have achieved both at once is remarkable and ought to be praised as such. More concretely, Martin has provided scholars with a portrait of Balthasar often hidden amid recent controversy and old generalizations. Says Martin, “these chapters venture to characterize Balthasar’s method as constitutively orthodox, but thoroughly probative, phenomenological, literary-critical, aesthetic-hermeneutic, and—despite his perhaps unjustly earned reputation as arch-conservateur—quintessentially non-nostalgic” (2). Martin wants to look at Balthasar’s decisions when he himself reads Christian and non-Christian thinkers and, thereby, to learn how to read him. Her task is immense. What she is determined to uncover is the interior dynamism that draws scholars to Balthasar, rather than the reactions that violently critique and praise.

Balthasar and Russian Religious Thought offers a sober account of Balthasar’s intellectual engagement with four figures: Vladimir Soloviev, Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and F. W. J. Schelling. The first three are members of the “Russian school,” and Schelling plays an important philosophical role as a resource for all three, as well as for Balthasar (1, 11–21). “Schelling constellates a point of triangulation between Balthasar and the Russians,” Martin writes (19). That is to say, Martin is interested in the complex layers of interpretation provided to the Russians by the ways they each uniquely adjust [End Page 675] Schelling and in Balthasar’s critical evaluations of Schelling in both his own work and that of the Russians. Much of Martin’s work is devoted to this complex task of “constellating” all five thinkers at various angles.

Rather than taking apart each thinker one by one, Martin divides her chapters according to themes: “beauty and aesthetics” in chapter 2 (39–78), “freedom, theogony, myth, and evil” in chapter 3 (79–116), “thanatology and traditional eschatology from an anthropological point of view” in chapter 4 (117–59), and “apocalyptic Trinitarianism” in chapter 5 (160–97) (thematic arrangement discussed in 3). She begins her study with beauty, continues forward into freedom amid its various contexts, draws together beauty and freedom through a realized eschatology, and super-excessively completes all three movements with the truth of the self-revealing Trinity.

Martin’s later chapters bear the weight of an increasingly complex task, for this is not only a study of Balthasar on various thinkers, but also a study of how Balthasar methodically (and methodologically) interacts with Christian and non-Christian thought. Her efforts maintain the same steady tone throughout, which is vital because flickering amid five thinkers can be overwhelming and confusing for a reader. Martin’s opening narrations in each chapter become rafts to which to cling in the rush of information. It is hard to criticize her for the possibility of losing her reader given the compound nature of her questions, but it still must be said that this is a constant risk. Readers who are not diligent will find themselves drowning. Balthasar and Russian Religious Thought makes its demands from the perspective of profound research made elegant and seamless. Here is Martin’s unspoken skill, as she holds the sinews of her study together with a careful, building narrative. That is, the book is a coherent whole.

That whole is as follows: “Balthasar can and does tolerate as well as enact an experimental, probative mode of theologizing, but, like Bulgakov, his profound devotion to and respect for the tradition are what allow him to do so” (196), and, from Balthasar himself, “the paradox must be allowed to stand: in the undiminished humanity of Jesus, the whole power and glory of God are made...

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