HENRY SHEA is a young Jesuit, an Oxford Ph.D., now teaching as Assistant Professor of Theology at the impressive Boston College. This book (clearly based upon his doctoral these, although this is never acknowledged) is a scholarly examination of the concept of grace in the writings of three of the most influential Jesuit theologians of the 20th century: Karl Rahner (1904-1984), Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-88) and their senior Jesuit, Erich Przywara (1889-1972).
Thanks to the translations of his influential, multi-volume Theological Investigations early in the 1960s, Rahner’s reformist interpretation of Catholicism was widely used by Anglican theologians at the time (including in my own 1969 doctorate). The influence of Balthasar’s dramatic, but more conservative, theology came a little later (shaping the work of Ben Quash and others), whereas knowledge of Erich Przywara’s seminal 1932 Analogia Entis is better known, and more convincing, to Roman Catholic theologians, influencing three Popes — John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis — as well as early books written separately by Rahner and Balthasar less than a decade after its publication.
Shea’s basic argument is that limitations in the understanding of grace in the works of Rahner and Balthasar can be overcome by returning to Przywara. Rahner was very open to modern culture in the form of, then fashionable, existentialism and a universal inner experience of humans as beings who are aware of their own transcendence, mirroring, to some degree, grace understood as God’s transcendent “self-communication”. Yet, in the process, Shea maintains, he risked making the particularity of Christianity and the incarnation “a matter of relative indifference”. Balthasar, in contrast, was more concerned with the human ascent in faith to the revelation of the Christ-form. Yet, for Shea, this rendered “inscrutable” Balthasar’s attempt to depict a universal part for Christianity to play.
He concludes that Przywara’s concept of the “oscillating” human perception of God’s grace — the philosophically debatable essence/existence duality of creation finding unity in God in Christ — can act as a bridge between Rahner and Balthasar.
This is a very Roman Catholic and scholastic account of God’s grace which, for some Anglicans, might seem to presume an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of God mediated through theologians who were sometimes favoured by the Vatican and sometimes not. Rahner was under inspection for his orthodoxy before being appointed, unexpectedly, as an official, and highly influential, peritus (expert adviser) to the Second Vatican Council by the saintly Pope John XXIII. And Balthasar was distrusted for resigning from the Jesuits, and yet was chosen as a cardinal theologian by Benedict (dying two days before his appointment was due to begin).
Although he was popular with a previous generation of Anglican theologians, Rahner is less so today: his existentialism and commitment to “universal human experience” are no longer fashionable. For me, at least, the sociologically informed work of the Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx is now far more engaging.
It must be for Catholic theologians to judge whether they find Shea’s championing of Przywara convincing. Unfortunately, An Analogy of Grace still reads like a doctoral thesis. Almost every sentence is heavy with jargon, untranslated German terms abound, and its comparative structure (hiding strategically behind the writings of others) works better for a thesis, now given an “Imprimatur”, than for a monograph.
Sadly, this is better suited to scholastic specialists than to others with more ecumenical theological interests.
Canon Robin Gill is Emeritus Professor of Applied Theology at the University of Kent.
An Analogy of Grace
Henry Shea SJ
University of Notre Dame Press £52
(978-0-268-20863-9)
Church Times Bookshop £46.80