Brian Hamilton-Vise

Memory against Hyperbole

It strikes me, as I read von Balthasar’s intimately historical arguments, that perhaps historical rootedness is the one antidote to theological hyperbole. Only when our vision extends beyond our own time can we avoid overreacting to what we perceive as the grievous errors of our day. Memory can illumine reasons for contemporary errors as it can warn us against opposing ones.

But I may be merely repeating von Balthasar’s critique of Protestantism, which will “have to live with a self-perpetuating double curse: first the splintering Protestantisms following one another in rapid succession will hardly ever be able to find their way back to Luther’s original intuition. (How could they, since the thread of tradition has been severed once for all?) And, second, the many sects will forever have to oscillate between irreconcilable extremes since the dialectic has been turned into a manipulable method” (1.1, p. 48, my emphasis).

10 January 2007 | Comments (0)
Tags: History