The Rapture of God : Balthasar's Theology, Exposition, and Interpretation

This is a book offering Balthasar’s theological oeuvre as a kerygma of Christ’s love proclaimed theologically as Christ’s esthetics of glory in his mission to reinvent himself, the world and us as beauty and glory. Balthasar’s hypothesis is that there is true theology and there is false theology. For him, theology is the unique science across the methods of which the decision of faith cuts, and divides it into two halves that cannot be united to each other: a genuine theology, which presupposes faith and does its thinking within the nexus of Christ and the Church; and a false theology, which rejects faith as methodologically dubious and irresponsible, and subsumes the truth of the phenomenon which discloses itself, under an anthropological truth (however this may be understood). In William Newell’s book he deeply reflects on the radical thinking being done in Catholic theology since the 1940s in Europe and now in the United States. Each chapter, each excursus, each elision, ushers the reader towards consolations without previous causes, the essence of mysticism in its first stages. The book, as with true theology, is a ‘come and see’ beckoning the reader to an endless furtherance of the archetypal experience of Christ.