Balthasar, writes Gerald O’Hanlon (The Immutability of God in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar), thought it necessary to re-examine the tradition regarding immutability and impassibility because both needed to be “understood in the context of the liveliness of inner-trinitarian love” (168).
He elaborates, “Within an analogical context (which, in attempting to convey the uniquely personal nature of the God/human relationship, could use language extending on a continuum from the metaphorical to the purely abstract) it was possible to attribute some very untraditional characteristics to God, including forms of surprise, receptivity, self-transcendence (‘ever-more’) and something that was remotely and mysteriously like suffering. It was possible also, to a limited extent, to specify the adjustments required when transferring language from the human to the divine spheres; nonetheless an intrinsic imprecision was also noted, appropriate to the partial nature of human knowledge in respect of the abiding mystery and transcendence
of God” (168).
Balthasar used Trinitarian theology to work out “the reconciliation of unity and difference, as well as that of state and event, and the inclusion of the aspects of receptivity and ‘ever-more,’” all of which expressed in Balthasar’s work “a scripturally-inspired Trinitarian ontology of love.” This ontology “used the analogy of
human love and applied it hypothetically to God, making adjustments to cater for the ontological difference between God and us, so that it was possible at least to hint at the way in which various modalities of human love could exist analogously in God as perfections, and not as deficiencies. Within this context divine immutability was interpreted as that perfection and fullness of free inter-personal love, intrinsic to which are the receptivity of mutual exchange and that mysterious ontological comparative, the ever-more of self-giving, which may be described as a supra-mutability” (169).
In all this, Balthasar insists that he is working from the norms of traditional orthodoxy: “Balthasar means to assert that the divine nature is one in the sense of numerical identity, and not just with reference to generic sameness or likeness. There are not two or three gods. Equally, of course, he insists on the real distinction of
Persons, brought out so clearly in the NT, and rejects any Modalist interpretations which threaten the reality of these distinctions” (111). Even his talk of a triune “event” is intended to emphasize the “liveliness” of the Triune God. Unlike events in our experience, the triune event is not “accompanied by a need which is a lack in perfection, but rather because it expresses a holy love that is unchanging and groundless” (113).
This event is an event of love: “The mysterious divine nature is constituted by this giving and receiving of love.The Father in God reveals himself by expressing himself completely in the Son. This means that fatherhood in God is the total giving of all that the Father is and has to the Son. In this eternally actual generation the Son both receives his being from the Father and returns it to him in a love which is equally without reserve. This filial love is full of thanksgiving (eucharist) for the gift of the Father and expresses itself most properly in a free ‘obedience’ to the Father which is without the subordination of creaturehood. And again because this event between Father and Son is eternal, and implies no ‘before’ and ‘after’, the Holy Spirit is the fruit and personification of their love without any implication of subordination (as there is in the created analogy to the procession of the Holy Spirit drawn from the child as fruit of the human parents’
love).Once again that which is most proper to the Holy Spirit, personhood, is constituted by being utterly the love of the other two in the Trinity and thus by being in this scene ‘expropriated’” (113). This is just what love eternally is in God; it is not a description of the origins of the Persons who then remain immovable; it is the eternal movement and interchange of the Persons.
And this leads Balthsar to identify an element of “ever-more,” of “surprise” in God: “This is a love,
then, which has an inbuilt open or ontological comparative to its nature - it is ‘ever-more’, ‘ever-greater’ than the reality which is present to the Persons themselves in their perfect knowledge of one another. In other words there is present in God’s love those elements of surprise, wonder and difference which are proper to the mysterious self-giving and inter-penetration (circumincessio) of free love and which transcend the level of knowledge, however complete.In this sense we may say that the Holy Spirit is constantly showing the
Father and Son that their perfect love is more than they themselves had expected. There is no boredom in heaven” (114).
As O’Hanlon says, this is a “daring way” of speaking about the inner life of the Trinity, but Balthasar presses further to claim that, always acknowledging that we are not speaking univocally, “one may speak of such immanent modalities of trinitarian love as renunciation, prayer, faith and hope, longing and fulfilment. Within this same framework one may also speak of those economic modalities of this love such as anger and jealousy, and even something corresponding to pain, all of which, in turn, are modalities of the immanent triune love within which their original images reside.” He goes so far as to suggest that “the transcendence of God may be maintained while allowing for the different reality of the contribution of dependent creation to the ‘ever-more’ of trinitarian love” (114).
