Von Balthasar and the Dialogue with Karl Barth

Extract

Karl Barth suits the role of a kind of theological Petruchio. Petruchio, you will recall, bursts upon the stage in The Taming of the Shrew, with the ‘shrew’ herself, Katherina, in his sights. He is determined to win the right to the hand of a maiden whom he construes as hostile, just as Barth (the early Barth at least) saw the theological establishment representing all the arrogance and vanity of a liberal theology in thrall to bourgeois complacency. He invades this hostile world in the name of the Word of God; he elects to be ‘rough, and woo not like a babe’, as Petruchio puts it. And as much of the theological establishment in Europe at the beginning of the 1920s reeled back in shock at Barth’s onslaught in The Epistle to the Romans, so Katherina is thoroughly taken aback by this

‘ ... one half lunatic A mad-cap ruffian and a swearing Jack,

That thinks with oaths to face the matter out’. (II i)

Petruchio will not deal with Katherina on her own territory. He whisks her away to his own remote and inhospitable house, and then turns her every expectation on its head. This is ‘crisis wooing’. Just as, in the early Barth, for the world of the creature to cross over the threshold into the divine world would entail its destruction and immolation, because of the utter difference of God’s ways and humanity’s ways, God’s eternity and humanity’s time, God’s holiness and humanity’s sin, so Katherina’s entrance into Petruchio’s house is entry into an environment in which all her expectations and routines tire altered.