Theo-Drama and Atheo-Farce

I don't want to dive all the way back into the Theo-Drama, because even flipping through its 2,600 pages would take all day. Best I can do is check out the highlights and notes to myself. The post may come together, or it may be a bunch of scattered fragments, any one of which might have been the basis for a decent post if Bob weren't so lazy.

First, to set the stage, the aim of Balthasar's work is to approach revelation from the standpoint of a dramatic encounter between God and man -- or, an encounter that takes on the form of a dramatic unfolding. How could it not? The entire thread from Genesis to right now may be be regarded as a cosmo-anthropic divine drama. How did you get here? Where are you situated in the plot? Who's your costar, and what's the conflict?

A note at the beginning says "Graft oneself onto the endless adventure of the incarnate God." Sounds like good advice. Or possibly insane. 

Elsewhere it says "God comes into the world with a mission: to change man and alter history." Mission accomplished! Or rather, mission being accomplished, since the adventure did not end at Calvary or with the Ascension. Rather, that's when act three really gets underway:

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

This is just me talking, but if act one is the drama of the encounter between God and Israel, and act two the drama of the Godman here on earth, then act three is the prolongation of the latter via the Church, or the Body of Christ. 

There is a horizontal aspect to this, i.e., the unfolding story which may be plotted along the temporal line, and a vertical aspect which fructifies time from above via a mysterious character called the Holy Spirit.

Here's an intriguing note: Jesus is God's "anthropology" and our "theology," since he is their intersection, precisely. Which reminds me of an aphorism about scripture, which is also a kind of controlled intersection:

The Bible is not the voice of God but that of the man who encounters Him.

It occurs to me that the narrative cannot be a drama at all if it comes only from one side or the other. If it is all rigidly scripted by God, then we have no role to play. And if it is just us writing on the walls of our prison, then it is but a random walk through the corridor of time, with no telos. Aphorism:

History would be an abominable farce if it were to have a worldly culmination.

This doesn't mean it isn't an abominable farce. But it does mean it must be either a Theo-Drama or an Atheo-Absurdity. Clearly, those are the only two options on the menu. 

But ironically, picking one or the other takes on its own dramatic structure, which comes down to the structure of man's encounter with Truth. So you can pretend to jettison the true and the good, but not the drama of doing so. And what a lousy ending! To paraphrase Marx, history repeats itself, the first time as farce, and then every time as farce. 

I think we can all agree that, absent any transcendent telos, "history" not only makes no sense, it cannot possibly make sense, and besides, it's not even history, just a bunch of tenured primates taking random snapshots of a river with no beginning or end. 

Attention, primates!

If history made sense, the Crucifixion would be superfluous.

And if the Crucifixion is the end, then history is superfluous. But again, history is this ongoing drama of the Incarnation prolonged in time. And if existence really were meaningless, then man could never know it.

Another note: the aim is to make the individual's short and finite span of life co-extensive with the life of the cosmos and beyond. Again, we are playing a role in a drama that began long before our birth and continues long after. And yet, in another sense the drama has been "resolved," in that we know its telos via faith and hope, which are like nonlocal tentacles that "touch" their object.

Here's a question: How does God overcome man's No without depriving him of his freedom?

Note that one of the dramatic devices of the narrative is an ongoing series of Yeses without which the drama would have ended (or at least God would have had to find other takers). Come to think of it, we might also say that the whole drama is triggered by that primordial NO in Genesis 3. Eve is the original Drama Queen.

The subsequent drama is enabled and moved along by the varied Yeses of Noah, Abraham, Moses, Mary, Jesus, the original twelve, Paul, and everyone since then who responds in the affirmative. 

Looked at one way, we could even say that history is a dialectic of Yes and No! There's an aphorism for that, for what is history but "the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God and another who believes he is a god"? For that matter,

Men are divided into two camps: those who believe in original sin and those who are idiots.

In case you were wondering why life itself is a dramatic struggle against these idiots. 

We'll close this out with another aphorism:

For history to be of concern to us, there must be something in it that transcends it: There must be something in history more than history.

Which means that progressives are half-right but totally wrong, in that there is a "right side of history," but only because it has a transcendent end.