Chapter 22

Hans Urs von Balthasar — Dare We Hope?

“The Christian may not know that all will be saved. But he may — must — hope that all will be saved.”

A Slim Book that Would Not Be Quiet

The book that appeared in 1986 was slim. Barely 130 pages in the original German. The title was simple, the kind of title that ought to belong to a devotional pamphlet: Was dürfen wir hoffen? — “What dare we hope?”¹ The author was Hans Urs von Balthasar, the most famous Swiss Catholic theologian of his generation. He was eighty years old. He had a body of work behind him that ran to tens of thousands of pages. His seven-volume aesthetic theology, Herrlichkeit — “The Glory of the Lord” — was complete. His five-volume Theo-Drama was finished and published. He was working on the closing volumes of the Theo-Logic. He was, by any honest measure, the most prolific Catholic theologian of the twentieth century.²

And yet this little book — this slim, almost casual-looking little volume — landed in the German Catholic press like a stone dropped into a quiet pond. It rippled. It rippled hard.

The thesis was deceptively soft-spoken. Balthasar argued that the Christian, on the basis of Scripture and the prayers of the Church, is not merely permitted but obligated to hope that all human beings will be saved. Not certain. Not knowing. Hoping. The Christian, he said, may not assert with confidence that anyone is in hell. The Church has never declared a single human person damned, only saints to be saved. We have no inventory of the lost. We have no human business numbering them. We have only the call to hope, and the call to pray for the salvation of every soul we have ever known — and every soul we have not.³

For some Catholics, the little book was a relief. For others, it was a scandal. Within months, conservative Catholic journals were running indignant rejoinders — Theologisches and similar traditionalist outlets in Germany and Austria led the charge, accusing Balthasar of softening eternal punishment, of rehabilitating Origenism in modern dress, of betraying the warnings of Christ. From the other direction, some theological liberals shrugged the book off as too timid — as a kind of hedged universalism that lacked the courage of its convictions. Why hope, they asked, if you would not commit? Why not just say what you mean?⁴

I want to start with that scene because it captures the situation Balthasar always occupied. He was attacked from both sides. The conservatives thought him too hopeful. The liberals thought him too restrained. The conservatives accused him of ignoring the warnings of Christ. The liberals accused him of clinging to the embers of a hell he should have long since extinguished. Balthasar himself — in the slim companion volume he published the next year, Kleiner Diskurs über die Hölle (A Short Discourse on Hell, 1987) — responded with patience, point by point, to the accusations that had come in. He did not retreat. He clarified. He restated. And then he let the books stand.⁵

That moment — 1986, in Basel, an old Jesuit theologian publishing a quiet little book that the Catholic world would not stop arguing about for the next forty years — is the door through which I want to enter this chapter.

To understand why Dare We Hope was such a bombshell, we have to remember where Catholic eschatology actually was in the mid-1980s. The Second Vatican Council had ended in 1965. Its eschatological pronouncements were measured. Lumen Gentium spoke of the universality of Christ's saving will and of the relationship between the visible Church and those outside it. Gaudium et Spes wrestled with the dignity of all human beings, even those who had never heard the gospel. Nostra Aetate gave a positive valuation to non-Christian religions that no prior council had granted. The post-conciliar atmosphere was one of cautious openness.⁶

And yet on the question of hell, the Council had said little new. The Catechism of the Catholic Church would not appear until 1992. When it did, it would reaffirm the reality of hell as a real possibility for those who die in mortal sin. The magisterium, in short, was not in the business of canceling hell. Anyone who lived in the Catholic theological world in the 1980s knew that the doctrine of eternal punishment remained on the books. What was up for grabs was not whether hell existed but who was in it.⁷

And that question — the population of hell, to borrow a phrase Avery Dulles would later make famous — had been growing more and more contested. Karl Rahner, the most influential Catholic theologian of the post-conciliar generation, had spent the 1960s and 1970s developing the doctrine of the “anonymous Christian” — the idea that human beings who never explicitly hear or accept the gospel may nonetheless, through their conscience and their orientation toward truth and love, be related to Christ in saving ways. The Rahnerian move broadened the population of the saved enormously. Some Catholic conservatives accused it of emptying the missionary mandate. (I treat Rahner's parallel project in Chapter 24.)⁸

Then there was Sergei Bulgakov's posthumous influence in the Russian Orthodox emigration. There was the rediscovery of Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor in the Catholic ressourcement movement. There was the long shadow of Karl Barth's “objective universalism” in Reformed theology — which Catholic theologians were watching with intense interest. There was, increasingly, an underground sense that the late-Augustinian assumption of a massa damnata — the great mass of the damned, a phrase Augustine himself uses — was no longer the unspoken default of Catholic theology.⁹

Balthasar's Dare We Hope was the moment the underground broke the surface. It was the moment that an unimpeachable Catholic figure — patristically rigorous, doctrinally orthodox, no liberal, no modernist, an intimate of Henri de Lubac and Joseph Ratzinger — said openly what Catholic theologians had been thinking quietly. We may hope for the salvation of all. We are forbidden to know. But we are not forbidden to hope. And what we hope for, we may even pray for — because the Church already prays for it, every Eucharist, in the great intercessions of the Mass.

That is the door. Let us step through it.

The Life Behind the Book

Hans Urs von Balthasar was born on August 12, 1905, in Lucerne, Switzerland — into a patrician Catholic family with deep roots in the city and connections, on his mother's side, to the Hungarian nobility. His father, Oskar Ludwig Carl von Balthasar, was an architect who designed churches and held senior responsibilities in the cantonal department of public works. His mother, Gabrielle Pietzcker, was among the co-founders of the Schweizerischer Katholischer Frauenbund (the Swiss League of Catholic Women) and an active chronicler of its early history. The household was musical and the boy was a serious pianist. Balthasar would later say that music, more than philosophy or even theology, was the language in which he first learned to think about beauty.¹⁰

But the deeper pull was literature and philosophy. He studied at the universities of Zurich, Vienna, and Berlin in the early 1920s — reading Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin, the German Romantics, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard. In October 1928 he sat his doctoral examination at the University of Zurich on a sprawling dissertation called Geschichte des eschatologischen Problems in der modernen deutschen Literatur (“The History of the Eschatological Problem in Modern German Literature”). The dissertation was published in 1930. Within a decade, Balthasar would expand it into a three-volume work, Apokalypse der deutschen Seele (“Apocalypse of the German Soul,” 1937–1939). The subject is telling. From the start, Balthasar was interested in last things. He came to theology already obsessed with the question of how the human spirit reaches toward its end — and how it is met there.¹¹

Days after his doctoral exam — he was twenty-three years old — he committed himself to entering the Society of Jesus. The pull had been growing for years, partly through a thirty-day Ignatian retreat in 1927 that had shaken him. He entered the novitiate in November 1929. The Jesuits were the order of the great German Catholic intellectual tradition; they were the order of Erich Przywara, the philosophical theologian who would become Balthasar's first major teacher and lifelong friend.¹²

The next several years were Balthasar's Jesuit formation. He studied philosophy at Pullach near Munich (1931–1933) and theology at Lyon-Fourvière (1933–1937), where Henri de Lubac was teaching. Lubac introduced him to the Greek Fathers — to Origen, to Gregory of Nyssa, to Maximus the Confessor — and changed his life. The neo-scholastic system that the Jesuits had been training him in — the manuals, the syllogisms, the careful demarcations of nature and grace — began to feel narrow. The Fathers, by contrast, were vast. They were dramatic. They thought in stories and symbols and liturgies. Balthasar would later say that de Lubac taught him how to read.¹³

After ordination as a priest in 1936 and a stretch at the Jesuit periodical Stimmen der Zeit in Munich, Balthasar moved to Basel in 1940 as a Jesuit student chaplain. Basel, by happenstance, was where Karl Barth was teaching. Balthasar and Barth became friends. They argued. They played Mozart together. The friendship would shape both men. (I have developed Barth at length in Chapter 21; I will only mention him in passing here.)¹⁴

And in Basel, in 1940, Balthasar met the woman who would shape him more than any other — Adrienne von Speyr.

Speyr was a Swiss physician in busy general practice in Basel, the wife (since 1936) of the historian Werner Kaegi, and the adoptive mother of two boys from the previous marriage of her first husband, Emil Dürr, who had died in 1934. She had been raised Reformed Protestant, descended from old Basel and Neuchâtel Protestant families, and had spent years searching unsuccessfully for a Catholic priest who could guide her into the Church. On All Saints' Day — November 1, 1940 — Balthasar received her into the Catholic Church. Almost immediately, by her own account and his, she began to experience profound mystical states. Most strikingly, she experienced the descent of Christ into hell from inside Christ's own consciousness on Holy Saturday. She wrote and dictated voluminously. Balthasar transcribed. In 1945 they co-founded a secular institute — the Community of St. John (Johannesgemeinschaft) — dedicated to the integration of Speyr's contemplative life and Balthasar's theological project in a vocation lived in the world.¹⁵

This was the breaking point with the Jesuits. The Society of Jesus did not allow its members to lead secular institutes in this way. Balthasar was asked to choose. In 1950 he left the Society. He spent years — many years — in a kind of ecclesial wilderness, attached to no religious order, dependent partly on Speyr's medical practice for his living, writing furiously and publishing books that very few people read. He was not invited to Vatican II as a theological expert. One of the great omissions of the Council, which welcomed the equally rigorous Rahner as a peritus but not Balthasar. Some have attributed the exclusion to Balthasar's association with Speyr, whose private mystical experiences made certain Roman gatekeepers nervous.¹⁶

Then, slowly, the world caught up. By the late 1960s his major works — The Glory of the Lord, Theo-Drama, Theo-Logic — were beginning to appear in translation. In 1972 he co-founded the international theological journal Communio with Joseph Ratzinger and Henri de Lubac. Younger Catholic theologians began to read him as the great alternative to Rahner. Pope John Paul II, who had read Balthasar carefully as a young Polish bishop, named him a cardinal in May 1988.¹⁷

Balthasar died on June 26, 1988, two days before he was to receive the red hat in Rome. He had been preparing the homily for his own consistory. He had set out his cassock. He never wore it.

He was eighty-two years old. He had written more than a hundred books and hundreds of articles. The slim 1986 volume on hope was, by his own reckoning, almost an afterthought — a clarification, a tying-up. He could not have known that it would be the single book most non-specialists would remember him by.¹⁸

Inside Dare We Hope

Let me get to the book itself.

Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”? (the English title, with the awkward inner quotation marks fully retained) is short. The German original is 130 pages of mostly continuous text. There are no chapters in the traditional sense — just a sequence of small numbered sections, each of which takes up a single question or text or objection. It reads less like a systematic treatise and more like an argument carried on in real time. Balthasar is responding to opponents whom he names. He quotes their positions. He dismantles them piece by piece. The opening pages are devoted to a kind of catalogue of accusations from German Catholic critics — a litany of people who had told Balthasar that hoping for the salvation of all is incompatible with the faith. He works through them with a wry patience that occasionally slips into edge.¹⁹

The book's central argument is built on a single observation about the New Testament. Balthasar notices that the New Testament contains two strands of teaching about the eschaton, and these two strands cannot be smoothly reconciled. They have to be held in tension — or, more accurately, one has to be allowed to relativize the other without either being dissolved.

The Two Strands of the New Testament

One strand is the warning strand. Jesus speaks repeatedly of the danger of damnation. He uses fierce imagery: the worm that does not die, the unquenchable fire, the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, the goats sent away to eternal punishment in Matthew 25. The Letter of Jude warns of the eternal fire prepared for those who reject Christ. Paul, who is not above the sharpest pastoral rhetoric, speaks in Romans 2 of those who store up wrath for themselves. The biblical witness contains a serious, terrible, unmistakable warning that some may finally be lost.²⁰

The other strand is the universal strand. Paul tells the Romans (5:18) that “as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one man's act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men.” He tells the Corinthians (1 Cor 15:22) that “as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” He tells the Colossians (1:20) that God was pleased “through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.” First Timothy 2:4 states the divine will: God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” The First Letter of John (2:2) makes Christ “the expiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” And the climax of Paul's vision in 1 Corinthians 15:28: “When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things under him, that God may be everything to everyone.”²¹

Balthasar's first move is to refuse to choose between these two strands. Both are there. Both are inspired Scripture. Both must be respected.

The strict eternal-conscious-torment advocate, who chooses the warning strand and explains away the universal strand, is doing violence to Scripture. The confident universalist — the Origen of On First Principles at his most speculative, the Hart of That All Shall Be Saved at his most certain — who chooses the universal strand and explains away the warning strand, is doing the same violence in reverse. Balthasar resists both moves. He believes the two strands are both Scripture's word about the same God. The Christian's task is to hold them together — not to harmonize them into a system, but to live within the tension they create.²²

What is the posture that can hold both? Hope. Hope is the theological stance that takes the warnings with absolute seriousness — so seriously that the very possibility of being damned cannot be evacuated from one's own self-knowledge. Balthasar will say, repeatedly, that the only person about whom we are obligated to fear damnation is ourselves. But hope is also the stance that takes the universal strand with absolute seriousness — so seriously that the eschatological prayer of the Church for the salvation of all becomes not pious decoration but a deep and real expectation. We may hope. We may pray. We must not claim to know.

And that is the central distinction of the book: between hoping and knowing.

The Hoffen/Wissen Distinction

In German, the distinction is between Hoffen and Wissen. Balthasar uses these terms as terms of art. Wissen — knowledge — would be the claim that we possess theological certainty about the population of the saved or of the damned. Hoffen — hope — is the active, prayerful expectation of an outcome that we do not control and cannot verify in advance. To hope for the salvation of all is to align oneself, in trust, with the universal saving will of God revealed in the universal strand of Scripture. It is not to claim that this will is, in the event, fully achieved. That claim — the confident-universalist claim — would be Wissen. And Wissen, Balthasar insists, we do not have.²³

Now, this distinction has been the most contested feature of Balthasar's whole project. Is it a coherent theological posture, or is it a soft universalism dressed up in modesty? I will come to that criticism shortly. For now, take seriously what Balthasar is doing. He is trying to occupy the only ground he believes the New Testament permits. He is not a confident universalist. He never claims to know that all will be saved. But he also is not a confident restrictivist. He refuses to claim to know that any are lost. The whole point is to inhabit the eschatological openness that the New Testament itself preserves.

The Liturgical Argument

One of the most distinctive features of Dare We Hope is the way Balthasar turns to the Church's own prayer. He notes that the Catholic liturgy — in the Good Friday intercessions, in the great Eucharistic prayers, in the prayers for the dead — petitions God for the salvation of all. The Church prays for unbelievers. The Church prays for those who have died. The Church prays for the whole world. It is not optional pious garnish. It is part of the Mass.²⁴

The argument is simple. If the Church prays for the salvation of all, then the Church believes such a prayer is theologically possible — that is, that God may grant it. If the Church believed that some persons were already, certainly, condemned, then praying for their salvation would be an empty ritual. The Church's actual liturgical practice presupposes that hope, the hope Balthasar is articulating, is the right posture toward the eschatological future. The hope is not Balthasar's private invention. It is the unspoken theology of the Mass.

This argument has remarkable force, especially within Catholicism. It is one thing to dispute a private theologian's interpretation of a few biblical verses. It is quite another to argue that the entire liturgical tradition of the Catholic Church is misguided. Balthasar essentially traps his conservative Catholic critics on the horns of a dilemma: either grant that hopeful universalism is at least permissible — since the liturgy presupposes it — or claim that the Church's central act of worship is built on a false premise. Few Catholic critics have been willing to take the latter horn.²⁵

The Patristic Warrant

Balthasar does not invent his position out of thin air. He sees himself as recovering a strand of patristic theology that the Latin West, under Augustine's influence, had let drift to the margins.

In Dare We Hope he draws particularly on Gregory of Nyssa. I have developed Gregory's eschatology in full in Chapter 9; I will not repeat that material here. The point is what Gregory is for Balthasar: the patristic universalist whose ecclesial standing cannot be impeached. Gregory contributed to the final form of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed in 381. He was praised by the later councils as a “father of fathers.” He taught the universal restoration of all rational creatures — the apokatastasis tōn pantōn, the “restoration of all things” — without ever being condemned for it. He is the patristic figure who proves that universal hope can be held by a doctor of the Church and yet remain solidly in the Church.²⁶

Balthasar also engages Origen, but with more care. (Origen is developed in Chapter 8.) He distinguishes the apokatastasis doctrine in Origen from the surrounding Origenist construction — the speculative pre-existence of souls, the elaborate cosmology of fall and return — that was condemned in the second Origenist controversy and at Constantinople II in 553. Balthasar holds that the 553 condemnation was directed primarily at the Evagrian system, not at the broader Christian doctrine of universal hope, and that the latter can be detached from the former. (The conciliar question itself is treated in Chapter 11.)²⁷

And Balthasar makes much of Maximus the Confessor, who — he argued already in his 1941 study Kosmische Liturgie (“Cosmic Liturgy”) — maintained a careful eschatological hope without committing himself to the Origenist construction. Maximus, on Balthasar's reading, is the patristic theologian who shows how to occupy the hope-without-knowledge posture from within full ecclesial orthodoxy.²⁸

The patristic warrant matters because it lets Balthasar say, with a straight face, that hopeful universalism is not a modern theological novelty. It is a recovery. It is something the early Church had ample room for. The Western theological tradition, under the Augustinian default, narrowed; what Balthasar is doing is letting the older breadth back in.

The Christological Argument: Mysterium Paschale

The deepest layer of Balthasar's hope is not patristic, however. It is Christological. And to see the Christological argument we have to turn to his earlier book, Mysterium Paschale (1969).²⁹

Mysterium Paschale began as a contribution to a Catholic dogmatic encyclopedia and grew into a slim independent volume. It is Balthasar's major statement of the theology of the Easter Triduum — the three days of the cross, the tomb, and the resurrection. And in Mysterium Paschale, Balthasar develops a reading of Holy Saturday — the day Christ lay dead — that has become, by far, his most controversial single contribution to twentieth-century theology.

Traditional Catholic theology of Christ's descent into hell — the descensus ad inferos of the Apostles' Creed — had typically been a kind of victory parade. Christ descends not into the hell of the damned but into the limbus patrum, the “limbo of the fathers,” the waiting place of the righteous dead of the Old Testament — Adam and Eve, Abraham, Moses, David — and triumphantly leads them out into paradise. Medieval Western iconography is full of these scenes: Christ kicking down the gates of hell, holding Adam by the wrist, the demons cowering, the saints rejoicing. The Eastern Orthodox icon of the Anastasis presents a parallel image with greater dramatic intensity. The descent is a victory. The descent is, on the older imagery, the harrowing of hell.³⁰

Balthasar refuses this older imagery — or, more carefully, he transposes it into a different key. He thinks the medieval Western picture risks understating the depth of what Christ did. For Balthasar, Holy Saturday is not, in the first place, a victory parade. It is the deepest possible solidarity of Christ with the damned.

On the cross, Christ cries out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That cry is, for Balthasar, more than a quotation of Psalm 22. It is the cry of a soul experiencing the absence of the Father. And in death, that absence becomes total. Christ enters into the experiential state of the lost — the state of being utterly separated from God, of having no relation, of being in the dark. He does this not as a metaphor and not as a spectator. He does it as the second Person of the Trinity in the flesh, undergoing the worst that creaturely existence can undergo.³¹

This is the moment Balthasar calls Christ's descent into “the abyss” (Abgrund). It is not the descent of a victor but of a sufferer. Christ undergoes Holy Saturday — the silent day, the day when nothing is happening on earth but everything is happening in the depths — by entering into the very condition of God-forsakenness that hell is. Hell, Balthasar insists, is not a geography; it is a relation, or rather the absence of a relation. To be in hell is to be in the state of total separation from God. And Christ — on Holy Saturday, in the abyss — experiences that state. Not as a tourist. As a Person.

And this is what gives Balthasar his Christological argument for universal hope. If Christ has truly descended into the depths of God-forsakenness — if he has truly experienced what the lost experience — then the saving reach of his cross extends anywhere a damned soul might be. To say “Christ has descended to the deepest place there is, and there is no further place the lost can go that Christ has not already been” is to say that the soteriological scope of Christ's work has no outer boundary we can name. If any soul, anywhere, is in the dark, then Christ has met that soul at the bottom of the dark. Whether that meeting will, in every case, eventuate in salvation — that we do not know. But the meeting has occurred. And so we may hope.³²

There is a major caveat I have to mention. Balthasar's Holy Saturday theology is shaped, intimately and inseparably, by Adrienne von Speyr's mystical experiences. From 1941 onward, Speyr underwent — every Holy Saturday, year after year — what she described as a mystical participation in Christ's experience of hell. She dictated her visions to Balthasar, who transcribed them. He published them, with her permission, in a series of works including Kreuz und Hölle (“Cross and Hell”). Balthasar has acknowledged that his theology of Holy Saturday is partly the theological articulation of what Speyr experienced. This dependence on private mystical experience would become, for many of Balthasar's later critics, the single most contested feature of his system. I will come to that in the next section.³³

The Drama Continues: Theo-Drama IV and V

The eschatological volumes of the Theo-Drama, published in German in 1980 and 1983 (English Ignatius 1994 and 1998), develop Balthasar's hope further. The Theo-Drama is Balthasar's middle major project — the five-volume reflection on salvation history as a dramatic action between God and the human creature. Volumes IV and V are the eschatological “act” of the drama.³⁴

Without dragging the reader through a thousand pages of dramatic theology, here is the heart. Balthasar argues that the freedom of the human creature is real — so real that it must be granted the dignity of refusing God if it so chooses. Hell, as a possibility, is the necessary corollary of true human freedom. To deny the possibility of hell is to deny the seriousness of human freedom. So far, Balthasar sounds like a traditionalist.

But — and this is the dramatic move — the possibility of refusal is met by the dramatic reality of divine pursuit. God is not passive in the face of human freedom. God dramatically pursues. God lays out, in Christ, an offer of self-giving love so total that the human will, encountering it, may finally — even after death, even in the abyss — find the resources to consent. The drama, in Balthasar's reading, is not finished when human beings die. The drama continues. Christ's pursuit of the lost continues, through, in some sense, the depths of Holy Saturday and beyond. And so we may hope that the drama ends, for every actor, in the embrace of the Father.

There is a careful philosophical point here that deserves attention. Balthasar is not saying that human freedom is overridden by divine grace — that would be the precise universalist position he refuses. Nor is he saying that human freedom can resist divine grace eternally — that would be the strict ECT position he equally refuses. He is saying that we cannot know, in advance, whether finite human freedom, encountering the infinite gift of divine love laid bare in the wounds of Christ, can sustain its refusal forever. The drama is open. Its closure is not yet given. We do not script the ending. We participate as actors in a play whose author has not yet revealed the final scene.

This is what gives Balthasar's project its distinctive shape. It honors both poles of the New Testament's witness — the seriousness of human resistance, the breadth of divine pursuit — without collapsing either into the other. The cost is that we cannot, on Balthasar's reading, anticipate the outcome. The reward is that we can, with full theological license, hope for it.

What Balthasar refuses to do is to claim certainty about how this drama ends. The drama is not a script. It is a real drama, with real actors making real choices. We do not know how it ends. We may hope. We must hope.

A Short Discourse on Hell (1987)

After the publication of Dare We Hope in 1986, the criticism poured in. Within months, German Catholic theologians had filled the journals with rejoinders. Conservative voices accused Balthasar of dissolving the doctrine of hell. He responded the following year with the slim companion volume, Kleiner Diskurs über die Hölle — A Short Discourse on Hell. The 1988 English Ignatius edition includes both books in one volume.³⁵

The Short Discourse takes the objections one by one. To the charge that he denies the reality of hell, Balthasar responds: he does not. Hell, as a real possibility for every human being, is not denied. The doctrine is preserved. What is denied is only the claim to know that anyone is, in fact, in it.

To the charge that he denies the warnings of Christ, Balthasar responds: he does not. The warnings are real warnings, made to real listeners about real dangers, and the listener is — always — to apply them first to himself, not to others. “The only person about whom I am required to fear damnation is myself,” he writes, in one of the lines most often quoted from him.

To the charge that hopeful universalism slides into actual universalism, Balthasar responds: the slope is not slippery if one holds the distinction firmly. Wissen is not Hoffen. To know is not to hope. To hope is not to know.³⁶

The Short Discourse is, in many ways, the better book for the reader who wants to follow Balthasar's argument quickly. It is more focused. It is more polemical. It is a clearer window into how Balthasar's position holds together under pressure.

Two Earlier Books that Made the Later Ones Possible

Two earlier books deserve mention because they set the foundation for what came later.

The first is The Theology of Karl Barth (1951; English T&T Clark / Communio Books, 1992). This was — astonishingly for the time — the first major Catholic engagement with Barth at length, and it set the tone for half a century of Catholic-Reformed dialogue. (Barth himself is the subject of Chapter 21.) What matters for our chapter is the deep affinity Balthasar perceived between his own emerging eschatological hope and Barth's “objective universalism” — Barth's claim that in Christ, God has elected to be for humanity rather than against it, and that all human beings are, in this election, gathered into the saving scope of Christ. Barth never made the further universalist move of saying that all will, in fact, be saved. He preserved the openness of the dramatic event. He hoped. Balthasar, reading Barth carefully, saw a Reformed brother who had reached, by a different route, much the same posture Balthasar himself was developing.³⁷

The second is Presence and Thought: An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa (French original Présence et pensée, 1942; English Ignatius, 1995). It was Balthasar's first major patristic study, written when he was thirty-seven, still a Jesuit, sitting in Lyon under de Lubac and reading the Greek Fathers. Presence and Thought is a sympathetic, philosophically serious portrait of Gregory's vision of the soul's ascent into God. Even there, at thirty-seven, Balthasar lays out Gregory's universalist eschatology with extraordinary patience and respect — though he is careful, at this early stage, not to commit himself to it.³⁸

The line from Presence and Thought (1942) to Dare We Hope (1986) is one of the great arcs in twentieth-century theology. The seed was planted in Balthasar's early reading of Gregory under de Lubac. The fruit ripened over forty-four years. The little book of 1986 was, in one sense, what he had been building toward since the war.

Reception, Controversy, and the Battle Over Holy Saturday

Few twentieth-century theological books have generated as sustained a reception as Dare We Hope and the Holy Saturday material of Mysterium Paschale. The arguments have run for forty years and show no sign of stopping. Let me sketch the main lines.

Avery Dulles and the “Population of Hell”

The major American Catholic response came from Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., the long-serving McGinley Professor at Fordham. Dulles delivered his McGinley Lecture in November 2002 on “The Population of Hell”; an adapted version appeared in First Things in May 2003. The article is courteous, careful, and unmistakably critical of the Balthasarian project.³⁹

Dulles surveyed the broad sweep of Catholic teaching from the New Testament through the Fathers through Augustine, Aquinas, and the great preachers of the Catholic tradition. He concluded that the dominant Catholic teaching has always been that some are damned, and that the tradition's near-unanimous expectation has been that the damned are many rather than few. He acknowledged that twentieth-century Catholic theology had grown more cautious. He acknowledged Balthasar's case. But he came down on the side of the older, sterner tradition. The Christian, on Dulles's reading, should not assume the universal salvation of all and should preserve the realistic possibility that hell is well populated.

Dulles's article was not framed as a personal attack on Balthasar. The two men were colleagues, and Dulles wrote with the courtesy of a friend. But the article became, almost immediately, the standard conservative-Catholic answer to the Balthasarian hope. Anyone arguing the Balthasarian case in a Catholic context after 2003 had to engage Dulles.⁴⁰

Ralph Martin and the Will Many Be Saved Argument

The most extended scholarly critique of Balthasar from a Catholic conservative came from Ralph Martin, professor of theology at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit. Martin's Will Many Be Saved? What Vatican II Actually Teaches and Its Implications for the New Evangelization (Eerdmans, 2012) is a careful, sustained argument that Balthasar and Rahner have misread the actual texts of Vatican II.⁴¹

Martin focuses on Lumen Gentium 16, which speaks of those who through no fault of their own do not know the gospel but who, with the help of grace, can attain salvation. Martin reads the passage carefully. He notes that the conciliar text immediately continues: “But often men, deceived by the Evil One, have become vain in their reasonings and have exchanged the truth of God for a lie….” The Council, Martin argues, anticipates a real possibility of salvation for those who never hear the gospel, but it also anticipates that many in fact fall short. The Balthasarian and Rahnerian readings, on Martin's view, take the first half of Lumen Gentium 16 and ignore the second.

Martin's book has been influential among American conservative Catholics. It is the major book-length statement of the case against Balthasar's hope. Defenders of Balthasar have replied that Martin reads the Council's language too restrictively, that he conflates “many fall short” with “many are finally damned,” and that the conciliar text leaves the final question genuinely open. The debate continues.⁴²

The Oakes–Pitstick Exchange

The most heated single exchange came from a younger Catholic theologian, Alyssa Lyra Pitstick. Pitstick's Angelicum dissertation, published as Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ's Descent into Hell (Eerdmans, 2007), is a sustained, technically rigorous argument that Balthasar's Holy Saturday theology is not a development of Catholic doctrine but a deviation from it.⁴³

Pitstick argues that the traditional Catholic doctrine of the descent is the one I sketched above — Christ descending in triumph into the limbus patrum to liberate the righteous dead, the descent as a victory parade. The Balthasarian rereading — Christ entering into the abyss of God-forsakenness, sharing the experiential state of the damned — is, on Pitstick's account, simply incompatible with the magisterial teaching of the Catholic Church. She marshals canonical, liturgical, and patristic sources at length. Her argument is not that Balthasar is a clumsy theologian. Her argument is that he has crossed a line.

Edward T. Oakes, S.J. — the most distinguished American Balthasarian, professor at the seminary of the Archdiocese of Chicago, and author of Pattern of Redemption: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Continuum, 1994) — responded vigorously. The famous exchange ran in First Things: “Balthasar, Hell, and Heresy: An Exchange” (December 2006), followed by “More on Balthasar, Hell, and Heresy” (January 2007), with a flood of letters in March 2007 and continuing in academic journals for years thereafter.⁴⁴

Pitstick's case was that Balthasar's Speyr-shaped Holy Saturday theology contradicted the traditional Catholic doctrine of the descent and could not be defended as a legitimate development. Oakes's case was that Balthasar's Holy Saturday theology was a creative but orthodox deepening of the descent doctrine — one that took the traditional language seriously by asking what it would mean for the Son of God to truly descend into the worst that fallen human existence could undergo. Oakes accused Pitstick of treating “tradition” as a rigid set of fixed propositions rather than as a living thought that continues to develop. Pitstick accused Oakes of replacing “tradition” with a private theology midwifed by Speyr's visions.⁴⁵

The exchange — which I will not try to adjudicate here — clarified the stakes. Anyone who wants to engage Balthasar's Holy Saturday theology must reckon with the Pitstick–Oakes debate. The questions at the center remain live: whether Balthasar's reading is a development of doctrine or a departure from it; whether Speyr's mystical visions count as legitimate raw material for theology; whether the older medieval imagery of the descent as a victory parade is the only orthodox option, or whether the depth that Balthasar finds in Holy Saturday can be received as orthodox.⁴⁶

Jenson and the Broader Reception

Among Lutheran and broader Protestant theologians, the reception has been more uniformly appreciative. Robert Jenson — one of the major American Lutheran theologians of the late twentieth century — engaged Balthasar at length in his Systematic Theology (Oxford, 1997, 1999) and treated the Holy Saturday material as a serious theological contribution. Jenson did not endorse every detail. He criticized what he took to be Balthasar's tendency to allegorize the historical particulars of Holy Saturday into a metaphysical abyss. But he found the basic move — the descent as solidarity rather than victory parade — theologically generative. The Lutheran tradition, Jenson noted, has its own resources for taking Christ's God-forsakenness on the cross with full seriousness; Balthasar was a Catholic theologian who had pushed in directions that Luther himself, with his famous “He must descend,” had pointed toward.⁴⁷

Aidan Nichols, the Dominican theologian who has written extensively on Balthasar's whole system — the major studies Divine Fruitfulness, The Word Has Been Abroad, and several other volumes — has provided the most thorough English-language guide to Balthasar's project. Nichols is sympathetic but not uncritical, and is especially helpful in setting Balthasar's eschatology within the broader architecture of the Theological Aesthetics, Theo-Drama, and Theo-Logic. For readers who want to understand how Dare We Hope fits into the larger Balthasarian project, Nichols is the place to begin.⁴⁸

The Eastern Orthodox Reception

The Orthodox reception of Balthasar has been mixed. Some Orthodox theologians have found his hope congenial — Kallistos Ware, in particular, wrote a much-discussed essay titled “Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All?” that drew on Balthasar approvingly and connected the Balthasarian project to the patristic Eastern tradition of Gregory of Nyssa and Isaac of Nineveh. Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev's work on Isaac of Nineveh and on the descent of Christ (Christ the Conqueror of Hell, 2009) belongs in the same broader conversation. (These figures are developed in Chapter 24.)⁴⁹

Other Orthodox theologians have been wary. The Holy Saturday material in particular has struck some Orthodox readers as a Western, even a Protestantizing, importation that flattens the rich liturgical and iconographic tradition of the Anastasis. The Orthodox picture of the descent is not a depressive solidarity with the damned; it is the trampling-down of death by death. Balthasar's reading, on this view, loses the joy of Holy Saturday in pursuit of its depth.

The Balthasarian response — one I find persuasive — is that the joy and the depth are not in competition. The Anastasis icon and the abyss of Holy Saturday are not two rival pictures but two moments of the same descent: Christ goes down in order to lead up. The joy of the Anastasis presupposes the descent that has just taken place. Balthasar is asking us to feel the descent before we celebrate the rising. That, I think, is a recovery of biblical seriousness, not a retreat from Orthodox vision.

It is also worth noting how the Orthodox-Catholic conversation that Balthasar's hope has helped to open has begun to bear fruit in unexpected places. David Bentley Hart — an Eastern Orthodox theologian whose That All Shall Be Saved (2019) is the most prominent recent confident-universalist case — sits in some sense at the intersection of this debate. Hart's argument is not Balthasarian in form: where Balthasar hopes, Hart insists. But Hart's appeal to the Greek Fathers, his rejection of the Augustinian default, and his Christological grounding of universal scope all walk a road that Balthasar helped reopen in the West. Whether one finally lines up with Hart's confidence or Balthasar's hope, the conversation between them is one the contemporary Church owes, in significant part, to the slim 1986 Catholic book that made the question speakable again.

The Modern Evangelical Reception

Outside Catholic circles, Balthasar's hope has been quietly received by several streams of modern evangelical and Reformed theology. Robin Parry, whose Evangelical Universalist (2nd ed., Cascade, 2012) is treated at length in Chapter 25, has acknowledged that his thinking about the descent of Christ was decisively shaped by Balthasar. Parry's 2010 Two Horizons commentary on Lamentations is, in many ways, a sustained extension of the Balthasarian Holy Saturday move into the Old Testament — reading Lamentations as Israel's own “Holy Saturday literature,” the anguished poetry of those caught between the death of Jerusalem and its resurrection. The lineage is direct.⁵⁰

James Beilby, in Postmortem Opportunity (IVP Academic, 2021), distinguishes carefully between hopeful universalism (Balthasar) and confident universalism (Hart) when surveying the contemporary options. He is sympathetic to neither at full strength but treats Balthasar's hope as the more defensible of the two. (Beilby is the principal subject of Chapter 26.)⁵¹ Andrew Hronich, in Once Loved, Always Loved (Wipf & Stock, 2023), engages the Balthasarian framing on his way toward a more confident universalism. The hopeful-Catholic-Balthasarian voice has, in short, become one of the major points of reference even for Protestants thinking about the scope of Christian hope.⁵²

What is striking is how the Balthasarian framework has provided a kind of common grammar across confessional lines. The Catholic, hopeful-but-not-confident position has been received almost without alteration by a wide range of Protestant theologians who, twenty years before, would never have been reading Balthasar at all. The reason, I think, is that the Balthasarian framework names something the New Testament itself does — the dual movement of warning and promise, the refusal of premature closure, the centering of hope in Christ rather than in human optimism. That is theological territory any serious Christian theologian must walk. Balthasar mapped it carefully. Protestants have found that the map works on their side of the river too.

Assessment

What can we actually conclude about Balthasar's eschatology?

Let me start with what I think Balthasar got most right, and then move to what is most contested.

What Balthasar Got Right

First, Balthasar refused to predetermine the eschatological question. This is, I think, his most lasting contribution. The strict ECT advocate predetermines the question by saying we know that some are damned and that the population of the damned is large. The confident universalist predetermines the question by saying we know all will be saved. Both are claims to Wissen. Both, by Balthasar's lights, exceed what the New Testament permits us to say. Balthasar's hope is the discipline of not predetermining — of inhabiting the openness that Scripture itself preserves. That posture is theologically humble in the best sense. It refuses to make a god of one's own eschatological certainties.⁵³

Second, Balthasar's patristic seriousness. Where the modern evangelical default is to treat the question of hell as if it were settled by a handful of New Testament texts read in isolation, Balthasar reads those texts within the long conversation of the Church — Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus, Augustine, the medievals, the modern Catholic reformers. He does not pretend that the question is simple. He does not pretend that the Church has spoken with one voice. He takes seriously the patristic universalist witness as a real and ecclesially respectable position. He takes seriously the Augustinian counter-tradition as a real and ecclesially respectable position. He works in the space between them. This is what a historical theologian of the long hope should look like.

Third, the Christological centering. Balthasar's hope is not grounded in optimistic anthropology, not in some sentimental confidence in human good will. It is grounded in Christ — specifically in what Christ underwent on the cross and on Holy Saturday. The reach of Christian hope, for Balthasar, is the reach of Christ's descent. That is a Christological argument, not an anthropological one, and it is exactly the kind of argument the New Testament itself makes. (When Paul argues for the universal scope of reconciliation in Colossians 1, he grounds it not in human potential but in the cosmic Christ — the one in whom all things were created, the one in whom all things hold together, the one through whom all things are reconciled.) Balthasar gets the logic right.⁵⁴

Fourth, the pastoral wisdom of distinguishing hope from knowledge. This is, I think, the most important contribution of Balthasar to the contemporary pastoral conversation. The pastor sitting with the family of an unbeliever who has just died is in a hard place. The strict ECT default offers them nothing but warnings about hell. The confident universalist offers them what may be a false comfort. Balthasar offers a third option: we may hope. We may pray for the dead. We may believe that the God who descended into the abyss of Holy Saturday has met our loved one at the bottom. We may not know that this person is saved. But we may hope. And the hoping is not nothing — the hoping is the very posture the Church's liturgy has been training us into for two thousand years.

What Is Contested

Now to what is genuinely contested.

First, whether the Wissen/Hoffen distinction holds up under sustained pressure. This is the central question raised by Balthasar's confident-universalist successors. David Bentley Hart, in That All Shall Be Saved (Yale, 2019), argues that hoping for the salvation of all without believing it is psychologically unstable and theologically incoherent. To hope, Hart argues, is to expect; to expect is to believe; the distinction collapses under serious examination. Either you really hope for the salvation of all — in which case you believe it is at least more likely than not — or you do not, in which case you are merely entertaining a pious wish. Hart's confident universalism is, in part, a critique of Balthasar's hopeful version as too timid to be honest with itself.⁵⁵

The Balthasarian reply — advanced by Edward Oakes and others — is that hope is not the same as probabilistic belief. To hope, in the Pauline-Christological sense, is to align oneself with God's revealed saving will and to refuse to anticipate the verdict that belongs to God alone. It is not a betting position. It is a prayer. Whether this reply satisfies the philosophical objection is, in my judgment, an open question. I lean toward thinking that Balthasar's distinction does real work pastorally even if it is harder to defend metaphysically than its defenders sometimes acknowledge. The hopeful universalist owes the confident universalist a more rigorous account of how hope can mean less than expectation without meaning less than serious prayer.

Second, whether Balthasar's reading of Gregory of Nyssa is too hopeful. Pitstick and others have argued that Balthasar's appeal to Gregory smooths over Gregory's own complexity. Gregory's apokatastasis is, on a careful reading, more confident than Balthasar's hope — Gregory really does seem to expect, even predict, the universal restoration of all rational creatures, including the devil. (See Chapter 9 for the Gregorian texts in full.) If that is right, Balthasar is using Gregory selectively. He is taking the patristic posture of hope without taking the patristic confidence of doctrine. That may be theologically defensible, but it is not, strictly speaking, Gregory of Nyssa's position. It is Balthasar's adaptation of Gregory toward a more cautious modern stance.

Whether this is a fair criticism depends on how one thinks the patristic witness should be read in the present. I think Balthasar's adaptation is theologically responsible — he is doing what every theologian who reads the Fathers must do, namely, retrieving what he can use without claiming everything they said. But the criticism stands as a caution. Balthasar is not Gregory of Nyssa. He is something newer.

Third, the Holy Saturday theology. This is the genuine sore spot. Pitstick's accusation — that the Holy Saturday material depends in too central a way on Adrienne von Speyr's private mystical experiences — cannot be brushed aside. Balthasar himself acknowledged the dependence. And it is fair to ask whether a Catholic doctrine of the descent can be redrawn around the mystical experiences of one twentieth-century laywoman, however holy she may have been.

My own judgment, for what it is worth, is that Balthasar's Holy Saturday theology is best taken as a theological retrieval of what is already Scriptural and patristic — the depth of Christ's descent, the seriousness of God-forsakenness on the cross, the breadth of the saving reach — rather than as a doctrine wholly built on Speyr. Speyr's visions illumined what Balthasar was already finding in Scripture and the Fathers. But the foundation is the texts, not the visions. To the extent that Balthasar's theology has Christological and Scriptural standing on its own — and I think it largely does — the dependence on Speyr is more illustrative than foundational. Pitstick's challenge has been valuable for forcing the question. The answer, I believe, is that the dependence on Speyr is real but not fatal.

Fourth, and related, the question of how the Holy Saturday theology coheres with the immaterial soul in a conscious intermediate state — which I take, with the historic Christian tradition, to be the right anthropology. Balthasar's account presupposes that Christ's human soul, in the silent interval between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, was genuinely active — descending, encountering, undergoing — not unconscious or extinguished. That presupposition is congenial to substance dualism and to the patristic intermediate-state tradition. Where I find Balthasar most theologically suggestive is in his refusal to flatten the intermediate state into a non-event. Christ's descent only makes sense if there is something for him to descend into, and someone — or some many — for him to meet there. The conditionalist or annihilationist who denies the intermediate state has, on my view, a harder time receiving Balthasar's Holy Saturday material than the dualist does.

The Author's Position

I should say plainly where I land. I am writing this book from the position of conditional immortality with postmortem opportunity, open to conservative biblical universalism. Balthasar is closer to my position than the strict ECT default of my own evangelical tradition, but not as close as the more confident postmortem-opportunity tradition that runs from the late Pinnock through Sanders, Walls, Beilby, Jonathan, and Hronich (see Chapter 26).

What I receive from Balthasar is, above all, the discipline of hope-without-knowledge. I do not know that all will finally be saved. I do not know that any are finally lost. I have biblical reasons to hope. I have biblical reasons to fear. Balthasar's posture — hold both, hope hard, never claim more than the New Testament permits — is, I have come to believe, the only honest place from which to do this kind of theology.

What I am less convinced about is the Holy Saturday material in its strongest form. I find Balthasar's Christological argument compelling at its core: the saving reach of Christ extends to wherever the lost might be, because Christ has descended to where they are. I am more cautious about the specifically Speyrian details. I do not need to know what Christ experienced in the depths in order to trust that he was there. The biblical witness gives me the reach; the mystical witness gives me, at most, color.⁵⁶

And I judge that Balthasar is, on the whole, the major Catholic post-conciliar long-hope theologian. His position is more careful than Origen's at his most speculative, and more Christologically grounded than Gregory of Nyssa's at his most metaphysical. He is not the most confident long-hope theologian of the twentieth century — that is Moltmann (Chapter 23) or Hart (Chapter 25). But he is the most carefully-tuned. His distinction between hope and knowledge has shaped Catholic eschatological imagination for two generations and shows every sign of continuing to shape it.

Why This Matters

Balthasar's Dare We Hope matters for the contemporary conversation in four ways.

First, it broke open the Catholic question. Before 1986, post-conciliar Catholic eschatology had been moving quietly toward a more hopeful posture without anyone naming the move. Rahner's “anonymous Christian” was pushing in one direction. Bulgakov's sophiology was being rediscovered. The Greek Fathers were being read. But no one had said, openly and at length, that the Christian is obligated to hope for the salvation of all. Balthasar said it. And once said, it could not be unsaid. The conservative reaction was fierce, but the reaction did not undo the saying. From 1986 on, the Catholic theological conversation about the population of hell has had to engage Balthasar's hope as a serious option.

Second, it provided a framework that crossed confessional lines. The Balthasarian hope — we may hope, we may not know — turned out to be importable into Protestant theology with relatively few adjustments. Robin Parry imported it explicitly. Brad Jersak, Rob Bell, and many of the “hopeful universalist” evangelical voices treated in Chapter 27 work in a register essentially indistinguishable from Balthasar's. The contemporary “hopeful universalist” position, in evangelical idiom, is Balthasar in Protestant clothing. That ecumenical reach is itself a remarkable contribution.

Third, it gave pastoral care a third option. The pastor sitting with grieving Catholic and Protestant believers had, before Balthasar, two options. The first was strict ECT: this loved one is most likely in hell; pray for the living that they may avoid this fate. The second was a vague liberal sentimentalism: God is loving, all will be well, do not worry. Balthasar's third option — you may hope, and you may pray, and you may take comfort in Christ's descent — is more theologically serious than the first and more honest than the second. It is the option many contemporary pastors implicitly draw on, even if they have never read a word of Balthasar.

Fourth, it changed the question. Before Balthasar, the Catholic question about the eschaton was: how many are saved, and how can we be sure? After Balthasar, the question shifted: what are we permitted to hope for, and how does that hope shape our prayer and our witness? The first question is, in the end, unanswerable. The second is the question Scripture itself invites. Balthasar moved the conversation from a metaphysical inventory to a posture of prayer. That move, by itself, is one of the great achievements of late twentieth-century theology.

And there is a fifth thing, which matters especially for the trajectory of this book. Balthasar showed that hopeful universalism is not the same as confident universalism — that one can occupy the broad Christological hope without collapsing into the soft sentimentalism that haunts a certain caricature of the universalist position. The careful version of the long hope, in other words, is theologically rigorous, ecclesially faithful, and pastorally serious. It does not require treating Scripture's warning texts as somehow less than fully inspired. It does not require treating the seriousness of sin as somehow softened. It only requires resisting the temptation to claim more than we know. Balthasar made that posture available again to Christians in the late twentieth century who had been told, often, that they had to pick between confident damnation and confident salvation. He showed them a third way. And that third way, refined and contested but never effectively answered, has become one of the central inheritances of the long-hope tradition.

Balthasar's “dare we hope” is, I think, one of the most influential single phrases in late-twentieth-century theology. It has reopened in Catholic circles questions that had been closed since at least Trent. It has crossed into Protestantism. It has shaped contemporary Orthodox conversation. It is not the explicit universalism of his more confident successors. But it is the careful “hopeful universalism” that the long hope tradition has often been at its best.

A reader can disagree with Balthasar on dozens of points and still walk away grateful for his having made the hope speakable again. That is, in the end, what the long hope tradition needed in 1986. It needed a great Catholic theologian to say what the Church's liturgy had been praying for two thousand years.

He said it. The hope is now part of the contemporary conversation in a way it had not been since at least the Cambridge Platonists.⁵⁷

That is no small thing.