6 - Theodramatics, history and the Holy Spirit

Summary

Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

(gerard manley hopkins)

This final chapter begins with a line from a dramatic poem: Gerard Manley Hopkins's The Wreck of the Deutschland. With the help of this poem, and of some of Rowan Williams' reflections on tragedy, time and the Trinity, it will supplement the theodramatics that arises from Hegel's and von Balthasar's thought (and that finds analogies and correctives in Barth's work) – the theodramatics traced and critiqued in the book so far. The supplementation is intended to meet some of the deficiencies I have identified in the theodramatic model bequeathed by its main proponent, Hans Urs von Balthasar (and latent in his sources), whilst continuing to affirm the value of a theodramatic approach overall; it aims not to deny what the idea of theodramatics owes to those who have been my main conversation partners in this book, but rather to take the idea further and make it even more fruitful for the way theology thinks about history.

The problems bequeathed by the Balthasarian model have the power utterly to disable a theodramatics’ value as a heuristic for theological thought about history. It is worth summarising those problems here. They include (i) the evacuation of time of much of its significance as the carrier of divine revelation and as the medium for human encounter with life-giving and death-dealing questions – therefore of time as an ethical and what I have called an existential space.