Introduction

A critical assessment of Balthasar's position will be facilitated by situating it more precisely vis-à-vis other contemporary approaches. These approaches will be considered in so far as they relate to Balthasar's own position and without claim to comprehensive coverage. A further aim of this chapter is to go beyond Balthasar in initiating a dialogue between his position and that of an English-speaking world to which he rarely adverts. This aim functions as another criterion with regard to the selection of authors considered, authors who represent an important contemporary approach but with whom Balthasar himself has had no explicit dialogue.

There will be no further consideration of the position of Process philosophers and theologians within this dialogue. The general lines of Balthasar's rather sweeping rejection of the explanatory details of the Process understanding of God have been spelled out with great particularity and with more nuances by many other thinkers, several of whom present the Process case very sympathetically. There is, accordingly, no need to go back over this ground here. It will be sufficient to note that emerging from this discussion there is a general unease with two basic positions in the Process understanding of God. First, the notion of an ontological dipolarity in God's nature (between primordial–abstract nature and consequent–concrete nature) seems to involve an unsatisfactory duality in God, with the primacy given to the concrete in a way which necessitates creation and so threatens the divine transcendence. Secondly, the concept of becoming (creativity, increase) is given such prominence that it seems itself to be a primary metaphysical principle to which even God is subject, and so once again divine transcendence is called into question.