An ideal Balthasarian church building has shown the distance between God and his creatures. It has awed and silenced the faithful. It has enfolded them in its side chapels to await the Word from God, the Logos. But where in the architecture is the image of Christ to be found?

Depicting the Whole Christ: 

Hans Urs von Balthasar and Sacred Architecture

by Philip Nielsen

The theological work of twentieth-century theologian Hans Urs von 

Balthasar has only recently begun to take its proper place in Catholic 

theology. In his lifetime he certainly took a back seat to contemporaries 

such as Karl Rahner, Yves Congar, and those men who were known as the 

theological architects of Vatican II. Balthasar never attended Vatican II, 

unlike so many of his fellow theologians and friends. This absence, 

combined with the difficulty inherent in classifying such a diverse corpus 

as his, has slowed his acceptance as a theological authority in the Church. 

But for the past thirty years—since the election of John Paul II to the Holy 

See—Balthasar’s star has risen as one of the great theologians after Trent, a 

status that the election of Balthasar’s close personal friend and theological 

sympathizer Joseph Ratzinger to the Chair of Saint Peter seemingly 

stamped with an imprimatur of the highest rank. At Balthasar’s funeral, 

Henri Cardinal de Lubac described him as “probably the most cultured 

man in the Western world.” Indeed, when one looks at the cultural topics 

that Balthasar treated, Cardinal de Lubac’s statement becomes hard to 

refute: Balthasar wrote his doctoral dissertation on German literature; his 

first major work was on music; he was one of the foremost patristic 

scholars of his time; and, thanks to his father’s practice of church 

architecture in Switzerland, he loved the visual arts and architecture.

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