KOREA PRESBYTERIAN   JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 52 No.

The Integrity of Holy Knowing

and Holy Living in Wesley’s and
Balthasar’s Epistemology

RYU Jae-Sung, Ph.D. (ABD)

Doctor, Christian Theology & Ethics

Graduate Theological Union, USA

I. Introduction
II. Wesleyan Epistemology
III. Balthasarian Epistemology
IV. Conclusion

Korea Presbyterian Journal of Theology Vol. 52 No. 4 (2020. 11), 127-158

DOI: 10.15757/kpjt.2020.52.4.005
128 KOREA PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 52 No. 4

Abstract

To avoid threats to the integrity of theology and spirituality

and bring to the field of theological epistemology the vision for the
reintegration of contemplative life and practical life, this paper will
explore the epistemological vision of John Wesley and Hans Urs von
Balthasar that holds on to a firm belief in the ever-growing synergism
between God and man, between theōria and praxis, between cognitive
formation and moral transformation. While criticizing the overly
intellectual tendency of modern epistemology, this exploration will
show that both theologians are approvingly unfolding the integrity of
life and practice within their theological epistemology. To be true to
this purpose, this paper will avoid a comparative methodology that
flattens—and do not account for—their own theological footsteps
(which may cause disservice to both Wesley and Balthasar). Instead
it will remain faithful to each tradition, examining to see the sense in
which the two affirm that true knowledge rests on an ever-growing
communion of God and man; and an ever-strengthening unity of
noetic life and saintly life.

Keywords
Christ’s Form (Gestalt) and Christian Form, Divine and Human Testimony, Knowledge of God,
Spiritual Senses, Theological Aesthetics
The Integrity of Holy Knowing and Holy Living in Wesley’s and Balthasar’s Epistemology
DOI: 10.15757/kpjt.2020.52.4.005 129

I. INTRODUCTION

Theological epistemology is not the establishment of an intellectual

mechanism. Nor is it a negation of human possibility that makes
ineffective the voluntary openness (and harmonious participation)
of man to the fullness of God’s revelation. The task of theological
epistemology is, as Andrew Prevot has aptly pointed out in Thinking
Prayer, an eventful act in which divine freedom and human freedom
encounter actively on both sides in love lurking in prayer.1 Although
God initiates this act, the fact nonetheless remains that man is not
excluded from that which originates only in the divine, but affectively
drawn into it, insofar as God is a Trinitarian Beauty into which every
man and woman is graciously allowed to participate analogically (and
yet fully on the part of man).2 The nature of theological epistemology
must be a perennial spiral of holy knowing and holy living for the sake
of an achievement of inner transformation for true knowledge of God.
To support this argument, this paper examines the writings of
John Wesley and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Regarding the structure,
this paper is divided into “Wesleyan Epistemology” and “Balthasarian
Epistemology.” The first part begins by considering the divine testimony
that Wesley places tremendous epistemic weight on. This divine
testimony is Scripture, and its primary function in Wesley’s view is to
give man access to truths about God or the spiritual world. After that this
paper proceeds to a chapter on Faith as Spiritual Sensation. The focus
here consists in the metaphysics of the heart, of human participation in
what God has acted and spoken in Scripture, which Wesley sometimes

Andrew Prevot, Thinking Prayer: Theology and Spirituality amid the Crises of
1

Modernity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 2.

2
Having affirmed both God’s freedom and human freedom, Balthasar also argues
that the Bible provides an unheard-of paradox: “that God can be ‘everything’ (Sir 43:27)
and yet man can be ‘something’; and that God can be absolutely free without robbing
man of his genuine freedom; and that, in fact, God shows his almighty power particularly
by imparting authentic selfhood to his creatures.” The ultimate ground of such an
affirmation is the kenotic nature of the Triune God. And this very essence is the basis
for assuring the free action of man pursuing knowledge of God. Hans Urs von Balthasar,
Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, Vol. 1: Prologomena (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1988), 192.
130 KOREA PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 52 No. 4

refers to as faith, while at other times as spiritual senses.

The second part of this paper begins with a deeper level of
engagement in the Form of Christ, a necessary element with regard to
divine agency in Balthasar’s theological epistemology, and then moves
on to its human counterpart: the “Christian form.” The Balthasarian
notion of Christian form refers to Christ’s τρόπος of living, which is
primarily accessible to us through the apostolic witness of the Gospels.
According to Balthasar, the Christian form is structurally “a part of
the miracle of the forgiveness of sins, of justification, of holiness, the
miracle that transfigures and ennobles the whole sphere of being and
which itself guarantees that a spiritual form will thrive as the greatest
of beauties.”3 One important reason why the Balthasarian epistemology
is so instructive is the way in which it relates divine to human agency;
and theoria to praxis. By using the aesthetic categories of Christ’s Form
and Christian form, Balthasar avoids mistakes falling into any division
or extremes and presents a sort of aesthetical remedy to the scholastic
professionalism that conveys threats to the integrity of theological
epistemology by dividing contemplation and practice.

II. WESLEYAN EPISTEMOLOGY

John Wesley adopted a variety of positions from various thinkers

(Aquinas, Scotus, Malebranche, More, and Clarke) and made many
scattered comments about epistemology in his writings.4 Although
building a coherent system of thought may seem worth exploring in this
context, this paper will focus on the discussion of Wesley’s theological
epistemology. The main approach to this discussion will be along the
lines of the double operations of Word and Faith, of the Scripture and
the Faith as elenchos, instead of using the Wesleyan Quadrilateral or

3
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form, 2nd ed.
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 28.
4
D. Stephen Long, John Wesley’s Moral Theology: The Quest for God and Goodness
(Nashville: Kingswood Books, 2005), 44–5, 64-6.
The Integrity of Holy Knowing and Holy Living in Wesley’s and Balthasar’s Epistemology 131

the Lockean empiricist-rationalist framework.5 As will be elaborated

through the following discussion, knowledge of God in Wesley’s view
takes man beyond mere speculative or scientific probabilities to a firm
foundation of moral transformation.

1. Scripture: Divine Testimony

How does man obtain knowledge of God? The crucial concept

involved in Wesley’s answer to this question is divine revelation. Wesley
strongly believed that divine revelation is necessary because man does
not have access to God unless God wills to disclose Himself to that man.
As he states it in his essay “Of the Gradual Improvement of Natural
Philosophy,” “Whatsoever men know or can know concerning them
[God and spirits], must be drawn from… God. Here, therefore, we are
to look for no new improvements; but to stand in the good old paths; to
content ourselves with what God has been pleased to reveal.”6 In order
to grasp how Wesley understands divine revelation, one must first focus
on the incarnation of the Son in Jesus Christ. While Wesley upholds
the authority of scripture as a special revelation, which originates from
God by way of divine inspiration, and relates its epistemic weight (that
of Scripture) to that of divine revelation, he also gives a central place
to the incarnation of the Son in Jesus Christ, who is both the definitive

5
Over the past half-century or so, the Wesleyan Quadrilateral and the Lockean
empiricist-rationalist framework have dominated the discussion of Wesley’s theological
epistemology. Each of these approaches seems to provide some insight into Wesley, but
they ultimately end up obscuring when it comes to getting hold of Wesley’s specific
arguments with regard to the knowledge of God. That is to say, the four categories
specified by the Quadrilateral are far too broad to reflect each of these categories which
Wesley divides further into the different kinds for denoting the different level of epistemic
weight in theological knowledge; and the Lockean empiricism is far too narrow to mirror
the Wesleyan metaphysics of spiritual senses. For further discussion of the fundamental
limitations of the former, see W. Stephen Gunter, Wesley and the Quadrilateral: Renewing
the Conversation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997), 17-38; and for the latter, see Joseph
W. Cunningham, John Wesley’s Pneumatology: Perceptible Inspiration (Oxford: Routledge,
2016), 79-108.
6
John Wesley, The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 13-14 (Grand Rapids: Baker Books,
1996), 487.
132 KOREA PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 52 No. 4

revelation of the Father and the Redeemer of our sins. 7 The divine light
of God incarnating into human form, in Wesley’s view, enables man to
obtain the most complete knowledge about God. One of the clearest
testimonies of this point is probably found in his sermon, “On Working
Out Our Own Salvation”:

Notwithstanding a spark of knowledge glimmering here and there, the

whole earth was covered with darkness till the Sun of Righteousness
arose and scattered the shades of night. Since this Day-spring from on
high has appeared, a great light hath shined unto those who till then
sat in darkness and in the shadow of death. And thousands of them in
every age have known, ‘that God so loved the world’ as to ‘give his only
Son, to the end that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but
have everlasting life’.8

Wesley believes that man in his sin is devoid of knowledge of

God completely.9 As a result of the fall, all human agents have become
disordered intellectually: to wit, they have become malfunctioning
cognitive agents in spiritual matters. Thus, in and of themselves they
are no longer capable of perceiving the truth about God. God must
enter into the world and shed light on what is darkened within the
nature of man. Without that grace of divine self-disclosure in Christ
through the Spirit, Wesley believes, man would have remained a mere
Atheist who is ignorant of God.
How is it, then that a mere Atheist becomes aware of God? How

7
For further discussion of the epistemological authority of the Bible, see William
James Abraham, Aldersgate and Athens: John Wesley and the Foundations of Christian
Belief (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), 61–80. For more discussion of Wesley’s
understanding of the Incarnation, see Douglas S. Koskela, “John Wesley,” in The Oxford
Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 459-
70.
8
John Wesley, “On Working Out Our Own Salvation,” in The Bicentennial Edition
of the Works of John Wesley, Vol. 3, ed. Albert C. Outler (Nashville: Abingdon Press,
1986), 201. All future references to The Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley
(Volume 1 through 35) will be listed as Works (BCE) followed only by the volume number
and page.
9
Here one can sense the impact of Reformation anthropology on Wesley.
The Integrity of Holy Knowing and Holy Living in Wesley’s and Balthasar’s Epistemology 133

is it that the mystery of an incarnation located at a particular time

and place can be known by “thousands of them in every age”? Here
is exactly where the authoritative word of God in the Scripture comes
to have such a crucial place in Wesley’s view of divine revelation. For
he claims in his sermon “The Means of Grace” that a second act, or
manifestation, of God’s free grace to man is necessary: the inspiration
of the Bible by the Holy Spirit.10 Though he left room for incidental
errors in the Scriptures,11 Wesley believes in Scriptural inspiration and
infallibility, strongly insisting that the written Word of God is infallible
for both drawing out the epistemic implications of the Incarnation and
preserving them for thousands of people in all times and places.12 And
Wesley believes if man reads, meditates, hears Scriptures with earnest
prayer under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, that man will have come
into contact with divine revelation preserved in the Bible as God’s
own proposal for epistemology — or if you will, as the entry point for
knowledge of God.13 The Preface to his Notes on the New Testament
states:

Concerning the Scriptures in general, it may be observed, the word

of the living God, which directed the first patriarchs also, was, in the
time of Moses, committed to writing. To this were added, in several
succeeding generations, the inspired writings of the other prophets.
Afterwards, what the Son of God preached, and the Holy Ghost spake
by the apostles, the apostles and evangelists wrote. This is what we now
style the Holy Scripture: this is that ‘word of God which remaineth for
ever’.14

10
John Wesley, “The Means of Grace,” Works (BCE). Volume 1. 386- 9, 396. See
also John Wesley, “A Father Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, Part I,” Works (BCE).
Volume 11, 171-72.
11
Colin W. Williams, John Wesley’s Theology Today: A Study of the Wesleyan
Tradition in the Light of Current Theological Dialogue (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1960),
26.
12
Gary J. Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism,
and Modernity, 1900-1950 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 531.
13
Scott J. Jones, John Wesley’s Conception and Use of Scripture (Nashville: Kingswood
Books, 1995), 106.
14
John Wesley, John Wesley’s Theology: A Collection from His Works, ed. Robert
134 KOREA PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 52 No. 4

In another passage of a letter dated November 10, 1748, Wesley

clearly delineates the Bible as a fundamental act of divine revelation
that enables man to acquire truths about God:

The Scriptures are the touchstone whereby Christians examine all, real
or supposed revelations… For though the Spirit is our principal leader,
yet He is not our rule at all; the Scriptures are the rule whereby He leads
us into all truth.15

For Wesley, the divinely inspired Scriptures serve as a means by

which man could attain true awareness of God. Man now has God’s
own testimony to what God has been pleased to reveal: “I warn you
in His name that the Scriptures are the real Word of God.”16 It is this
very reason that Wesley borrowed the phrase homo unius libri from
the 17th century bishop Jeremy Taylor and repeatedly called himself
a man of one book.17 As deducible from the discussion hitherto, the
Latin phrase applied to Wesley does not mean that he has no interest in
any other books. The vast amount of journal, which Wesley wrote from
1736 to 1791, shows how many different books he read and how diverse
his theological interests were. Calling himself a man of one book only
indicates that as far as epistemic matters of God (knowledge of God)
were concerned, the truth written in the Scripture and the knowledge
pneumatologically gained from it were the only and absolute standard.
In short, for Wesley, the Bible is the most significant factor in spiritual
knowing. Accordingly, Wesley consistently maintained the superiority
of the Bible in relation to any other forms of divine revelation. He could
not allow that any human testimony could either add to or supersede
the written Word of God. To Wesley, the natural knowledge of God
was only secondary to the knowledge which comes from God’s own

Wallace Burtner and Robert Eugene Chiles (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1954), 18.
15
John Wesley, The Letters of the Rev. John Wesley, Vol.2, ed. John Telford (London:
Epworth Press, 1931), 117. See also John Wesley, “Preface to Sermons on Several Occasions”
in John Wesley (Library of Protestant Thought), ed. Albert C. Outler (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1980), 89.
16
John Wesley, “Dives and Lazarus,” Works (BCE). Volume 4. 16.
17
John Wesley, John Wesley (Library of Protestant Thought), 89.
The Integrity of Holy Knowing and Holy Living in Wesley’s and Balthasar’s Epistemology 135

testimony to God Himself.

But this reliance on Scripture as the primacy of revelation was
never meant to preclude a concomitant appeal to human testimony, to
the insights of wise and saintly men conveying what the Scripture has
proclaimed. This can be observed in Wesley’s esteem for the writings
of the Greek Fathers and the decisions of the Councils, which he often
called primitive Christianity or Christian antiquity — in that regard he
is far from sola Scriptura.18 One representative example can be found in
his understanding of the Apostles’ Creed as a summary of Scripture.19
The revelatory role of human testimony is also implicit in the way
Wesley understands the beauty of holiness. For Wesley, true virtue has
reference to God. And it catches human attention and ultimately draws
the person toward God, the object to which that virtue refers:

The beauty of holiness, of that inward man of the heart which is renewed
after the image of God, cannot but strike every eye which God hath
opened, every enlightened understanding. The ornament of a meek,
humble, loving spirit will at least excite the approbation of all those
who are capable in any degree of discerning spiritual good and evil.
From the hour men begin to emerge out of the darkness which covers
giddy, unthinking world, they cannot but perceive how desirable a thing
it is to be thus transformed into the likeness of him that created us. This
inward religion bears the shape of God so visibly impressed upon it that
a soul must be wholly immersed in flesh and blood when he can doubt
of its divine original.20

18
John Wesley, “A Father Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion,” Works (BCE).
Volume 11. 105-325. For more discussions of Wesley’s appeal to the writings of Greek
patristics, see Jones, John Wesley’s Conception and Use of Scripture; Ted Campbell,
John Wesley and Christian Antiquity: Religious Vision and Cultural Change (Nashville:
Kingswood Books, 1991); and Randy L Maddox, “John Wesley and Eastern Orthodoxy:
Influences, Convergences and Differences,” The Asbury Theological Journal 45-2 (1990),
29–53.
19
John Wesley, “The Case of Reason Impartially Considered,” Works (BCE). Vol-
ume 2. 591-2.
20
John Wesley, “Upon Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount IV,” Works (BCE). Vol-
ume 1. 531.
136 KOREA PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 52 No. 4

One aspect is noteworthy here. Although Scripture is the fount of

all revelation in Wesley’s epistemology, the fact still remains that the
beauty of holiness—which Wesley would identify with “the Christian
rule of right and wrong”21 that includes arts of holy living, acts of
ministry, and ascetic practices of moral transformation listed under
the headings of inner attention, vigilance, self-denial, and exercising
the presence of God—plays a significant epistemic role in bringing (or
affectively drawing) those who have seen such beauty to God.22 One
reason why such a life pursuing true virtue can bring man to God can
be found in the way Wesley understands God. Wesley does not refer to
God as the transcendent One. God is an “Abba, Father” who not only
adopts man by grace as His son but also leads that man beyond mere
scientific and philosophical probabilities such as Lockean rationalism
to a firm foundation of personal acquaintance with God.23 Thus, for
Wesley, the nature of one’s knowledge about God is fundamentally
characterized as personal or relational instead of speculative or
inferential. It is crucial that we come to terms with what Wesley is
suggesting here. With the child-parent relationship between man and
God, we now have a filial knowledge of God. Such knowledge is far
from that which is impersonally abstract or morally impotent. It rather
is personally concrete or morally transforming to the extent that it
takes man beyond intellectual assent or mere nonpersonal reasoning
to a loving and obedient commitment to life resembling the filial image
of God, which in turn enables the living witness of that man to echo
God’s own testimony. To put it more concisely: knowledge of God is
transformative. For these reasons, Wesley places tremendous epistemic
weight on life practicing God’s agenda for holiness and has almost
equated it with all that Scripture which was given by inspiration of
God: “[T]he Christian rule of right and wrong is the word of God, the
writings of the Old and New Testament… a lantern unto a Christian’s
feet and a light in all his paths… towards God.”24 To put it another

John Wesley, “The Witness of Our Own Spirit,” Works (BCE). Volume 1, 302.
21

John Wesley, “A Plain Account of the People Called Methodists,” Works (BCE).
22

Volume 9, 254-80.
23
John Wesley, “The Witness of the Spirit, II,” Works (BCE). Volume 1. 298.
24
John Wesley, “The Witness of Our Own Spirit,” 302-303.
The Integrity of Holy Knowing and Holy Living in Wesley’s and Balthasar’s Epistemology 137

way, a saintly life which Wesley further elaborates in A Plain Account

of Christian Perfection through the doctrine of entire sanctification
mediates the content of knowledge to the perceiving subject, but Wesley
undergirded that such content must always be traced back to its source
in the Scripture; thus one can see here a unique form of synergism,
that is, a theology of sanctification that retrieves the testimony of the
Christian literature but is still grounded in the Protestant primacy of
Scripture.
Along with divine testimony and the two human testimonies
which come from the early Christianity and the saintly life, there is
yet one more form of testimony that needs to focus on. This is the
testimony of faith that Wesley conceptualizes as an elenchos or spiritual
sensation. The human testimony which worked in man through
spiritual senses is clearly distinguished from the divine testimony
recorded in the Scripture. The former refers to the witness of our own
spirit, while the latter refers to the witness of God’s own Spirit.25 But
Wesley saw that there is a clear analogy between these two testimonies.
He also argued that even though the latter has the final authority for
matters of knowledge, the epistemic role of the former could never be
overlooked.26 To support this argument, Wesley conducted an exegesis
of Hebrew 11:1 in his sermon “The Scripture Way of Salvation”:

Faith, in general, is defined by the Apostle, ἔλεγχος πραγμάτων οὐ

βλεπομένων—‘an evidence’, a divine ‘evidence and conviction’ (the word
means both) ‘of things not seen’—not visible, not perceivable either by
sight, or by any other of the external senses. It implies both a supernatural
evidence of God, and of the things of God, a kind of spiritual light
exhibited to the soul, and a supernatural sight or perception thereof.27

This Biblical interpretation of faith leads Wesley to focus on a

faculty of spiritual sight; that which the Scripture speaks of as a God-

25
John Wesley, “The Witness of the Spirit, I,” Works (BCE). Volume 1, 274; and
John Wesley, “The Witness of the Spirit, II,” Works (BCE), Volume 1, 287.
26
John Wesley, “The Witness of the Spirit, I,” Works (BCE). Volume 1, 282.
27
John Wesley, “The Scripture Way of Salvation,” Works (BCE). Volume 2, 160.
138 KOREA PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 52 No. 4

given vision or a divinely driven power of discernment.28 The same

inference is found elsewhere in Wesley’s writings. In his 1744 treatise,
entitled An Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, Wesley
articulates faith as

… ‘the demonstrative evidence of things unseen’, the supernatural

evidence of things invisible, not perceivable by eyes of flesh, or by any
of our natural senses of faculties. Faith is that divine evidence whereby
the spiritual man discerneth God and the things of God. It is with regard
to the spiritual world what sense is with regard to the natural. It is the
spiritual sensation of every soul that is born of God.29

In his 1756 letter to Richard Tompson (‘P.V.’), Wesley writes: “Faith

implies both the perceptive faculty itself, and the act of perceiving God
and the things of God. And the expression, ‘seeing God’, may include
both; the act, and the faculty, of seeing him.”30 The following chapter
will discuss faith as spiritual sensation in more detail.

2. Faith as Spiritual Sensation

During his lifetime, Wesley thematizes three forms of faith: 1)

faith as assent to true propositions of Christianity (which draws on
reason), 2) faith as trust in Christ alone for his salvation (perceived and
understood by heart), and 3) faith as spiritual perception of spiritual
realities (made possible by the “twofold operation of the Holy Spirit”
who has “opened” and “enlightened” the eyes of the soul).31 The third
form gradually comes to have greater emphasis in his writings over the

28
Ibid.
29
John Wesley, “An Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion,” Works (BCE).
Volume 11, 46.
30
John Wesley, “To Richard Tompson (‘P.V.’),” Works (BCE). Volume 27, 27.
31
John Wesley, “The Scripture Way of Salvation,” Works (BCE). Volume 2, 160. For
further discussion of these three forms of faith, see Rex Dale Matthews, “Religion and
Reason Joined: A Study in the Theology of John Wesley” (Th.D. dissertation, Harvard
University, 1986), 240-46.
The Integrity of Holy Knowing and Holy Living in Wesley’s and Balthasar’s Epistemology 139

two latter forms.32

In this third sense, faith is a gift of God. Given the condition which
makes it possible, it can also be regarded as the act of God, on which
the human act of faith depends. This gift of faith as spiritual perception
overcomes the cognitive effects of sin and enables us to sense directly
what is testified in the Scripture: the glorious things of our God.
Wesley used the language of elenchos or spiritual senses to refer to this
capacity. When this phrase was used, he often related the capacity to
the experience of new birth. Just as a new born child puts his senses to
work after being born, so also the new born Christian becomes directly
sensible of the spiritual realm of God.33
Here we must recognize two basic assumptions that Wesley had in
mind. One is the deficiency of natural senses. Natural senses are in a
lapsed state until they are born of God. In other words, man in his sin
is incapable of seeing, hearing, and tasting spiritual or divine things
until they are born of God.34 The other assumption is the necessity of
spiritual sensation. While natural senses are insufficient for perceiving
the full splendor of God, faith as elenchos is able to encounter the
fullness of God’s revelation. For that faith does not merely uncover the
potentialities of the natural senses but is also the principle of Christian
life which brings forth all the benefits of grace, including a new power
or capacity opened by new birth or regeneration as elenchos in our soul
for direct perception of God.35
Particularly noteworthy is the fact that the new birth or regeneration
presented above as a necessary condition for spiritual sensation can
never be thought of apart from God working in the Holy Spirit.36 In
other words, Wesley’s theological epistemology is essentially coupled

32
Among the three distinct languages of faith, faith as spiritual experience
becomes predominantly addressed in Wesley’s later sermons, e.g. “Awake, Thou That
Sleepest (1742),” “The New Birth (1760),” “The Difference Between Walking by Sight,
and Walking by Faith (1788),” “On the Discoveries of Faith (1788),” “On Living Without
God (1790),” and “On Faith (1791)”.
33
John Wesley, “The Great Privilege of those that are Born of God,” Works (BCE),
Volume 1, 432-35.
34
John Wesley, “The New Birth,” Works (BCE), Volume 2, 192-94.
35
John Wesley, “The Scripture Way of Salvation,” Works (BCE). Volume 2, 162-69.
36
John Wesley, “The Scripture Way of Salvation,” Works (BCE). Volume 2, 160-61.
140 KOREA PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 52 No. 4

with soteriology. In “On Living Without God,” Wesley uses a figurative

expression to explain the condition of a man who lives in the world
without God (i.e. an “atheist” or “the man who is not yet born of God”).
Wesley describes them as ‘a toad in a large oak tree.’ About the toad,
Wesley writes that

… [the toad] had organs of sense; yet it had not any sensation. It had
eyes, yet no ray of light ever entered its black abode. From the very first
instant of its existence there, it was shut up in impenetrable darkness. It
was shut up from the sun, moon, and stars, and from the beautiful face
of nature; indeed from the whole visible world, as much as if it had no
being.37

And, about atheists, he writes:

What a thick veil is between him [atheists] and the invisible world,
which with regard to him, is as though it had no being! He has not the
least perception of it, not the most distant idea… In a word, he has no
more intercourse with, or knowledge of, the spiritual world, than his
poor creature had of the natural, while shut up in its dark inclosure.38

Wesley describes the toad as located in “impenetrable darkness” by

the barrier of an oak tree and atheists (the man who is not yet born of
God) as situated in the “dark inclosure” by the barrier of a thick veil. Both
of them are encircled by the same barrier that makes them incapable of
perceiving divine things even if they have senses. According to Runyon,
this barrier is the condition of a man who is not yet born of God and is,
therefore, representative of the hardness of the heart, “insensitivity to
spiritual reality, dulled spiritual senses, and ignorance of the divine.”39
In order for the hardness to be broken, the dullness awakened, and the

37
John Wesley, “On Living Without God,” in John Wesley’s Sermons: An Anthology,
ed. Albert C. Outler (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2010), 568–9.
38
Ibid., 570.
39
Theodore Runyon, The New Creation: John Wesley’s Theology Today (Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 1998), 77.
The Integrity of Holy Knowing and Holy Living in Wesley’s and Balthasar’s Epistemology 141

ignorance enlightened, there must be an intervening moment; there

must be an external agent who would rescue them from the barrier and
opens a new world of sensitivity to spiritual reality.40 For Wesley this
rescue refers to “new birth,” “regeneration,” or a spiritual experience
“from spiritual death to spiritual life.”41 Thus, the faculty of being able to
perceive for divine matters is not an extension of our natural senses but
a divine gift, a sheer act of God that makes the spiritual world visible
to someone who is born of God, or regenerated after the image of God.
According to Rex D. Matthews, there is a long history of spiritual
sense in Christian theology. Undeniably, that history includes Origen
who invented the doctrine of spiritual senses and developed it based
on his own way of the Platonic-Christian system.42 With reference to
Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Glory of the Lord, Matthews maintains that
spiritual senses receive some attention in modern scholarship, but was
even more prevalent in patristic and medieval contexts.43 Examining
the extensive volumes of Wesley’s sermons in his “Religion and Reason
Joined,” Matthews argues that Wesley would have been familiar with
the spiritual sense tradition.44 But, this should not be meant that Wesley
is content simply to repristinate the doctrine out of its patristic and
medieval versions. Avoiding uncritical mimesis of such texts, Wesley
is more concerned with critically integrating spiritual sense traditions
into the 18th-century English context, where often theological anthro­
pocentrism attempts to mediate divine revelation to man through the
use of Lockean reason.45 Thus, we must note that Wesley relies not
only on spiritual senses but also on reason as he develops theological
epistemology.
In his sermon “Case of Reason Impartially Considered,” Wesley
assumes the necessity of reason, and in his Compendium of Logic

40
Ibid.
41
John Wesley, “On Living Without God,” in John Wesley’s Sermons, 571.
42
Rex Dale Matthews, “Religion and Reason Joined,” 234.
43
Ibid., 235. For further discussion of the spiritual sense, see Mark McInroy,
Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses: Perceiving Splendour (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2014)
44
Rex Dale Matthews, “Religion and Reason Joined,” 235.
45
Theodore Runyon, The New Creation, 74–81.
142 KOREA PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 52 No. 4

Wesley sheds light on the significant role of our rational mechanism

in the formation of knowledge of spiritual objects. And finally, in his
Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, Wesley establishes a
dynamic relationship between spiritual senses and reason within his
epistemological system. For Wesley, reason is a faculty of our mind that
operates in a three-fold way: (1) apprehension, that is “barely conceiving
a thing in the mind, the first and most simple act of understanding,” (2)
judgment, “the determining that the things before conceived either agree
with or differ from each other,” and (3) discourse, which is “the motion
of progress of the mind from one judgment to another.”46 This faculty,
usually deemed as “understanding,” serves as an important proposition
of Wesley’s theological epistemology. Another important proposition is
to reject the Cartesian concept of “innate ideas” and critically embrace
in light of the spiritual sense tradition the Lockean epistemology that
knowledge is a product of that which reason makes with ideas gained
through sensory experience. From these two propositions, Wesley draws
a syllogism of theological knowledge: Man can attain true knowledge
of God if that man first obtains a right sense (faith as elenchos) for
the sake of right (super)sensory experience and then judges truly (or
reasons justly) concerning that experience.47 According to this logic, it
is not God’s one-sided work that we obtain knowledge of God. Nor is
it the two extremes of rationalism (the son of theoria) and enthusiasm
(the daughter of praxis) that make us capable of perceiving God. It is
only the synergism between God and man, between faith and reason,
between the gift of our God that provides faith as elenchos for the sake
of spiritual experience and the faculty of our mind that operates in the
three-fold way of apprehension, judgment, and discourse that enables
us to attain true knowledge of God.

46
John Wesley, “The Case of Reason Impartially Considered,” Works (BCE), Vol-
ume 2, 590.
47
John Wesley, “An Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion,” Works (BCE),
Volume 11, 46.
The Integrity of Holy Knowing and Holy Living in Wesley’s and Balthasar’s Epistemology 143

III. BALTHASARIAN EPISTEMOLOGY

Theological epistemology is the study of our knowledge of God.

Balthasar regards God’s revelation as the norm and source of this study of
theological epistemology. To elaborate this divine event, Balthasar uses
the notion of Gestalt, a theological-aesthetic element that determines
the nature of his theological epistemology. His understanding of the
Gestalt is fundamentally Christological. But as he connects it with
trinitarian discourse, the concept becomes more complicated. The main
discussion of “Balthasarian Epistemology” is to examine this complex
notion (Gestalt). This discussion, however, does not end there but will
proceed to the Christian Form, another essential concept to consider
when exploring the theological epistemology of Balthasar. At the end
of examining these two concepts, the whole discussion of “Balthasarian
Epistemology” will come to the conclusion that the synergism between
God and man is at the heart of Balthasar’s theological epistemology.

1. The Form of Christ

Balthasar is most widely known for the use of aesthetic categories

in mediating God’s revelation to man. At the heart of his theological
epistemology stands a simple yet very provocative idea. By assuming
human nature God changed and renewed the very beginning of
culture. Therefore, all forms must be measured by the supreme form of
the Incarnation. Theological epistemology itself, inextricably linked to
this divine-human form, thereby acquired an aesthetic nature. It would
have to engage in its very content and structure the “divinity of the
Invisible, which radiates in the visibleness of Being of the World.”48 But,
in fact, it has moved in the opposite direction. It does not pertain to
the form’s aesthetic quality of radiance but has become an intellectually
rigorous discipline where logic (viz., scholastic professionalism) makes
of a positivistic science out of aesthetics (viz., the supreme form of

48
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1, 421.
144 KOREA PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 52 No. 4

the Incarnation).49 The form thereby has lost its importance as an axis
to the task of theology and become relegated to some kind of sterile
rationalism, to what Louis Dupré called a “mere sign pointing toward
a mystery that lies entirely beyond it.”50 However, the revelation in
Christ, according to Balthasar, manifests an “infinitely determined
super-form.”51 In this particular form, which Balthasar calls in The
Theo-Drama [vol.2] the Ungestalt (non-form) of the cross that in faith
the believer can decipher as Übergestalt (super-form),52 God himself
appears as expressive (or revelatory) in His very nature. The aesthetic
notion of form (Gestalt), then, does not lie on the periphery but at the
very center of theology seeking to understand the mystery of God.
Admitting the theological importance of the term Gestalt (form) at
the outset of his seven-volume Herrlichkeit, Balthasar states its unique
characteristics in an important chapter of The Theo-Logic [vol.1] titled
“What It Is that Signifies,” where he explains that the Gestalt, considered
as the signifier (Bedeutung) when it appears, is not separate from what
it signifies (das Bedeutende).53 For the Gestalt is, unlike Plato’s theory of
eidos—indeed, its chief significance is not “what is seen”—or Aristotle’s
notion of morphe, “the inexplicable active irradiation of the centre
of being into the expressive surface of the image, an irradiation that
reflects itself in the image and confers upon it a unity, fullness, and
depth surpassing what the image as such contains.”54 In The Glory of the
Lord [vol.1], too, Balthasar repeatedly conveys similar points:

49
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 4: The Realm of Metaphysics
in Antiquity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 35.
50
Louis Dupré, “The Glory of the Lord: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theological
Aesthetic,” Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1992), 184.
51
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1, 422.
52
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory: The Dra­
matis Personae: Man in God, Vol. 2, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1990), 26.
53
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory: The Truth of the
World, Vol. 1 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001), 139.
54
Ibid., 142. See also Stephen M. Garrett, God’s Beauty-in-Act: Participating in
God’s Suffering Glory (Eugene: Wipf & Stock Pub, 2013), 40.
The Integrity of Holy Knowing and Holy Living in Wesley’s and Balthasar’s Epistemology 145

Visible form not only “points” to an invisible, unfathomable mystery;

form is the apparition of this mystery, and reveals it while, naturally, at
the same time protecting and veiling it. Both natural and artistic form
has an exterior, which appears, and an interior depth, both of which,
however, are not separable in the form itself. The content (Gehalt) does
not lie behind the form (Gestalt) but within it.55

To Balthasar, the Gestalt, however diverse it is translated, has one

common and very important feature: Gestalt carries, within itself, as it
were, the Gehalt that it communicates. Or to use scholastic terminology
on this term (in which form is something that is distinct from the
content it represents, so the knowing subject only experiences its
external features, not its intrinsic reality),56 Balthasar means by Gestalt
both form (Bedeutung) and content (das Bedeutende), both the exterior
appearance and the inner depth that emerges from within.
This very aspect is the aesthetical foundation of Balthasar’s much-
celebrated notion Gestalt Christi (Christ’s Form). In his theological
aesthetics, Balthasar puts forward the claim that the Gestalt that
Christ has assumed from the world (Gal 4:19) — in a proper and not
an analogous sense — cannot be reduced to any worldly categories
of form, although it makes use precisely of that worldly category in
order to make its own depths, its own ground, its own essential core
manifest in an incomprehensibly positive way.57 But it rather exceeds all
worldly form58 while also serving as the standard by which such form
is measured, judged, and redeemed:

By being that historical existent who, in his (human) positivity, makes

present the Being of God for the world in an unsurpassable manner,
Christ becomes the measure, both in judgment and in redemption, of all
other religious forms in mankind. This judgment and this redemption

55
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1, 146-7.
56
Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1988), 69.
57
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1, 593.
58
Ibid., 422, 455.
146 KOREA PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 52 No. 4

are internal to him, and secured by virtue of his very existence. He

himself does not judge: he redeems; but the very fact that he is there
means judgment for all worldly forms (Jn 3.17-19; 5.29f; 8.15f; 12.47f).59

It is also for this reason that the Gestalt Christi is, to Balthasar, the
highest form, Übergestalt. As is true for the idea that Balthasar develops
on the Gestalt’s intermediary role as well as its signifier-and-signified
character, the Gestalt Christi serves as the medium in which God not
only reveals but also bestows Himself, so that the Gestalt Christi is
God’s exhaustible, ever mysterious expressiveness and presence itself.
In other words, a principal consequence of Balthasar’s use of aesthetical
categories is that the invisible, unfathomable mystery of God makes
its own way into the visible dimension of the form — Jesus Christ, the
Word made flesh.
Throughout his theological aesthetics, and in many other works,
too, Balthasar repeatedly emphasizes that Jesus Christ, as Gestalt Christi,
is what brings the total coherence and comprehensibility “to which all
particular aspects have to be referred if they are to be understood.”60
And following Christ — who makes a unique claim to his divinity by
asserting that he is united to both the Flesh and the I Am of the Old
Testament hypostatically rather than accidentally — Balthasar upholds
that Christ is “the becoming visible and experienceable of the God who
is himself triune.”61 By this, Balthasar means that Christ is the center of
the form of revelation that not only measures and judges all things but
also unveils to them the final countenance of the thing itself (God who is
Deus triunus). Or to use Thomistic terminology on this topic (in which
a material component and a spiritual dimension, species and lumen,
forma and splendor are considered as one and the same), Balthasar
means by Gestalt Christi that God is above all a form (Gestalt Gottes),
and His light and splendor does not fall on this form (Gestalt Christi)
from above and from outside, rather it breaks forth from the form’s
interior. Thus, whoever is not capable of seeing the Gestalt Christi

59
Ibid., 165.
60
Ibid., 451.
61
Ibid., 422.
The Integrity of Holy Knowing and Holy Living in Wesley’s and Balthasar’s Epistemology 147

will, by the same token, fail to perceive Gestalt Gottes. Whoever is not
illumined by the former will see nothing in the latter either.62
Herein lies Balthasar’s Christological account for the episte­
mologically central task of seeing the Gestalt. According to Balthasar,
the Gestalt Christi is the unique, singular expression of God’s intra-
Trinitarian nature (or extra-Trinitarian, ad extra, also).63 And this
very expression is wholly exteriorized when Christ becomes Ungestalt
on the cross, traveling into the depths of infernum and utter mystery
of poena damni and returning as the Übergestalt and Herrlichkeit in
the resurrection.64 A crucial implication of this double veiling — the
twofold mode of self-concealment that Gestalt Christi (forma) was
once the most unsightly form of the cross (non-forma) and is now the
most inconceivable form of resurrection (trans-forma) — is that man
is unable to see the Gestalt Christi on his own merits.65 Their natural
abilities of reason and mind are part of the created order that descends
into a deeper pit of darkness at the Fall, causing them to misapprehend
reality in illogical and fantastical ways. In order to see the Gestalt
Christi aright and thereby perceiving the full extent of the depths of
God (Eph 3:10), man and his rationalistic cerebralism (reductionism)
and monotony need proper orientation, as Balthasar portrays it:

In order to see the form of the Redeemer, a turning is necessary;

a turning away from one’s own image and a turning to the image of
God. And here lies the whole problem of the representation of Jesus
in images, particularly of his suffering. The turning or ‘con-version’ is
the prerequisite, not only for ‘being able’ to endure this image and look
at it, but the prerequisite for being able to see at all what it expresses
objectively.66

62
Ibid., 146-47.
63
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Logic, Vol. 2: Truth of God (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 2004), 59-62.
64
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Vol. 2, 26. See also Hans Urs von Balthasar,
Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012), 176-77.
65
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1, 496-511.
66
Ibid., 509.
148 KOREA PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 52 No. 4

To Balthasar, this ‘turning’ is essential in a sense that it is a nece­

ssary prerequisite for knowledge of God — as a useful example, think
of Mary Magdalene, first failing to recognize Jesus, and then turning
and recognizing him. In an important chapter of The Glory of the Lord
[vol.1] titled “The Light of Faith,” where Balthasar describes faith as
a conversion (or a loving surrender) of one’s own person, along with
his or her subjective evidence, into the “hands of the divine Person
who possesses and encompasses within himself the gravitational
center of all evidence,”67 Balthasar further emphasizes this ‘turning’ by
asserting that the possibility of perceiving (wahr-nehmen) the Gestalt
Christi, through which God is revealed to man, dawns on God-seeking
souls by their faith in response to God’s objective revelation.68 Faith
here, though, should not be understood in these instances as static or
fideistic but as an active movement which God “effects in man (even in
his unwillingness and recalcitrance, due to sin)… through his Christian
eros… [by the Gestaltungskraft of] the divine Spirit [who] en-thuses
and in-spires man to collaboration [or communion with the Father
through the Son].”69
To sum up, Balthasar puts forward the claim by employing the
aesthetic notion of form that the invisible God has indeed made
himself perceivable in the form of Christ. Not directly, but indirectly.
Not to reason, but to faith. Not in his being, but in form. Not, then,
by the dissolution of his being itself — but wholly to the very last. The
explanation of this paradoxical series of statements by Balthasar is to be
found in the seven volumes of The Glory of the Lord. The importance
of Balthasar’s aesthetical understanding of God lies in the fact that the
form remains as a veil — even when God unveils himself to man in and
through that form — in order to demand an act of faith such that the
knowing subject moves away from him or herself toward God, making
epistemological contact in God’s eros.
An instructive point can be derived from Balthasar who affirms
an inextricable parallel between faith and knowledge. This point

67
Ibid., 196.
68
Ibid., 208-12.
69
Ibid., 118.
The Integrity of Holy Knowing and Holy Living in Wesley’s and Balthasar’s Epistemology 149

demonstrates that Balthasar’s theological aesthetics does not simply

establish an epistemological formula which captivates no one but actively
“dissolve[s] all phenomena horizontally-quantitatively, in order to make
them approximately intelligible and [scientifically] reconstructable.”70
Rather, he pursues a theological integrity that resists such a mechanistic
(or purely gnostic) view by uniting faith and knowledge in one and the
same total human act.71 Knowledge, in Balthasar’s view, does not grow
at the expense of faith. It, rather, gains an ever-increasing ascendency
toward God in and through faith, and vice versa. The knowing subject
in this sense is always required to do something more than disinterested
contemplations when he or she encounters the Gestalt Christi, namely
an act (or dynamic movement) of faith which God effects in him or
her. Far from romantic ideals that make man search for escape or some
hedonistic (self-serving) self-satisfactions,72 this act of faith draws them
out of themselves and into God’s image, God’s ever-objective evidence,
and more specifically God’s drama of redemption revealed through
“Jesus’ historical life, death, and Resurrection.”73
Herein lies a critical element of perceiving the Gestalt Christi,
namely the form-giving power (Gestaltungskraft) of the Spirit.74
Consistent with our previous remarks about the Spirit who en-thuses
and in-spires man to communion with the Father through the Son, we
grasp the importance of the Spirit’s work to form and impress God’s
image, God’s ever-objective evidence, and God’s drama of redemption
into our lives, creating pure hearts (Mt 5:8) and renewing a steadfast
spirit within us (Ps 51:10).75 Once our life and existence molded by the
Gestalt of Christ through these impressing works of the Spirit, we do
no longer perceive God by gnosis alone but grow beyond that noetic
perception into a pistis that demands action — a theological aesthetics
of Christian form, which in Balthasar’s sense requires more than an

70
Mark McInroy, Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses, 146.
71
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1, 130-31.
72
Stephen M. Garrett, God’s Beauty-in-Act, 146.
73
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1, 191.
74
Veronica Donnelly, Saving Beauty: Form as the Key to Balthasar’s Christology
(Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 102.
75
Stephen M. Garrett, God’s Beauty-in-Act, 148-49.
150 KOREA PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 52 No. 4

inward vision of God, namely an outward sign that concretizes that

vision in one’s life and extends it through his or her action to the entire
world.76
Yes, Christian knowledge requires action. Such connections shed
light on the theoretical and the performative element of the knowledge
of God rather than merely its cognitive counterpart. And Jesus’
historical life, death and Resurrection give shape to God-seeking souls
and thus form within their life a Christian form, all in accordance with
the Father’s will through the form-giving power of the Spirit. As such,
when the knowing subject does not just see but actively participates
fittingly in God’s drama of redemption, he or she fully knows the forma
and splendor of God’s triune love to the world, which is the absolute
Beauty, or ‘Glory’ (kabod, δόξα), according to Balthasar’s usage.77

2. The Christian Form

At the heart of Balthasar’s theological epistemology stands

an inextricable parallel between the Gestalt Christi and the life of a
person who lives by faith in and imitation of Christ through the
Gestaltungskraft of the Holy Spirit — which Balthasar describes as
the Christian form. Balthasar considers this parallel as a prerequisite
for the knowledge of God. In other words, there are two conditions
in theological epistemology, and both conditions must be fulfilled in
order for one’s knowledge of God to be true and complete. The first
condition is the Gestalt Christi that contains the objective evidence
of Christian revelation. The second condition is the Christian form
which is, in a sense, equivalent to the Gestalt Christi. Claiming that
the evidential validity of Christian form stems from the mystery of
Christ’s hypostatic union, Balthasar regards this form as the subjective
evidence that reveals the ever-greater mystery of God.78 Thus, if the first
condition is a formless invitation, the second condition gives shape to that
invitation and makes it visible to the responder. In other words, these

76
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1, 28.
77
Ibid., 136.
78
Ibid., 208.
The Integrity of Holy Knowing and Holy Living in Wesley’s and Balthasar’s Epistemology 151

two conditions are complementary, and in Balthasar’s epistemology,

they always work together to reveal the truthfulness of the perception
of God as objective and subjective evidence of revelation.
Balthasar’s theological epistemology does not pertain to
scholasticism that rejects the subjective dimensions to the act of per­
ception by its predominantly negative decision. His focus is, therefore,
not in obtaining a theoretical knowledge of God. In fact, he wants
to leave aside for a moment “the whole host of sciences that have
set up camp, as it were, around the forecourts of theology — secular
history, archaeology, the history of culture and of ethics, philology
(both of the Bible and of other related documents), linguistics, and
all the others.”79 He directs our attention to the central problem: Can
we acquire knowledge of God without transforming ourselves into an
ever-greater likeness to Christ? In Balthasar’s view, one’s primary access
to God is not through an “‘inner-worldly humanism’ that is secular,
scientific, and bourgeois.”80 “Neither that heaven-directed gaze of
foolishness prevails here, nor the thrust of a transcendent eros… [This]
is the dissolution of an immanent anthropology which in its enclosed
dialectic must increasingly have recourse to forms of perversity…”81
The turn to inner-worldly horizontal humanism and a life without God
cannot reach perfection because the vertical dimension is cut off. Such
a turn to the godless life is far off from the fullness of contemplation,
the highest degree of epistemological initiation into the mysteries of
God. Thus, they all must be sacramentally transfigured such that a new
science of the “Christian life” puts a brake on their orientation and
becomes a prerequisite for the knowledge of God.82 We might say that
Balthasar’s primary concern is knowledge acquired through holy living.
Or to put in another way, he wants to bring a sense of practicality into

79
Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Theology and Holiness,” Communio 14 (1987), 347.
80
Kevin Taylor, Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Question of Tragedy in the Novels
of Thomas Hardy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 47.
81
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 5: The Realm of Metaphysics
in the Modern Age (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), 410. Quoted from Kevin Taylor,
Hans Urs von Balthasar, 47.
82
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Explorations in Theology, Vol. 1: The Word Made Flesh
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), 187.
152 KOREA PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 52 No. 4

the theological epistemology tradition which has let itself be shaped

too much by reductive rationalism and a methodology shaped by the
modern approach to natural science. Balthasar is actually upholding
this thought by saying, “[One’s primary access to God is] through the
medium of his [or her] own intentional human acts” — how he or she
has chosen to live.83 This provides Balthasar with further motivation
for examining the lives of saints who strive to attune themselves to God
(and for God) by virtue of imitating Christ in the power of the Spirit.84
But what does it mean to be attuned to God? Balthasar’s response
to this question brings us once more to view the Christological
characteristic of his approach to epistemology. The concept of ‘attune­
ment,’ in Balthasar’s view, primarily refers to “the heart of human
wholeness, where all man’s faculties (potentiae) appear rooted in the
unity of his forma substantialis, regardless whether these faculties are
of a spiritual, a sensitive, or a vegetative kind.”85 Thus, when we attune
ourselves to God, it means that we are ontologically resonant to God.
But in order for this resonance to be true and complete, we must first
of all attend closely to Christ and see in him “a man who lived in a
perfect relationship to God the Father and who therefore shows us
what a perfect human life looks like.”86 Christ’s way of living, which
is primarily accessible to us through the Old and New Testaments,
apostolic witnesses, and writings of the Church Fathers, has laid the
foundation for the Christian manner of living, which Balthasar views
as subjective conditions for the receipt of revelation.
Along with the Christian Form, a theological aesthetics of Christian
living that functions as an equivalent to the theological-aesthetic
notion Gestalt (form), there is yet one more form of subjective evidence

83
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1, 244.
84
Ibid., 235-50. Balthasar’s study of the life and theology of the saints is primarily
derived from his Jesuit training; “it is the figure of Ignatius of Loyola,” according to Matthew
A. Rothaus Moser, “who fundamentally determines the shape and character of Balthasar’s
theology of the saints.” Matthew A. Rothaus Moser, Love Itself Is Understanding: Hans Urs
von Balthasar’s Theology of the Saints (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016), xx-xxi.
85
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1, 236.
86
Victoria S. Harrison, “Hans Urs von Balthasar,” in The Oxford Handbook of the
Epistemology of Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 539.
The Integrity of Holy Knowing and Holy Living in Wesley’s and Balthasar’s Epistemology 153

that is worth focusing on. This is Balthasar’s idea of spiritual senses.

In the “Spiritual Senses,” Balthasar argues that spiritual sensation is
the intersection (synergy) of God’s grace and humanity’s spontaneous
response.87 Far from a pre-existing, transcendental structure of cons­
ciousness through which one beholds God, this eventful act comes
‘from above’ and ‘from outside’ into oneself and plays a crucial role in
perceiving the total form (Gestalt) of revelation by being integrated into
one’s natural, corporeal senses, thereby making his or her sensorium as a
whole “one single, corporeal-spiritual sense apparatus.”88 This apparatus
performs, in an extrinsic manner that is nevertheless non-extrinsic, the
epistemologically central task of seeing the absolute beauty, or ‘glory’
(kabod, δόξα), according to Balthasar’s usage.
Balthasar’s doctrine of spiritual senses, which is at the heart of his
theological aesthetics, heavily relied on patristic and medieval texts.
But this is not to say that Balthasar is content simply with simple
repetition or uncritical mimesis of such texts. He is more concerned
with constructively integrating spiritual sense traditions into a
modern context, where often theological anthropocentrism attempts
to mediate divine revelation to humanity through the use of natural (or
philosophical) aesthetic categories. To be more specific, Balthasar treats
the spiritual senses as a distinct kind of aesthetic dimension, a place of
theological aesthetics which must be distinguished from the category
of natural aesthetics. For Balthasar, natural aesthetics are insufficient to
perceiving the full splendor of the form, whereas theological aesthetics
are able to encounter the fullness of God’s revelation.
Here we need to consider three important points that Balthasar
achieved through his distinctive rearticulation (or rehabilitation)
of the doctrine of the spiritual senses in the modern context. First,
Balthasar developed his doctrine of spiritual senses by tracing an
theological genealogy of the spiritual senses from Origen of Alexandria
to contemporary analytic philosophers of religion and constructively
describing it from their various theological perspectives. His exceptional

87
Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Spiritual Senses,” in The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1, 353-
415.
88
Mark McInroy, Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses, 184.
154 KOREA PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 52 No. 4

devotion to the study of spiritual senses is sufficient to draw the

attention of churches and seminaries and strongly appeals to the need
for a recovery of the spiritual sense tradition in Christian theology.
Secondly, Balthasar demonstrates the epistemological task of Christian
theology beyond the establishment of abstract intellectual mechanisms
in serving persistently the knowing subject in making him or her
open to God’s grace, to the extent that he or she finally enters into the
prayerful and doxological realm, where “one becomes both enraptured
and overwhelmed by God’s glorious splendour, awakening the desire
to follow where God will lead.”89 Thirdly, Balthasar makes clear that
Christian theology can address contemporary theological problems by
constructively reviewing not only the contemporary sources but also
the traditional sources. Indeed, this extensive reviewing is at the heart
of the resourcement that he has always thought of and engaged in for
renewal of Catholic theology.

IV. CONCLUSION

In modern theology, a highly technical or scientific tendency

seems to serve as the standard by which theology has to be done.
Indeed, theology students have been pressured to master rigorous
disciplines such as linguistics, semiology, history, philosophy, and
natural science. The problem lies not in these disciplines per se, but
the rationalism or scholastic professionalism that conveys threats
to the integrity of theology by dividing theoria and praxis. Perhaps,
theological epistemology is the field where such a division is most
severely present. To avoid such divisions and bring to the field the
vision for the reintegration of contemplative life and practical life,
this paper examined two distinguished theologians: John Wesley and
Hans Urs von Balthasar. Though Wesley and Balthasar appear to be
different in many ways with respect to the means or references they use
to account for divine revelation and the perception of God resulting

89
Ibid., 190-91.
The Integrity of Holy Knowing and Holy Living in Wesley’s and Balthasar’s Epistemology 155

therefrom, both of them hold on to a firm belief in the significant role

of spiritual senses in theological epistemology and the ever-growing
synergism between God and man, between cognitive formation and
moral transformation.
The commonality of such beliefs can certainly open up the possi­
bility of a comparative study of Wesley’s and Balthasar’s theological
epistemology. Moreover, another commonality we have identified in
this paper (that Wesley and Balthasar strongly appealed to the patristic
and medieval texts) may link each of their theological epistemology
into more extensive research or dialogue with the early or medieval
traditions of Christian theology. However, the focus of this paper was
primarily on reading in the work of those two theologians an integrated
version of epistemology that connects contemplative life and practical
life. This may yield a sort of counternarrative alleviating the threat
that compromises the integrity of theology and spirituality, of holy
knowing and holy living. But it could also bring to the field—or, more
specifically, to the rich body of those who regard Wesley and Balthasar
as authorities—a hermeneutic lens that the essence of their theological
epistemology is a matter of divine-human synergism, to wit, a co-
operation between divine grace and human efforts in the pathway to
knowledge.
156 KOREA PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 52 No. 4

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한글 초록

웨슬리와 발타자르의 인식론 안에 있는 성스러운 지식과

성스러운 삶의 온전성

류재성
Graduate Theological Union 박사(ABD), 조직신학

온전한 신학과 영성에 대한 위협을 피하고, 관상적인 삶과 실천적인 삶의 재통합을

위한 비전을 신학적 인식론 분야에 가져오기 위해서, 본 논문은 하나님과 인간 사이에서,
관상과 실천 사이에서, 그리고 인식의 형성과 도덕적 변혁 사이에서 계속 늘어나는 협력
에 대한 굳건한 신념을 놓지 않았던 존 웨슬리와 한스 우르스 폰 발타자르의 인식론적인
비전을 탐구할 것이다. 현대 인식론의 지나친 지적 경향을 비판하면서, 이 탐구는 두 신학
자들 모두가 그들의 신학적 인식론 내에서 삶과 실천의 완전성을 승인적으로 드러내고
있음을 보여줄 것이다. 이러한 목적에 충실하고자, 본 논문은 두 신학자들 사이에 존재하
는 엄연한 차이나 독특한 신학적 발자취를 평준화시키는 비교주의적 방법론을 지양하고,
각 전통에 충실한 읽기를 하면서 이 두 신학자가 참 지식은 하나님과 인간 사이의 지속적
으로 성장하는 친교에 달려 있다고 확인하는 것의 의미를, 지성적인 삶과 성도의 삶 사이
의 끊임없는 일치에 달려 있다고 확인하는 것의 의미를 살펴볼 것입니다.

주제어
그리스도의 형식과 그리스도인의 형식, 신적인 간증과 인간의 간증, 하나님에 대한 인식, 영적인 감각,
신학적 미학

Date submitted: September13, 2020; date evaluated: October 4, 2020; date confirmed: October 6, 2020 .