Author Description

This incisive, accesible study highlights Hans Urs von Balthasar's response to "Promethean" critics of Christianity from romantics such as Shelley to the philosophical likes of Feuerbach and Marx, focusing on these critics' unrelenting rejection of the religious claims of historical Judaism. The attributes of the Christian God which such humanists find most unpalatable--such as fatherhood, authority, and transcendence--are precisely those that were inherited from Judaism. According to von Balthasar, such critics have inadvertently reinvented the patristic-era heresy of Marcionism, which posits a radical and false dichotomy between the message of the Hebrew bible and that of the New Testament. (Publisher).