Quotes from Hans Urs von Balthasar

To be sure, the response of faith to revelation, which God grants to the creature he chooses and moves with his love, occurs in such a way that it is truly the creature that provides the response, with its own nature and its natural powers of love.

Christian obedience, by its very nature, has a heroic character.

St. Paul would say to the philosophers that God created man so that he would seek the Divine, try to attain the Divine. That is why all pre-Christian philosophy is theological at its summit.

There will never be beings unloved by God, since God is absolute love.

There is much in Christianity which can be subjected to exact analysis. But the ultimate things are shrouded in the silent mysteries of God.

The saints are never the kind of killjoy spinster aunts who go in for faultfinding and lack all sense of humor.

Even if a unity of faith is not possible, a unity of love is.

Prior to an individual's encounter with the love of God at a particular time in history, however, there has to be another, more fundamental and archetypal encounter, which belongs to the conditions of possibility of the appearance of divine love to man.

But the issue is not only life and death but our existence before God and our being judged by him. All of us were sinners before him and worthy of condemnation.

Whoever removes the Cross and its interpretation by the New Testament from the center, in order to replace it, for example, with the social commitment of Jesus to the oppressed as a new center, no longer stands in continuity with the apostolic faith.

Without a doubt, at the center of the New Testament there stands the Cross, which receives its interpretation from the Resurrection.

Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness.

Thus it is necessary to commence from an inescapable duality: the finite is not the infinite.

The inner reality of love can be recognized only by love.

Love alone is credible.

If God wishes to reveal the love that he harbors for the world, this love has to be something that the world can recognize, in spite of, or in fact in, its being wholly other.

The first attempt at a response: there must have been a fall, a decline, and the road to salvation can only be the return of the sensible finite into the intelligible infinite.

It is, finally, a word is untimely in three different senses, and bearing it as one's treasure will not win one anyone's favours; one rather risks finding oneself outside everyone's camp... Beauty is the word that shall be our first.

The One, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, these are what we call the transcendental attributes of Being, because they surpass all the limits of essences and are coextensive with Being.

If one does away with the fact of the Resurrection, one also does away with the Cross, for both stand and fall together, and one would then have to find a new center for the whole message of the gospel.

The Holy Spirit knows what a particular age's most pressing need is far better than men with their programs.

The Christian response is contained in these two fundamental dogmas: that of the Trinity and that of the Incarnation. In the trinitarian dogma God is one, good, true, and beautiful because he is essentially Love, and Love supposes the one, the other, and their unity.

What you are is God's gift to you, what you become is your gift to God.

But the issue is not only life and death but our existence before God and our being judged by him. All of us were sinners before him and worthy of condemnation.