Quotes from Hans Urs von Balthasar

The Church does not dispense the sacrament of baptism in order to acquire for herself an increase in membership but in order to consecrate a human being to God and to communicate to that person the divine gift of birth from God.

God defines himself as "I am who I am", which also means: My being is such that I shall always be present in every moment of becoming.

Man is the creature with a mystery in his heart that is bigger than himself.

Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness of their being children, and therefore of having to ask and give thanks for things.

What the Father gives is the capacity to be a self, freedom, and thus autonomy, but an autonomy which can be understood only as a surrender of self to the other.

In Christ, for the first time, we see that in God himself there exists--within his inseparable unity--the distinction between the Father who gives and the Gift which is given (the Son), but only in the unity of the Holy Spirit.

For all his gentleness and humility unto death on the Cross, God does not relinquish his attribute of being judge and consuming fire. Nothing is more majestic than his Passion; even his anxiety is sublime. And God never denies his attributes to those who are his light in the world. They shine like stars in the cosmos, and even their anxiety, if God allows it, bears the marks of their divine destiny.

Her (Mary's) Son first had to be the Child of the Father in order then to become man and be capable of taking up on his shoulders the burden of a guilty world.

Love alone is credible.

Wonder—the enthusiastic ardor for the sublimity of being, for its worthiness to be an object of knowledge—promises to become the point of departure for genuine insight only where it has reached the stage in which the subject, overwhelmed by the object, has, as it were, fused into a single point or into nothing… like the movement of hope and love toward God, which is genuine and selfless only where it has assumed the attitude of pure worship of God for his own sake.

We do not build the kingdom of God on earth by our own efforts (however assisted by grace); the most we can do through genuine prayer, is to make as much room as possible, in ourselves and in the world, for the kingdom of God, so that its energies can go to work. All that we can show our contemporaries of the reality of God springs from contemplation: Jesus Christ, the Church, our own selves.

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

Faith's table is always laid, whether the invited guest sits down or stays away with a thousand excuses and pretexts.

No fighter is more divine than one who can achieve victory through defeat. In the instant when he receives the deadly wound, his opponent falls to the ground, himself struck a final blow. For he strikes love and is thus himself struck by love. And by letting itself be struck, love proves what had to be proven: that it is indeed love.

The flight away from self to God is not a "forgetting self" in the sense that man thereby loses himself. Rather, in the experience of the Spirit there is bestowed on man the deepest possible experience of himself: for the Holy Spirit is a Spirit of revelation which illuminate the human spirit, in which it is immanent, by telling man what he is.

Mary thus learns that the Most High has ever borne a Son in his bosom, and that this Son has now chosen her bosom as dwelling-place.

Every mystery of life has its origin in the heart.

The Spirit of holiness and love is also the Spirit of wisdom and knowledge about love; and they are in fact one and the same Spirit: "Truth and love are inseparable wings—for truth cannot fly without love—and love cannot hover without truth

It would be unjust toward children to introduce them to Christian teaching and existence only as little pagans and catechumens, in order to leave it up to them to choose the Faith on their own responsibility at a point in time difficult to determine.

The saint is the apology for the Christian religion. He is holy, however, because he allows Christ to live in him and it is in Christ that he "glories".

What you are is god's gift to you, What you make of yourself is your gift to god

God is not, in the first place, 'absolute power', but 'absolute love'

firstly, prayer is a conversation between God and the soul, and secondly, a particular language is spoken: God's language. Prayer is dialogue, not man's monologue before God.

The work with which we embark on this first volume of a series of theological studies is a work with which the philosophical person does not begin, but rather concludes.