Hans Urs von Balthasar - God Quotes

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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.

Hans Urs von Balthasar
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.

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.

Hans Urs von Balthasar
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.

Hans Urs von Balthasar
Consequently, Christian meditation is entirely trinitarian and at the same time entirely human. In order to find God, no one need reject being human personally or socially, but in order to find God all must see the world and themselves in the Holy Spirit as they are in God's sight.

Hans Urs von Balthasar
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.

Hans Urs von Balthasar
When you say Yes to God unconditionally, you have no idea how far this Yes is going to take you. Certainly farther than you can guess and calculate beforehand... but just how far and in what form? At the same time, this Yes is the sole, non-negotiable prerequisite of all Christian understanding, of all theology and ecclesial wisdom.

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.

Hans Urs von Balthasar
Lovers are the ones who know most about God; the theologian must listen to them.

Hans Urs von Balthasar
There is a moment when the interior light of the "eyes of faith" becomes one with the exterior light that shines from Christ, and this occurs because man's thirst, as he strives and seeks after God, is quenched as he finds repose in the revealed form of the Son.

Hans Urs von Balthasar
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.

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

Hans Urs von Balthasar