Quote of the day: Hans Urs von Balthasar
Perhaps the New Testament prophecy that the charity of many will grow cold envisages precisely our present time. It is a tragic epoch, for it must understand two things simultaneously: that nothing else is worthwhile in the world except man (because there is nothing else in the world on which one can stake oneself)–and that yet ultimately man is not worthwhile. This is the time of philanthropism and perfect humanism, when all philosophies whether of the East or of the West center on man. They are all concerned with the aid and the development he should be given, and yet this interest has, whether openly or secretly, a bitterly cynical or a sweetishly insipid, or else an impersonal and inhuman flavor. There is no way out of this tragic situation, and man knows it himself. Somehow or other he feels cheated in the prison of his nature, of his history and of his absurd planet. He looks for somebody who has defrauded him, but finds no one.
If, however, there was one who was truly man and at the same time God; a God who was not only infinite, unattainable majesty, but at the same time wholly man–such a one would give meaning to the world. Perhaps he came too soon. The Fathers of the Church and the medieval doctors took great pains to explain why he had come so late, at the “end of time”. We ask: why did he not delay his coming until today, when life on earth has become unbearable without him? The reason probably is that the seed he sowed into the earth is breaking the soil and becoming visible only today, not only for the believers within the Church, who have always known it, but also for those outside, with an evidence striking as never before. The hour has come to the world when Christians and non-Christians are united in fraternal love as a question and a reality. Hence it is also the hour in which we must realize that, in its inmost being, Christian love transcends “Christianity” into the space of the world. Indeed, this transcending movement constitutes the essence of Christianity.
Hans Urs von Balthasar. The God Question and Modern Man. (New York: Seabury Press. 1967)
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One of the things so many people forget is that, yes, we are to worship God, but God comes to the world for the sake of the world, that the world is to be affirmed (as long as it is affirmed, not in the state it is in, but in its essence). So many complain about how various aspects of the liturgy is focused on us — and yet, isn’t that what one should expect, if, for US God became one of us? Of course there is to be worship of God, but the incarnation is to unite us, not separate us!
von Balthasar understood this, though so many who follow him, I feel, do not. I wonder how he would see his legacy if he were alive ?
So many complain about how various aspects of the liturgy is focused on us — and yet, isn’t that what one should expect, if, for US God became one of us?
I’m not sure this is so. If a man were to discover, beyond his wildest dreams, that the woman he most loved and desired above all, but of whom he knew himself to be altogether unworthy, had, out of gratuitous love, chosen to make him her own and join him to herself, should we expect him to crow about himself or to honor and magnify her? Would not a focus on himself in fact separate him from her love, rather than bind himself more closely to her?
All the same, I think your caution may be correct in this sense, namely that we ought not to let our confession of our own unworthiness of God’s love imply that God was somehow unworthy in loving us, even when we were still his enemies. Among the things God wants us to profess are the wonderful things he has done for us in Jesus Christ. “The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy!” as the Psalmist says. Even so, while it is gracious for God, out of his love, to attend to us, and it would be wrong for us to despise the good he has done for us, including the good of giving us the redeemed selves he has given us through Christ in the Holy Spirit, we surely ought to direct our attention to him who has done these things for us. “It is he that has made us, and not we ourselves. We are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.”