“ 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. Hans Urs von Balthasar
“ It is impossible to contemplate the word without the serious intention of doing justice to it in practical behavior. It demands love for God and our neighbor, and does so with such immediacy and unmis… Hans Urs von Balthasar
“ Not longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man. Hans Urs von Balthasar
“ The full Christian experience, however, is not an individual experience which may be isolated from all else; it is, unconditionally, an experience within the context of the Church. It is 'a personal h… Hans Urs von Balthasar
“ 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 experienc… Hans Urs von Balthasar
“ Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters… Hans Urs von Balthasar
“ 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 intere… 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, wit… Hans Urs von Balthasar
“ We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Hans Urs von Balthasar
“ 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 t… 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… Hans Urs von Balthasar
“ 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 lon… Hans Urs von Balthasar
“ 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 sub… Hans Urs von Balthasar
“ Instead, it is the reality that the God-forsaken one experienced in an eminent way because no one can even approximately experience the abandonment by God as horribly as the Son, who shares the same e… Hans Urs von Balthasar
“ Nevertheless, in a passage that is very often commented upon because it summarizes the entire salvific economy of faith, the Apostle calls Christ the 'pioneer and perfecter of our faith' (Heb. 12:2),… Hans Urs von Balthasar
“ The first thing the Cross does is cross out the world's word by a Wholly-Other Word, a Word that the world does not want to hear at any price. For the world wants to live and rise again before it dies… Hans Urs von Balthasar
“ 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 a… Hans Urs von Balthasar
