Hans Urs von Balthasar Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Hans Urs von Balthasar quote about:
- Age,
- Appearance,
- Children,
- Christ,
- Christianity,
- Church,
- Easter,
- Faith,
- Fathers,
- Holy Spirit,
- Resurrection,
- Unity,
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“Even if a unity of faith is not possible, a unity of love is.”
-- Hans Urs von Balthasar -
“Without Easter, Good Friday would have no meaning. Without Easter, there would be no hope that suffering and abandonment might be tolerable. But with Easter, a way out becomes visible for human sorrows, an absolute future: more than a hope, a divine expectation.”
-- 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 -
“There will never be beings unloved by God, since God is absolute love.”
-- 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 without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.”
-- Hans Urs von Balthasar -
“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.”
-- Hans Urs von Balthasar -
“It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.”
-- Hans Urs von Balthasar -
“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.”
-- 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 -
“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.”
-- Hans Urs von Balthasar -
“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.”
-- Hans Urs von Balthasar -
“Hell is to be contemplated strictly as a matter which concerns me alone. As part of the spiritual life it belongs behind the 'closed door' of my own room. From the standpoint of living faith, I cannot fundamentally believe in anyone's damnation but my own; as far as my neighbor is concerned, the light of resurrection can never be so obscured that I would be allowed or obliged to stop hoping for him.”
-- 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. 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 without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past -- whether he admits it or not -- can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”
-- Hans Urs von Balthasar -
“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.”
-- Hans Urs von Balthasar -
“Lovers are the ones who know most about God; the theologian must listen to them.”
-- Hans Urs von Balthasar -
“The Holy Spirit knows what a particular age's most pressing need is far better than men with their programs.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“To be a child means to owe one's existence to another, and even in our adult life we never quite reach the point where we no longer have to give thanks for being the person we are.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“One can understand nothing of Christ without the mystery of the Trinity, nothing of the Church without faith in the divinity and humanity of Christ, nothing of the sacraments without the bridal mystery between Christian life without Christian faith. Thus, the present sermons revolve around the same center--the inexhaustible mystery of the one indivisible faith.”
-- Hans Urs von Balthasar -
“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.”
-- Hans Urs von Balthasar -
“Thus it is necessary to commence from an inescapable duality: the finite is not the infinite.”
-- Hans Urs von Balthasar -
“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 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.”
-- Hans Urs von Balthasar -
“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.”
-- 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 -
“Christian obedience, by its very nature, has a heroic character.”
-- Hans Urs von Balthasar
