Top 69 Balthasar Quotes
#1. Hans Urs von Balthasar maintained that the best evangelistic strategy is to capture people with the beautiful, then enchant them with the good, and then lead them to the true.
Robert Barron
#2. A wall is a defense of a country that values inaction. But a wall imprisons the people of a country as much as it protects them. That's why Balthasar had us go this way. He wanted me to see the error in the Tao. One can't be free without action.
Christopher Moore
#3. The three jewels of Tao: compassion, moderation, and humility. Balthasar said compassion leads to courage, moderation leads to generosity, and humility leads to leadership.
Christopher Moore
#4. 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
#6. Only in Christ are all things in communion. He is the point of convergence of all hearts and beings and therefore the bridge and the shortest way from each to each.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#7. The Holy Spirit knows what a particular age's most pressing need is far better than men with their programs.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#8. 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
#9. The greatest tragedy in the history of Christianity was neither the Crusades nor the Reformation nor the Inquisition, but rather the split that opened up between theology and spirituality at the end of the Middle Ages.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#10. 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
#12. 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
#14. Thus it is necessary to commence from an inescapable duality: the finite is not the infinite.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#15. In the mother's smile, it dawns on him that there is a world into which he is accepted and in which he is welcome, and it is in this primordial experience that he becomes aware of himself for the first time.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#16. 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 the word that shall be our first.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#18. God does not only oppose the enemy of the divine from an external or superior standpoint, but also does the unthinkable: he exposes himself to Satan's fascination, in order to burst the dazzling bubble from within.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#19. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. Being disguised under the disfigurement of an ugly crucifixion and death, the Christ upon the cross is paradoxically the clearest revelation of who God is.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#25. In this sense, the methodological form that comes into play here is ultimately quite simple: Scripture is interpreted by Scripture. Scripture interprets itself. Attentive listening to Scripture's own internal self-interpretation is very characteristic of Redemptoris Mater.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#26. A truth that is merely handed on, without being thought anew from its very foundations, has lost its vital power.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#27. 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
#28. The saints are never the kind of killjoy spinster aunts who go in for faultfinding and lack all sense of humor.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#29. 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".
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#30. 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
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#31. The Passion narratives are the first pieces of the Gospels that were composed as a unity.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#32. 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
#34. 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.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#35. 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
#36. Everything in Irenaeus is bathed in a warm and radiant joy, a wise and majestic gentleness. His words of struggle are hard as iron and crystal clear, ... so penetrating that they cannot fail to enlighten the unbiased observer.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#37. 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.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#42. The word of God can require something of me today that it did not require yesterday; this means that, if I am to hear this challenge, I must be fundamentally open and listening.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#43. Thus it seems that the Cross of Christ, laden with every sinful refusal of man, must stand at the very last extremity of hell; indeed, it must stand beyond hell, where the Son is forsaken by the Father in a way that only he can know.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#44. Perfection lies in fullness of journey. For this reason, never think you have arrived. Forget what lies behind you, reach out for what lies before you. Through the very change in which you lose what you have snatched up you will at last be transformed into what you crave for with such longing.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#45. [God loves us, not such as we are by our merit, but such as we will be by his own gift]
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#46. 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.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#48. It is as if the fact that God is light, penetrating and manifesting everything, is so absolutely important that darkness and bondage can and must exist for the light's sake.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#49. As One and Unique, and yet as one who is to be understood only in the context of mankind's entire history and in the context of the whole created cosmos, Jesus it the Word, the Image, the Expression and the Exegesis of God.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#50. 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
#51. 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.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Hence it is evident that if men are pious, good and orderly, they will bear the sword for the protection of the innocent, according to the will of God, and for a terror to evil-doers, according as God has appointed and ordained.
Balthasar Hubmaier
#55. 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
#56. 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 interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#59. 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
#60. 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 essence with the Father for all eternity.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#62. Without a doubt, at the center of the New Testament there stands the Cross, which receives its interpretation from the Resurrection.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#63. 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
#64. Faith's table is always laid, whether the invited guest sits down or stays away with a thousand excuses and pretexts.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#65. Above all we must not wish to cling to our suffering. Suffering surely deepens us and enhances our person, but we must not desire to become a deeper self than God wills. To suffer no longer can be a beautiful, perhaps the ultimate sacrifice.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
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