A Short Primer for Unsettled Laymen by Hans Urs von Balthasar

Author:Hans Urs von Balthasar [Hans Urs von Balthasar]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781681490229
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

PARTIAL IDENTIFICATION

This is a new catchword which is said to fit the majority of Catholics in our countries. Put differently, those who have settled at the “periphery” are said to be more numerous than those who, in contrast, are called “integralists” in a derogatory sense.

To see here more clearly, one should look back to the threefold gradation made above in the context of “reinterpretation”. The evaluation of the truths of faith belonging to the first category may be decisive. Many Christians today (as probably also in earlier times) see the Creed’s individual “articles of faith” as isolated truths, some of which appeal to them so that they gladly believe them, while others strike them as strange or even hostile. These people lack the inner insight into how closely the essential articulations of the Christian faith belong together and how grievous the consequences are for the whole if one or several are set aside.

Let us go through the Creed in summary fashion. We confess God the Father as Creator of heaven and earth. One could doubt God’s fatherliness if one looks at the horrors of this world. The assertion becomes bearable only if one adds what follows: that this God is not a god who looks on as a spectator from above and outside but one who gives his beloved Son to this world, even hands him over to execution, in order through him to bear the whole suffering of the world experientially in solidarity and to transfigure it from within. How would we know that God is a lover and a compassionate Father if Jesus Christ, as his co-essential Son (“light from light, true God from true God”), had not “interpreted” (Jn 1:18) to us his Heart: in words and deeds, in sovereignty and humility, in judgment upon sin and mercy to the sinner, in the fact that he gave us the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the mutual love between Father and Son? For without the divine Spirit, our spirit could never have experienced anything of the mystery of God’s interior (1 Cor 2:10-11). Only in the light of Christ’s life, Passion and Resurrection can one dare to assert that God is in himself eternal triune love, in himself and not only by the fact that he became man (and was thus previously not triune); not only by the fact that God gains an object of love in the world, for then he would not be “love”. In the middle of the Creed which deals with Father, Son and Holy Spirit, there is the little sentence, “conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary”. Could one not bracket at least this seemingly unimportant sentence? Why should this Jesus of Nazareth not have been begotten and born normally and as such be the Word of God made man? Because, to put it briefly, Jesus, who calls God “his Father” in a unique and exclusive way, simply cannot have two fathers (toward whom he would have to keep the

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