Convergences: To the Source of Christian Mystery by Hans Urs von Balthasar

Author:Hans Urs von Balthasar [Hans Urs von Balthasar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781681491110
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 1983-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

3. The Transcendence of Jesus Christ

The evangelists provide the key when they attest—each in his own way—that the synthesis effected by Jesus became clear to them only after Easter and through Easter. This clearly means that Jesus did not spend his earthly life reconciling the contents of the Old Testament titles of majesty—indeed, that he probably never assumed these titles himself at all. He lived and fulfilled the will of the Father to the last: The titles and their contents, of themselves, fell to his share all together like portions of the spoil. He fulfilled his mission at a point which proves, in retrospect, to be the point toward which—in some unimaginable way!—all figures of the Old Covenant converge. But this point could not possibly be found on the level of the figures, for the figures contradicted each other (on their own level)—at times diametrically. Only because Jesus transcends the figures and remains in a kingly freedom with regard to them do they fall to him as if incidentally—and yet centrally, insofar as they could come to belong to no one other than him.

The transcendence of his event is shown in the fact that a breakthrough is effected in his historical existence, which divides at once into a breakthrough upward, to God, and downward, to death and hell. Insofar as he is Verbum-Caro, God and man, he is at the same time the realized covenant and the solution to the riddle of tension between Abraham and Moses: He is the Word of the Father returning to God with the whole human “accomplishment”, and the human accomplishment is precisely the “complete faith”, pure obedience. From this, the double breakthrough becomes understandable.

Upward the image of God is supplemented in that God is not only the freely choosing Love in relation to Israel and, eschatologically, to humanity in general and the world; rather, God is Love in himself, namely absolute, that is, triune Love, which does not need man in order to possess an object of love. For if this idea were seriously entertained, man would without fail receive power over this God who needs him, and the path would go on irresistibly, cither to Hegel (because man then surveys the depths of God: God only becomes truly God through the necessary unfolding of his capacities as a creator, through the creation of his vis-à-vis, in whose release and home-bringing he first discovers himself—who he, as God, is and what he, as God, can do) or to the komme révolté, who has already been achieved in Job and who has become for many moderns the shibboleth of the actual man, because man’s freedom is made free to explore the weakness of God, and in this perverse way to search “the deep things of God” (1 Cor 2:10) or “the so-called ‘deep secrets’ of Satan” (Rev 2:24). Only the identity of freedom (of election) and love in God himself, only the mystery of the Trinity which God discloses to humanity in the making of

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