The Laity and The Life of The Counsels by Hans Urs von Balthasar

Author:Hans Urs von Balthasar [Balthasar, Hans Urs von]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9780898705720
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2012-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

2. The Gospel and the Counsels

a. Theology of the states of life

In the midst of the stream of our age, surrounded by various forms that presume to be taken for granted, let us, too, attempt to find our way back to the origins out of which they have grown and which alone allow us to understand them.

If it is true that God himself has turned to humanity in the biblical event of salvation of the Old and the New Covenants, most supremely in Jesus Christ, speaking to humanity and dealing with it, finally becoming incarnate and entering into humanity, then we have an initial consequence that precedes all else: it is impossible that God, who is essentially infinite, wholly other, and incomprehensible, should enter into the web of human concepts of order through his speaking, dealing, and becoming incarnate in such a way that he can be grasped and comprehended. Rather, in this event, all inner-worldly univocities will break open in order to offer as far as possible a space and a vessel for the freedom of the Almighty.

Neither the Word of God nor Jesus nor the Church nor Christian existence can be reduced to an all-embracing and comprehensive definition: Si comprehendis, non est Deus. Herein lies an infinite wealth of meaning, which takes the breath away from the one who contemplates it: endless vistas, all of them accessible, lead toward a glowing, unapproachable center. Who can say definitively how the divine and the human are related to one another in the word of the Bible (no matter how precisely we know and how often we indeed see that they are distinct from one another)? It is at any rate not the case that the one begins where the other stops. Who can say definitively where the divine and the human natures meet each other in Jesus, how they collaborate, what is to be attributed to the one nature and what to the other? The mystery laughs at every attempt to master it. Who dares to define in concrete terms what in the empirical Church has a divine origin and what a human origin? For example, what in the Church is the mystery of human rebellion against Christ’s commandments, and what is the mystery of a profoundly hidden share in Christ’s suffering through and under human weakness? What is the penance she does for her own guilt, what for the guilt of humanity outside her? The same question can be asked in regard to each individual Christian life.

Man can never reduce God and world, grace (supernature) and nature to a relationship that he can survey from above, for otherwise he would be a third, synthesizing entity above God and the world. If this is so, then the Christian cannot even cobble together what he calls the natural law with the immediate summons that comes to him from Scripture and from Christ into a system that he can master: he may indeed possess the first law to some extent “in himself”, but he will always stand “under” the second law.

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