Love Alone is Credible by Hans Urs von Balthasar

Author:Hans Urs von Balthasar [Balthasar, Hans Urs von]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9780898708813
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2012-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

7. Love as Justification and Faith

The sign of Christ is legible only if we read his human love and self-gift unto death as the manifestation of absolute love. Seeing this relationship would prevent us from putting his humanity on a pedestal, making him a hero or superhuman demigod (as ancient Gnosticism and Arianism did, and as a certain well-meaning but unenlightened Christology has a tendency to do even today) and thereby obscuring the real manifestation of love. What most decisively draws our attention to Christ is not that he is more powerful than other human beings (that is, that he has an unheard-of knowledge and strength of will and other psychic or parapsychic powers, which would perhaps serve to explain his miracles), but that he seeks to be so “meek and humble of heart” (Mt 11:29) and therefore so “poor in spirit” (Mt 5:3) that absolute love might shine through his human love and become present in it. Indeed, such an attitude of love can ultimately be determined (conceived and carried out) only on the basis of this absolute love. Christ’s act of creating space in himself for God is not self-mastery, but is itself already obedience, an obedience willing to take on whatever task the “ever greater Father” gives. The task, however, consists in letting the sins of the world into the same space he had allowed the Father to fill, and to do so out of the love that God also fills, as the “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” (Jn 1:29), and therefore takes away mine.

It is always the dogma of the removal of guilt through representative substitution that shows most decisively whether an approach is merely anthropologically or truly christologically (that is, theologically) centered. Without this dogma, it always remains possible to interpret everything in rational terms as an expression of human possibility, no matter how much historical mediation one wishes to build in. Our inability to resolve this dogma into gnosis is the true scandal; it is a signal and a warning that this is where genuine faith begins. For it is precisely here, in this deed, that genuine divine love begins and ends, a love that overwhelms us and exceeds all capacity to think it—and thereby becomes completely evident as love. Ultimately, there can be absolute faith only in this deed, because only such a deed, if it should happen, is absolute love, love as the absolute, as the ungraspable epitome of the wholly-other God: “We believe the love God has for us” (1 Jn 4:16).

If this is true, then “the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2:20). Faith, in this case, means the fundamental response to the love that has offered itself up for me. A response that always comes too late because the deed God carried out in Christ, the bearing away of my sins, has already taken place, before any response was possible, before a response could even be considered.

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