Who Is a Christian? by von Balthasar Hans Urs

Author:von Balthasar, Hans Urs [Urs, von Balthasar, Hans]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781586177829
Published: 2014-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

It Leads Farther than You Think

Thus Christianity has a very unusual proposal to make with regard to the general desire of all religions for unity with God. Religions, provided they do not remain stuck in ritualism, must ultimately content themselves either with removing the difference between God and world or else with having men merge into God (in death, in ecstasy or meditation, and so on). How is it possible, Christianity asks, for there to be an identity between God and man, since both are and remain essentially different? And it answers: Such an identity is possible by virtue of the fact that God gives his love the character of obedience and man gives his obedience the sense of love. This happens when he, man, agrees to be led by God (whom he loves because God has loved him) beyond everything he himself is capable of planning, foreseeing, desiring, and enduring by his own strength. This transcending of everything that is his own leads into the freedom of the divine. Transcendence is essentially not “Eros”—which is merely the desire to overcome—but, rather, faith-filled obedience, through the power of the God who commands. Just as Peter walks on the waves by the power of obedience. Just as Lazarus rises up and walks, a bound-up corpse, by the power of obedience.

The word that calls us out beyond the sphere of our planning and finite desiring is necessarily hard. For it must break open the hard kernel of our finiteness, of our sinful entrenchment. That is why all the words of the Lord in the Gospel have such a steely ring. Till the end of the world, mankind will break its teeth on them. And at the core of their hardness, these words conceal an infinite sweetness. Their implacability, which in substance is like the Old Testament, merely underlines the real, free, sovereign nature of the living God, whose will to holiness remains infinitely superior to all human striving, yearning, and understanding and, to the extent that man is a sinner, also contrary to them. The natural yearning of the human will [Sehnsuchtswille] (voluntas ut natura, eros, desiderium) can never be the ultimate measure of moral action where God has made known his loving will [Liebeswille]. The yearning will, by virtue of being ordered toward the absolute, can indeed be a far-reaching criterion for that which, in the finite world, is to be either eschewed or striven for (through self-mastery); however, it can never reach farther than the horizon of our own human understanding. Supposing a person were to set himself a moral ideal of the highest and most difficult kind to strive for, it would nonetheless have to be an ideal that he himself had conceived and shaped and could consequently also perceive as right. To seek to go beyond this horizon of our own volition is neither possible nor responsible for man. Not possible, because even the created will, to the extent that it is free, tends toward the absolute—otherwise it

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