Hans Urs von Balthasar

In this final volume, Balthasar reflects on the New Testament vision of God's revelation of his glory in Christ. In Christ's incarnation and resurrection the Christian vision is truly expressed and the joining of God and the world in the new and eternal covenant is realized. - Publisher.

Theology: The New Covenant

The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 7

Zeke Taylor

Human existence is finite, an existence that moves towards death; in death, human utterance ends once for all, and what was spoken as word in the course of the mortal life, whether significant or insignificant, is in any case bound to the form of temporality and thus to transitoriness, and thereby inescapably to futility. Words from past moments, if they are to live again, must always be reincarnated in a present moment. And even though a man were able to incorporate into his uttered word much of his experience of life, indeed much of the truth of his life, he would precisely then be unable to bracket off the fleetingness and futility of his existence so that this found no place in his utterance — or else, he would have to renounce precisely the (approximate) synthesis of existence and word that seemed worth striving for, by anchoring the possible supratemporal significance of what was said somewhere else than in his own existence. The idea that a mortal being (‘flesh') could give itself utterance as immortal ‘word' is a contradiction that would seem necessarily to burst open and destroy human existence. But if the divine and eternal word wished to give itself adequate expression in mortal flesh --however mysterious the manner of this might be — this could not happen through man himself, unless he were to place his entire existence in the flesh, mortal and futile, at the disposal of the divine Word in such a self-exposition, by handing himself over like an alphabet or a keyboard, for the act of formulation in words, handing over himself as a whole; birth and death, speaking and silence, waking and sleeping, success and failure, and everything else that belongs to the substance of human existence.

“…no statistics can encompass what the saints do: their action in pure prayer, in the night of the cross, and in hidden suffering can be much more fruitful than all that takes places visibly and can be assessed up to a certain extent. ‘For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God' (Col 3.3) With the life, power too is hidden; as Christian power, its only way to affect the world is via the conversion of hearts through the contagious example of humility and selflessness. This is true both for the man who is engaged in political and economic life and in the business of culture and technology, and for the housewife, the child and the old man. One may have a wider reach than the other, but the way in which they are effective is the same. ‘The kingdom does not come in way that can be pinned down' (Lk 17.20). An aspect of the powerlessness of Christians is their inability to locate, promote and establish in the world the eschatological event which they proclaim. They have 'seen his glory' (Jn 1.14), but what can they demonstrate of this? They proclaim and indeed promise the greatest thing of all; thus they seem ridiculous, contemptible, deserving hatred. They must resist the temptation to transmute their 'spiritual weapons', which alone are 'truly powerful' (2 Cor 10.4), into worldly weapons; they must be content to prescind from power and powerlessness and to bear witness to the presence of what is ultimate: i.e., the love of God in Christ. It goes without saying that this requires active brotherly love as the expression of their grateful love of God. This love builds the kingdom, and is a secret anticipation of it; but it is not we who build the kingdom, but the one who is present in us and through us. The endless obstinate struggle of the world to declare his presence a past that is long since finished with, to change his event into a rumour, and to tear up the indissoluble form of the gospel into archaeological strips, to exhaust the Christians emotionally and undermine them intellectually (better than nourishing their vitality through prison and torture) — this struggle, with its ever-increasing intensity, proves the power of his presence.”

The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 7 quotes

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