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But the issue is not only life and death but our existence before God and our being judged by him. All of us were sinners before him and worthy of condemnation.

Hans Urs von Balthasar

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Hans Urs von Balthasar
Age: 82 †
Born: 1905
Born: August 12
Died: 1988
Died: June 26
Cardinal
Catholic Priest
Theologian
Translator
Writer
Lucerne
Switzerland
Balthasar
Hans-Urs von Balthasar
Issues
Existence
Death
Condemnation
Life
Sinners
Sinner
Judged
Issue
Worthy

More quotes by Hans Urs von Balthasar

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Everything in Irenaeus is bathed in a warm and radiant joy, a wise and majestic gentleness. His words of struggle are hard as iron and crystal clear, ... so penetrating that they cannot fail to enlighten the unbiased observer.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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Even if a unity of faith is not possible, a unity of love is.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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Thus it is necessary to commence from an inescapable duality: the finite is not the infinite.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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Christian obedience, by its very nature, has a heroic character.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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The first attempt at a response: there must have been a fall, a decline, and the road to salvation can only be the return of the sensible finite into the intelligible infinite.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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Consequently, Christian meditation is entirely trinitarian and at the same time entirely human. In order to find God, no one need reject being human personally or socially, but in order to find God all must see the world and themselves in the Holy Spirit as they are in God's sight.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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St. Paul would say to the philosophers that God created man so that he would seek the Divine, try to attain the Divine. That is why all pre-Christian philosophy is theological at its summit.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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The inner reality of love can be recognized only by love.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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The One, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, these are what we call the transcendental attributes of Being, because they surpass all the limits of essences and are coextensive with Being.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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The saints are never the kind of killjoy spinster aunts who go in for faultfinding and lack all sense of humor.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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No one should think he can quickly dispose of questions posed here offhandedly. It was precisely because writers were in the habit during the time of the Reformation of theologizing with a hammer that the split in the Church became irreparable. And to work at overcoming this split means much effort. Only the patient need apply.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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When you say Yes to God unconditionally, you have no idea how far this Yes is going to take you. Certainly farther than you can guess and calculate beforehand... but just how far and in what form? At the same time, this Yes is the sole, non-negotiable prerequisite of all Christian understanding, of all theology and ecclesial wisdom.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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Every experience of beauty points to [eternity].
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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The Christian response is contained in these two fundamental dogmas: that of the Trinity and that of the Incarnation. In the trinitarian dogma God is one, good, true, and beautiful because he is essentially Love, and Love supposes the one, the other, and their unity.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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Lovers are the ones who know most about God the theologian must listen to them.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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The greatest tragedy in the history of Christianity was neither the Crusades nor the Reformation nor the Inquisition, but rather the split that opened up between theology and spirituality at the end of the Middle Ages.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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Her (Mary's) Son first had to be the Child of the Father in order then to become man and be capable of taking up on his shoulders the burden of a guilty world.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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If God wishes to reveal the love that he harbors for the world, this love has to be something that the world can recognize, in spite of, or in fact in, its being wholly other.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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The Passion narratives are the first pieces of the Gospels that were composed as a unity.
Hans Urs von Balthasar