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The work with which we embark on this first volume of a series of theological studies is a work with which the philosophical person does not begin, but rather concludes.

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
Rather
Embark
Doe
Theological
Persons
Studies
Person
Volume
Firsts
Philosophical
First
Series
Work
Begin
Study
Concludes

More quotes by Hans Urs von Balthasar

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It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.
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
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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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Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness of their being children, and therefore of having to ask and give thanks for things.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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Every experience of beauty points to [eternity].
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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It is, finally, a word is untimely in three different senses, and bearing it as one's treasure will not win one anyone's favours one rather risks finding oneself outside everyone's camp... Beauty is the word that shall be our first.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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God defines himself as I am who I am, which also means: My being is such that I shall always be present in every moment of becoming.
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 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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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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To be a child means to owe one's existence to another, and even in our adult life we never quite reach the point where we no longer have to give thanks for being the person we are.
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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Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness.
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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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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Only in Christ are all things in communion. He is the point of convergence of all hearts and beings and therefore the bridge and the shortest way from each to each.
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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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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Christian obedience, by its very nature, has a heroic character.
Hans Urs von Balthasar