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Hans Urs von Balthasar Biography

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Browse famous quotes by Hans Urs von Balthasar.

God Christ Christianity Theology Catholicism God Father God Son

Source: Unless You Become Like This Child

“The Church does not dispense the sacrament of baptism in order to acquire for herself an increase in membership but in order to consecrate a human being to God and to communicate to that person the divine gift of birth from God.”

God Faith Christianity Birth Theology Catholicism Baptism Infant Baptism

Book:Unless You Become Like This Child

Source: Unless You Become Like This Child

“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.”

God Spirituality Christianity Catholicism God Father Eternal Father

Book:Unless You Become Like This Child

Source: Unless You Become Like This Child

“What the Father gives is the capacity to be a self, freedom, and thus autonomy, but an autonomy which can be understood only as a surrender of self to the other.”

God Christ Christianity Jesus Christ Theology Catholicism God Father Christology God Son

Book:Unless You Become Like This Child

Source: Unless You Become Like This Child

“In Christ, for the first time, we see that in God himself there exists--within his inseparable unity--the distinction between the Father who gives and the Gift which is given (the Son), but only in the unity of the Holy Spirit.”

God Christ Christianity Jesus Christ Theology Holy Spirit Catholicism Holy Trinity God Father God Son God Spirit

Book:Unless You Become Like This Child

Source: Unless You Become Like This Child

“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.”

God Jesus Christ Christianity Grace Jesus Christ Catholicism Mary Incarnation Virgin Mary Blessed Virgin Mary God The Father Eternal Child

Book:Unless You Become Like This Child

Source: Unless You Become Like This Child

“Mary thus learns that the Most High has ever borne a Son in his bosom, and that this Son has now chosen her bosom as dwelling-place.”

God Jesus Christ Christianity Jesus Christ Catholicism Mary Incarnation Virgin Mary Son Of God Blessed Virgin Mary Most High

Book:Unless You Become Like This Child

Source: Unless You Become Like This Child

“In principle this implies something else, something harder to grasp, namely, that his whole suffering—a suffering that goes to the utter limits—follows from and actually expresses his eternal, triune joy.”

Joy Suffering Divinity

Book:Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory : The Last Act

Source: Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory : The Last Act

“Only that which is given by the unsearchable freedom of love has power to reveal.”

Love God Relationship Man

Author:Hans Urs von Balthasar

“It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.”

Suffering Jesus Christ Christianity Jesus Christ Theology Redemption Catholicism Crucifixion Cross The Cross

Book:Unless You Become Like This Child

Source: Unless You Become Like This Child

“In the end, only something endowed with mystery is worthy of love. It is impossible to love something stripped of mystery; at best it would be a thing one uses as one sees fit.”

Love Beauty Mystery Devotion Mysticism Mystic Unknown Unknowing

Author:Hans Urs von Balthasar

“The man who follows Christ in full, who denies himself and and dies to himself and to the world, can never, ever be a “bourgeois.”

Christ Catholicism Bourgeois

Author:Hans Urs von Balthasar

“It would be unjust toward children to introduce them to Christian teaching and existence only as little pagans and catechumens, in order to leave it up to them to choose the Faith on their own responsibility at a point in time difficult to determine.”

Faith Christianity Theology Catholicism Baptism Infant Baptism

Book:Unless You Become Like This Child

Source: Unless You Become Like This Child

“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.”

Christ Christianity Theology Catholicism God Father Christian Religion God Son

Book:Unless You Become Like This Child

Source: Unless You Become Like This Child

“No fighter is more divine than one who can achieve victory through defeat. In the instant when he receives the deadly wound, his opponent falls to the ground, himself struck a final blow. For he strikes love and is thus himself struck by love. And by letting itself be struck, love proves what had to be proven: that it is indeed love.”

Love True Victory Defeat And Attitude

Book:Heart of the World

Source: Heart of the World

“What you are is God's gift to you, what you become is your gift to God.”

Inspirational Philosophy God Spirituality Christianity Gift Catholicism Christian Living

Book:Prayer

Source: Prayer

“Nevertheless, in a passage that is very often commented upon because it summarizes the entire salvific economy of faith, the Apostle calls Christ the 'pioneer and perfecter of our faith' (Heb. 12:2), because he has to accomplish the same act as the Christian, only in the opposite direction, as it were. Whereas by venturing to let go of everything the Christian takes a stand beyond finitude and comes into the limitlessness of God, Christ, in order to make this act possible and to be its source, has dared to emerge from the infinitude of the 'form of God' and 'did not think equality with God a thing to be grasped,' has dared to set out into the limitation and emptiness of time. This involved a transcendence and a boundary crossing no less fundamental than that of the Christian, and Christ undertook it so as to entrust himself henceforth within time, with no guarantee or mitigation from eternity, to the Father's will, which is always given to him in the present moment.”

God Jesus Christianity The Incarnation

Book:The Christian and Anxiety

Source: The Christian and Anxiety

“The full Christian experience, however, is not an individual experience which may be isolated from all else; it is, unconditionally, an experience within the context of the Church. It is 'a personal history which is imbedded in the greater history of the Church - a spiritual becoming which is incarnate and is lived within the Church's own process of becoming. It is the effort to develop what has been given, to discover what is hidden, the effort to attain to oneself by attaining, though the Church and within her, to the mystery of Christ, the Saviour'.”

Church Christian Experience

Author:Hans Urs von Balthasar

“The uneasy conscience that many Christians have, and the anxiety based on it, do not come about because they are sinners and backsliders but because they have stopped believing in the truth and efficacy of their beliefs; they measure the power of faith by their own weakness, they project God's world into their own psychological makeup instead of letting God measure them. They do something that Christians are forbidden to do; they observe faith from the outside; they doubt the power of hope; they deprive themselves of the power of love; and they lie down to rest in the chasm between the demands of Christianity and their own failure, in a chasm that, for a Christian, is no place at all. Is it any wonder that anxiety seizes them on account of this placelessness?”

God Faith Peace Morality Anxiety Guilt

Book:The Christian and Anxiety

Source: The Christian and Anxiety

About the Author

Known for: Author
Quotes: 19

Books & Sources

Unless You Become Like This ChildRelated source material

The Christian and AnxietyRelated source material

Heart of the WorldRelated source material

PrayerRelated source material

Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory : The Last ActRelated source material

Hans Urs von Balthasar Biography

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