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.
From Hans Urs von Balthasar
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.
Not longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man.
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.
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.
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.
The Passion narratives are the first pieces of the Gospels that were composed as a unity.
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.
Thus it is necessary to commence from an inescapable duality: the finite is not the infinite.
To be sure, the response of faith to revelation, which God grants to the creature he chooses and moves with his love, occurs in such a way that it is truly the creature that provides the response, with its own nature and its natural powers of love.
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