Quotes from Hans Urs von Balthasar

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.

Christian obedience, by its very nature, has a heroic character.

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.

There will never be beings unloved by God, since God is absolute love.

There is much in Christianity which can be subjected to exact analysis. But the ultimate things are shrouded in the silent mysteries of God.

The saints are never the kind of killjoy spinster aunts who go in for faultfinding and lack all sense of humor.

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

Even if a unity of faith is not possible, a unity of love is.

Prior to an individual's encounter with the love of God at a particular time in history, however, there has to be another, more fundamental and archetypal encounter, which belongs to the conditions of possibility of the appearance of divine love to man.

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.

Whoever removes the Cross and its interpretation by the New Testament from the center, in order to replace it, for example, with the social commitment of Jesus to the oppressed as a new center, no longer stands in continuity with the apostolic faith.

Without a doubt, at the center of the New Testament there stands the Cross, which receives its interpretation from the Resurrection.