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. — Hans Urs von Balthasar Copy Share Image
“The flight away from self to God is not a "forgetting self" in the sense that man thereby loses himself. Rather, in the experience of the Spirit there is bestowed on man the deepest possible experience of himself: for the… — Hans Urs von Balthasar Copy Share Image
Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness… — Hans Urs von Balthasar Copy Share Image
The work with which we embark on this first volume of a series of theological studies is a work with which the philosophical person… — Hans Urs von Balthasar Copy Share Image
The Holy Spirit knows what a particular age's most pressing need is far better than men with their programs. — Hans Urs von Balthasar Copy Share Image
The first attempt at a response: there must have been a fall, a decline, and the road to salvation can only be the return… — Hans Urs von Balthasar Copy Share Image
There is a moment when the interior light of the "eyes of faith" becomes one with the exterior light that shines from Christ, and… — Hans Urs von Balthasar Copy Share Image
A truth that is merely handed on, without being thought anew from its very foundations, has lost its vital power. — Hans Urs von Balthasar Copy Share Image
But the issue is not only life and death but our existence before God and our being judged by him. All of us were… — Hans Urs von Balthasar Copy Share Image
Faith means the fundamental response to the love that has offered itself up for me. It thus becomes clear that faith is ordered primarily… — Hans Urs von Balthasar Copy Share Image
Hell is to be contemplated strictly as a matter which concerns me alone. As part of the spiritual life it belongs behind the 'closed… — Hans Urs von Balthasar Copy Share Image
What you are is God's gift to you, what you become is your gift to God. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar Copy Share Image
Above all we must not wish to cling to our suffering. Suffering surely deepens us and enhances our person, but we must not desire… — Hans Urs von Balthasar Copy Share Image
