M All Urs Quotes & Sayings

Firstly, prayer is a conversation between God and the soul, and secondly, a particular language is spoken: God's language. Prayer is dialogue, not man's monologue before God. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

In this sense, the methodological form that comes into play here is ultimately quite simple: Scripture is interpreted by Scripture. Scripture interprets itself. Attentive listening to Scripture's own internal self-interpretation is very characteristic of Redemptoris Mater. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

Wonder - the enthusiastic ardor for the sublimity of being, for its worthiness to be an object of knowledge - promises to become the point of departure for genuine insight only where it has reached the stage in which the subject, overwhelmed by the object, has, as it were, fused into a single point or into nothing ... like the movement of hope and love toward God, which is genuine and selfless only where it has assumed the attitude of pure worship of God for his own sake. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

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. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

I love seeing tattoos on 60-year-olds who have had them for 40 years. — Urs Fischer

Gregory of Nyssa, in contrast, tries to advance philosophical and theological arguments to prove that the pains of hell cannot be co-eternal with God. His main argument is based on the essential superiority of good over evil; for evil, in its essence, can never be absolute and unlimited. The sinner inevitably reaches a limit when all his evil is done and he cannot go farther, just as the night, after having reached its peak, turns toward the day.18 This reasoning corresponds to the example of a physician who allows a boil to mature until it can be lanced. Thus the Incarnation, too, occurred only when evil had reached its climax.19 Gregory's position has never been condemned. — 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. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

The inner reality of love can be recognized only by love. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

The Word, then, came into the world - came to what was his, but those who were his did not receive him. He beamed into the gloom, but the darkness turned away. Thus had love's revelation to choose a struggle of life and death. God came into the world, but a bristling barrier of spears and shields was his welcome. His grace began to trickle, but the world made itself supple and impenetrable, and the drops fell to the ground. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

The person whose house has been cleared of demonic influence retains an uncanny susceptibility and vulnerability. Care must be redoubled, for the "unclean spirit" wanders through waste places and finds no rest; it forces its way back into its former habitation and "finds it empty, swept and put in order. Then he goes and brings with him seven other spirits more evil than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first" (Mt 12:43 ff). The person to whom Jesus has said "Go and sin no more" (Jn 8:11) must be supported until he is sufficiently established in his new freedom. But — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

Christian obedience, by its very nature, has a heroic character. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

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. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

We do not build the kingdom of God on earth by our own efforts (however assisted by grace); the most we can do through genuine prayer, is to make as much room as possible, in ourselves and in the world, for the kingdom of God, so that its energies can go to work. All that we can show our contemporaries of the reality of God springs from contemplation: Jesus Christ, the Church, our own selves. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

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

I think when tattoos are new and colorful, they look bad. But they look better the older and more bleached out they become. — Urs Fischer

Life is one long decay, no? There's a lot of beauty in it. Like the patina in an old city. — Urs Fischer

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

Instead, it is the reality that the God-forsaken one experienced in an eminent way because no one can even approximately experience the abandonment by God as horribly as the Son, who shares the same essence with the Father for all eternity. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

What is the art world? I never really understood. I started doing this stuff to do what I want to do. Not to be this or that. — Urs Fischer

When everything is blocked off,' I was told by a dear friend who lives in Erfurt, one must try to live in the interstices.' Apparently, the Christians of the Apocalypse, though they did not bear the sign of the beast, had discovered or created such spaces. From islands like these, true culture, Christian culture, may spread across the earth. Many people are athirst for it. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

But there is also a depth-psychology which can discover in physical sickness a spiritual guilt, a person's covert acquiescence in being bound by the "strong man" in such a way that he cannot break free. Here Jesus starts by loosing the spiritual bond: the first thing he says to the lame man who is set before him is: "My son, your sins are forgiven you," and only after his power to forgive sins has been called into question does he utter the second word (which was in principle included in the first): "Rise, take up your pallet and go home" (Mt 2:5, 11). To the sick man by the pool, whom Jesus knew to have been "lying there a long time", he gave this admonition: "See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse befall you" (Jn 5:6, 14). The — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

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. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

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. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

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

God is not, in the first place, 'absolute power', but 'absolute love', — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

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

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

It is as if the fact that God is light, penetrating and manifesting everything, is so absolutely important that darkness and bondage can and must exist for the light's sake. — 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. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

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