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Anyone who makes Marx the philosopher of theology adopts the primacy of politics and economics, which now become the real powers that can bring about salvation (and, if misused, can wreak havoc).
Since the real message that he brings is not a doctrine but his very person, we must of course add that this “I” of Jesus refers absolutely to the “Thou” of the Father and is not self-sufficient; rather, it is indeed truly a “way”. “My teaching is not mine” (Jn 7:16). “I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me” (Jn 5:30).
The mystical dimension of the concept of God, which the Asian religions bring with them as a challenge to us, must clearly be decisive for our thinking, too, and for our faith. God has become quite concrete in Christ, but in this way his mystery has also become still greater. God is always infinitely greater than all our concepts and all our images and names.
Ever since the Prologue to the Gospel of John, the concept of logos has been at the very center of our Christian faith in God. Logos signifies reason, meaning, or even “word”—a meaning, therefore, that is Word, that is relationship, that is creative.
The world is not just maya, appearance, which we must ultimately leave behind. It is not merely the endless wheel of sufferings, from which we must try to escape. It is something positive. It is good, despite all the evil in it and despite all the sorrow, and it is good to live in it.
Faith in the Logos, the Word in the beginning, understands moral values as responsibility, as a response to the Word, and thus gives them their intelligibility as well as their essential orientation.
Just as the believer is choked by the salt water of doubt constantly washed into his mouth by the ocean of uncertainty, so the nonbeliever is troubled by doubts about his unbelief, about the real totality of the world he has made up his mind to explain as a self-contained whole.
It signifies the deliberate view that what cannot be seen, what can in no wise move into the field of vision, is not unreal; that, on the contrary, what cannot be seen in fact represents true reality, the element that supports and makes possible all the rest of reality.
Indeed belief is the conversion in which man discovers that he is following an illusion if he devotes himself only to the tangible.
For the ancient world and the Middle Ages, being itself is true, in other words, apprehensible, because God, pure intellect, made it, and he made it by thinking it. To the creative original spirit, the Creator Spiritus, thinking and making are one and the same thing.
Things are, because they are thought. In the ancient and medieval view, all being is, therefore, what has been thought, the thought of the absolute spirit. Conversely, this means that since all being is thought, all being is meaningful, logos, truth.9
Man can rethink the logos, the meaning of being, because his own logos, his own reason, is logos of the one logos, thought of the original thought, of the creative spirit that permeates and governs his being.
Thus in the thirteenth century the great Franciscan theologian Bonaventure felt obliged to reproach his colleagues of the philosophical faculty at Paris with having learned how to measure the world but having forgotten how to measure themselves.
And further: Christian belief—as we have already said—means opting for the view that what cannot be seen is more real than what can be seen. It is an avowal of the primacy of the invisible as the truly real, which upholds us and hence enables us to face the visible with calm composure—knowing that we are responsible before the invisible as the true ground of all things.
The tool with which man is equipped to deal with the truth of being is not knowledge but understanding: understanding of the meaning to which he has entrusted himself.
The corollary of this is that by the inner structure of faith our relationship to God and our fellowship with man cannot be separated from each other; the relationship to God, to the “You”, and to the “We” are intertwined; they do not stand alongside each other.
We unthinkingly assume that pure thought is greater than love, while the message of the Gospel, and the Christian picture of God contained in it, corrects philosophy and lets us know that love is higher than mere thought. Absolute thought is a kind of love; it is not unfeeling idea, but creative, because it is love.
a. The philosophical God is essentially self-centered, thought simply contemplating itself. The God of faith is basically defined by the category of relationship.
It becomes apparent that truth and love are originally identical; that where they are completely realized they are not two parallel or even opposing realities but one, the one and only absolute.
In other words, faith means deciding for the view that thought and meaning do not just form a chance by-product of being; that, on the contrary, all being is a product of thought and, indeed, in its innermost structure is itself thought.
The other possibility points in the opposite direction. It says: Whoever looks thoroughly at matter will discover that it is being-thought, objectivized thought. So it cannot be the ultimate. On the contrary, before it comes thinking, the idea; all being is ultimately being-thought and can be traced back to mind as the original reality; this is the “idealistic” solution.
The Christian belief in God is not completely identical with either of these two solutions. To be sure, it, too, will say, being is being-thought. Matter itself points beyond itself to thinking as the earlier and more original factor. But in opposition to idealism, which makes all being into moments of an all-embracing consciousness, the Christian belief in God will say: Being is being-thought—yet not in such a way that it remains only thought and that the appearance of independence proves to be mere appearance to anyone who looks more closely.
Christian belief in God means that things are the being-thought of a creative consciousness, of a creative freedom, and that the creative consciousness that bears up all things has released what has been thought into the freedom of its own, independent existence. In this it goes beyond any mere idealism.
At the beginning of all being it puts not just some kind of consciousness but a creative freedom that creates further freedoms. To this extent one could very well describe Christianity as a philosophy of freedom. For Christianity, the explanation of reality as a whole is not an all-embracing consciousness or one single materiality; on the contrary, at the summit stands a freedom that thinks and, by thinking, creates freedoms, thus making freedom the structural form of all being.
But if the logos of all being, the being that upholds and encompasses everything, is consciousness, freedom, and love, then it follows automatically that the supreme factor in the world is not cosmic necessity but freedom. The implications of this are very extensive. For this leads to the conclusion that freedom is evidently the necessary structure of the world, as it were, and this again means that one can only comprehend the world as incomprehensible, that it must be incomprehensibility.
This new experience of God is followed finally by a third, the experience of the Spirit, the presence of God in us, in our innermost being. And again it turns out that this “Spirit” is not simply identical either with the Father or the Son, nor is he yet a third thing erected between God and us; it is the manner in which God gives himself to us, in which he enters into us, so that he is in man yet, in the midst of this “indwelling”, is infinitely above him.
This too, mutatis mutandis, is true of the question of God. There is no such thing as a mere observer. There is no such thing as pure objectivity.
The experience of the God who conducts a dialogue, of the God who is not only logos but also dia-logos, not only idea and meaning but speech and word in the reciprocal exchanges of partners in conversation—this experience exploded the ancient division of reality
It is the nature of the trinitarian personality to be pure relation and so the most absolute unity.
It is identity of logos (truth) and love and thus makes love into the logos, the truth of human existence. The essence of the faith demanded by a Christology so understood is consequently entry into the universal openness of unconditional love. For to believe in a Christ so understood means simply to make love the content of faith, so that from this angle one can perfectly well say, love is faith.
Therefore it is also true that faith that is not love is not a really Christian faith; it only seems to be such—a fact that must redound both against any doctrinalistic misunderstanding of the Catholic concept of faith and against the secularization of love that proceeds in Luther from the notion of justification exclusively by faith.13
For man is the more himself the more he is with “the other”. He only comes to himself by moving away from himself. Only through “the other” and through “being” with “the other” does he come to himself.
But in Christ the countenance of him who is to come is already revealed: it will be the man who can embrace all men because he has lost himself and them to God.
Christian faith is not based on the atomized individual but comes from the knowledge that there is no such thing as the mere individual, that, on the contrary, man is himself only when he is fitted into the whole: into mankind, into history, into the cosmos, as is right and proper for a being who is “spirit in body”.
Louis Evely has expressed this perception splendidly: The whole history of mankind was led astray, suffered a break, because of Adam’s false idea of God. He wanted to be like God. I hope that you never thought that Adam’s sin lay in this. . . . Had God not invited him to nourish this desire? Adam only deluded himself about the model. He thought God was an independent, autonomous being sufficient to himself; and in order to become like him he rebelled and showed disobedience. But when God revealed himself, when God willed to show who he was, he appeared as love, tenderness, as outpouring of
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In the New Testament the situation is almost completely reversed. It is not man who goes to God with a compensatory gift, but God who comes to man, in order to give to him. He restores disturbed right on the initiative of his own power to love, by making unjust man just again, the dead living again, through his own creative mercy.
God does not wait until the guilty come to be reconciled; he goes to meet them and reconciles them. Here we can see the true direction of the Incarnation, of the Cross.
The essential form of Christian worship is therefore rightly called Eucharistia, thanksgiving. In this form of worship human achievements are not placed before God; on the contrary, it consists in man’s letting himself be endowed with gifts; we do not glorify God by supposedly giving to him out of our resources—as if they were not his already!—but by letting ourselves be endowed with his own gifts and thus recognizing him as the only Lord.
1. In view of the New Testament’s message of love, there is more and more of a tendency today to resolve the Christian religion completely into brotherly love, “fellowship”, and not to admit any direct love of God or adoration of God: only the horizontal is recognized; the vertical of immediate relationship to God is denied.
This article thus asserts that Christ strode through the gate of our final loneliness, that in his Passion he went down into the abyss of our abandonment. Where no voice can reach us any longer, there is he. Hell is thereby overcome, or, to be more accurate, death, which was previously hell, is hell no longer.
First of all, it is quite clear that after his Resurrection Christ did not go back to his previous earthly life, as we are told the young man of Nain and Lazarus did. He rose again to definitive life, which is no longer governed by chemical and biological laws and therefore stands outside the possibility of death, in the eternity conferred by love.
He who had been transposed into the other world of God showed himself powerful enough to make it palpably clear that he himself stood in their presence again, that in him the power of love had really proved itself stronger than the power of death.
Hell consists in man’s being unwilling to receive anything, in his desire to be self-sufficient. It is the expression of enclosure in one’s own being alone.
Hell is wanting only to be oneself; what happens when man barricades himself up in himself.
As fulfilled love, heaven can always only be granted to man; but hell is the loneliness of the man who will not accept it, who declines the status of beggar and withdraws into himself.
Christ is really, as St. John’s Gospel says, the “door” between God and man (Jn 10:9), the “mediator” (1 Tim 2: 5), in whom the Eternal One has time.
“objective mind” is always derived from subjective mind; it points back to person, mind’s only real mode of existence.
if it is true that at the end stands the triumph of spirit, that is, the triumph of truth, freedom, and love, then it is not just some force or other that finally ends up victorious; what stands at the end is a countenance. The omega of the world is a “you”, a person, an individual.
Church and sacrament stand or fall together; a Church without sacraments would be an empty organization, and sacraments without a Church would be rites without meaning or inner cohesion.
It now also becomes clear that the real heart of the faith in resurrection does not consist at all in the idea of the restoration of bodies, to which we have reduced it in our thinking; such is the case even though this is the pictorial image used throughout the Bible.
