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Only by entering does one experience; only by cooperating in the experiment does one ask at all; and only he who asks receives an answer.
Jesus is “word”, and thus it becomes clear that his teaching is he himself. If one reads the sentence again with this insight, it then says: I am by no means just I; I am not mine at all; my I is that of another.
Where faith has parted people, love can bind them together. Jesus versus Christ, and this means “away from dogma, onward to love”.
The person of Jesus is his teaching, and his teaching is he himself. Christian faith, that is, faith in Jesus as the Christ, is therefore truly “personal faith”. What this means can really be understood only from this standpoint. Such faith is not the acceptance of a system but the acceptance of this person who is his word; of the word as person and of the person as Word.
“Christian faith is not centered on ideas but on a person, an ‘I’, and on one that is defined as ‘word’ and ‘son’, that is, as ‘total openness’.”
As king he is a servant, and as the servant of God he is king.
The only real ancient parallel to the description of Jesus as the Son of God (which expresses a new understanding of power, kingship, election, indeed, of humanity) occurs in the description of Emperor Augustus as “son of God”
So both in the ancient East and again in imperial Rome, the title “son of God” is—let us be quite clear about this—a piece of political theology.
this means that the future of man lies in “being for”. This
From the standpoint of Christian faith one may say that for history God stands at the end, while for being he stands at the beginning.
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,
Being a Christian is in its first aim not an individual but a social charisma. One is not a Christian because only Christians are saved; one is a Christian because for history Christian loving service has meaning and is a necessity.
Being a Christian means essentially changing over from being for oneself to being for one another.
The cosmic Nothing is the true All, because “for” is the really divine thing.
The calculatingly righteous man, who thinks he can keep his own shirtfront white and build himself up inside it, is the unrighteous man.
the new-made wine amounted to between 130 and 190 gallons, a somewhat unusual quantity for a private banquet!
And both point back, as we found with the principle of “for”, to the structural law of creation, in which life squanders a million seeds in order to save one living one; in which a whole universe is squandered in order to prepare at one point a place for spirit, for man. Excess is God’s trademark in his creation; as the Fathers put it, “God does not reckon his gifts by the measure.”
the truly breathtaking fact that God, in an incredible outpouring of himself, expends not only a universe but his own self in order to lead man, a speck of dust, to salvation.
man comes in the most profound sense to himself, not through what he does, but through what he accepts. He must wait for the gift of love, and love can only be received as a gift. It cannot be “made” on one’s own, without anyone else; one must wait for it, let it be given to one. And one cannot become wholly man in any other way than by being loved, by letting oneself be loved.
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.
God showed himself obedient, obedient unto death. In the belief that he was becoming like God, Adam turned completely away from him. He withdrew into loneliness, and yet God was fellowship.49
that the six principles finally coalesce into the one principle of love.
“So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor
so now she appears as the temple upon which descends the cloud in which God walks into the midst of history.
it has always been a basic tenet of the Christian faith that Jesus is completely God and completely man.
In Jesus, God has placed, in the midst of barren, hopeless mankind, a new beginning that is not a product of human history but a gift from above.
But Christian faith really means precisely the acknowledgment that God is not the prisoner of his own eternity, not limited to the solely spiritual; that he is capable of operating here and now, in the midst of my world, and that he did operate in it through Jesus, the new Adam, who was born of the Virgin Mary through the creative power of God, whose spirit hovered over the waters at the very beginning, who created being out of nothing.
the true “daughter of Zion”, Mary is the image of the Church, the image of believing man, who can come to salvation and to himself only through the gift of love—through grace.
Worship follows in Christianity first of all in thankful acceptance of the divine deed of salvation.
The New Testament is the story of the God who of his own accord wished to become, in Christ, the Omega—the last letter—in the alphabet of creation. It is the story of the God who is himself the act of love, the pure “for”, and who therefore necessarily puts on the disguise of the smallest worm (Ps 22:6 [21:7]). It is the story of the God who identifies himself with his creature and in this contineri a minimo, in being grasped and overpowered by the least of his creatures, displays that “excess” that identifies him as God.
So according to Plato the truly just man must be misunderstood and persecuted in this world; indeed, Plato goes so far as to write: “They will say that our just man will be scourged, racked, fettered, will have his eyes burned out, and at last, after all manner of suffering, will be crucified.”
Thou art such, man, that thou canst not bear the just man—that he who simply loves becomes a fool, a scourged criminal, an outcast.
This is how it is with man; this is man. The truth of man is his complete lack of truth. The saying in the Psalms that every man is a liar
The Cross is thus truly the center of revelation, a revelation that does not reveal any previously unknown principles but reveals us to ourselves by revealing us before God and God in our midst.
“God is dead and we have killed him.” This saying of Nietzsche’s belongs linguistically to the tradition of Christian Passiontide piety; it expresses the content of Holy Saturday, “descended into hell”.7
No calling seems to be able to awaken God. The rationalist seems entitled to say to us, “Pray louder, perhaps your God will then wake up.” “Descended into hell”; how true this is of our time, the descent of God into muteness, into the dark silence of the absent.
it denotes a loneliness that the word love can no longer penetrate and that therefore indicates the exposed nature of existence in itself.
love demands infinity, indestructibility; indeed, it is, so to speak, a call for infinity. But it is also a fact that this cry of love’s cannot be satisfied, that it demands infinity but cannot grant it; that it claims eternity but in fact is included in the world of death,
So he takes refuge in the idea of fame, which should make him really immortal if he lives on through all ages in the memory of others.
If this is so, then only one could truly give lasting stability: he who is, who does not come into existence and pass away again but abides in the midst of transience:
to us—curious reasoning of St. Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians now becomes comprehensible: if he has risen, then we have, too, for then love is stronger than death; if he has not risen, then we have not either, for then the situation is still that death has the last word, nothing else (cf. 1 Cor
one encounters the risen Christ in the word and in the sacrament;
One cannot have both the Christian faith and “religion within the bounds of pure reason”; a choice is unavoidable. He who believes will see more and more clearly, it is true, how rational it is to have faith in the love that has conquered death.
Hell consists in man’s being unwilling to receive anything, in his desire to be self-sufficient.
Hell is wanting only to be oneself; what happens when man barricades himself up in himself.
“Heaven” is by nature what one has not made oneself and cannot make oneself; in
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.
then it means the beginning of “eschatology”, of the end of the world.
Jesus has time and does not anticipate in sinful impatience the will of the Father. “Hence the Son, who has time, in the world, for God, is the point at which God has time for the world.
it becomes clear once again that the New Testament rightly depicts this Resurrection as the eschatological happening.
