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how the reality of belief in the return of Christ is to be conceived: as faith in the final unification of reality by spirit or mind.
implies that the cosmos is moving toward a unification in the personal.
Anyone who entrusts himself to faith becomes aware that both exist: the radical character of the grace that frees helpless man and, no less, the abiding seriousness of the responsibility that summons man day after day.
This is the source of a profound freedom, a knowledge of God’s unrepentant love; he sees through all our errors and remains well disposed to us. It becomes possible to do one’s own work fearlessly; it has shed its sinister aspect because it has lost its power to destroy: the
issue of the world does not depend on
us but is in God’...
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Nothing and no one empowers us to trivialize the tremendous seriousness involved in such knowledge; it shows our life to be a serious business and precisely by doing so gives it its dignity.
It is not a stranger who judges us but he whom we know in faith. The judge will not advance to meet us as the entirely Other, but as one of us, who knows human existence from inside and has suffered.
“Fear not, it is I”
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.
We are tempted to say, if we are honest with ourselves, that the Church is neither holy nor catholic:
William said that the barbarism of the Church had to make everyone who saw it go rigid with horror: “We are no longer dealing with a bride but with a monster of terrible deformity and ferocity.”1
The holiness of the Church consists in that power of sanctification which God exerts in her in spite of human sinfulness.
One could actually say that precisely in her paradoxical combination of holiness and unholiness the Church is in fact the shape taken by grace in this world.
revealed what true “holiness” is: not separation, but union; not judgment, but redeeming love. Is the Church not simply the continuation of God’s deliberate plunge into human wretchedness;
refers, first, to local unity—only the community united with the bishop is the “Catholic Church”, not the sectional groups that have broken away from her, for whatever reasons.
Rather, the basic elements of the Church appear as forgiveness, conversion, penance, eucharistic communion, and hence plurality and unity: plurality of the local Churches that yet remain “the Church” only through incorporation in the unity of the one Church. This unity is first and foremost the unity of Word and sacrament: the Church is one through the one Word and the one bread.
Only if she is “catholic”, that is, visibly one in spite of all her variety, does she correspond to the demand of the Creed.
man can no longer totally perish because he is known and loved by God. All love wants eternity, and God’s love not only wants it but effects it and is it. In fact the biblical idea of awakening grew directly out of this dialogical theme: he who prays knows in faith that God will restore the right (Job 19:25ff.; Ps 73: 23ff.);
“It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail.”
because he knows there is such a thing as meaning, he can and must cheerfully and intrepidly do the work of history, even though from his little segment of it he will have the feeling that it is a labor of Sisyphus and that the stone of human destiny is rolled anew, generation after generation, up the hill only to roll down again once more and nullify all previous efforts.
