come and see

Why has faith still any chance at all? I should say it is because it corresponds to the nature of man. For man is more generously proportioned than the way Kant and the various post-Kantian philosophies see him or will allow him to be. The longing for the infinite is alive and unquenchable within man. None of the attempted answers will do; only the God who himself became finite in order to tear open our finitude and lead us out into the open space of his infinity, only he corresponds to the question of our being.

Anyone who entrusts himself to faith becomes aware that both exist: the radical character of grace that frees helpless man and, no less, the abiding seriousness of the responsibility that summons man day after day.  Both together mean that the Christian enjoys, on the one hand, the liberating, detached tranquility of him who lives on that excess of divine justice known as Jesus Christ.  There is a tranquility that knows: in the last analysis, I cannot destroy what he has built up....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's hands.  At the same time the Christian knows, however, that he is not free to do whatever he pleases, that his activity is not a game that God allows him and does not take seriously.  He knows that he must answer for his actions, that he owes an account as a steward for what has been entrusted to him.  There can only be responsibility where there is someone to be responsible to, someone to put the questions.  Faith in the Last Judgment holds this questioning of our life over our heads so that we cannot forget it for a moment.  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.

Heaven is not a place that, before Christ's Ascension, was barred off by a positive, punitive decree of God's, to be opened up one day in just as positive a way.  On the contrary, the reality of heaven only comes into existence through the confluence of God and man.

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.  Neither is the same any longer because there is life in the midst of death, because love dwells in it.

Anyone who has stretched his existence so wide that he is simultaneously immersed in God and in the depths of the God-forsaken creature is bound to be torn asunder, as it were; such a one is truly 'crucified'.  But this process of being torn apart is identical with love; it is its realization to the extreme and the concrete expression of the breadth it creates....It is not pain as such that counts but the breadth of the love that spans existence so completely that it unites the distant and the near, bringing God-forsaken man into relation with God.  It alone gives the pain an aim and a meaning.

...from the point of view of the Christian faith, 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.  That love represents simultaneously both man's highest possibility and his deepest need and that this most necessary thing is at the same time the freest and the most unenforceable means precisely that for his 'salvation' man is meant to rely on receiving.  If he declines to let himself be presented with the gift, then he destroys himself.  Activity that makes itself into an absolute, that aims at achieving humanity by its own efforts alone, is in contradiction with man's being.

...all man's efforts to go beyond himself can never suffice.  He who only wants to give and is not ready to receive, he who only wants to exist for others and is unwilling to recognize that he for his part, too, lives on the unexpected, unprovokable gift of others' 'for', fails to recognize the basic mode of human existence and is thus bound to destroy the true meaning of living 'for one another'.  To be fruitful, all self-sacrifices demand acceptance by others and, in the last analysis, by the other who is the truly other of all mankind and at the same time completely one with it: the God-man Jesus Christ.

Christian faith demands the individual but wants him for the whole and not for himself.

Just as self-love is not the primordial form of love but at the most a derivative of it, just as one has only arrived at the specific nature of love when one has grasped it as a relation, that is, something coming from another, so, too, human knowledge is only reality when it is being known, being brought to knowledge, and thus again 'from another'.

Man is man by reaching out infinitely beyond himself, and he is consequently more of a man the less enclosed he is in himself, the less 'limited' he is.

...to him who died on the Cross, to him who renounced all earthly power, to him who laid aside the sword and, instead of sending others to their death (as earthly kings do), himself went to his death for others, to him who saw the meaning of human existence, not in power and self-assertion, but in existing utterly for others - who indeed was, as the Cross shows, existence for others - to him and him alone God has said, 'You are my son, today I have begotten you.'  In the crucified Christ those who believe see what the meaning of that oracle, what the meaning of being chosen is: not privilege and power for oneself, but service to others.

To John, 'Son' means being from another; thus, with this word he defines the being of this man as being from another and for others, as a being that is completely open on both sides, knows no reserved area of the mere 'I'...This fundamental statement about Christ becomes at the same time the explanation of Christian existence.  To John, being a Christian means being like the Son, becoming a son; that is, not standing on one's own and in oneself, but living completely open in the 'from' and the 'toward'.

To him who believes in God as tri-une, the highest unity is not the unity of inflexible monotony.  The model of unity or oneness toward which one should strive is consequently not the indivisibility of the atom, the smallest unity, which cannot be divided up any further; the authentic acme of unity is the unity created by love.  The multi-unity that grows in love is a more radical, truer unity than the unity of the 'atom'.

In a world that in the last analysis is not mathematics but love, the minimum is the maximum; the smallest thing that can love is one of the biggest things; the particular is more than the universal; the person, the unique and unrepeatable, is at the same time the ultimate and highest thing.

...a new concept of power and a new concept of lordship and dominion are born.  The highest power is demonstrated as the calm willingness completely to renounce all power; and we are shown that it is powerful, not through force, but only through the freedom of love, which, even when it is rejected, is stronger than the exultant powers of earthly violence.

The philosophical God is essentially self-centered, thought simply contemplating itself.  The God of faith is basically defined by the category of relationship.  He is creative fullness encompassing the whole....The philosophical God is pure thought: he is based on the notion that thought and thought alone is divine.  The God of faith, as thought, is also love.  His image is based on the conviction that to love is divine...it becomes apparent that truth and love are originally identical.