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Two Say Why
 Two Say Why

Why I am Still a Christian

by
HANS URS VON BALTHASAR
and

Why I am Still in the Church

by
JOSEPH RATZINGER

Translated by
JOHN GRIFFITHS

REMOVED FROM THE

ALVERNO COLLEGE LIBRARY

Search Press
London
Franciscan Herald Press
hicago
 This translation first published in 1973 by
Search Press Limited, 85 Gloucester Road, London SW7 4SU
and
Franciscan Herald Press, 1434 West 51st Street, Chicago,
Illinois 60609

TWO SAY WHY: Why I am Still a Christian, by Hans Urs von

Balthasar, and Why I am Still in the Church, by Joseph Ratzinger,
translated from the German by John Griffiths (the original
appeared as Volume 57 of the Miinchener Akademie-Schriften of the
Catholic Academy of Bavaria, published by Késel-Verlag,
Munich). Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74—169057.
ISBN: 8199-0434-1 (USA). This translation Copyright © 1971 by
Franciscan Herald Press, 1434 West 51st Street, Chicago, Illinois
60609.

Nihil Obstat:
Marion A. Habig O.F.M.
Censor Deputatus

Imprimatur:
Rt. Rev. Mgr. Francis W. Byrne
Vicar General, Archdiocese of Chicago
September 22, 1971

“The Nihil Obstat and the Imprimatur are official declarations

that a book or pamphlet is free of doctrinal error. No implication
is contained therein that those who have granted the Nihil
Obstat and Imprimatur agree with the contents, opinions, or
statements expressed.”

Set in Intertype Baskerville,

printed in Great Britain by The Anchor Press Ltd,
and bound by Wm. Brendon & Son Ltd, both of Tiptree, Essex

ISBN 0 85532 289 6 (UK)

 Contents

I WHY I AM STILL A CHRISTIAN

. Alpha
. The Challenge
. Relative Singularities
. Absolute Singularity
. The Eschatological Moment: Its Form
. The Eschatological Moment: Its Content
Pf
aN
DN
WO
OO. Destruction of the Eschatological Moment

II WHY I AM STILL IN THE CHURCH

. Introductory Thoughts on the State of the

Church
. An Image of the Essence of the Church
. Why I Stay in the Church
Notes
Biographical Notes
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 i
Why I Am Still a Christian
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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 1. Alpha
At one time the Church was more assured and convinced
of its unique character and mission, and power to affect
the world, than it has been ever since. Yet those were
the very centuries when it was least concerned to examine
its own nature and to define it theologically. Even
Aquinas produced no special treatise on the Church,
which was conceived as the ultimate form of all human
society, ideally gathered together in the “kingdom” (more
realistically, the Holy Roman Empire), and directed to
the God from whom it derived. It was a “form” to be
applied to the “matter” of humanity; the yeast whose
savour was apparent only when mixed into “three
bushels of meal” (though, of course, that was also the
time when the Church’s missionary activity was least evi-
dent).
With the dawn of the modern age, however, the secu-
lar sphere began increasingly to seek an independence
which set it apart from the sacred. This process led even-
tually to the theory of “‘two social entities, each perfect in
itself’, one secular and the other spiritual, whose in-
terests coincided only marginally. Of course this was also
10 TWO SAY WHY

the time when the Church could begin to see itself ob-
jectively — the spring-time of a largely institutional
ecclesiology. This seems at first to have been as inevit-
able as the liberation of the secular sciences from their
sacral strait-jacket. Yet in recalling today the disciples’
original mission to all nations, the function of the Chris-
tian community as leaven, and the former ideal of a
secular-cum-spiritual “Christendom”, the second Vatican
Council has again acknowledged that the “Church” (as
“form’’) essentially transcends the world (as “matter’’).
It has thrown the doors wide open yet reminded Chris-
tians of their basic apostolic duty.
It seems somewhat romantic — this dream of refur-
bishing the medieval ideal in a wholly different situation :
a desacralized world suspicious of and fundamentally an-
tagonistic to a fossilized, self-enclosed Church; even
more so when the attempt is to be made by a constantly
dwindling band of Christians on behalf of a self-suffi-
cient world perfecting itself under its own steam. Yet
the first disciples had to contend with a pagan world-
civilization and the political and military security of an
immense area. No less utopian a dream, in fact. But in
little more than two hundred years that immensity had
been Christianized.
Admittedly, in those years an invincible, intensive force
was at work: one utterly convinced of its uniqueness and
ability to win through. But what conviction has Vatican
IT shown in sending its renewed Christians out into the
world? Do they trust in the formative power of the pri-
 ALPHA II

mitive Church? Doesn’t this power have to be still greater

and yet emerge as an even more concentrated force from
a single emission point, precisely because the world on
which it is to be focussed is more complex, pluralistic
and self-contradictory than any ancient civilization could
ever have been?
In fact, Christian missionaries are asked to do some-
thing almost superhuman: they are required to change
from a static and self-enclosed to a dynamic and apostolic
Church which has both the power of unity (without
which it could have no unifying effect) and the ability to
expand into the diversity of this world (without which it
could not hope to penetrate the world as it is).
This is a programme for supermen: one that seems
in every way beyond the scope of mere human beings,
especially when we remember that the power of unity,
from which everything is to flow, is the power of the
crucified and powerless man who renounced the means
of power of this world, whereas the world possesses an
ever-growing arsenal of powerful aids to conquer human
problems and unify the world.
Perhaps I should use the word “saints” instead of
“supermen”, while attributing to them certain new
human dimensions: of being both in the power of the
source of all things and wholly at the utmost point of
its outpouring; of being wholly with the crucified Lord
and wholly with the human creatures whose need and
God-forsakenness Jesus shared to the point of identifi-
cation. Of course they wouldn’t have to be in two places
Eo TWO SAY WHY

at once; if they kept the right tension between the two

locations, they would be in only one place. Then they
would be doing exactly what a Christian life and mission
demand, and consequently would not need constantly
to worry how it ought really to be done, and whether men
were in fact capable of such a task anyway.
This is important. Just as Christian faith in what God
did for the world through Jesus can never be fully ex-
plained in rational terms (if it were possible to do so,
I would have understood this or that act of God, and
then it would no longer be an act of God for us), so the
Christian existence that is lived by virtue of that faith
can never locate itself definitively in relation to that faith.
It aspires to be an expression of that faith and therefore
contained in and formed by it. It does not have to trouble
itself with the insoluble problem of exactly what my re-
lationship as a failure and sinner is to the Lord whom I
proclaim and somehow represent: with the problem of
exactly what distance and closeness mean in this re-
lationship. It doesn’t have to worry about an even more
difficult problem referred to by Paul: What is my rela-
tion to the Christ-event?
Do I stand before the cross (which I always have to
aim for first of all), or in the cross and death itself, or
after the cross in the resurrection (which first makes pos-
sible my taking part in the Christ-event)? Which Lord
do I approach in the eucharist? The eternal Lord who
will never die again? Or the one who suffers his agony
until the world’s end, and whose death I show forth in
 ALPHA 13
every celebration of the eucharist? Or do these two modes
of existence merge indistinguishably, for the Lamb is upon
God’s throne, simultaneously living and “as though slain
from the beginning of the world”?
The mystery of Christian existence derives its strength
from faith in the mystery of Christ; therefore it is im-
penetrable, and no Christian who has any real claim to be
one will try to elucidate it. His existence is marked out by
two fixed points : that is from which he lives, and that to-
wards which he lives. The first is God in Christ; the
second is his fellow man. He himself can be a Christian
only by existing as the movement between those essential
points : a transition by the Holy Spirit.
Everything depends on correct discernment of the
alpha point, which holds the concentrated unifying force
that must spread out into the pluralism of the world.
The alpha certainly does not consist of me and of my
actions. My behaviour can only bear witness to what
preceded my self and has now confronted and affected
me. I shall be concerned with this alpha alone in the
following pages — with its properties and the evidence it
offers of its originality. The justification for my remain-
ing a Christian depends on the cogency of this evidence.
The point towards which we look is the grain of mus-
tard seed in the parable. It is smaller, more insignificant
and poorer than all the other seeds. It is merely “sown
upon the ground”, never displayed as a cultivated growth
but apparent only in the process of dying (decay) and
resurrection as ear and fruit. No contemplative “aesthet-
14 TWO SAY WHY
ics” can penetrate this “drama” of the mustard seed;
the most fundamental thing we can see is always what
happens (apparently of itself) between God and the
world. But the primary subject of this happening “of
itself” is always God. Whatever happens is what he does
and suffers: in the man Jesus Christ, and through him
for and in all men.
All subsequent problems have always to be related to
this foregoing dramatic point, however important they
may be as direct consequences of the principle. The ques-
tion is not, therefore, one concerning the relation of
the Christian alpha to others that have arisen in the course
of world history and also claim to be the starting-point.
Nor is it why I belong to any one Christian denomination
rather than another. Nor the question of the prerequis-
ites that are demanded of the Church and of the world
before the mustard seed bears fruit.
Such questions would raise the problems of adaptation,
aggiornamento, hermeneutics, demythologization, and
commitment to modern society. But however much such
problems fire us, they take second place to the one before
us now. The first question is not How can I appear as a
credible Christian today? but Why am I still a Christian?
This is where it is really important to keep the ques-
tions in proper order. The post-conciliar confusion has
come about largely because the Council thought that the
main questions the trinitarian and christological dogmas,
and the dependent ecclesiology) could be taken as a
basis without more ado, and that they could start straight
 ALPHA 15
into the pastoral problems arising from that basis. Per-
haps this kind of procedure is permissible in a number of
secular areas. It is inappropriate in Christianity, where
the river can never be divided from its source.
No beta can be explained other than in terms of its
alpha. The alpha always presupposes everything else,
yet we can never take it for granted as a premiss just
to be left behind us, like that. If we take it for granted,
then — like the builders of the tower of Babel — our dis-
course is confusion and we cannot even say what everyone
knows. The common task, begun in dialogue, is left in-
complete; and each man goes his own way.
 2. The Challenge
The essence of Christianity may be summed up by using
one of the later “I am” pronouncements (which Jesus
probably never spoke himself); they are verbal expres-
sions of the challenge that Jesus lived in his actual exist-
ence: “IT amthe way...”.
Buddha and Mahomet might well have asserted that
they were the way to the truth, which they had learned
through a special revelation and were now able to point
out to others. But “I am the truth” is a very different
kind of assertion. In fact, it doesn’t matter which con-
cept of truth is in question: the Old Testament Semitic
notion or the Greek one. What is intended is much
more than some truth that happens to rank above all
others in the universe; and more than the sum of all the
true propositions that can be asserted about everything
we find in the universe.
What is intended is something embracing all philo-
sophic truths and which alone endows such truths with
the property of truthfulness, Because the speaker says
“TJ”, his assertion of all-embracing truth is no reference
to a mere rational truth. By his assertion he has already
 THE CHALLENGE 17

transcended any possible antithesis between factual truth

and truth founded on reason. He transcends the very
transcension of his assertion if he then says: “I am the
life’.
He is speaking here of life pure and simple, not of the
life principle invested and restructured in individual liv-
ing beings, but of the inexhaustible divine source that
transcends that principle : what is often, in the same con-
text, described as “light”; the light of life which, for
Plato and for Fichte in his later period, lies above the
area of being and truth; the goal that offers fulfilment
beyond all striving; the happiness that delights beyond
all true knowing.
The “I” that says, in this instance, “I am’, is elevated,
as that light and goal, above every human [-thou rela-
tionship, not as if it were a mere “mediation” of human
freedoms and dialogues, but so as to make possible and
open up the ways between two as the way of both, and
the truths between them as the truth of both.
There is an immense provocation here which is unique
in world history and seems almost absurd, coming as it
does from a single individual, and therefore a minute
fragment of the universe with all its multitudinous ways
and truths — and from an individual, too, who the very
night before he died claimed the power of eternal life.
If we allow the speaker to take the responsibility for
what he claims, and do not put it down to the enthusiasm
of the author of the fourth gospel; if we see his assertion
as the sum total of a wholly demanding life that had per-
18 TWO SAY WHY

sisted in refusing confinement within a fixed framework

and saw itself as continuous with the great things God
did in Israel, and as consummating, not contradicting,
those acts, then it is obvious that no human wisdom
(which always tries to understand the things of this world
in terms of an all-comprehensive framework) could en-
dure this kind of provocation — or has been able to stand
it since its first enunciation.
The Greek mind found it ridiculous that one of the
products of all-pervasive physis should equate itself with
the generative matrix. Jewish thought found it even more
incredible that a created man should predicate of himself
the attributes proper to the creator of the world and the
covenant-Lord of Israel. It is still nonsense (but now to a
modern evolutionary universal philosophy of any per-
suasion) to assert that one wave in the river that has
flowed for millions of years and will continue to flow un-
thinkingly for yet more millions once the wave is no more,
can be identified with the river; nonsense, too, to assert
(especially when mankind is entering upon an age of
maturity and of future self-determination) that this wave
has already comprehended all that future, and enclosed
within itself the fulness of time and of the end of time.
On attempting to estimate the degree of provocation in
such fantastic claims, we see clearly that any school of
religious or philosophic thought must be deeply shocked
by and surprised at another statement in the same con-
text : “They hated me without cause.”
 3. Relative Singularities
Any philosophy that tries to see reality as a whole will
tend to refuse any identification of a part with the whole.
Yet it might admit so presumptuous a claim to some
extent in trying to show that significant aspects of reality
as a whole may (for the first time perhaps) become con-
centrated in the contingent part (which, as such, is open
to inspection by the rational mind). The historical event
may be a significant concentration of the whole.
It is not difficult to affirm the temporal contingency of
the Jesus-event. Modern scholarship is uncovering more
and more evidence of ways of thought and events of that
time. The results of this research are increasingly accepted
and put forward as a matter of course.
The aggiornamento programme, in all the difficulties
experienced in trying to put it into practice, shows very
clearly how firmly the gospel truths are attached to that
point in time, and how hard it is for us to translate the
Gospel into more accessible images and categories, even
though we realize how the expressions are conditioned
by their own age and perhaps sense their supra-temporal
meaning.
20 TWO SAY WHY

On the other hand, the universal significance of the

Jesus-event, beginning with the moment at which he en-
tered history, can be described all the more reliably be-
cause Jesus himself spoke to posterity, promised his own
divine Spirit to his faithful disciples, and (according to
Luke) fulfilled this promise on the day of Pentecost.
Since then, the Church, as the community of men re-
conciled with God in the Holy Spirit and given God’s
life and light, has mediated to the world something that
in Jesus is at first alien and unique, in such a way that
this unique something seems analogous to other relatively
singular things that have emerged in history. Let us look
for a moment at three forms of singularity.
1. Great works of art appear like inexplicable miracles
and spontaneous eruptions on the stage of history. Socio-
logists are as unable to calculate the precise day of their
origin as they are to explain in retrospect why they
appeared when they did. Of course works of art are sub-
ject to certain preconditions without which they cannot
come into being: such conditions may be effective sti-
muli but do not provide a full explanation of the work
itself.
Shakespeare had his predecessors, contemporaries and
models; he was surrounded by the atmosphere of the
theatre of his time. He could only have emerged within
that context; yet who would dare offer to prove that
his emergence was inevitable? Mozart’s Magic Flute was
preceded by a number of Viennese and Italian sugges-
tions and models; there was a considerable amount of
 RELATIVE SINGULARITIES QT

material available, but no one can explain the unique

form that became manifest in this material.
At most, we can point to or guess at the propitious
moment — the kazros — but never whatever it is that flows
in it and gives it that lasting form which, as soon
as it emerges, takes control. It speaks the word. Its unique
utterance becomes a universal language.
A great work of art is never obvious and immediately
intelligible in the language that lies ready to hand, for
the new, unique language that comes into existence with
it is its interpreter. It is “self-explanatory”. For a moment
the contemporary world is taken aback, then they under-
stand, and begin to speak in the newly minted language
(e.g. “the age of Shakespeare’’) as though they had in-
vented it themselves. The unique word makes itself com-
prehensible through its own self. The greater a work of
art, the more extensive at least the cultural sphere it
dominates will be.
The Magic Flute is known to every child who hums
the Papageno arias, but even a really fastidious ear never
tires of hearing it: the Pamino recitative, the Tamina
aria, the farewell trio all represent inexhaustible
mystery.
A great work of art has a certain universal compre-
hensibility but discloses itself more profoundly and more
truly to an individual the more attuned and practised
his powers of perception are. Not everyone picks up the
unique inflection of the Greek in a chorus of Sophocles,
or of the German of Faust, Part II, or of the French of a
22 TWO SAY WHY

poem by Valéry. Subjective adaptation can add some-

thing of its own, but that objective adequacy which is
able to distinguish the noble from the commonplace is
more important.
Philosophies of art — Schelling’s and Hegel’s, for ex-
ample — try to project the great, irrationally and arbi-
trarily erupting works of art and the picture of the world
they adduce against a horizon of universal understand-
ing. And is there any reason why they should not par-
tially succeed? Yet the “miracle” that is a great work of
art remains inexplicable.
2. Genuine love between persons is probably less
common than one thinks — although most men believe
that they have some share in it, and that they really pos-
sess it for brief moments. It may well be as rare as great
works of art, which tower here and there above the mass
of what masquerades as art.
I am not thinking about the mischance of passion
which, as in the Tristan and Isolde of Gottfried and of
Wagner, relates the whole world to this one absolutely
fixed point, and with it gives itself up to disaster, but
about something that is much simpler and that to suc-
ceed requires a Christian predisposition : a dedication of
one’s whole life to a “thou” in whom the lover sees illu-
mined the quality of the absolute, which involves the
whole world.
Such dedication is a wager that makes sense in the end
only if related to an absolute venture: the apparently
arbitrary choice by God of Israel from among all other
 RELATIVE SINGULARITIES 23

nations (Deut. 7, 7) and the consequence — the call of

Jesus and no other.
The glory of loving choice by God raises the individual,
lost in the anonymity of the species, to the uniqueness
of a person. In this ultimate mutual awareness between
two lovers, Eros can not merely offer the intial impulse,
but continue the whole way, if only it allows itself to be
purified into transfigurations beyond itself: Dante and
Beatrice, Holderlin and Diotima, Claudel’s Silver Slipper,
Teilhard’s Hymn to Beatrice.
There is a pure foretaste in the Alcestis of Euripides.
Line 242 and the following tell of the vicarious death of
the wife for her husband who, at the moment of farewell,
knows that he will live on, lonely upon the earth: “If
you die, I live no ionger: you are my life and my death,
for your love is holy to me” (lines 277-9).
In The Meaning of Sexual Love (1892-1894) Solo-
viev praised so sublime love that even subtle reason
cannot explain it. In the eyes of the world it always looks
like folly, for the stream of life flows on (Hofmannsthal
has described the immanent “wisdom” of this “unfaith-
fulness” in many ways); it sets itself deliberately and
stubbornly against the current laws of life; and some-
how it interprets itself eschatologically: in the midst
of time this love discovers not only a “moment” of eter-
nity, but a lasting experience of faithfulness that rises for-
ever above all immanence.
3. That which is seldom achieved by love is offered as
a possibility to every man in the moment of his death,
 LWU SAY Witt

when he comes to understand himself not merely as a

transitory individual in the ever-flowing stream of life
— “to yield oneself up to which is delight” — but as a
unique person who has to carry out his own unique com-
mission against a finite, and not merely limited, horizon,
and who in the end cannot do so.
It is this extreme loneliness of dying that makes the
individual who, unlike the animals, sees what is ahead,
conscious of his own personal uniqueness. On this point
Scheler (Death and Afterlife, 1911-1912) and Heidegger
are correct. Although the biblical revelation stresses
more the spiritual solidarity of all men, thus introducing
something like a corporate human history that is supra-
individual (though not cosmic and cyclical in style),
nonetheless it makes is thoroughly aware, under both
the old and the new covenants, in contrast to the idea of
solidarity, of the finitude of personal life in face of the
loneliness of personal death.
When one leaves the society of men and walks towards
the judgment of the God who predestines; when one en-
ters that refining fire, through which the individual must
pass, and in which the worth of his deeds upon earth
will be revealed — empty straw or solid metal (I Cor.
3, 12 ff) — one walks completely alone.
Here, in earnest, it is “monos pro monon’’; there can be
no quick reference to the merits of others. Here no one
can take my place: “Each will be rewarded according
to “his.deeds”) (Ps) 62-195) Prviceqy: 123 Sire 35. aeas
Mt:16;.275 Rome; 63D:Gora4, 57:11 Gorsgaro)
 At the judgment the communion of saints can be un-
derstood only dialectically, in conjunction with this
appointed loneliness. Death and judgment are primarily
an interruption of every horizontal, dialogic situation;
all such situations derive their meaning only from a
non-dialogic situation, from one that answers to God
alone.
From this we must conclude logically that true time
is primarily the one each individual counts from his death
and judgment, whereas common “world-historical” time,
made into a chronological continuum by bracketing-off
personal deaths, is a secondary phenomenon, because in
it the whole motive that constitutes the seriousness of
temporality is suspended.
A philosophy of the future, which takes account of the
whole ethos of man in the time to come when he himself
will have gone, can address man only as a member of
a species and not as a person. The problem of how the
individual person can incorporate into his finite time any
notion of mankind’s future ultimately demands a christo-
logical answer.
I have picked out three points at which at least a rela-
tive singularity stands out from environing human
reason. These points have not been systematically
arranged, but merely displayed as symptoms. They do,
however, have something in common. Man is always
confronted by a sheer datum, acceptance of which deter-
mines his rational attitude towards it.
In order objectively to perceive and then judge the
 LWO SAY Wingy

unique work of art, he has to create for himself the appro-

priate mode of receptivity.
In order to love, he has to discover in the beloved a value
presented to him, which may perhaps be for him alone to
see and to come forward and receive.
In order to approach his death responsibly, he has to
accept this frontier and adapt his actions to conform to
it.
At these three points we find a provocation offered
by the several types of uniqueness, in that each eludes the
law of generality.
As Paul says: ‘‘Not that it makes the slightest differ-
ence to me whether you, or indeed any human tribunal,
find me worthy or not . . . the Lord alone is my judge”
(I Cor. 4, 3 f). Yet all three situations are phenomena
belonging to the general, human, mundane sphere.
They bear a dialectical relationship to the universal
that finds expression in a certain secrecy, defencelessness,
and often shyness. The true artist, aware of his own
worth, doesn’t boast about his work, but leaves it to its
fate. It may be carried on high in triumph, or it may
remain in the shadows (Schubert) only to be exhumed
later, as if by chance. Great personal love can remain
esoteric; and the responsibility that comes from facing
death is always silent. Whatever is aware of its own
uniqueness surrenders itself unhesitatingly to relativity.
 4. Absolute Singularity
This modest action of the sublime would seem to be
eclipsed at the point where a man, Jesus of Nazareth,
claimed that he was the way, the truth, and the life.
The fact that the claim was made with modesty, or
rather with humility — “I am meek and lowly of heart” —
in no way weakens it, but makes it seem all the more un-
usual,
He is represented as the one who is absolutely singular
or unique: “No one has gone up to Heaven except the
one who came down from Heaven, the Son of Man who
is in Heaven” (Jn. 3, 13). And the thought is echoed by
his disciple : ‘“‘A spiritual man, on the other hand, is able
to judge the value of everything, and his own value is
not to be judged by other men” (I Cor. 2, 15).
This is said loudly and clearly. Would a wise man raise
his voice in this way? Do the wise not speak more softly?
And what of the constant stress on his own boldly pro-
nounced “I’’? “It was said of old to your fathers, but
I say to you.” The whole Gospel is full of this resounding
I, We cannot shut our ears to it.
People would like to turn Jesus into an apostle of love
28 TWO SAY WHY

of one’s neighbour standing up for the poor and the

oppressed, and declaring his solidarity with sinners. But
then they would have to take away all his provocative
references to his own person, and all his measuring of
others by their relationship to him: ‘If anyone . . is
ashamed of me and of my words, the Son of Man will
also be ashamed of him when he comes in the glory of
his Father...” (Mk. 8, 38).
It is immaterial whether they distinguish the “I” from
the Son of Man. They would have to excise the provoca-
tion in the question: “Who do people say Iam . . . who
do you say I am?” (Mk. 8, 27 ff), and the command
to leave all ‘for my sake” (Mk. 9, 29) immediately and
without first fulfilling the basic duties of piety
(Mk. 8, 21 f). All these words and actions are character-
ized by a severity comparable in love and behaviour
with nothing else that can lay claim to greatness in the
history of man.
A man who presents himself in this way, must realize
the extent of the demands he is making. The disputes
with the Jews, reported by John, are one long relenting
provocation. A man who uses such peremptory tones must
be resigned to and prepared for anything. He must have
some weapon that gives him the confidence to challenge
the whole world. He must be conscious that he is able to
step forward with complete authority.
At the centre of history, he knows himself to be the
one who includes all things from beginning to end: ‘“‘Be-
fore Abraham was, I am.” ‘“‘You will see the Son of Man
 ABSOLUTE SINGULARITY 29

coming.” “I am the alpha and the omega.” He must

see clearly that in him the End, the eschaton, is in sight.
But how can he be the End if he stands, a mortal man,
within the stream of history, which will flow on after
his death? He will have to make the apparently mad
claim that the outrunning of his own death embraces
the outrunning of all history to its very end; that he pos-
sesses finite time in such a powerful and primary sense
that it holds within itself all past aeons of time — emptied
of death.
If he is correct, something equally crazy has to hap-
pen: all that he is, his life and death taken together,
manifests itself as the absolute. Death is essentially part
of this manifestation, for speaking and acting and even
suffering do not reveal the whole truth about his being.
But if the claim stands, the whole truth must also possess
an absolute weight that can be counterbalanced by noth-
ing, and — because it is a question of truth — be able to
show that this is so.
The stone in one pan of the scales must be so heavy
that one can place in the other all the truth there is in
the world, all religion, all philosophy, every complaint
against God, without counterbalancing it. Only if that is
true is it worthwhile remaining a Christian today.
If there were any weight capable, ever so slightly, of
raising up the Christian side of the scales, and moving
it into the sphere of relativity, then being a Christian
would become a matter of preference, and one would
have to reject it unconditionally. Somehow or other it
30 TWO SAY WHY

would be outflanked. To think of it as of more than

historic interest would be a waste of time.
The Gospels are full of disturbing miracle stories. A
man does not prove his authenticity by working miracles.
Truth must be its own proof. But how could Jesus’ claim
prove itself if his life has still not reached the end of the
world and of time, if the proof will be conclusive only
when all life and death has run its course ?
Miracles are in themselves no proof of what really
matters; but they can be signs in a twofold sense: signs
that what was intended from the beginning — the eschato-
logical “miracle” of God which breaks the very bounds
of human reason — has come to be in Jesus Christ, has
started to happen; and second, that in its consummation
the event, if it occurs, must be so conclusive in the one
really needful thing, that all mundane understanding is
put right out of joint and appears to that understanding
as “miracle”.
 5. The Eschatological Moment: Its Form
We could try to use the Christ-event to plumb all
reality to the utmost limits of thought. All, God and the
world, would be bound to converge on this centre. The
world would find its ultimate essence in its self-transcen-
dence through the Son of God, and God would manifest
himself as all in all, by presenting himself above the Son
of God, who is the head of the “body of the Church”
and ultimately of the whole world, as the meaning of
all becoming, and as the one who realizes all his creative
potential.
Nothing could be left out of this all-embracing prin-
ciple; one would in the end define absolute truth as the
identity of identity (God) and of non-identity (the world
distinct from God); and would be aware that from this
formula only non-being — i.e. nothing — could appar-
ently be excluded.
In terms of the Christ-event, no matter how “free”
God’s self-revelation in Christ may seem to be, God re-
mains the absolute reality, but now has become visible,
knowable and accessible to thought. Whoever has grasped
the absolute with his mind has — essentially — grasped
everything.
c
32 TWO SAY WHY

Remember those two post-Hegelians: Kierke-

gaard who (in Protestant style) in his “absolute
paradox” summed up the patristic axiom, “se compre-
hendis, non est Deus”; and Marx who, from an alleged
intellectual grasp of God, drew the correct conclusion
that it is sheer and self-destructive speculation to say that
the mind of the thinker has explored everything, because
truth lies not in thinking but in the world-changing action
that man retrieves from the estrangement of his thoughts.
Both are right: absolute philosophy is not the last
word, for it has grasped God but not changed the
world.
If Christianity is to possess eschatological momentum,
is to have the last word, it must prove its claim in a special
way, so that at no point does it “explain” the mystery
that is God — even though God reveals himself therein —
but at the decisive point actively changes the world.
First: the provocation contained in the assertion “I
am the way, the truth, and the life” cannot be watered
down by compromise. There is nothing quite like this
statement; it is unique at the centre of history. Every-
thing is founded upon this utterly simple point. It does
not come from a combination or synthesis of Jewish and
Hellenistic expectations. It is completely unexpected and
incapable of being expected; and where it suddenly
appears, without allowing a moment’s pause for reflec-
tion, it immediately demands belief: “I am the resur-
rection and the life. Do you believe this?” (Jn. 11, 25 f).
The answer is “Yes”; and faith has to recognize
 ESCHATOLOGICAL MOMENT: ITS FORM 33

the validity of the claim sufficiently in the claim itself to

allow of assent.
But it would not be faith if it were able to work out
this validity in a rational system and expound it exhaus-
tively. There must always be something which eludes or
obstructs faith when it thinks that it is about to under-
stand the conditions for the possibility of the reality that
stands before it. When Jesus says: “I am the truth”,
“I am the resurrection”, he is saying that God is present
in him. But: “Si comprehendis, non est Deus” — if you
understand it, it is not God. If God shows himself in
Jesus Christ, then Anselm’s formula for God applies to
this manifestation too: “id quo majus cogitari non
potest” — that than which a greater cannot be conceived.
The context makes it clear that this means neither
exhaustive knowledge — as though we could conceive
the maximum, the all-embracing system of truth — nor
a dynamic-comparative knowledge — as though the ob-
jective, utter “greaterness”’ of God corresponded to a sub-
jective, ever-expanding thought in man. It is rather that
the “majus’ — greater — of the one who manifests him-
self takes possession of the “cogitatio” — thinking — in
such a way that the latter, by acknowledging its being
over-mastered, praises the perfect victory of the inscrut-
able truth of God.
Other formulas of Anselm confirm this interpreta-
tion: “videt se non plus posse videre” — it sees that it
cannot see more: the little eye can encompass only so
much, although the object seen extends farther than its
34 TWO SAY WHY
power of vision; and the eye (in being overmastered)
terms this farther field of vision “quiddam majus quam
cogitari possit” — something greater than could be
thought. And so we come to the ultimate formulations
which open up vision into a higher sphere, without allow-
ing what is seen there to be dragged down into the realm
of sight: “evidentissime comprehendi potest, ab humana
scientia comprehendi non posse” — it can most clearly be
comprehended that it cannot be comprehended by
human knowledge. Or yet again in other words: “‘ration-
abiliter comprehendit incomprehensibile esse” — he rea-
sonably comprehends that it is incomprehensible.
In order to express these formulas in a practical man-
ner, we may again ask : Can anyone, with eye or ear com-
pletely exhaust a great work of art? It offers itself totally
for us to take, and yet in so doing eludes total understand-
ing. This is even more true of the beloved who yields
himself up freely and yet always stays out of final reach.
And who has fathomed death, which intensifies the light
of finality that shines upon each day of our lives, and
gives them definition?
These three spheres, in their several ways, show
what can be meant by “grace’’. That there is a thing so
magnificent as a work of art, which offers itself ungrudg-
ingly to me, can make itself intelligible to me by some
intrinsic power of communication, while remaining in a
sphere penetrated by my conceptual categories; that there
is something so improbable as a “thou”, which, for no
comprehensible reason, has chosen me from among all
 ESCHATOLOGICAL MOMENT: ITS FORM 35

beings as the object of his love and devotion; that there is

an inescapable end of life, which out of an incomprehen-
sible mercy grants me the privilege of yet another today
among the living : this is grace.
At every point the essential thing is that that which is
conferred by grace can be comprehended as such, but
can never be logically reconstructed in retrospect. I can-
not say: that is what I have always “really” expected, or
what my mind and heart have always been oriented to-
wards, so that only the slightest impulse from outside was
required to allow my pre-understanding to crystallize into
perfect insight.
That which offers itself with the basic character of
grace can never be grasped rationally without losing
that distinctive quality. And in so far as it can never be
captured it constitutes a continuous source of bliss for
the recipient.
Nor is that which grace gives ever in the last analysis
something given: it remains within the originating act
of that which gives itself. It keeps on producing meaning
out of itself, and this prevents understanding from closing
in upon the meaning already revealed. On the contrary,
the more meaning that is revealed, the more faith the
recipient is able to put in that which gives itself.
These affirmations lead us back from the approxima-
tions to our main object. This embraces certain aspects
of our three analogies, but is much more than a clever
combination of them. It is the “glory” which was quite
unimaginable and which graciously invites us to share in
36 TWO SAY WHY
itself. It is the gift that is quite undeserved, the gift of
absolute love that turns towards me. And from the angle
of judgment upon my life, it is the grace of patience and
clemency. All of these, however, are only formal state-
ments that must now be tested and filled with content.
6. The Eschatological Moment: Its Content
Everything is founded upon the claim that Jesus made.
This claim is the stone that is thrown into the pool, send-
ing out concentric circles of waves. The last circle, always
clearly linked to the generating centre, spreads out to
embrace the most distant shore.
It is enough to consider three circles in succession : the
Jesus-event itself; Biblical revelation as a whole; the over-
flowing of this revelation into the whole history of man-
kind: “You will be my witnesses not only in Jerusalem
but throughout Judaea and Samaria, and indeed to the
ends of the earth” (Acts 1, 8). Are we to say that we,
who live in the ambit of the third circle, can see the origin
only through a multiplicity of estranging media, so that
we are obliged to undertake a long series of hermeneutic
manipulations in order to arrive after several transposi-
tions and by way of conjecture at the original meaning of
the first circle?
If that were so, the claim to be the eschatological mo-
ment — for all times and places — would already have
been thoroughly refuted. The claim, along with the whole
scandal it contains, must be powerful enough (and this
power is the Holy Spirit) to make itself intelligible
38 TWO SAY WHY
“always, until the end of the world” and “‘to all nations’.
This is not to deny the part played by hermeneutics (“‘you
will be my witnesses” and “teach them to observe all
things’, which includes, presumably, teaching them to
understand). But the claim, if justifiably upheld, is not
dependent on hermeneutical acuity.

a. The first circle: the Christ-event. Everything depends

on the claim made by Christ. ‘This claim cannot be inter-
preted out of existence. Humility serves only to under-
line its strangeness. It can only present a challenge; and
this is precisely what it did the moment it was made.
In the third chapter of Mark’s Gospel we find Jesus
regarded by his disciples as mad, by the scribes as pos-
sessed of a devil (vv. 21-2); and the scribes have already
made up their minds that this intolerable person must
die (3, 6). In the eyes of the cognoscenti the claim could
only appear as hubris, no matter how much the crowd
was impressed by Jesus’ eloquence and miracles, and
although Jesus counted himself one of the line of pro-
phets that ended in John the Baptist (Mt. 5, 12, etc.).
But the scandal of his “I’’ sayings is of quite a different
kind from that of the prophets. The cross is the com-
pensating justification for arrogance, and the fact that
the one convicted felt, as his cry of abandonment shows,
that God, too, was judging him, corroborates the justice
of the verdict. (The presumption of the closeness of his
“I” to the “I” of Yahweh is compensated by apparent
remoteness.)
 ESCHATOLOGICAL MOMENT: ITS CONTENT 39

The fate of the Galilean seems to hang in the balance

between these two moments. And then, on the third day
after his burial, the dead man meets his disciples as one
alive. No one could have expected this, not even in an
age used to the notion of the resurrection of the dead on
the last day — a day that was not far off.
The resurrection of one man, who thereby had arrived
at the end of the world, in contrast to all the others who
would go on living in time, threw every concept of time —
even the apocalyptic notion — into confusion. They just
could not believe it: they must have seen a spirit.
It was possible that Jesus’ precise announcements con-
cerning his coming resurrection were retrospective inter-
polations — that remained to be seen. The event certainly
could not have been expected, for, as things were, there
was no concept available with which to frame the
thought. This is obvious from the way in which the
attempt is made immediately to adapt it to current ideas :
if one man has arrived at the end of the world, that means
that the end of time really has dawned, and the resur-
rection of the rest — or, what is the same thing, the return
of the risen Lord — is at hand. This interpretation proved
to be a delusion.
The time-horizon of Jesus of Nazareth was obviously
not that of the rest of mankind. It was part of his com-
mission, and hence of his claim, completely to encompass
the history of this world within the scope of his mor-
tal life. His finite span of life hid within itself the life-
span of all who had died in the past and of all who would
40 TWO SAY WHY
die in the future: here, in one single instance, primary,
personal time has become identified with all the time that
has run in the course of history. But who at that time
could understand this? Luke sets a limit to every attempt :
“Tt is not for you to know times or dates that the Father
has decided by his own authority” (Acts 1, 7).
The extension of chronological time removes the
Easter-event more and more from the sphere of time-
conditioned apocalypticism. But from the very start — as
John frequently confirms (16, 8) — it was understood
that, with the resurrection of the condemned man, God
in his righteousness had taken a stand at his side (Acts
2, 36). The monstrous claim has been justified and cor-
roborated. And if the claim made by Jesus could be
made only in the consciousness that it would be repaid
with total rejection by, and excommunication from,
Israel (that is, with complete disaster), the cross, too,
was justified.
The whole man Jesus (and a man consists of all that he
attempts in life and his destruction in death) became hid-
den within the eternal life of God. In other words: not
merely what a man does, but also what he suffers, is of
value in the sight of God. A man does not have first to
be purified from his shame and helplessness and frailty
before he can move out into the absolute. Just as he is —a
failure, and abandoned by God -— so is he received. His
scars are accepted not only as authentication, but as en-
ablement.
The Gospels are written from the viewpoint of Easter.
 °

ESCHATOLOGICAL MOMENT: ITS CONTENT Al

The phenomenon, understood as a whole in terms of the

end-point, is interpreted and unrolled back to the be-
ginning; the life of Jesus, understood in retrospect, is in-
evitably coloured over by the radiance of Easter; his claim
becomes articulate as the intelligible language of God —
as theology. And all this is perfectly legitimate, however
human and time-conditioned the instruments used.
The more profoundly we reflect on the point of de-
parture — God’s corroborating the mighty claim of Jesus
by his own word in raising him from the dead — the
more the very origin of this claim of Jesus merges into
the pre-time and supra-time of God. If his claim was
valid, he must always have been (but in an incompre-
hensible way) what he was finally confirmed as being.
But doesn’t this unique constellation — claim, cross,
resurrection — break like a rogue meteorite into the hori-
zontal course of world history ? What has it to do with us?
In what way has it altered the human situation? We can
find a positive answer only if we first look at the Christ-
event in its biblical context. If we try to bypass Paul,
who in moving out to the Gentiles took with him the
decisive categories of total biblical thought, we no longer
understand the event.
It is a simple fact that the theology contained in the
claim made by Jesus was formulated almost entirely in
the language and alphabet, in the images and hiero-
glyphs, and in the titles and sacred nomenclature, of the
Old Testament.
The shock of the fact of Easter released the locked-
42 TWO SAY WHY
up treasures of the Old Testament. All the unfulfilled
and arrested images and titles — Messiah, mediator,
the sin-bearing servant of God, the prophet, the priest and
all his sacrificial victims, the Son of Man coming on
the clouds of heaven, the justice, the wisdom, and the
glory of God dwelling upon earth, the Word of God, and
so on — all of these at last converge by moving in upon
the transcending subject who is the risen Jesus. Not until
they come to rest in that which supersedes them all do
they find true meaning.

b. The second circle: the biblical event. The Christ-event

is understood as the fulfilment of all the promises of God
(II Cor. 1, 19; Heb. 1, 1-2). This realization is actual,
because all promises and faith in them, from the very
beginning, had been aimed at resurrection from the dead.
Abraham was the first to believe the promise. He
believed in a God “‘who brings the dead back to life and
calls into being what does not exist” (Rom. 4, 17). By
so doing he formulated a pattern of behaviour, and trig-
gered off a dynamic process that was to go far beyond
the symbolic confirmation of his act of faith: he received
the son of promise although “his body was past father-
hood — he was about a hundred years old — and Sarah
too old to become a mother” (Rom. 4, 19).
This faith in a God who can raise the dead resounds
like a bass beneath all the promises to Israel. Hence the
oldest Christian credal statement: “Christ died for our
sins, in accordance with the Scriptures; . . . he was buried;
 ESCHATOLOGICAL MOMENT: ITS CONTENT 43

and . . . was raised to life on the third day, in accordance

with the Scriptures” (I Cor. 15, 3 f). The whole faith of
Israel is a single assault upon the frontier of death, with
a dynamic that, in contrast to all other peoples,
approached death not as an immovable power to be pla-
cated by some religious device or another, but as a power
to be broken under all circumstances — despite the appar-
ent resignation occasionally suggested by the Old Testa-
ment.
Proof of this may be found in present-day Jewish
thought, which shows us how real this mediating second
circle — the transcendence-dynamic of the Old and New
covenant — is for world-history as a whole. The presup-
position is the mysterious association of the two entities
“law” and “death” (cf. Rom. 7). Both barriers fall together
or relativize one another.
Paul puts Abraham’s faith before the law that “‘came
after’, and was thus able to attribute to him a longing
for a goal that lay on the other side of the law and of
death. But even this faith had to supersede and depose
itself, for its object is boundless, as the Letter to the
Hebrews expounds, using the analogy of the superiority
of Melchizedek, the immortal “king of peace” who
is “like the Son of God” (Heb. 7, 3).
Israel will constantly find itself refusing to pay tithes
to this mysterious king. It will try to follow three roads of
escape from the dreaded gates of death and of the under-
world.
1. The Platonic road leading straight up out of the
44 TWO SAY WHY
sphere of law and death into the spiritual sphere, whether
in its contemplative or ethical form. This was the road
followed by Josephus and Philo of Alexandria, as it is
followed by idealist-liberal Jews today (Cohen and
Brunschweig). But this represents a digression into the
general, as we find, say, in Hegel. Death is regarded as
a necessary moment in the dialectic of becoming; and it
is folly for the finite individual to rush towards it. The
other two schemes are to be taken more seriously.
2. Israel owed its origin to the “mighty acts of God”,
in which, however, it was an active and fighting partici-
pant. The prophets set the imagery of the origin (Exodus)
materially in the future, making the people feel urgently
their co-responsibility for the advent of the eschatological
kingdom — lying temporally in the future.
The apocalyptic writers see God (in the form of his
Messiahs and angel hosts) fighting with Israel in their
triumphant battle against the nations. The plan of battle,
which redeems Israel from all sickness, subservience, and
loss of identity, is set out in the Qumran writings as “the
battle of the sons of light against the sons of darkness”.
Modern Marxism lives by the prophetic-apocalyptic
pathos of this redemption from slavery into freedom.
(The end of this development can be no other than Niko-
lai Federov’s “philosophy of common work” [1906]:
the resurrection of all past generations by means of all
the elemental and technical forces of the world, so that
they can share in the condition of the redeemed world.)
This is linked with the zealot and Zionist inauguration
 ESCHATOLOGICAL MOMENT: ITS CONTENT 45

of the kingdom, which for Israel, however, is to come

about through Israel itself.
3. Perhaps it is unnecessary for material imagery, which
in the end must always be finite and legalistic, to be pro-
jected into the future by the dynamism of prophetic, hope-
ful faith. Perhaps all imagery, like the law, is something
that has “come after” : a transient projection of the empty
formal drive forwards, itself creating the framework
which it can then discard, and thus proving itself stron-
ger.
It occurs (a) in the “life philosophy” (Lebensphilo-
sophie) developed by the early Bergson and in detail by
Simmel; (b) in the libido philosophy of Freud and his
successors down to Marcuse, in open contradiction of
Paul’s correlation of epithymia (libido) with sin and
death, constantly aggravated and found guilty by the
law; (c) in Ernst Bloch’s philosophy of hope, a philo-
sophy in which the absolute drive forwards rejects the
principle of legal rule from above (God).
This last idea is rooted in Job’s rejection of the injustice
of a God who lays upon life more of a burden of suffering
than it deserves, and who appeals from this God to a
transdivine court. Kafka’s impeachment of the law bears
an affinity to this, as does the destruction of all that has
been and is, in favour of a reality that is yet to be in-
augurated. (G. Landauer: “There is nothing at all; we
still have to make everything.”) This is perennial apo-
calyptic.
The presence and actuality of this unique, irrepressible
46 TWO SAY WHY
drive onwards, which stems from the Bible and rejects
any assuagement from the Christ-event, becomes a last-
ing proof of the actuality of Jesus’ claim to be the rational
climax of this dynamic.
It is thus logical, and forms part of the proof of the
validity of this claim, that Christians who contest the
eschatological aspect of Jesus’ claim, become caught
up in this dynamic. For them, Jesus becomes a political
theologian who at least tolerates zealots among his dis-
ciples, and by his sympathy with the people is forced
to throw all human potentialities into the attempt to fulfil
his mission — the coming of the kingdom of God upon
earth.
In reality, however, to be the rational climax of this
dynamic and to know himself as such implies that in
moving towards his death (which is also the end of the
world) Jesus experienced an absolute passion. His peti-
tion to God: “Thy kingdom come”’ contained the ulti-
mate self-sacrifice.
It was to come through his whole life and being,
through his being utterly consumed to the last drop of
sweat and blood. And if it is true that the kingdom has
fundamentally been reached and has come through Jesus’
victory over death and his resurrection, then it has not
by any means come by Jesus’ sheer waiting patiently for
some act to be accomplished by God alone, but by an
equally impatient pressing forward towards a total effort,
which then coincides with being totally used and con-
sumed.
 ESCHATOLOGICAL MOMENT: ITS CONTENT 47

“I have come to bring fire upon earth. . . . There is a

baptism I must still receive, and how great is my distress
till it is over!” (Lk. 12, 49 f). “Learn that today and
tomorrow I cast out devils and on the third day attain
my end. But for today and tomorrow and the next day
I must goon...’ (Lk. 13, 32 f).
If the resurrection is not the act of the one who died
(for it is the living God who raises him), then his most
spiritual act and self-sacrifice enter into the resurrection
as the substance which alone gives value to being raised
to share the eternal life of God. “He has entered the
sanctuary once and for all, taking with him .. . his own
blood...” (Heb. 9, 12).
The difficulty of being a Christian, both in the sense of
believing in Jesus and in following him is this: the pas-
sion of the Jewish before-and-after has to be taken over
by the Christian, and then fulfilled as Christ fulfilled it.
The whole utopian urge towards the advent of the
kingdom of God — “on earth as it is in heaven” — must,
therefore, be incorporated until it includes the sacrifice
of life (for if man does not offer up his life he has not
given himself wholly); but sacrificing one’s life to be taken
over by God constitutes the ultimate renunciation of self-
determination in favour of disposal by God; and such
sacrifce raises the fulfilment of the claim to a dimension
that lies beyond life and death.
Does this mean that all that is visible eludes the Chris-
tian, and that all his creative endeavour to mould the
future of this world is always in vain? To purely im-
D
48 TWO SAY WHY
manent thinking it appears so, for then Christianity
would not be the rational climax, but the abrupt cessa- |
tion of movement, a betrayal of the earth.
But Jewish prophetic and apocalyptic thought goes far
beyond mere immanence; it is essentially utopian. As a
material projection and as formal dynamism this utopia
runs into the void. It is the revelation of the goal attained :
the resurrection of Jesus provides advance hope with a
real basis. It is a pledge or first instalment, as Paul puts
it. Christianity is no less utopian than Judaism, but it is
factually utopian.
If in Jesus the fulfilment of his mission causes personal
death to coincide with the accomplishment of the end of |
the world, that means that he must have lived through |
destruction and death with all men who had lived and
who would live — to their final redemption.
The Old Testament category of the “pro nobis”
(Is. 53) comes immediately to mind as a pre-Pauline
interpretation of the event upon the cross. But only re-
flection upon the Christ-event brings to light who he
must have been who could effect this “pro nobis”, and
how he was constituted. In the claim that isolates his “‘T’”’
from all other “Is” lies the power of his supreme capacity
to bear so much. This is what illumines the uniqueness
of his abandonment by God.
It is not just the sum, but the surpassing, of all aban-
donment that men could suffer. For only the I that was
so close to the divine IJ — “the Word was with God...
the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he does
 ESCHATOLOGICAL MOMENT: ITS CONTENT 49

. ». my food is to do the will of him who sent me” — only

this “I” can know what it really means to be abandoned
by God. What in the Old Testament goes by the name
of “the grave”, “the shades”, “Sheol”, stands for the
enduring of utter abandonment, and corresponds to the
“hell” of the New Testament, into which Jesus descended
“pro nobis’.

c. The third circle: the humanity-event. On the Biblical

stage, the world-historical battle about the meaning of
life and of history is fought to the right and the left of the
cross. The object of strife has become everything — corres-
ponding to Jesus’ original claim to be the way, the truth,
and the life.
Israel remains caught in the paradox of being but one
nation that was supposed, in its election, to have re-
ceived an eschatological redemptive significance for all
nations. This paradox — irresolvable by proselytism — is
at times endured by transferring its apocalyptic restless-
ness to the world.
The Gospel, on the other hand, in accordance with its
essence, from the very start overstepped the Biblical sphere
and entered the pagan oekumene — the inhabited world.
The claim implicit in the Gospel, that it had received
and was able to proclaim all truth, was soon organically
transformed into the proofs of the apologists, just as the
scattered samen-logoi of religions and philosophies had
largely to be assimilated to the eschatological synthesis of
Christ.
50 TWO SAY WHY
The final task, therefore, is to prove how the claim
made by Christ is a challenge to every philosophy of life —
religious or secular — to measure itself against this claim,
and to determine which criteria are valid in assessing the
demands which Christ’s claim and the philosophies make
of each other.
This theme, carefully handled, would require a whole
book. Only a few pointers can be given here. Man,
as an individual and as a social animal, is seized at the
core of his being by the resurrection of Christ from the
dead. It is an event which completely re-values the whole
of individual human life, as it does the whole of human
history, since history has reached its end in the death of
Jesus.
This takes place, however, only because in the Christ-
event God, as Father, appears in his Son and in the com-
munication of the Holy Spirit, so that an equally fresh
concept of God emerges, a concept which we must take
as a new starting-point if the concept of man that it de-
termines is to achieve its full weight.
The Christian concept of God is determined by the
final statements of Paul and John. These writers inter-
pret the Christ-event theologically, and refer back to the
great Old Testament election texts (e.g. Hos. 11, 8 ff;
Jer. 31, 20 f; Dt. 6-7) : “God loved the world so much...
God is love.” In view of the state of this world no religion
other than Christianity could accept responsibility for
such statements. At best God could be the peace that lies
beyond mortal discord, the nothingness beyond our in-
 ESCHATOLOGICAL MOMENT: ITS CONTENT 51

tolerable, meaningless existence, the world of archetypes

above the reified copies. At best he could be expected
to incline with compassion and grace towards suffering
creatures.
But how could he ever, as Creator, accept responsibility
for all the world’s agony? Two things are insufficient:
first, instruction, even if it did bring with it the power of
overcoming suffering for oneself; for there are still the
majority of those who cannot find, or are not able to
walk along, these secret paths. Second, there is the
thought of the power of God, to which is imputed the
possibility of preserving, by a surplus of grace, the crea-
ture whom he has liberated, from apostasy from God,
from guilt and its consequent disaster.
Such a God of power — even if his power were that
of grace — would never have dared, or been able, seri-
ously to give the gift of freedom to his creature. The
father, whose younger son asked him for his birthright
in advance so that he could go to a foreign land, did not
withhold anything that was asked. Is it possible for God
to lose the game of creation in the self-losing of his liber-
ated creature? This is a profoundly mysterious possibil-
ity, for which we can find a certain human analogy, but
which in the end must be consigned with relief to the
realm of faith.
God goes silently along the way into complete aban-
donment — suffering with us, truly representing all of us.
In the parable of the Prodigal Son one figure is absent:
the narrator himself — Jesus. The father not only waits
52 TWO SAY WHY

for the spontaneous or constrained return of the Prodigal,

but (in the form of his son) sends out his love into his
desolation. He allows his son to identify himself with his
lost brother. And by this very power of identifying him-
self — without keeping a respectable distance — with his
complete opposite, God the Father recognizes the con-
substantiality, the divinity of the one he has sent as his
redeeming word into the world.
He recognizes that this word, become man, has been
able to do what the Father intended when he generated
and uttered this word: to make himself audible and in-
telligible to anyone who does not want to hear any more
about God. In other words: that Jesus could become the
brother of the very least and of the lost; that he could
reveal, more by deed than by word; that God, as all-
powerful, is love, and, as love, is all-powerful; that he is
this intrinsically, in the mystery of his Trinity, which can
be explained only by the total opposition — between being
with God and being abandoned by God — within God
himself.
This mystery can reveal itself in its full reality as accom-
panying the sinner only sub contrario, in secret, be-
cause otherwise it would not have revealed itself as real-
ity. But because in this God (and God is God only as
eternal and living) reveals himself as love, he cannot have
become love merely by virtue of the emancipation of the
creature; he has no need of the world and its ways in
order to become himself; but manifests himself, precisely
in the cross of Christ, in his abandonment by God and
 ESCHATOLOGICAL MOMENT: ITS CONTENT 53

descent into hell, as the one he always was: everlasting

love.
As the three in one, God is so intensely everlasting
love, that within his life temporal death and the hellish
desolation of the creature, accepted out of love, can be-
come transmuted into an expression of love. (The neces-
sary concealment of a vicarious accompanying into aban-
donment also results in a certain concealment of the
resurrection in the eyes of the world: an event which
can be accepted only by an act of receptive faith could
not become a neutral datum of world-historical public-
ity.)
The eschatological aspect of the Christian idea of God
is that God is not immanent in all world history in a
general philosophical sense, merely because he transcends
the world and is incommensurable with it — the one with
no opposite (non-aligned), the wholly other compared
with all other beings who all have their opposites — but
because he realizes this relationship in a way that the
world cannot discover, cannot guess at, a manner that
is completely free; and this manifests him as the God who
in himself is absolute love (and hence a Trinity). This
love cannot be elicited in restrospect by any kind of
gnosis: everything that we can “understand” about it
places us ever again before “the love of Christ, which is
beyond all knowledge” (Eph. 3, 19).
Therefore the Christian concept of man is deter-
mined. Man has been endowed by God with genuine
freedom and self-determination, for a work that is both
54. TWO SAY WHY
himself and the world that is to be made fit for men to
live in, and that is both his own human work and creative
co-operation in the work of God the Creator.
Man is taken out of his depth by a naturalistically con-
ceived immanent, or even transcendent, providence,
which would relate his actions and decisions away beyond
him to a goal unknown to him. Here we find limits set
to all optimism concerning a court of appeal that en-
croaches either evolutionally or dialectically upon human
freedoms.
There may be laws of the species which permit cer-
tain harmful tendencies to swing back and forth, yet which
create more or less beneficial preconditions, although
never determining an ultimate personal decision. We can-
not rely on technical progress, for the increased power
this puts in men’s hands can be used both for good and for
ill. Concentrations of power, moreover, offer demonic
temptations to misuse them.
Neither can the dialogical principle and the communi-
cation between personal freedoms one hopes to gain from
it be an escape from the loneliness of personal decision.
Dialogue between individuals always has to be taken up
from the beginning again, going back to the same basic
questions and fundamental options. Freedom as such is
not perfectible.
All the educational aids to right choice may indeed be
useful, but they cannot compel; all sociological structures
remain ambivalent: the proved injustice of one is no
proof that another, which might redress this specific jus-
 ESCHATOLOGICAL MOMENT: ITS CONTENT 55

tice, will not bring with it new and perhaps greater in-
justices. If a State needs several hundred prisons with
millions of inmates, it will hardly commend itself as a
road to freedom.
Nothing can be relied upon except man himself and
his freedom. But with this he would be well and truly lost
if it were that solitary absolute by which he might make
his way from his own nothingness either to “God” or to
“the devil”. Even this concept of freedom is a sign of
abandonment and disorientation.
Human freedom finds a location in terms of God’s
freedom in Jesus Christ to accompany man vicariously
into all the consequences of his abandonment. Externally
this looks like mere “sharing our common humanity” —
and it is that too — but it is essentially more, because this
sharing our common humanity proves itself to be effective
in the end in virtue of its being God-with-us. It assists us
precisely at that point where mere sharing our common
humanity no longer helps: in the loneliness of death, of
abandonment by God, of the descent into ultimate de-
solation.
Jesus’ companionship is not primarily earthly and
humanity-sharing, in order to become eucharistic in its
final phase, but is eucharistic from the very start :aban-
doned by God on the cross, in his broken body and shed
blood, he puts himself at the disposal of his fellow men.
As fellow Christians we have carefully to assess every
provisional and earthly social configuration by the prin-
ciples of social justice (explicitly adopting the ethical de-
56 TWO SAY WHY
mands of the Old Testament), yet we are always inclined
to go beyond the criteria of utility and success, and to take
our companionship into the darkness where earthly mean-
inglessness reigns.
Genuine Christian charity prefers to tend the dying,
the helpless, the lepers, the mentally defective. Again:
Christian compassion for men does not wish to begin, nor
ought it to begin, there — thus allowing itself to be more
and more ousted by increasing non-Christian welfare in-
stitutions. It begins, rather, at the heart of common,
human social-welfare work, but must distinguish itself —
because it knows about God’s ultimate way with men —
by always proceeding in tranquillity and by going on
when others give up.
The impulse for the Christian to go on further is his
knowledge that what is meaningless and utterly negative
to the eye of man has acquired meaning through God’s
accompanying man in Christ. For, in Christ, the love of
God has succeeded in transforming the loneliness of death
and of the interrupted conversation between God and
man into a situation of companionship in suffering, and
of turning merely passive resignation into an expression of
the most active abandonment of the self to God.
This is something unique in the whole of human
thought and behaviour, for it presupposes precisely faith
in the action of the triune God in the cross and resur-
rection of Christ. The perfect expansion of the concept
of man in Christianity is correlative with the expansion of
the concept of God in the Trinity and in christology.
 ESCHATOLOGICAL MOMENT: ITS CONTENT 57

At this point we must be prepared to face Nietzsche’s

reproach seriously. He said that Christianity is a religion
of the weak who turn negative into positive values. It is
much more the religion of those who know how to under-
stand positively even those things which all others see as
negative.
Nor must we give too much weight to Bonhoeffer’s
idea that Christianity ought not to address man prin-
cipally in terms of his weak marginal situations, but in
the concentrated strength of his existence. For it will
reach the heart of the strong man only if simultaneously
it permits him a glance at the periphery of existence, so
that freely and positively he is able to face up to every
situation — terror, sickness, weakness, loneliness, and spiri-
tual darkness.
Today these marginal situations come into collective
consciousness, hence the panic flight into anarchy and
the fantasy of drugs, into artificial spirituality with its
compulsive devaluation of personal freedom, its shutting
its eyes to the reality of death, its destruction of childhood
where the “‘non-adult” person can no longer rely upon
loving friendship.
Teilhard de Chardin is right in asserting that Chris-
tianity alone can supply a world that doubts its capability
of building up peace and contentment from its own
resources, and is on the brink of giving up all hope —
hence all the hysterical talk about hope — with a motive
for carrying on.
7. Destruction of the Eschatological Moment
Being a Christian only makes sense if the eschatological
moment of God’s action in Jesus Christ is maintained.
It would be meaningless if this moment were relativized
and watered down so that some other factor assumed
equal or greater weight.
Many people today do not realize this. Under pro-
paganda, in face of the modern world, they concede a
certain easing of burdens, and although this attitude
seems tolerable it does abrogate the indivisible claim
made by the Christ-event. When dealing with the pri-
mary phenomenon — the unity of Christ’s claim, abandon-
ment on the cross, and then the resurrection — the line
between vitalizing re-formulation and falsification of em-
phasis is very hard to draw,
A decision about what is happening must be made in
the clear knowledge of the absolute moment. That cannot
be ascertained by any scientific measure, but must be
arrived at existentially by uniting a number of consider-
ations, and finally — if it is to be applicable — through the
illumination of faith.
Who, then, is the true believer? There are many un-
DESTRUCTION OF ESCHATOLOGICAL MOMENT 59

intentional falsifiers of emphasis who in good conscience

still regard themselves as believers; others, who deliber-
ately falsify, lay great store on being thought of as be-
lievers, despite their own strong convictions, Their object
very often is to deprive true believers of the eschato-
logical basis of their faith, and to lead them into that
uncertain twilight between belief and unbelief, in which
they themselves dwell.
In order to “split the atom” of the complex: claim —
cross — resurrection, they proceed from the weakest link
in the chain, from the Easter experience of the disciples.
This rests, they would argue, upon the testimony of a
few people, is not verifiable, and has retrospectively
affected the interpretation of the meaning of the cross
and life of Jesus.
The “pro nobis” of the cross, its redemptive signifi-
cance for mankind, is equally unverifiable; and the claim
made by Jesus — supposing that the other data fall out,
while the claim retains credibility - must have received
considerable retrospective reinforcement. His sayings and
acts have to be toned down; the miracles can easily be
explained away; the imminent expectation of the king-
dom can be explained in terms of contemporary atmo-
sphere; an intensified prophetic or even Messianic men-
tality may have been present. The successive editing of
the texts also reveals certain tendencies towards exaggera-
tion.
Most, if not all, of the Old Testament titles were applied
to Jesus only after Easter; many combinations of these
60 TWO SAY WHY
titles may be found or may be taken as having been cur-
rent in Jewish literature of the times. All in all, the fun-
damental thesis: “Jesus (the man from Nazareth) is
Christ (the anointed of God and hence the fulfilment of
the Old Testament eschatological promises of God to
Israel and to mankind)” is an a posteriori synthetic propo-
sition (Bultmann).
Despite all these arguments one must affirm that
they contradict the central faith of the primitive Church,
the many theological theories about which converge on
the proposition “Jesus is Christ”, all depend on its
strength, and are inseparable from it.
They also contradict the whole Gospel of Paul, which
on the one hand rests upon and is linked to the Gospel
already being preached, and on the other is newly
founded upon his own experience of the risen Christ,
again supported upon the twin pillars of cross and re-
surrection, whereas for him the claim of the historical
Jesus remains in the background as the presupposition
that is taken for granted but not explicitly preached.
From this it becomes clear that whoever bypasses this
normative phase in Christian faith by deliberately making
it relative must logically renounce the term ‘‘Christ”, a
term which was put into the mouths of the disciples, pre-
cisely because of their common faith that Jesus was the
Christ. Such a person, constructing a hypothetical Jesus
of Nazareth, whose nature and doctrine remained to-
tally obscure, might indeed call himself a “Jesusite”, but
he could scarcely maintain that this shadowy person and
DESTRUCTION OF ESCHATOLOGICAL MOMENT 61

his doctrine can be a world-moving force today, certainly

not a force distinguished by its eschatological moment :
“Aut Christus aut nihil.’
A second and totally different mode of doubt is one
concerned with the historical forms and effects of Chris-
tianity. This is more effective than the other, because it
isolates the problem of how the incomparable One (who
is also the Last), imitated by however many, can be made
present down the ages.
Of necessity this has to be called in question, both in
its supra-individual (institutional) aspect and in its in-
dividual (charismatic) aspect, so that the origin itself
appears in a distorted light. Christians ought to look like
the redeemed; the Church ought to be an image of
Christ. With malicious relish we can say at once: no
matter how the Church behaves it will never be able to
provide a fully credible reflection of its origin in all its
eschatological weight.
The answer to this is: it may never try to overlay the
reality that is Christ with its own reality. With all the
energy it expends in imitating and making him present
it can never want to be more than a pointer towards him.
And it must do this in the multiplicity of its mutually
irreconcilable charisms: some turned towards the con-
temporary world, working in it and for it, others forward-
looking and eschatological, proclaiming the coming,
secretly present kingdom of God.
Without the latter, the former would run the risk of
remaining stuck within the mundane sphere; without the
62 TWO SAY WHY
former the latter would be tempted to flee from the de-
mands of this present world. Christ can transmit the light
of the origin only through the prism of an ecclesial to-
getherness; but in the prism each colour must blend with
every other one.
The essence of the Church is the material love of
Christians of the most diverse vocations: this loving in-
terconnection, this transcendence of itself by each char-
ism in allowing all the others to want, this rising of the
charismatic (I Cor. 12) to a more excellent love as his
foundation and goal (I Cor. 13) is the authentication of
the Church’s pointing to her ever-elusive origin.
There will always be people whose whole life is a con-
vincing pointer to many others. These are “‘saints’’ in the
restricted sense of the word. But these individuals are
quick to declare that they could never give their testi-
mony apart from the testimony of the Church which
hands on the word and sacraments of Jesus. And if there
are any who complain that the Church does not live out
credibly enough that which is testified and presented in
word and sacrament, they cannot wrench away from the
Church that which has been entrusted to her, in order
to claim it as their own monopoly.
All of this requires an exposition that would be out of
place here. Let us stick to the theme of the absolute mo-
ment and end with it. The weakness of our age is that
it has lost all feeling for this moment and is in danger of
losing all interest in it, preferring to become wholly en-
grossed in the present tangible world.
DESTRUCTION OF ESCHATOLOGICAL MOMENT 63

One of the symptoms of this weakness is the inability

of Christians to judge how much they stand to lose
through the allegedly critical “reduction” of the Chris-
tian phenomenon. They no longer have eyes to see the
absolute uniqueness of the claim “Jesus is Christ”, and
all that it implies.
They bow their necks to the yoke of a worldly reason-
ing that claims to grasp this unique thing, a reasoning
that categorizes what is left of the mystery of Christ,
thus subjecting it to a law that is no longer that of the
utterly free, utterly self-abasing love of God, accompany-
ing man in his desolation. In a frantic attempt to attract
buyers, they are offering Christianity at cut prices, not
realizing that by so doing they are making Christianity
not of less value, but of no value at all.
Without noticing they are going the way of the Grand
Inquisitor, who diffused Christianity for the masses, who
must be given bread and robbed of their freedom before
they are prepared to accept a faith — and what sort of
faith? The Grand Inquisitor was a deliberate faker of
weights; many of his imitators do not even know that
they are falsifiers. They will not be taught by the Gospel,
which demands of disciples not some things, but every-
thing.
Anyone who asks so much — that a disciple give up
everything to become a fisher of men — remains a socio-
logical fool for all time. But he cannot ask less, and cannot
absolve from the utmost effort, without denying that he
“4s it” : the way, the truth, and the life.
E
64 TWO SAY WHY
That which demands most is also the most beautiful.
Because it is love, the hardest proves to be a “light bur-
den, an easy yoke”; it is what, despite much resistance, in
the end a man does most willingly.
On the human level, love is just one of the possibilities
arising from freedom. On the divine level, love becomes
the manifestation of divine freedom, proven in the claim,
cross and resurrection of Christ, where alone being can
itself be loved as love. As love, it embraces and supports
man’s becoming and dissolution, so that his strength
and helplessness alike become meaningful and lovable.
The point from which all this light shines out is the
intersection between God and the world: a point called
Jesus Christ. He is not only a more or less accidental
occasion for a universal doctrine and system of truth
but the lasting manifestation of divine and human love
together — its actuality and focus in the deepest sense.
The Holy Spirit of God is able to take our lives to that
point, but we never become identified with him so that
he ceases to be the highest object of our love — a “thou”
who shines forth meaningfully and clearly to us, as the
inscrutable “thou” of the threefold God of Love, and as
the constantly reappearing “‘thou”’ of the “least of these
my brothers’.
 II
Why I Am Still in the Church’
Joseph Ratzinger
Today there are many and contradictory reasons for no
longer remaining in the Church. To turn one’s back on
the Church is an urge felt not only by those alienated
from the faith of the Church, by men to whom the Church
appears out-of-date, medieval, too much at enmity with
life and the world, but also by those who loved the his-
torical form of the Church, its worship, agelessness and
the reflection in it of the eternal.
To them it seems as though the Church is betraying
its essential nature, selling out to the way of the world
and losing its soul. They are disillusioned, like any lover
whose great love has been betrayed; in all seriousness
they dare to turn their backs on the Church.
On the other hand, there are quite contradictory rea-
sons: for staying in the Church. Not only those stay who
are immovable in their faith in the Church’s mission, or
who do not want to break with an old beloved habit —
even if they make little use of it — but those who disavow
the Church’s whole historical manifestion, and vehem-
ently attack the substance which church officials try to
keep in or infuse into it.
The second group are often the more zealous; although
they want to discard what the Church was and is, they
are determined not to be expelled from it, so that they
can make of it what they think it is intended to become.
 INTRODUCTORY THOUGHTS 69

It would seem that in our efforts to understand the

Church, efforts which at the Council finally developed
into an active struggle for the Church, and into concrete
work upon the Church, we have come so close to the
Church that we can no longer see it as a whole: we can-
not see the city for the houses, or the wood for the trees.
The situation into which science has so often led us in
respect of reality seems now to have arisen in respect of
the Church. We can see the detail with such precision
that we cannot see the whole thing. As in scientific study,
so here, an increment in exactitude represents loss in
truth. Indisputably precise as is all that the microscope
shows when we look through it at a section from a tree,
it may obscure truth if it makes us forget that the in-
dividual is not just an individual, but has life within the
whole, which is not visible under the microscope and yet
is true — truer, indeed, than the isolation of the individual.
The perspective of the present day has distorted our
view of the Church, so that in practice we see the Church
only under the aspect of adaptability, in terms of what
can be made of it. Intensive efforts to reform the Church
have caused everything else to be forgotten.
For us today the Church is only a structure that can be
changed, and which constantly causes us to ask what can
be altered, in order to make the Church more efficient
for the functions that someone or other thinks appro-
priate. In all this questioning the concept of reform as it
occurs in the popular mind has largely degenerated and
lost its essence.
70 TWO SAY WHY
Reform originally meant a spiritual process, very much
akin to repentance. A man becomes a Christian only
by repenting; and that applies throughout his life; it
applies to the Church throughout its history. The Church,
too, keeps alive as the Church by turning again and
again to its Lord, by fighting ossification and comfortable
habits which so easily fall into antagonism to the
truth.
When reform is dissociated from the hard work of re-
pentance, and seeks salvation merely by changing others,
by creating ever fresh forms, and by accommodation to
the times, then despite many useful innovations it will
be a caricature of itself. Such reform can touch only
things of secondary importance in the Church.
No wonder, then, that in the end it sees the Church
itself as of secondary importance. If we become aware of
this, the paradox that has emerged apparently with
the present efforts at reform becomes intelligible: the
attempt to loosen up rigid structures, to correct forms of
Church government and ministry, which derive from the
Middle Ages, or, rather, the age of absolutism, and to
liberate the Church from such encrustations and inaugur-
ate a simpler ministry in the spirit of the Gospel — all these
efforts have led to an almost unparalleled over-emphasis
on the official elements in the Church.
It is true that today the institutions and ministries in
the Church are being criticized more radically than ever
before, but in the process they attract more exclusive
attention than ever before.
 1. Introductory Thoughts on
the State of the Church
The Church now finds itself in a situation of Babylon-
ian captivity, in which the “for” and “against” attitudes
are not only tangled up in the oddest ways, but seem to
allow scarcely any reconcilation. Mistrust has emerged,
because being in the Church has lost straightforwardness
and no one any longer risks attributing honesty to an-
other.
Romano Guardini’s hopeful observance of 1921 (A
process of great moment has begun, the Church is coming
to life in the souls of men) seems to have turned into its
opposite. Today the saying would seem to run thus: In-
deed, momentous things are in progress, the Church is
becoming extinguished in men’s souls, and Christian com-
munities are crumbling. In the midst of a world striving
for unity the Church is falling apart in nationalistic par-
tisanship, in calumniation of the alien and glorification of
self.
There seems to be no middle way between the icono-
clasts and a reaction that clings too much to externals
and what always has been, between contempt of tradi-
tion and a mechanical dependence on the letter. Public
72 TWO SAY WHY
and more confused. What do we really mean by “resur-
rection from the dead”? Who is believing, who is inter-
preting, who is falsifying? The countenance of God
rapidly disappears behind this argument about the limits
of interpretation. The “death of God” is a very real pro-
cess, and today reaches right into the heart of the Church.
It looks as if God were dying within Christianity. For
where the resurrection becomes the experience of a mes-
sage that is felt to be cast in out-of-date imagery, God
ceases to be at work.
Does he work at all? This is the question that follows
immediately. But who is so reactionary as to insist upon a
realistic “He is risen”? And what one sees as progress
another thinks of as unbelief, and what was for aeons
inconceivable is now usual: men who have long since
given up the Church’s creed, in good conscience regard
themselves as genuine progressive Christians.
For them the one standard by which to judge the
Church is the efficiency with which it operates. Obviously
we have to ask what efficiency is, and what the end is
which it subserves. Is it supposed to provide a critique of
society, to assist evolution, or to inaugurate revolution,
Or is it there to promote community celebrations? At all
events we have to start again from the ground floor, for
the Church was originally designed for none of these
things, and in its present form really is not adapted to
these functions at all.
Discontent grows among believers and unbelievers
alike. The foothold gained by unbelief within the Church
 INTRODUCTORY THOUGHTS 73

makes the situation seem intolerable to both parties; most

of all, these circumstances have given the reform pro-
gramme a certain notable ambiguity, which to many
seems almost irremovable — at least for the time being.
Quite obviously this is not the whole story. In recent
years many positive things have happened, about which
we must not keep silent: the new accessibility of the
liturgy, an awareness of social problems, a better under-
standing between separated Christians, the removal of
much anguish that had arisen from a false and liberal-
istic faith, and many other things.
All this is true and not to be minimized. But these
things are not the distinguishing features of the general
climate in the Church. On the contrary, all of this has in
the meantime passed into the twilight created by the
blurring of the lines of demarcation between faith and
unbelief. Only at the beginning did this blurring look like
a liberation. Today it is clear that, in spite of all signs of
hope, the Church that has emerged from this process
is not a modern but a thoroughly shaky and deeply di-
vided Church.
Let us put it very crudely: the first Vatican Council
described the Church as a “signum levatum in nationes’,
as the great eschatological banner that was visible from
afar and called and united men. It was (so said the
Council of 1870) that for which Isaiah had hoped
(Is. 11, 12): the universally visible sign that every man
could recognize and that pointed the way unequivoc-
ally to all men. With its astounding expansion, superb
74 TWO SAY WHY
holiness, fecundity in all goodness, and invincible stability,
it was supposed to be the real miracle of Christianity, its
permanent authentication — replacing all other signs and
miracles — in the eyes of history.” .
Today everything seems to have turned to the opposite.
There is no marvellous expansion, but only a small-scale,
stagnating association that cannot seriously overstep the
boundaries of Europe or of the spirit of the Middle Ages;
there is no superb holiness, but a collection of all human
sicknesses besmirched and humiliated by a history from
which no scandal is absent — the persecution of heretics
and witch-hunting, persecution of the Jews and violation
of conscience, self-dogmatizing and opposition to scienti-
fic evidence — so that anyone who listens to this story can
only cover his head in shame; there is no stability, but
only involvement in all the streams of history, in colonial-
ism and nationalism, and the beginnings of adaptation
to, and even identification with, Marxism. These are not
signs that evoke faith, but seem to constitute a supreme
obstacle to it.
A true theology of the Church would seem to consist
in denuding the Church of all theological attributes and
looking on it as a wholly political entity. Then it is no
longer seen as a reality of faith, but as a purely accidental
— even if indispensable — organization of the faithful,
which ought as quickly as possible to be remodelled ac-
cording to the most recent sociological theory. Trust is
good, but control is better — after all our disillusionment
with the official Church; this is now our slogan. The
 INTRODUCTORY THOUGHTS 75
sacramental principle is no longer self-evident; the only
reliable thing is democratic control.°
Ultimately we come to the point where the Holy Spirit
himself is also incomprehensible. Anyone who is unafraid
to look back into the past is aware, of course, that the
scandals of history arose from the conviction that man
must always seize power, that only the achievements of
power are real.
 2. An Image of the Essence of the Church
A Church seen against the background of its whole his-
tory and its very essence as purely political makes no
sense. To give a wholly political reason for staying in the
Church is dishonest, even if it seems quite sincere. How
then, in view of the contemporary situation, can remain-
ing in the Church be justified? The decision for the
Church must be a spiritual decision if it is to make
sense; but how can such a spiritual decision be substanti-
ated?
I would like to give an initial answer in the form of a
metaphor, and refer back to what I said in describing
the present situation. I said that in dealing with the
Church we had come so close to it, that we could no
longer see it as a whole. This statement can be expanded
if we adopt an image used by the Fathers of the Church
in their symbolic descriptions of the world and the
Church.
In the structure of the universe, so they explain, the
moon is the analogue of that which the Church is in the
scheme of redemption, in the intellectual and spiritual
 AN IMAGE OF THE ESSENCE OF THE CHURCH a9!

universe. This goes back to primeval religious symbolism

(the Fathers said nothing about the “theology of reli-
gions” but they made full use of it) in which the moon,
symbol of fecundity as of weakness, of death and dis-
solution as of hope in rebirth and resurrection, became a
symbol of human life — “at once pathetic and comfort-
ing”’.*
Lunar and telluric symbolism frequently intermingle.
In its transitoriness as in its rebirth the moon represents
the world of men, the earth, the world that is character-
ized by passivity and privation, receiving its fecundity
from elsewhere — from the sun. Lunar symbolism becomes
both a symbol for man and for humanity as represented
by woman, who is passive and fruitful from the power of
what she receives.
The transference of moon-symbolism to the Church
was suggested to the Fathers by two things: the associa-
tion of the moon with woman (mother) and the fact that
the light of the moon is borrowed light, the light of Helios,
without which the moon would be darkness. The moon
shines, yet its light is not its own, but the light of an-
other.® It is darkness and light both at once. In itself it
is darkness, but it sends out light from another whose
light is transmitted through it.
It is precisely in this that it represents the Church,
which shines even although it is itself darkness: not with
its own light is it bright, but it receives light from the true
Helios who is Christ, so that although of earthly stuff
itself (just as the moon is another earth) none the less
78 TWO SAY WHY
in the night of our estrangement from God it can}
give light — “the moon speaks to us of the mystery of
Christ’’.° |
Symbolism must not be pressed too far. Its value con-
sists precisely in the pictorial quality that eludes logical
schematization. However, in this age of journeys to the}
moon, we are almost obliged to take the comparison fur-}
ther, and, in the antithesis between physical and sym-:
bolic thinking, to see the specific quality of our situation|
vis-a-vis the reality that is the Church.
The travellers to the moon explore the moon merely
as rock, desert, sand, mountains, and so on, but never as}
light. In itself, moreover, that is all that it is: desert, sand, |
rock. And yet it is, not intrinsically, but from another '
point of view, light, and continues to be light even in|
this age of space-travel. It is that which it is not in itself. |
The other, that which is not its own, is none the less its
reality — as not its own.
' There is a truth of physics and there is a truth of
poetry, of symbolism, and the one does not destroy the
other. Now we ask: is that not a very accurate picture
of the Church? If one travels around it and digs it up
with the techniques of the space-traveller, one finds only
deserts, sand, and rocks — the human qualities of man
and his history, with its deserts, its dust, and its heights.
That is proper to it. And yet that is not the most charac-
teristic thing about it. The decisive thing is that although
it is intrinsically no more than sand and stone, it is also
light from the Lord, from someone other than itself.
 AN IMAGE OF THE ESSENCE OF THE CHURCH 79

The essence of the Church is that it counts for nothing

in itself, in that the thing about it that counts is what
it is not, in that it exists only to be dispossessed, in that it
possesses a light that it is not and because of which alone
it nonetheless is. The Church is the moon — the myster-
tum lunae — and thus exists for the faithful, for thus it is
the place of an enduring spiritual decision.
Because the material touched on in this imagery seems
to me decisive, I would like, before trying to translate it
into factual language, to clarify it with another observa-
tion. After the liturgy had been translated into the ver-
nacular, before the last reform, I always experienced
verbal embarrassment over a particular text, which is
connected with the very things we have just been dis-
cussing.
In the German version of the Suscipiat the Lord was
asked to accept the sacrifice “as a blessing for us and all
his holy Church”. I was always on the point of saying
“and all our holy Church”.
This verbal embarrassment brings to light the whole
problem. His Church has been replaced by our Church,
and hence by the many Churches — for everyone has his
own. The Churches have become our enterprises, of
which we are proud or else ashamed.
Many small private properties are ranged alongside
one another — nothing but our Churches, made by our-
selves, our own work and property, and which we want
to keep as they are or refashion as we think fit.
Behind our Church or your Church his Church has
F
80 TWO SAY WHY

disappeared. But his is the only thing that matters, and |

if it is no longer there, ours too ought to abdicate. A |
Church that is no more than our Church is a useless sand- |
castle.
 3. Why I Stay in the Church
Now we have already given the main answer to the ques-
tion. I am in the Church, because I believe that now as
formerly, and inexorably through us, behind our Church
his Church lives, and that I cannot remain with him
except by remaining in his Church. I am in the Church
because, in spite of everything, I believe that at the deep-
est level it is not our, but his, Church.
In concrete terms that means: it is the Church that,
in spite of all the human frailty in it, gives Jesus Christ
to us, and only through it are we able to receive him as a
living, all-powerful reality, who challenges me and en-
dows me here and now.
_ Henri de Lubac states this fact in the following way:
“Don’t those who accept Jesus while rejecting his Church
know that in the last analysis they have the Church
to thank for him? .. . For us Jesus is living. But under
which sandhill would, perhaps not his name or memory,
but his living influence, the effect of the Gospel and of
faith in his divine person, lie buried, were it not for the
continuity of his Church? ‘Without the Church Christ
would be bound to evaporate, crumble, become extin-
82 TWO SAY WHY

guished.’ And what would mankind be, were Christ to |

have been taken from them ?”
This elementary fact must stand right at the begin-
ning. Whatever faithlessness there has been or will be in |
the Church, no matter how true it is that it must for ever |
reassess itself by the measure of Christ, there is no ulti-
mate opposition between Christ and the Church. It is
through the Church that he goes on living across the span
of the centuries, that he speaks to us, that he is united
to us today as Master and Lord, as our brother, making
us all brothers and sisters of one another.
And because the Church alone gives Jesus Christ —
to us and makes him present and alive in the world, gives |
birth to him anew in the faith and prayer of men in all
ages, it gives mankind a light, a resting-place and a mea-
suring-rod, without which life would be unthinkable.
Whoever wants Christ to be present in mankind will not
find him there against the Church, but only in it. |
This brings us to the next theme. I am in the Church
for the same reasons that make me a Christian. A man
can’t believe all on his own, but only as one among fellow
believers. Faith is essentially the power of union. Its arche-
type is the story of Pentecost : the miracle of understand-
ing that arises between men who, by descent and history,
are strangers to one another. Faith occurs in the Church
or not at all.
And just as a man cannot believe all on his own, but
only as one of a number of fellow believers, so he cannot
believe through his own power and discovery, but only
 WHY I STAY IN THE CHURCH 83
if and because the capacity for faith is given; and this is
not in a man’s power to give: it does not come
from his own strength, but comes to meet him from
outside.
A self-acquired faith is a self-contradiction; for such a
faith could only guarantee and tell me what I am and
know without it; it could never break through the fron-
tiers of my own ego. A self-made Church, a community
that creates itself, that exists by its own graces, is likewise
a self-contradiction. If faith requires a community it must
be one that possesses a power that comes to meet me,
not one that is my own creation or the instrument of my
own desires.
All of this can be formulated from a more historical
angle. Either Jesus was more than mere man and hence
possessed a power that was more than the product of a
human will, and this power proceeded from him and
endured right through the ages, or he left behind no such
power at all.
In that case I would have to rely entirely on my own
reconstruction, and he would be no more than another
great religious founder, to be made present in later gener-
ations by the process of reflection. But if he is more than
that he will not be dependent upon my reconstruction,
and the power he left behind will be operative today
also.
To recapitulate : a man can be a Christian only in the
Church, not outside it. We have to ask quite soberly:
What would the world be without Christ, without a
84 TWO SAY WHY
God who speaks and knows men, and whom, therefore, |
men can come to know?
Today we know where the attempt to run such a world
is being made with such dogged tenacity. We know ex- _
actly what that means: an experiment in absurdity; an |
experiment with no measuring-rod. However often actual
Christianity may have failed in the course of history —
and it has failed lamentably, and over and over again —
the standards of justice and love have come, sometimes
against the will of Christians, from the Gospel it preached, |
and often in judgment of Christians themselves, And
these standards have never failed to exercise the silent
power of the one who lives behind them.
I stay in the Church because I recognize the faith
that in the end we can acquire only in the Church, and
not in opposition to it, as a necessity for men and for the —
world, for by this the world lives, even when it does not |
share it. For where God no longer is (and a silent God
is no God at all) there no longer is the truth which leads
on in front of men and the world.
But man cannot go on living in a world without truth;
when man denies himself truth he ekes out an existence
on the illusion that the light of truth has not yet been
extinguished, just as the sun’s light would last for a while
after it had ended so that we would be deceived about
the universal night that had come upon us.
The same thing can be formulated from yet another
angle. I remain in the Church, because only the Church’s
faith can redeem mankind. This sounds terribly tradi-
 WHY I STAY IN THE CHURCH 85

tional, dogmatic, unreal, and yet it is said soberly, and

meant to be taken realistically. In our world of stresses
and frustrations there has been a resurgence, with ele-
mental force, of the longing for redemption.
The work of Freud and C. G. Jung is only an attempt
to bring redemption to the unredeemed. In their own
ways and from different presuppositions, Marcuse,
Adorno and Habermas carry on seeking for and pro-
claiming redemption. In the background stands Karl
Marx, and his question, too, is about redemption. The
freer, the more enlightened, the more powerful man be-
comes, the more he is caught up by the longing for re-
demption, the less free he feels himself to be.
All these efforts, from Marx to Marcuse, have been a
search for redemption by striving to build a world free
from pain, sickness, and sorrow. A world free from
tyranny, pain, and injustice has become the great slogan
of our generation. The violent explosions of youth pro-
claim this promise, and the angry resentment of the old
is a complaint that the promise remains unfulfilled, be-
cause there still are tyranny, injustice, and pain.
To fight against pain and injustice in the world is a
thoroughly Christian impulse. But to imagine that one
can inaugurate a sorrow-free world through social reform
and the abolition of government and the rule of law, and
the demand that this be accomplished here and now,
represent an erroneous doctrine, a serious error concern-
ing the nature of man.
In this world sorrow and pain do not arise from an
86 TWO SAY WHY

inequality of possessions or power. And pain is not the

only burden that man has to shake off. Whoever thinks
like that must flee into the bestiality of narcotics, there
well and truly to destroy himself and fall into contra-
diction with reality. Only in suffering himself, and in
“suffering himself free” from the tyranny of egotism does
man find his truth, his peace, and his happiness.
Today an illusion is dangled before us: that a man can
find himself without first conquering himself, without the
patience of self-denial, and the labour of self-control,
that there is no need to endure the discomfort of up-
holding tradition, or to continue suffering the tension be-
tween the ideal and the actual in our nature.
The presentation of this illusion constitutes the real
crisis of our times. A man who has been relieved of all
tribulation and led off into a never-never land has lost
what makes him what he is, has lost himself.
In truth man will be redeemed only through the cross,
through accepting his own and the world’s passion.
which, in the passion of God has become the place of
liberating meaning. Only thus, by this acceptance, does
man become free. All cheaper offers will fail and reveal
themselves as deceits.
The hope of Christianity, the opportunity of faith, in
the end rests simply upon the fact that it speaks the truth.
The opportunity of faith is the opportunity of truth, which
can become obscured and downtrodden, but never totally
destroyed.
And so we come to the final point. A man always sees
 WHY 1 SPAY INI THE CHURCH 87
only to the extent that he loves. True, there is a clear-
sightedness of denial and of hate. But these can see only
what is commensurate with themselves: negativity. They
are thus able to preserve love from a blindness in which it
fails to see her own limitations and dangers. But they
cannot be constructive.
Whoever does not commit himself at least a little to the
experiment of faith, to the positive experiment of the
Church, who does not risk looking about him with the
eyes of love, will only distress himself. The venture of love
is the precondition of faith. If a man makes this venture,
he has no need to shut his eyes to the darkness in the
Church. But he will discover, too, that there is more there
than dark spots.
He will discover that besides the history of scandals
in the Church there is a history, too, of liberating grace
which throughout all the centuries has been kept fruit-
fully alive in major figures like Augustine, Francis of
Assisi, the Dominican Las Casas with his passionate fight
for the Indios, Vincent de Paul, and John XXIII. He
will find that the Church has carried down the corridors
of history a lighted torch that cannot be extinguished, and
that cannot be ignored.
The beauty, likewise, that has been engendered at the
impulse of the Gospel, and which is manifest still today
in many incomparable works of art, provides another
witness to the truth. Anything that is able to express itself
so, cannot be wholly dark. The beauty of the great cathe-
drals, the beauty of the music that has grown up around
88 TWO SAY WHY

the faith, the dignity of the Church’s liturgy, most of all

the reality of festival — a thing that man cannot contrive
for himself, but only be given’ — the transmutation of the
year into the Christian Year, in which the past and the
present, time and eternity, intermingle — all of this, as I
see it, is certainly no meaningless accident.
Beauty is the radiance that shines out from truth, as
Aquinas once said, and, one might add, the caricature
of beauty is the self-irony of lost truth. The expression
which faith has been able to achieve of itself in history
bears witness for it of the truth which stands behind it.
There is one further piece of evidence that I would not
like to omit, even though it seems to lead well into sub-
jectivity. Even today, if one keeps one’s eyes open, one
can meet men who are living witnesses to the liberating
power of Christian faith. There is no shame in being a
Christian in the company of these men who set before us
a model of what it is to be a Christian; in their lives they
make being a Christian something credible and delight-
ful.
In the end it is sheer illusion for a man to want to turn
himself into a kind of transcendental subject, in which
only the absolute counts for anything. Certainly it is a duty
for us to reflect upon such experiences, to test their re-
liability, to purify them and fulfil them anew.
But even in this necessary process of objectification
surely we find a respectable demonstration of Christianity,
a demonstration that it has made men human by uniting
them with God. Does not something most subjective
 WHY I STAY IN THE CHURCH 89

turn out to be at the same time wholly objective, and

something we need feel ashamed of before no man?
One observation in conclusion. If we say, as we did,
that without love a man can see nothing, that men must,
therefore, love the Church if they are to recognize it,
then many today will become uneasy. Is not love the anti-
thesis of criticism? And in the end isn’t it used as an
excuse by the establishment to stifle criticism and main-
tain the status quo? Do we serve men by calming them
down and whitewashing things as they are, or do we
serve them by constantly taking up arms against en-
trenched injustice and against the dominant structures
of society?
These are very far-reaching questions that we cannot
discuss in detail here. One thing, however, ought to be
clear: true love is neither static nor uncritical. If there
is any chance at all of changing another man positively,
then it can be done only by loving him and so helping
him to change gradually from what he is into that which
he is capable of becoming. And can it be otherwise with
the Church? Look at very recent history: in the litur-
gical and theological revival of the first half of this cen-
tury there was a genuine reform which achieved positive
change.
This was possible because there were wide-awake men
who, with the gift of discernment, loved the Church “cri-
tically”, and were ready to suffer for it. If today nothing
more is achieved, that may well be because we are all
too set on proving our own point. To remain in a Church
go TWO SAY WHY
that we must first re-make so that it will be worth re-
maining in, is a hopeless task — a self-contradiction.
To remain in the Church because it is itself worthy |
to remain; to remain in it because it is worthy of our.
love, and will constantly, through love, be transformed
above itself into its truer self — this is the way in which,
as always, the response of faith is made today.
 Notes

1. The lecture-form of this paper and the nature of the topic set
me make an exhaustive exposition of the objective reasons for
being in the Church impossible. All I can do is to put together a
few indications of the reasons behind what, in the end, is a very
personal decision. In their own way, however, these hints and
suggestions will no doubt reveal something of the objective
validity of such a decision.
2. Denzinger-Schénmezer, Enchiridion Symbolorum (Freiburg,
1963), no. 3013 f.
3. The viewpoint that such aspirations contain legitimate
elements, which over a wide area are perfectly compatible with
the sacramentally determined form of church government, is
expounded, with the requisite distinctions, in J. Ratzinger & H.
Maier, Demokratie in der Kirche (Limburg, 1970).
4. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (London &
New York, 1958), p. 184; cf. in general the whole chapter,
“The Moon and its Mystique”, pp. 154-87.
5. Cf. Hugo Rahner, Greek Myths and Christian Mystery (London,
1963), pp. 89-176, and Symbole der Kirche (Salzburg, 1964),
pp. 89-173. It is interesting to note that in the ancient world they
discussed whether the moon’s light was its own or borrowed. For
the most part, the Fathers opted for the second idea and made
symbolic use of it in theology.
6. Ambrose, Exameron IV 8, 23 CSEL 32, 1 p. 137, Z 27 f;
H. Rahner, Greek Myths and Christian Mystery, op. cit., pp. 154 ff.
7. Cf. esp. J. Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture (London, 1948).
 Biographical Notes
Dr. Hans Urs von Balthasar was born in Lucerne on August 12,
1905. After studies in German language and culture, in theology
and philosophy, in Vienna, Berlin, and Ziirich, in 1929 he
received the degree of D.Phil. For many years he has been
active as an author and as director of the Johannes-Verlag in
Basle. He has written many books on religion, aesthetics and
literature.

Prof. Dr. Joseph Ratzinger was born in Marktl/Inn on April 16,

1927. After studies in philosophy and theology in Freising and
Munich he received the degree of D.Theol. in 1953. Since his
appointment in 1957 as tutor and professor he has worked in
Munich, Freising, Bonn, Miinster, and Tiibingen: Since 1969 he
has been professor of dogmatics at the university of Regensburg.
He was a peritus at the Second Vatican Council. He is the author
of numerous theological works.
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