Love Alone Is Credible
Overview
In Hans Urs von Balthasar’s masterwork, The Glory of the Lord, the great theologian used the term “theological aesthetic” to describe what he believed to the most accurate method of interpreting the concept of divine love, as opposed to approaches founded on historical or scientific grounds. In this newly translated book, Balthasar delves deeper into this exploration of what love means, what makes the divine love of God, and how we must become lovers of God in the footsteps of saints like Francis de Sales, John of the Cross, and Thérèse of Lisieux.
Based in the theological aesthetic form, Love Alone is Credible brings a fresh perspective on an oft-explored subject. This is nothing less than a deeply insightful and profound theological meditation that serves to both deepen and inform the faith of the believer.
Having this volume in Logos gives you unprecedented ways to study the theology of Balthasar. With just a click, you can perform powerful word studies, explore cross-references and footnotes, open theological dictionaries, encyclopedias, lectionaries, the Church Fathers, and much more.
- Explores God’s divine love and what love means for us
- Builds upon previous ideas of love in Balthasar’s earlier works
- Discusses the importance of becoming lovers of God
- The Cosmological Reduction
- The Anthropological Reduction
- The Third Way of Love
- The Failures of Love
- Love Must Be Perceived
- Love As Revelation
- Love As Justification and Faith
- Love As Deed
- Love As Form
- Love As the Light of the World
Top Highlights
“When man encounters the love of God in Christ, not only does he experience what genuine love is, but he is also confronted with the undeniable fact that he, a selfish sinner, does not himself possess true love.” (Page 61)
“John does not seek to demonstrate this by projecting the life of Jesus onto the level of Greek wisdom (or vice versa), but rather allows the incarnate Logos to interpret himself. The Logos reveals himself as ‘gracious love’ (χάρις), and thereby as ‘glory’ (the ‘divinely beautiful’, δόξα), and precisely for this reason as the ‘truth’ (ἀληθέιας: Jn 1:14).” (Pages 54–55)
“What is here called an ‘aesthetic’ is therefore characterized as something properly theological, namely, as the reception, perceived with the eyes of faith, of the self-interpreting glory of the sovereignly free love of God.” (Page 11)
“All the same, man cannot come to a recognition of this sign on the basis of his ‘anticipation’ without a radical conversion—a conversion not only of the heart, which must in the face of this love confess that it has failed to love until now, but also a conversion of thought, which must relearn what love after all really is.” (Page 61)
“The Church Fathers already insisted that all objective redemption would be useless if it were not relived subjectively as a dying and rising with Christ in the Holy Spirit; this truth echoes over and over throughout the Middle Ages (Bernard, Eckart, etc.) and the Baroque period.” (Page 42)
- Title: Love Alone Is Credible
- Author: Hans Urs von Balthasar
- Publisher: Ignatius
- Print Publication Date: 2004
- Logos Release Date: 2013
- Pages: 160
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- Subjects: God (Christianity) › Love; Love › Religious aspects--Christianity
- ISBNs: 9780898708813, 0898708818
- Resource ID: LLS:LVLNSCRDBLHNSRS
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-25T20:18:29Z
Reviews
1 rating
Br Damien-Joseph OSB
1/15/2015
Balthasar seeks to build his own argument for the existence of a loving God, first addressing the weaknesses in cosmological and anthropological arguments, and then spending the rest of his work discussing love: love as revelation, love as justification, love as deed, etc. It's a short book worth reading and highlighting and is very quotable. Read it and discuss it with others, because there is little hermeneutic to make this treatise presently useful besides as intellectual stimulation and theological poetry.