Love Quote by Hans Urs von Balthasar

Balthasar is trying to solve Christianity's hardest PR problem: how can an infinite, incomprehensible God communicate without collapsing into either sentimentality (God as a bigger version of us) or opacity (God as pure mystery, functionally irrelevant)? His answer is a tight paradox that doubles as a dare. Divine love must be "wholly other" - not just intensified human warmth, not a cosmic self-help vibe. Yet if it's real love rather than private perfection, it has to be legible inside history, in the messy grammar of human experience.

The line turns on that sly pivot: "in spite of, or in fact in". Balthasar isn't conceding a translation problem; he's asserting that otherness is the very medium of recognition. The shock of grace isn't that it feels familiar, but that it can be encountered as love precisely where it doesn't flatter our expectations. It's a rebuke to two temptations at once: the modern urge to domesticate God into moral reassurance, and the pious urge to protect transcendence by making it unapproachable.

Context matters. Writing in the mid-20th century, after Europe's theological and moral catastrophes, Balthasar insists Christian revelation can't be an abstract principle. For him, revelation is drama - God entering the world's stage without becoming just another character. Subtext: if the world cannot recognize God's love, then either God hasn't spoken or we've trained ourselves to mistake love for control, success, or spiritual safety. Recognition becomes an ethical test, not an intellectual one.