"Prior to an individual's encounter with the love of God at a particular time in history, however, there has to be another, more fundamental and archetypal encounter, which belongs to the conditions of possibility of the appearance of divine love to man"
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Balthasar is quietly insisting that divine love is not just an event but an intelligible event. Before the flashpoint of conversion, prayer, or grace "at a particular time in history", he posits a prior meeting point built into the human condition: an "archetypal encounter" that makes the later, explicit encounter with God even conceivable. The move is both pastoral and polemical. Pastoral, because it dignifies the pre-religious life as already structured by an address, a summons, a readiness. Polemical, because it refuses a crude supernaturalism where God drops in as a foreign object, as well as a flat secular anthropology where "divine love" is merely a projection.
The key phrase is "conditions of possibility", a tell that Balthasar is talking to modern philosophy as much as to the Church. He borrows the grammar of Kant and phenomenology to argue that grace does not abolish nature; it presupposes and fulfills it. The subtext: Christianity can meet modernity on its own terrain without conceding the center. God’s love still arrives historically (Incarnation, Cross, sacraments, the concrete "particular time"), but it resonates because the human subject is already shaped for encounter - by vulnerability, conscience, desire, the experience of being loved or called.
Context matters: writing in a 20th century scarred by ideological totalities and the thinning-out of metaphysics, Balthasar wants a theology that is neither defensive nor sentimental. He makes love legible as revelation, not mood: something that appears, but only to a creature already tuned, however faintly, to being found.
The key phrase is "conditions of possibility", a tell that Balthasar is talking to modern philosophy as much as to the Church. He borrows the grammar of Kant and phenomenology to argue that grace does not abolish nature; it presupposes and fulfills it. The subtext: Christianity can meet modernity on its own terrain without conceding the center. God’s love still arrives historically (Incarnation, Cross, sacraments, the concrete "particular time"), but it resonates because the human subject is already shaped for encounter - by vulnerability, conscience, desire, the experience of being loved or called.
Context matters: writing in a 20th century scarred by ideological totalities and the thinning-out of metaphysics, Balthasar wants a theology that is neither defensive nor sentimental. He makes love legible as revelation, not mood: something that appears, but only to a creature already tuned, however faintly, to being found.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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