Love Quote by Hans Urs von Balthasar

Grace, in von Balthasar's hands, is not a cosmic override button. It is an invitation that reaches all the way down into creaturely psychology: love, freedom, temperament, history. The line is doing delicate theological surgery on an old scandal in Christian thought: if God "chooses and moves" a person, is the human response anything more than a scripted yes?

Von Balthasar refuses both easy exits. He won't let faith become a heroic self-start (the modern fantasy of spiritual self-creation), but he also won't reduce the believer to a puppet animated by divine causality. The sentence performs that balancing act syntactically: God grants, chooses, moves; and yet "truly the creature" responds. The adverb "truly" is the pressure point, insisting on real agency rather than rhetorical window dressing.

The subtext is a critique of two rival spiritual aesthetics. On one side: a thin moralism where "faith" is basically good character plus religious vocabulary. On the other: a pious determinism that treats love as something done to you, not by you. By rooting the response in "its own nature" and "natural powers of love", he smuggles embodiment back into theology: revelation doesn't bypass desire, affection, loyalty, imagination; it recruits them.

Context matters. Writing in a 20th-century Catholic landscape shaped by debates over nature and grace, freedom and predestination, von Balthasar is staking a claim for a dramatized relationship rather than a mechanical system. Faith becomes cooperation without self-congratulation: God's initiative is total, but it arrives in a way that makes the human yes genuinely human.