Hans Urs von Balthasar - Who Is a Christian?

WHO IS A CHRISTIAN?

TRANSLATED BY
FRANK DAVIDSON

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

Original German edition:
Wer ist ein Christ?
1983 by JohannesVerlag, Einsiedeln
Fifth edition, 1993

Cover design by Roxanne Mei Lum

2014 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-58617-531-3
Library of Congress Control Number 2012942879
Printed in the United States of America

The young question us. Who can give them an answer? Before they question us, they look around with a certain, not unjustified, methodical mistrust. These people who claim to be Christianson what are their claims based? By what yardstick do we measure their tradition, catechism, sacramental practice? By the Gospel? But things look very different there. And so we have to invoke the intermediary of the Churchs Magisterium. But then things really start to get difficult, for now we can no longer look straight through to the origins but must, instead, look around the corner, so to speak; and so the tiresome squabbles begin: about the claims of the clergy to know the founders intentions precisely, to be able to interpret them in the right way, and even to impose this interpretation authoritatively on our consciences. But since such interpretations somehow always bearand who can blame them for this?the features of their own time, for which they are of course intended, it is inevitable that, in the altered spirit of the age, interpretations that were once so forcefully proposed should lose their power and immediacy and become pale, formulaic, and often embarrassing, frequently revealed to be time-bound ideology. So a new aggiornamento becomes inevitable, and while many loudly admire the Churchs constant power of renewal, others start to feel quietly uncomfortable when positions so long stubbornly defended are abandoned, deserted, razed to the ground as though they were no more than insignificant outposts or antiquated bastions. And so the question arises, still more disturbingly: Where, ultimately, is the yardstick to be found? The glance back at the origins becomes still more searching, since the historical aspects seem to move, like shifting sand dunes. Where, then, is the bedrock? Where can we find an unequivocal answer to the question of who a Christian is? And even if this question does not burn within me personally, it still burns in those around me. If I am a father, my son will want to know, and I cannot act toward him as though I knew the answer and thereby deceive his conscience. If I am a teacher, then I am abusing my authority if I sell the children notions for which I myself am unwilling to put my hand in the fire. If they are my workmates or other companions, then friend and foe alike are going to expect better answers from me than the pupil does from the teacherand be less likely to be easily put off. So, even if I do not ask the question myself, others will force me to ask it.

At the same time, the situation of the Christian who asks or is being asked is isolated as never before. Hitherto there was always some point of common reference for the religious debate, or at least it seemed as though there were a shared foundation upon which one could rely, so that one had only to argue about secondary differences. The situation of Saint Paul on the Areopagus, after a morning stroll through the temples and shrines of Athens, now seems altogether enviable to us. His interlocutors are very religious; not only do they see the Divinity as ruling everywhere in the universe, but they even have no difficulty in more or less assuredly believing in a variety of different personal revelations and acknowledging the official state worship of them. It is then only, so to speak, a matter of revealing the unknown God to them and showing how incomparably different from the existing cults is the way he has made himself known in the death and Resurrection of Christ. Undoubtedly, with Rome, the battle is then hard and harsh for a time, but the victory is comparatively very soon won, and from then on, throughout the Middle Ages, Renaissance and baroque, Enlightenment and idealism, the religious debate remains within the framework of the exchange in the Areopagus. When Thomas Aquinas speaks with the Jews and heathens (meaning Islam), the shared premise is the fundamental recognition of the Divine, in his otherness from the world, and also Gods personhood and his revelation in one or more historical prophets. On the basis of similar premises, Roger Bacon, Ramon Llull, Nicolas of Cusa construct their own conciliatory and often very accommodating approaches to religion. The Renaissance continues these, inasmuch as it looks back to the ancient world and, in considering other gradually emerging aspects of religious history, still sees Christianity as the highest and most beautiful expression of the worlds religions, since in comparing them it sees the preeminence, the absolute superiority of the Christian revelation as self-evident. The Enlightenment takes a fundamentally similar view, even if the accent shifts somewhat and the world religions are now viewed under the aspect of the religious faculty of man as such.

Does that not in any case fit in with your own Christian logic? Were not the first disciples sent out by your founder into all the world? You are contradicting yourselves, because while everyone else is looking forward, you are the only ones looking backward.

The Christian is left looking around for help. What was once like a warm, protective garment has now been stripped away, leaving him feeling embarrassingly naked. He feels like a fossil from a vanished age.

With the decline of religion, there is an automatic decline in those forms of ethics that are rooted in religion. On the one hand, there is the sort of ethics that was predicated either entirely or primarily on the notion of eternal justice and retribution. But man is either moral in himself or he is not so at all; behavior based on reward or punishment is morally questionable, or at any rate not pure. On the other hand, there is that higher ethics that seeks to do good in imitation of the highest Good: since God gives us being, since God causes his sun to rise selflessly on good and bad alike, therefore we, too, strive to be thankful and selfless. But what if God did not exist? Would not such selflessness still be within the nature of man? Does not the social animal world in any case lead us to infer this as something that in ourselves merely assumes a higher form of self-government? Moreover, should not this supposed selflessness also be counterbalanced by a healthy, natural inclination to selfhood, self-love, and self-concern, such as that possessed in elementary form by the subhuman living world? In which case, our ethics ought to be situated somewhere in the sane middle ground, between self-concern and altruism. Man surely does not need a reference to God, still less a personal revelation, in order to observe such things.

Consider too, dear Christian friend, if your lofty moral demands are alien to the world, whether it is not also because, along with the ethics of the outmoded, ancient world, they were of a kind reserved for heroes (you call them saints), for the nobler, aristocratic sort of peoplejust as in the ancient theatres it was the strict convention that only kings, heroes, and gods should be permitted to appear (as in the Christian theatre, martyrs or other heroic saints, or at least angels and the like), while the common plebs were allowed to play their part only in bawdy comediesin which, incidentally, gods and men would set about each other in the merriest manner. So it was once; and so it was for all too long in Christian times.