Vigils Reading

THROUGH GOD’S EYES

By Hans Urs von Balthasar

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Christians live with their involvement in the involvement of God for the

freedom of the world. They know that each one has been chosen by God and

called by name to assist in his work of liberation. In this work…Christians must,

first of all, learn to see fellow human beings and all created things through the

eyes of God. This does not mean that the human being seen in this light, ceases

to be a profound mystery. Just the opposite. If it is true that God has made the

human being in his own image and likeness, then this ought rather to mean that

something of the uniqueness and unfathomableness of God shines in the

human person, so much more clearly to the beholder when God, in choosing

him and acting in and for him, sheds upon him God’s own mysterious light.

To look through God’s eyes at the human world means enduring both the

openness and contradictions of humans.., bringing everything under the unity

of God’s plan. Whoever can see more truth than someone else when they look, is

in the right. This means first that the human being exists centrally as a person: a

person intended by God, loved by God, and for whom God dies in order to

rescue and draw him to God. Hence all that has the status of a thing, all that is

not personal in this world, has value only in so far as it serves the purposes of the

person, and is harmful when it betrays the person into the hands of the

impersonal, reducing him to slavery and to the status of a thing. This

determines the Christian’s attitude towards technology. Our battle with the

universe will always remain something of a struggle and perhaps even a violent

war, but such a war will be just and permissible only so long as its normative aim

remains the humanization of the human being.

As a fellow human being, the Christian is of course committed to taking

part in the total effort of humanity towards the humanizing of the world, the

perduring problematic and indeed tragic nature of which we have already

indicated. The Christian, however, has no clear-cut recipes or solutions to offer

to this problem, and like others must wrestle with the deciphering of the riddles

of nature and of history. In this pursuit Christians are at one with their fellows.

But from their knowledge of God’s involvement for the world, they have a wider

horizon which embraces the problematic and tragic, without eliminating it, and

from which there falls on the world the only light that is truly illuminating and

helpful. They must bear witness to this light not just abstractly – by professions

of faith – but concretely in their professional and human involvement.