Vigils Reading

THE EXPERIENCE OF FAITH

By Hans Urs von Balthasar7

◊◊◊

The analogy between the pre-Easter and the post Easter testimony

(comparable to the analogy between testimony in the Old and the New

Testament) signifies the decisive step forward: the leaving behind of the old,

which had served as basis, in order to become established in the new. Paul is

the eyewitness of this step forward, since he not only had to defend his

eyewitness arduously in itself, but his eyewitness in this matter against the

privileges of the original Apostles. Whoever disregards the element of analogy

in the Apostles’ witness, will hold unswervingly to the testimony of the other

Apostles and will with them consider Paul’s credentials as an eyewitness to be

secondary, if not altogether doubtful. But his legitimacy stands under the

protection of Scriptural inspiration and thus remains unassailable.

This is of the highest theological interest. Paul’s witness to the

Resurrection dispenses with the ‘analogy’ between witness to Christ’s earthly

existence and witness to the Resurrection; he is a witness only to Jesus’

Resurrection. For Paul, the identity of the risen Christ with the Jesus who

suffered and died lies in the vitality exhibited by the Kyrios. Because he is the

new man, he was also the old. If this holds for Paul and if it is to this that he

witnesses, the same does not necessarily apply to the others. For Paul there is

no other legitimation than that of his own turning from the Old to the New

Covenant and to the new man, his conversio morum, the fact that in all things

he shows himself to be a servant of God, the fact that his existence has been so

transformed that it has become an incontestable mirroring of the image of

Christ. Paul proves himself to be one who has seen essentially by letting himself

be seen and by being, in fact, seen. He gives himself wholly over to seeing,

hearing, and touching: by the grace of God, in him a Christian has been formed

who is not a ghost, but who has flesh and bones. Paul cuts right through the

analogy that runs across the testimony of Peter and others, and this cannot be

his work, since he himself is the work of the grace of the Risen One.

Paul straddles the boundary between the apostolic and the ecclesial era.

He fights for his inclusion in the apostolic era, and the Lord himself gives the

warrant for this inclusion; and yet his experience of Christ bears essential

features of the ecclesial era, namely, that of private revelation and its

confirmation by personal sanctity. He shares this transitional character with

the whole period of the Acts of the Apostles: this is the period of archetypal

Church history. This is certainly so, on the one hand, because this is the span

of time in which Christ’s original eyewitnesses lived. And yet Paul falls outside

these limits, while still dominating in a central way the events in the Acts of the

Apostles. For, on the other hand, this period of history is more than just the

timespan in which the original eyewitnesses lived; it is the privileged space in

which the Holy Spirit became visible, audible, and palpable: it is the expansion

of the explosion that occurred on Pentecost.

7 The Glory of the Lord. Vol. I Seeing the Form. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Ignatius Press, 1982, pp. 347-348.15