Vigils Reading

A reading from

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 human beings are

central, not the angels nor the subhuman things created for the sake of human

beings to rule as God commanded and chose them to do.

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, not forcing them onto a dogmatic

procrustean bed but 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.