Introduction To Christianity - Closing

Even the Christian may be assailed by the nightmares
induced by the fear of fruitlessness, out of which the
pre-Christian world created these moving images of the
anxiety that all human activity is vain. But his nightmare
is pierced by the saving, transforming voice of
reality: "Have courage, I have conquered the world"
(John 16.33). The new world, with the description of
which, in the image of the final Jerusalem, the Bible ends,
is no Utopia but certainty, which we advance to meet in faith.
A salvation of the world does exist - that is the confidence
which supports the Christian and which still makes it
rewarding even today to be a Christian.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 273

The foregoing reflections may have made a little clearer
what is involved in the biblical pronouncements about
the resurrection: their essential content is not the conception
of a restoration of bodies to souls after a long interval; their aim
is to tell men that they, they themselves, live on; not by
virtue of their own power but because they are known and
loved by God in such a way that they can no longer perish.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 271

Immortality as conceived by the Bible proceeds not from the
personal force of what is in itself indestructible but from being drawn
into the dialogue with the Creator; that is why it must
be called awakening.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 264

Because of the Lord's devotion, never more to be revoked
the Church is the institution sanctified by him for ever,
an institution in which the holiness of the Lord
becomes present among men. But it is really and truly
the holiness of the Lord that becomes present in it
and that chooses again and again as the vessel of its
presence - with a paradoxical love - the dirty hands of men.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 250

True love is excess of justice, excess that goes further
than justice, but never destruction of justice, which must
be and must remain the basic form of justice.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 247

This implies a further and very important consequence.
If the breakthrough to the ultra-complexity of the final phase
is based on spirit and freedom, then it is by no means a neutral,
cosmic drift; it includes responsibility. It does not happen of
its own accord, like a physical progress, but rests on decisions.
That is why the return of the Lord is not only salvation, not
only the omega that sets everything right, but also judgment.
Indeed at this stage we can actually define the meaning of the
talk of judgment. It means precisely this, that the final stage
of the world is not the result of a natural current but the result
of responsibility based on freedom. This must also be regarded
as the key to understanding why the New Testament clings
fast, in spite of its message of grace, to the assertion that at
the end men are judged "by their works" and no one can escape
giving account of the way he has lived his life.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 239

"Heaven" is by nature what one has not made oneself and
cannot make oneself; in scholastic language it was said to be,
as grace, a "donum indebitum et superadditum naturae"
("an unowed gift added on top of nature"). As fulfilled love, heaven
can always only be granted to man; but hell is loneliness of the man
who will not accept it, who declines the status of beggar and
withdraws into itself.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 234

Christian message is basically nothing else than the
transmission of the testimony that love has here
broken through death and thus transformed fundamentally
the situation of all of us.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 229

Death is absolute loneliness. But the loneliness into which
love can no longer reach is - hell.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 226

Thus the article about the Lord's descent into hell
reminds us that not only God's speech but also his silence
is part of the Christian revelation. God is not only the
comprehensible word that comes us; he is also the silent,
inaccessible, uncomprehended and incomprehensible ground
that eludes us. To be sre, in Christianity there is primacy of the
logos, of the word, over silence; God has
spoken. God is word. But this does not entitle us
to forget the truth of God's abiding concealment. Only
when we have experienced him as silence may we hope
to hear his speech too, which proceeds in silence. Christology
reaches out beyond the cross, the moment when the divine love
is tangible, into the death, the silence and the eclipse of God.
Can we wonder that the Church and the life of the individual
are led again and again into this hour of silence, into the forgotten
and almost discarded article, "Descended into hell"?

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 224

"God is dead and we have killed him.: This saying of Nietzsche's
belongs linguistically to the tradition of Christian Passiontide
piety; it expresses the content of Holy Saturday, "descended into hell".

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 221

Why should God take pleasure in the suffering of his creature,
indeed his own Son, or even see in it the currency with which
reconciliation has to be purchased from him? The Bible and
right Christian belief are far removed from such ideas. It is not
pain as such that counts, but the breadth of the love which spans
existence so completely that it unites the distant and the near,
bringing God-forsaken man into relation with God. It alone gives
the pain as aim and a meaning. Were it otherwise, then the
executioners round the cross would have been the real priests;
they, who had caused the pain, would have offered the sacrifice.
But this was not the point; the point was the inner centre that
bears and fulfils the pain, and therefore the executioners were not
the priests; the priest was Jesus, who reunited the two separated
ends of the world in his love.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 215

It says on the contrary that "God was in Christ something
new, something unheard of - the starting-point of Christian
existence and the centre of New Testament theology of the
cross: God does not wait until the guilty come to be reconciled ;
he goes to meet them and reconciles them. Here we can see
the true direction of the incarnation, of the cross.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 213

"Everything is grace" - a saying in which a life which seemed
to be only weakness and futility can see itself as full of riches
and fulfilment - truly becomes in Mary, "full of grace", a
concrete reality. She does not contest or endanger the exclusiveness
of salvation through Christ; she points to it.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 210

The virgin birth is not a lesson in ascetisim nor does it belong directly to the doctrine of Jesus' Sonship; it is first and last theology of grace, a proclamation of how salvation comes to us: in the simplicity of acceptance, as the voluntary gift of the love that redeems the world.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 208

For the Sonship of which faith speaks is not a biological
but an ontological fact, an event not in time but in God's
eternity; God is always Father, Son and Spirit; the conception
of Jesus does not mean that a new God-the-Son comes into being,
but that God as Son in the man Jesus draws the creature man
to himself, so that he himself "is" man.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 204

Let us be plain, even at the risk of being misunderstood:
the true Christian is not the denominational party-member
but he who through being a Christian has become truly
human; not he who slavishly observes a system of norms,
thinking as he does so only of himself, but he who has
become freed to simple human goodness. Of course,
the principle of love, if it is to be genuine, includes faith.
Only thus does it remain what it is. For without faith,
which we have come to understand as a term expressing
man's ultimate need to receive and the inadequacy of
all personal achievement, love becomes an arbitrary deed.
It cancels itself out and becomes self-righteousness:
faith and love condition and demand each other reciprocally.
Similarly, in the principle of love there is also present the
principle of hope, which looks beyond the moment and its isolation,
and seeks the whole. Thus our reflections finally lead of
their own accord to the words in which Paul named the main
supporting pillars of Christianity: "So faith, hope, love abide,
these three; but the greatest of them is love"

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 202

Accordingly, from the point of view of the Christian faith,
man comes in the profoundest sense to himself not through
what he does but through what he accepts. He must wait for
the gift of love, and love can only be received as a gift. It
cannot be "made" on one's own, without anyone else; one
must wait for it, let it be given to one. And one cannot become
wholly man in any other way than by being loved,
by letting oneself be loved. That love represents simultaneously
both man's highest possibility and his deepest need, and that
this most necessary thing is at the same time the freest and
the most unenforceable, means precisely, means precisely that
for his "salvation" man is meant to rely on receiving. If he
declines to let himself be presented with the gift, then he
destroys himself. Activity that makes itself into an absolute,
that aims at achieving humanity by its own efforts alone,
is in contradiction with man's being.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 201

Indissoluble marriage is in fact only comprehensible and
feasible on the basis of faith in God's henceforward irrevocable
decision, embodied in Christ, in favour of "marriage" with
mankind. It stand or falls with this faith; in the long run it
is just as impossible outside this faith as it is necessary within it.
And once again it should be stated that it is precisely this
apparent fixation on the decision of one moment in life that
enables man to march forward, to consolidate himself stage by
stage, while the continual annulment of such decisions keeps
sending him back to the beginning again and condemns him to
a circular motion that encloses itself in the fiction of eternal youth
and thus refuses to accept the totality of human existence.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 197

Christ is the infinite self-expenditure of God.