Perhaps the New Testament prophecy that the charity of many will grow cold envisages precisely our present time. It is a tragic epoch, for it must understand two things simultaneously: that nothing else is worthwhile in the world except man (because there is nothing else in the world on which one can stake oneself)–and that yet ultimately man is not worthwhile. This is the time of philanthropism and perfect humanism, when all philosophies whether of the East or of the West center on man. They are all concerned with the aid and the development he should be given, and yet this interest has, whether openly or secretly, a bitterly cynical or a sweetishly insipid, or else an impersonal and inhuman flavor. There is no way out of this tragic situation, and man knows it himself. Somehow or other he feels cheated in the prison of his nature, of his history and of his absurd planet. He looks for somebody who has defrauded him, but finds no one.
If, however, there was one who was truly man and at the same time God; a God who was not only infinite, unattainable majesty, but at the same time wholly man–such a one would give meaning to the world. Perhaps he came too soon. The Fathers of the Church and the medieval doctors took great pains to explain why he had come so late, at the “end of time”. We ask: why did he not delay his coming until today, when life on earth has become unbearable without him? The reason probably is that the seed he sowed into the earth is breaking the soil and becoming visible only today, not only for the believers within the Church, who have always known it, but also for those outside, with an evidence striking as never before. The hour has come to the world when Christians and non-Christians are united in fraternal love as a question and a reality. Hence it is also the hour in which we must realize that, in its inmost being, Christian love transcends “Christianity” into the space of the world. Indeed, this transcending movement constitutes the essence of Christianity.
Hans Urs von Balthasar. The God Question and Modern Man. (New York: Seabury Press. 1967)
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