“The religious element in mankind” stands as a whole unconsciously in the light of grace and redemption; on every religious road man can find the God of grace. This is the christening of the Enlightenment and of liberal theology from Herbert of Cherbury down to the present day. […] Further: why should a Christian truth not be hidden even in the Marxist total-labor process as the return of mankind from its self-alienation and as the transformation of the world and of man by means of technology? And if Marxism demands the self-immolation of the individual to the collective and to its ideal of the future, why can this process, this sacrifice, this anonymity and poverty of the individual not be understood much more profoundly and transfigured by the light of the salvific order in a Christian “theology of work”, according to the principle of hope in an eschatological kingdom into which, in any case, the collective effort of mankind must flow? And again: Is it not only through fellow feeling that man truly becomes man? Is it not precisely here that the absolute and the divine shine forth and become understandable to him, as (following Fichte’s profound speculation) Feuerbach and the modern personalists Scheler, Ebner, Buber and Jaspers emphasize? One can almost discern the Sermon on the Mount lying behind all this. Does not the Parable of the Good Samaritan (where it is the “heretic” who does the right thing and is put forward as the example) express precisely this “one thing necessary”? Does not the parable of Judgment Day (Mt 25) say precisely that even the just are astounded at the judgment (“Lord, when did we see you hungry, thirsty, naked, in exile, sick, in prison?”) and hence that the just, too, even when they are actually Christians, are “anonymous Christians” as genuine fellow men? Here, at last, true humanism is begotten.
–Hans Urs von Balthasar, My Work in Retrospect (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 53-55.
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