Love Alone Is Credible

Ignatius Pr, June 2005. Paper Back. New. It's folly to call any book by von Balthasar an easy grasp, but <i>Love Alone Is Credible</i> is simple in that it concerns itself only with God's great deed: his love as manifest in Christ. Yet in Von Balthasar's case, simplicity does not exclude complexity. His methodology in this little book is none other than the ''theological aesthetic'' he spent volumes explicating in <i>The Glory of the Lord</i> -- namely, ''the reception, perceived with the eyes of faith, of the self-interpreting glory of the sovereignly free love of God.'' What does that mean? Neither religious philosophy nor human experience is adequate when considering the truth of Christianity. Only revelation -- come from God and source of its own integrating center -- can reveal love, because love can only be seen by the eyes of love, and only God is love. This kind of logic (if one can call it that) is dizzying in its circularity but fundamental to Von Balthasar's thesis. Surveying the annals of history, it's evident the lovers are the ones who know God best. Petrarch, the infamous lover-poet himself, puts it beautifully: ''Precisely because we are Christians, philosophy must become for us nothing but the love of wisdom; God's wisdom, however, is his logos -- it is Christ; and thus we must love him in order to become true philosophers.'' 153 pp.