Balthasar & Koontz Quotes

From novelist-turned-non-fiction writer Dean Koontz:

This world's beauty is a gift to sustain the heart, and infer the reality of mercy...This may be the primary purpose of dogs: to restore our sense of wonder and to help us maintain it, to make us consider that we should trust our intuition as they trust theirs, and to help us realize that a thing known intuitively can be as real as anything known by material experience.

And from Balthasar's The Christian and Anxiety:

Does not the Christian who takes sin and salvation seriously get lost in a dialectic with no exit, in which each increase in grace brings forth an increase in unworthiness, even guilt, so that in this tangled thicket religion becomes the real inferno? And does not all this furnish the most merciless psychoanalysis with an easy target?

It cannot be denied that something like vertigo can come over a man, even a believer, in this transitional state between fear and hope; after all, it is a routine fact. But Christianity cannot be blamed for this loss of footing; it has to be laid at the door of the man who does not want to take Christianity seriously. Christianity offers man, not a bottomless pit, but solid ground- grounding in God, of course, and not in self. To place oneself on this solid ground involves relinquishing one's own ground...Living, efficacious faith means to walk, to be under way. Everyone who walks has ground under his feet. Faith, love, hope, unceasingly offered to man, are the ground that is constantly being pushed under his feet...Whoever believes, whoever reaches out for faith, takes a real step, and while he steps he cannot simultaneously philosophize about the possibility of stepping, cannot reflect introspectively upon the passage from himself to God and have it in his grasp....The job of mastering this passage, from the Christian point of view, is no longer in man's hands. When man is really walking, God has already provided for the possibility of walking and solved the problem of continuity, and so all the paradoxes of the mind, about Achilles and the tortoise, are passe.

The uneasy conscience that many Christians have, and the anxiety based on it, do not come about because they are sinners and backsliders but because they have stopped believing in the truth and efficacy of their beliefs; they measure the power of faith by their own weakness, they project God's world into their own psychological makeup instead of letting God measure them. They do something that Christians are forbidden to do: they observe faith from the outside; they doubt the power of hope; they deprive themselves the power of love...faith is described in the New Testament as something tangibly sure, giving resat and security - certainly not as a flickering dialectic between sin-anxiety and assurance of salvation, trembling before the devil one minute and triumphing over him the next....

I've tended to be sympathetic to Martin Luther because he was scrupulous and had problems with depression but Balthasar doesn't seem to cut too much slack:

Luther...abided too closely by the Old Testament understanding of promise and eschatology and because he was unwilling to accept either a real deliverance from the anxiety of sin or a real participation in the anguish of the Lord's Cross.