The Need for the Year
of Faith:
Without it, Purgatory
Remember: The “Last Things” are Christological. They
are relations, not states or places.
Hans Urs von Balthasar: “God is the ‘last thing’ of the creature.
Gained, he is heaven, lost, he is hell; examining, he is judgment; purifying,
he is purgatory. He it is to whom finite being dies, and through whom it rises
to him, in him. This he is, however, as he presents himself to the world, that
is, in his Son, Jesus Christ, who is the revelation of God and, therefore, the
whole essence of the last things. In this way, eschatology is, almost more even
than any other locus theologicus, entirely a doctrine of salvation. This is, as we shall see, absolutely central.” [1]
Joseph Ratzinger: “What actually saves us is the full
assent of faith.”[2] “But
in most of us that basic option is buried under a great deal of wood, hay and
straw. Only with difficulty can it peer out from behind the latticework of an
egoism we are powerless to pull down with our own hands. Man is the recipient
of the divine mercy, yet this does not exonerated him from the need to be
transformed. Encounter with the Lord is
this transformation. It is the fire that burns away our dross and re-forms us
to be vessels of eternal joy.”
Thus, “The essential Christian understanding
of Purgatory has now become clear. Purgatory is not, as Tertullian thought,
some kind of supra-worldly concentration camp where man is forced to undergo punishment
in a more or less arbitrary fashion. Rather is it the inwardly necessary
process of transformation in which a person becomes capable of Christ, capable
of God and thus capable of unity with the whole communion of saints. Simply to
look at people with any degree of realism at all is to grasp the necessity of
such a process. It does not replace grace by works, but allows the former to
achieve its full victory precisely as grace.” That is to say again: “What actually
saves us is the full assent of faith” [Ibid.]
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