Sheep Among Wolves

In the ideal of the organic unity and mutual permeation of State and Church in the Middle Ages there is a failure to ensure the necessary distinction between God and the world. To identify and condemn this permeation, or confusion, was the most important motive for Augustine's writing of The City of God in the Christian Empire of late Rome. In the world of George W. Bush, Balthasar's moment may have arrived. It is certainly a time to pay attention to 'always greater' Christian truth spoken from a rich, complex, Catholic, deeply and widely informed mind, and to understand the no more than relative and transient value of any and every human arrangement of power, or words. Among theologians, Hans Urs von Balthasar may seem like a fox among chickens, but in the last year of his life he ended the final section of his book, My Work in Retrospect: 'Christ sent his believers into the whole world as sheep among wolves. Before making a pact with the world, it is necessary to meditate on that comparison.' - Lucy Beckett in the Times Literary Supplement of the new Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar