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1. One way of putting the insight that my study of Maurice has more and more borne in upon me is this: the very meaning of my existence as a human being is my existence in God. But for God's having created me and immediately thereupon claimed me by offering me the gift of eternal life in Godself, I would not be a human being at all. To be human, which is to say, to be given the possibility and the necessity of ever and again becoming human, is to be confronted with the gift and demand of God's love, which calls me beyond myself to God. But although my acceptance of God's gift is indeed contingent upon my own free response of obedience to the demand it implies, the gift and demand themselves are in no way thus contingent, being contingent solely on God's free decision, which is nothing other than God's decision ever and again to become God in relation to the creatures of God's love. Thus, although I am never without the possibility of faith, in the sense of the acceptance of God's gift and obedience to God's demand, this is in no way because this possibility belongs to me in abstraction from God's ever-renewed gift of Godself and the demand it implies. Rather, I have the possibility only because, over and above all that I myself can be and do, God never ceases to be and to act as God toward me, always summoning me beyond myself and my past to Godself as alone my final future. In short, the possibility of faith, and hence of hope and love as well, is a strictly eschatological possibility, which I have thanks only to the consequent, eschatological activity of God. And this is true even though, because God is "primordially consequent," my eschatological possibility is never other than my protological possibility, which itself -- as Maurice insists -- is nothing I ever had in myself, in abstraction from God, but something I have only by virtue of God's ever-renewed self-relation to me in love.

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