Quotes about Revelation
People in darkness don't know they're in darkness because it's all they've ever known. It's their world. They navigate primarily by bumping off things that are stronger. Immovable. They don't know darkness is darkness until someone turns on a light. Only then does the darkness roll back like a scroll. It has to. Darkness can't stand light. And it hasn't. Not since God spoke it into existence.
— Charles Martin
See it?" ... "Yeah." ... "How in the world did you see that in the first place?" "Don't know." "It's hard to make out." "Give it about ten minutes..." So we waited. Trying not to look at it so much that it lost all meaning. Like a word you say over and over until you're only hearing what it sounds like and you've forgotten what it means.
— Charles Martin
That was the night I learned the value of an old hymn. How something so old and "out-of-date" could say words my heart needed to hear and didn't know how to say.
— Charles Martin
We wrestle and search. But regardless of where we search and how we try to answer the question or what we ingest, inject, or swallow to numb the nagging, only the Father gets to tell us who we are. Period.
— Charles Martin
Story is the bandage of the broken. Sutures of the shattered. The tapestry upon which we write our lives. Upon which we lay the bodies of the dying and the about-to-come-to-life. And if it's honest, true, hiding nothing, revealing all, then it is a raging river and those who ride it find they have something to give—that they are not yet empty.
— Charles Martin
The flight away from self to God is not a "forgetting self" in the sense that man thereby loses himself. Rather, in the experience of the Spirit there is bestowed on man the deepest possible experience of himself: for the Holy Spirit is a Spirit of revelation which illuminates the human spirit, in which it is immanent, by telling man what he is.
— Hans Urs von Balthasar
We dwell in the place in which we are not traveling but are at home. The landscape of God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ is our home. It is a landscape that we are never finished exploring, for new prospects are always emerging. Nevertheless, it is familiar to us and becomes all the more familiar the longer we reside there.
— Hans Urs von Balthasar
It is as if the fact that God is light, penetrating and manifesting everything, is so absolutely important that darkness and bondage can and must exist for the light's sake.
— Hans Urs von Balthasar
The letter kills, it is the Spirit that gives life!" (2 Cor 3:6). You may be sure, reverend sir, that I will never accept some concept from Scripture if I have not really understood its meaning.
— Hans Urs von Balthasar
The Church and her exegesis of revelation progress through the ever-changing periods of world history. New aspects emerge, while others wane; efforts are made to compensate for one-sided emphases, but not rarely they are simply replaced with the opposite extremes. Today too, then, it is a duty to restate the principles in a new and timely way—while being as measured as possible—and in so doing to retrieve what is of permanent value.
— Hans Urs von Balthasar
They try to reveal revelation to themselves. For the grace of the Holy Spirit never destroys the capabilities of nature. Just the opposite: it makes nature, which has been weakened by unnatural habit, mature and strong enough once again to function in a natural way and leads it upward toward insight into the divine.
— Hans Urs von Balthasar
God defines himself as "I am who I am", which also means: My being is such that I shall always be present in every moment of becoming.
— Hans Urs von Balthasar