I'm finding this an exciting and challenging book to read. Quite outside my tradition within the Church and so good to read a well respected and recommended author.
The following quote is from early in the book where Von Balthasar is discussion the role of the Father in contemplative prayer:
'"... this comprehensive work of salvation originates with the Father as Creator. He has established human nature, and it is he who defines and bestows its ultimate goal. It is out of love that he has done this, not out of necessity or mere justice, as if the greatness and dignity of created spiritual nature "demanded" it. He committed and "gave" (Jn 3:16) his only Son to this most sublime and free task of love; he took the raptus, mere nature's dizzy flight toward its heavenly goal, and focussed it in the Person of the incarnate Son who binds together God and man, heaven and earth, whom he sent "in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin" and in whose flesh he condemned sin( Rom 8:3)' (pages 42-43)
What a great deal we lose here if God is not Creator. Our salvation is not a small work undertaken by us, or by some 'contained within creation deity', our salvation is the ultimate goal of the purposes of God the Father who is the Creator of all things.
How hard it must be to understand and relate to a passage like this in Von Balthasar unless one submits to a form of atonement by the Son, which is both in the will of God and offered towards God as the object of that atonement.
And then to ponder that this God has opened a way for us that we might contemplate him, as he is in himself, and through which he draws us ever more closely to himself as the outcome of his purposes of salvation.
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