Welcome back to the Word on Fire show.

I'm your host, Matthew Petrusig.

We are continuing our walk through Bishop Barron's lecture series

on one of the most important Catholic theologians

of the 20th century, Hans Ors von Balthasar.

Enjoy.

We're continuing our study of Hans Urs von Balthasar, and I promise we will get to his text,

but I'm doing some of this preliminary work because I think it's really important that we get how distinctive his approach is.

So last lecture, we looked at the whole issue of beauty and the objectivity of it,

using Dietrich von Hildebrand, Thomas Aquinas, and others.

That's key to Baltazar.

What I want to do at the beginning of this lecture is look at some of his intellectual forerunners,

the people that pave the way for what he's doing.

And I think, again,

Word on Fire people will see influences on my own writing and thought. A first one, and we could do

a wonderful lecture series just on him, is Soren Kierkegaar, the great 19th century Protestant

philosopher influenced so many people, but Baltas

are in a big way. I'll just say some very simple things about him. His distinction between

what he calls religiousness A and religiousness B. What's religiousness A? It's religion

or spirituality that comes from our experience, from our consciousness.

What we call doctrine, dogma, is an expression of what we derive more directly from our

experience or from our consciousness. What's religiousness be? It's the religion that is

...