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. I promise I get to the text of

Baltazar. Now we will. Looking at the first part of the great trilogy, the hairlishkite.

As I mentioned, the word is that double sentence of glory and also of lordliness.

The glory of the Lord.

To take in now the lustre and the glow and the beauty of the Lord is what Christianity is all about.

Remember, too, that we're talking about someone formed in the Ignatian,

the Jesuit tradition. When one goes on a Jesuit retreat, one spends an extended amount of time

contemplating the form of Christ patiently. Keep, you know, Jane Goodall in mind, and keep Bart in mind and keep Wittgenstein in mind.

We must plow through the whole of speech, the patient listening. Keep Gerta in mind.

Baltazar is now going to urge all of us not to do a sitting theology, which is sort of the academic, but what he calls

a kneeling theology, kneeling in the presence of the form of Christ, and allowing that form

to work on us. Keep in mind, too, the iconic tradition. So now we're in the Eastern Christian

world. When you pray with an icon,

you're not in charge. Rather, the person represented by that icon addresses you, as it were,

through it. You sit or you kneel in the presence of the icon, and it works upon you.

Baltazar is proposing an iconic theology, allowing the glory of the Lord to transform and

transfigure us. He wants our sort of Newtonian, aggressive, rationalistic tendencies to fall away, and our contemplative, receptive capacity to come to the form.

Here's something I find really interesting.

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