I was literally 2/3 through the book before I began to intimate at all what he was trying to say. But I kept reading. Like one continues watching a suspense film, you trust that all the mysteries and raised questions will be answered in the end, so it was that I trusted Hans Urs von Balthasar. He did not disappoint. Though after finishing I needed to review briefly the first chapters so that I might see them in light of the end, I was finally able to grasp his message (though I retain a sense that there was still much lost on me).  Love Alone is Credible begins with the question "What is specifically Christian about Christianity?" At once I recognized the depth and quality of the question. He proceeds to expound two inadequate answers. The first he calls The Cosmological Reduction. He recounts how many throughout history have considered Nature and stories about nature, the world and the myths about the world, to have been little images of the Truth-writ-large that we witness in Christ. All the myths of the dying gods, of Baldir and the Corn-Kings, were shadows of the substance of Jesus. In this sense Christianity becomes the perfection of all our imperfect stories, the Myth-Become-Fact as C.S. Lewis put it. It is the religion which Augustine sought which would bring Platonism to perfection. But, if this is true then it means that Christianity is not at all unique, except by degree. Christianity is the full grown Man which we got to know as a child through our nursery rhymes and myths of the mysterious Mediterranean. Still, both the boy and the man are human. This Cosmological reduction, then, cannot be what is specifically Christian about Christianity. It would be truer to say that this is what is specifically pagan about Christianity, though it is the truest pagan thing that pagans ever did say. Balthasar moves on to consider what he names The Anthropological Reduction. This begins with the idea that Man is the measure of all things. Truth, then, is judged by its ability to aid Man in being fulfilled or attaining to perfection,  As thinkers have reflected upon what it means to be a human being many of them have found that the necessary path looks much like Christianity, as if Man himself, through reflection upon Man, could have invented Christianity had his reason been clear enough. As Kant said this is "the teaching of biblical faith, insofar as it can be deduced from ourselves by means of reason." If this is true, however, then it cannot be what is specifically Christian about Christianity. It can only be that which is specifically human about Christianity. Or even more accurately, it can only be what is humanistic about Christianity. Where then is the divine? Where then is Christ? Where is the one who combines what is human and what is divine in order to be the Christ and so produce what is specifically Christ-ian about Christ-ianity? Balthasar's answer is that love alone is credible. Love is the only specifically Christian thing about Christianity. Not love as an abstract idea, but as a real concrete event. And not just any real kindness which might be labeled "Love." Rather, the only love worthy to be called love. The only love which we could not have guessed. The only love which is a surprise. The love which throws itself away for the good of the other. The love which empties itself so that the other might be full. The love which dies so that others might live. The love which by dying conquers death and brings new life. The love of God expressed in the cross of Christ, let loose by the resurrection to run free and wild, and the love which is kindled in the heart of the church by God's good and loving Holy Spirit. Love, .ove alone is credible. And only by love shall the world know that we are Christians. And what is of infinite more importance, only by our love shall the world know Christ and only through him shall they know God.

P.S. (After a re-read): I read this book for the first time exactly four months ago. I was dissatisfied with my grasp of the first reading. Since then I have discovered Stanley Hauerwas who introduced me to Karl Barth. I learned that Barth and Balthasar were good friends. Balthasar saw much truth in Barth's work and thought that his work could serve as a sort of ecumenical bridge between Protestants and Catholic. He even wrote a book on his work entitled "The Theology of Karl Barth." My experience with Hauerwas and Barth made me want to revisit Balthasar to see if perhaps I was better prepared for what he had to say. I confess, I still feel as though much was lost on me. Regardless, I did make progress. Balthasar and Barth seem to emphasize the "Otherness" of God. As such, he cannot be guessed or proved or "arrived at" through philosophy or natural theology, whether we reason from the cosmos or from mankind. How then can we know God? He must reveal himself. Put another way, we do not "get at God" by beginning with Truth or Reason. Rather, we are arrested by the Beautiful. God's glory, as revealed by the love of Christ, appears to us and we are overwhelmed by it. It appears too good to be true. We know that this absolute love has no natural origin; It is, quite literally, heavenly. Still we might ask, "How do we know this love?" Through the presence of Christ in the church. "The sole credibility of the Church Christ founded lies, as he himself says, in the saints, as those who sought to set all things on the love of Christ alone. It is in them that we can see what the 'authentic' Church is, that is, what she is in her authenticity, while she is essentially obscured by sinners (as people who do not seriously believe in God's love) and turned into a useless enigma, which as such deservedly provokes contradiction and blasphemy (Rom 2:24). Christ's apologetic, by contrast, can be summarized in the sentence: 'By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another' (Jn 13:35)" (p.122). And so, whereas arguments and reason cannot prove God, there is a love which only the God in Jesus Christ can explain. For the world "Love alone is credible."