Johann Baptist Metz

Towards the end of the Second World War, when I was sixteen years old, I was taken out of school and forced into the army. After a brief period of training at a base in Wüzburg, I arrived at the front, which by that time had already crossed the Rhine into Germany. There were well over a hundred in my company, all of whom were very young. One evening the company commander sent me with a message to battalion headquarters. I wandered all night long through destroyed, burning villages and farms, and when in the morning I returned to my company I found only the dead, nothing but dead, overrun by a combined bomber and tank assault. I could see only dead and empty faces, where the day before I had shared childhood fears and youthful laughter. I remember nothing but a wordless cry. Thus I see myself to this very day, and behind this memory all my childhood dreams crumble away.

Tko npr. formulira govor o Bogu Abrahamovu, Izakovu i Jakovljevu tako da se u njemu više ne _uje Jobov uzdisaj i tužaljka 'Ta dokle još?', taj se ne bavi teologijom nego mitologijom.

No mi krš_ani upu_eni smo po središtu našega Creda - 'mu_en pod Poncijem Pilatom' - u povijest u kojoj je bilo razapinjanja i mu_enja, u kojoj se plakalo i tako rijetko ljubilo. I nikakav od povijesti udaljeni mit, nikakav Platonovi idejni Bog, nikakva gnosti_ka soteriologija i nikakav apstraktni govor o povijesnosti naše egzistencije ne mogu nam vratiti onu nedužnost koju smo u toj povijesti izgubili.

[N]one of us drinks the chalice of our existence to the last drop. None of us is fully obedient. Each of us falls short of the human nature entrusted to us.

Molitveni jezik jedini je jezik u kojem nema jezi_nih zabrana. Kako je ve_ re_eno, on je obuhvatniji od jezika vjere koja je sigurna u samu sebe. U jeziku molitve može se naime re_i i to da se ne može vjerovati.

We must learn to accept ourselves in the painful experiment of living. We must embrace the spiritual adventure of becoming human, moving through the many stages that lie between birth and death.