“[T]he martyr becomes truly a living image of the trinitarian truth revealed in and through the love of the Cross.”

It has been almost sixty years since the publication of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s book Cordula oder der Ernstfall, translated into English under the title The Moment of Christian Witness.¹ The main argument of the book could be synthesized in the following way: martyrdom, as a loving response of faith to Christ’s love unto death “for me” (Gal 2:20), is the decisive moment and measuring “canon” of Christian witness, more than (although inseparable from) “love of neighbor” simply.² Independent from the occasional casus belli of the work—providing a response to Rahner’s theory of “anonymous Christianity”—the central question on which Balthasar reflects in Cordula is no less pertinent today than fifty years ago. If we ask, “What is Christian witness?” we could say something like, “The main object of Christian witness is the revelation of God’s love in Christ. Therefore the two privileged ways of bearing witness to Christ in the world are the preaching of the good news, and active love (agape) of neighbor, with all it includes.” This answer, which says of course nothing substantially new, finds further magisterial support today³ in the emphasis of the strong inherent connection between revealed truth and the mystery of the divine tri-personal communion of Love, in which through Christ the believer comes to share. This does not entail in principle any denial of the importance of dogmatic “truths.” And yet it does entail the affirmation that love, or agape, is what stands at the beginning (Jesus Christ) and at the end (the trinitarian Mystery) of the Christian understanding of truth. If it is true that Deus caritas est,⁴ then to bear witness to God’s truth should mean ultimately nothing else than this: to love our fellow man as (kathos: cf. Jn 13:34; 15:12) God loved us in and through Christ.⁵ “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (Jn 13:35, emphasis mine).

The identification of the fundamental witness of the Christian with active agape for one’s brother could not be better captured than in these last words of Jesus. It remains however open to the question: To what does the Johannine “as” (kathos) exactly point? How does Jesus love us? A second related question: If it is true that the disciple’s love for his brother coincides with the expression of his love for his Master (Jn 14:15, 21, 23), is it not also true that the two things are explicitly put by Jesus in a precise hierarchy? Christ says to Peter: “Peter, Son of John, do you love me? . . . Tend my sheep” (cf. also Jn 21:17–18). We return in this way to the central question of Cordula: How are we to conceive the relation between the believer’s zeal for Christ and the love for his neighbor?

In the context of today’s increasingly liberal and pluralistic culture, and also in light of the dramatic increase of the persecution of Christians in the world, this question could be perhaps re-framed in the following terms: How are the love of the truth (love for Christ) and the truth of love (kata Christon, according to Christ) related to each other?

In the following pages, we will try to address this question in light of the witness of the early (pre-Constantinian) Church.

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