Nowhere is the creaturely nature of our thought more emphatically evident than in the problem posed by the clash between “to be” and “ought to be”. Here it is clearly shown to us that there are problems we are not intended to solve, no more than Adam should have eaten the apple in paradise. For, on the one hand, we are not permitted to think that everything already is as it should be: no one has the competence to calculate sin into a stable picture of the world and thus usurp for himself the vantage point of the redemption, which God alone occupies. But neither are we entitled to doubt the fact that everything is as it should be, that is, that God’s will is absolutely superior to man’s and that it does prevail against it. The sting of this aporia makes itself keenly felt in a practical way when we must unite an absolute impatience with regard to sin with an absolute calm that trusts in God—a dead-serious desire to have the world be different with an equally dead-serious desire that nothing should be other than God wills it. Once again, the problem must be relocated, transferred into Christ. For him it was unbearable that the world should be as it was, and so he bore the unbearable in obedience to the Father. The real Passion lies at the crossroads of these two things; but there we also encounter the overcoming of the contradiction in the one and only Cross.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (1953), chapter titled Christ