Thérèse and Luther

One would have to be blind not to see that Thérèse's [of Lisieux] doctrine of the little way answers point by point the program outlined by the Reformers and that she presents the Church's bold, irrefutable answer to Protestant spirituality. One can find innumerable points of contact between Thérèse and the Reformers: the rejection of Old Testament justification by works; the demolition of one's own ideal of perfection to leave room for God's perfection in man; the transcendent note in the act of faith, the center of which remains in God; the existential fulfillment of the act of faith, which means more than a mere intellectual assent to the content of faith and involves utter personal fidelity toward the personal truth of God; and, finally, disregard for one's own failings—even for that joy over them that says felix culpa. But the contrasts between Thérèse and the Reformers are equally striking. Thérèse's little way is a way to perfection, a way for those who have courageously resolved to love and do nothing else but love. And the faults of which she speaks are not the sins that Luther had in mind; they are "faults that do not offend God". What divides Thérèse from Luther is that the drama of sin never entwines itself round her soul. She recognizes the drama of God's descending into the nothingness of the creature and the flame of love with which the Absolute, God, unites himself to his creature's nothingness….It is Luther's error to have profaned mystical truths, which presuppose an intimate exchange of love between God and man, by treating them as general formulae for the sinner's relation to God. – Hans Urs von Balthasar, Two Sisters in the Spirit