ABSTRACT
In the first of Irenaeus of Lyons' five books on the 'Refutation and Contradiction of Gnosis falsely so called', he illustrates the appearance of the Holy Scriptures by means of a remarkable comparison. He accuses gnostic exegetes of having changed the true order of the Scriptures and altered the true sense by falsifying the way the books are assembled. In a special theological sense the relation between the letters of the biblical text and the revelational content which is ascribed to them also breaks down because no utterance can express God's truth fully and finally. Hence the reality of God cannot be ascribed a one-to-one relation to the words of the Bible. Apart from occasional examples, no theologian in modern times has handled the question of spiritual perception of Gestalt so comprehensively as Hans Urs von Balthasar. God appears in the biblical texts in the broken Gestalt of Jesus Christ.
