God’s Gamble

The Gravitational Power of Crucified Love

The Cross of Christ has left a crater at the center of history, an inflection of sacrificial love toward which everything before and after this event is ordered and properly understood. That Christ is the Alpha and Omega—the logic, the meaning of creation itself, from whom the drama of salvation emanates and toward whom it moves—is a central but often neglected doctrine of Catholic Christianity. Though it is a mystery that will ever elude rational explication, sufficient traces of it can be found. Drawing primarily on the insights of René Girard and Hans Urs von Balthasar, Gil Bailie’s new book is a work of reconnaissance, an effort to locate and explicate some of these traces. He presents a narrative of both rich and subtle textures—the story of God’s gamble in and on history.