Whereas The Glory of the Lord approached revelation in light of the beautiful, the Theo-drama does so in terms of the good, understood through the lens of Christ’s world-reconciling mission. Hence the project of this first volume, which is to lay the groundwork for a theological exploration of the drama of salvation using analogies derived from the theater. Balthasar begins by answering objections to his undertaking, goes on to recount the historically tense between drama and theology, and finally shows the indispensability of the dramatic analogy for understanding Revelation. In the second part of the book, Balthasar prepares a “dramatic toolkit” for theology. He begins with a survey of the “theater of the world” motif from antiquity to the present and then goes on to analyze more specialized topics like the connection between author, actor and director; performance; audience and horizon; finitude and death, and, finally, the norms of dramatic action. The concluding part of the book contains a brief discussion of the analogy between role and mission, which opens the way to the properly theological reflection pursued in the remaining volumes of Theo-drama.