The essays gathered in Verbum Caro can be read as a Catholic response to Karl Barth, who among modern Protestant thinkers comes closest to Balthasar’s own understanding of the indissoluble connection between the exclusive centrality of Jesus Christ, on the one hand, and the all-inclusive openness of Redemption, on the other. Unlike Barth, however, Balthasar insists on the principle of analogy between God’s incarnate Word and the intelligibility of God’s creation. The exclusivity of faith’s concentration on God’s enfleshed self-utterance, Balthasar shows, requires the inclusion of reason (together with its enfleshed historicity). In the encounter with Christ, reason is judged, but through this judgment it is also saved, confirmed, and brought home to its crowning end.