Explorations in the Theology of Benedict XVI by Cavadini John C.;

Author:Cavadini, John C.; [Cavadini, John C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL010000 Religion / Christianity / Catholic
ISBN: 3441124
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2015-12-11T00:00:00+00:00

SOME OBSERVATIONS

Looking back on the elapse of thirty years since Introduction to Christianity saw light, Ratzinger says that were he to write the book today he would have spent more time on “interreligious discussions” but thinks he was not mistaken about the “fundamental approach”: “I put the question of God and the question of Christ in the very center which then leads to a ‘narrative Christology’ and demonstrates that the place for faith is in the Church.”8 That affirmation of confidence gives us a clue as to how to proceed: the question of God and the God of Jesus Christ, to borrow a title from the later work of Cardinal Kasper. Although Ratzinger touches on all the elements of the creed in his lectures, it is nonetheless the case that his basic thrust is to speak about God, and God’s definitive revelation of God’s self in the Word made flesh, a hallmark of his theology. In fact, his comments on the part of the creed that begins with faith in the Holy Spirit are not pursued in any depth.

That Ratzinger would start with the question of God should not surprise anyone who knows anything about the humanistic leanings of his audience. After all, one need only recite the litany of names in the German intellectual tradition, familiar to everyone who graduated from the German Gymnasium and university. This was an audience that understood the kind of question proffered by Goethe’s Faust: of those who would be tempted to slot religion into Kant’s practical reason; who trembled before Lessing’s ditch; who felt the lash of Nietzsche’s excoriating tongue; and so on. In other words, the Gottesfrage was imbibed by his Tübingen audience with its intellectual mother’s milk. Furthermore, that same audience had still-vivid memories of the catastrophic collapse of National Socialism little more than a decade earlier. The questions that haunted Dietrich Bonhoeffer less than two decades earlier while in a Gestapo prison could not be ignored.

How did Ratzinger frame his discussion of God? His general approach affirmed an ancient theme in Catholic thought: one could fruitfully discuss the God Question within the framework of philosophy, but somehow that discussion took on thick meaning only when it was seen in the light of revelation. Like Pascal, it was not the question of the “god of the philosophers” but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Ratzinger was committed to both faith and reason—to the fides et ratio robustly defended decades later by John Paul II. What Ratzinger most insistently desired was that no cleavage be entertained between the god of the philosophers and the God of Abraham. He shrewdly observed that such a rupture, in order to enter into what he called “the purely religious,” was a path taken by Schleiermacher and, he added, “paradoxically enough, in a certain sense[,] . . . Schleiermacher’s great critic and opponent Karl Barth.”9 He had no desire to abandon the path of reason in favor of faith alone.

Earlier in these reflections I noted that

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