Truth and Tolerance by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

Author:Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger [Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781681496061
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2009-11-23T16:00:00+00:00

2. CHRISTIANITY—THE TRUE RELIGION?

At the close of the second Christian millenium, it is in the very area of its first great expansion, in Europe, that Christianity finds itself deep in crisis, arising from the crisis concerning its claim to truth. There are two dimensions to this crisis: First, the question is becoming ever more pressing as to whether it makes any sense to apply the concept of truth to religion at all—in other words, whether man is capable of perceiving the real truth concerning God and things divine. Today’s man is more inclined to recognize himself in the Buddhist parable of the blind men and the elephant: Once, it is said, a king in northern India had all the blind people in the city brought together in one place. Then he had an elephant led out in front of them all. Some of them he allowed to feel its head, saying: That is what an elephant is like. Others were allowed to feel the ear, or the tusk, the trunk, the hindquarters, the hair at the tip of the tail. Next, the king asked them one by one, What is an elephant like? And according to what part they had felt, they answered: It is like a woven basket. . . It is like a pot. . . It is like a plow handle. . . . . . It is like a store room. . . It is like a pillar. . . It is like a mortar. . . It is like a broom. And then, so the parable says, they began to quarrel, and, crying “an elephant is like—”, they fell upon one another and struck each other with their fists, to the great delight of the king.1 The conflict between religions seems to people today like the quarrel of those born blind in the story. For we are all born blind when it comes to the mysteries of divinity, so it seems. For the way people think today, Christianity by no means finds itself better placed than the other religions—on the contrary, with its claim to be true, it seems to be particularly blind to the limits of all our knowledge concerning what is divine, being characterized by an especially foolish fanaticism, so that it cannot be taught and insists on saying that the bit it has felt in its own experience is the whole thing.

The quite general scepticism in the face of any claim to truth where religion is concerned is then further buttressed by the questions that modern science has directed at the origins and the content of Christian teaching: the theory of creation seems to be made obsolete by that of evolution; the teaching on original sin by our knowledge of man’s origins; critical exegesis relativizes the figure of Jesus and puts a question mark against his consciousness of being the Son; it seems doubtful whether the Church really originates from Jesus, and so forth. The philosophical basis of Christianity has become problematic

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