Who is god according to ratzinger

One could have seen these by examining his earlier writings on the relationship between the divine and the human envisaged in terms such as: grace and nature, Church and world, or the sacred and the secular.

In , writing on nature and grace, he had already taken a line in relation to the human - to our created reality - that took account of the Reformed critique of the over-optimistic approach to nature characteristic of Catholic theology drawing on its Thomistic heritage.

As I pointed out in my book on Ratzinger:. Ratzinger said that he would follow the same basic direction Corkery ; see also Ratzinger He did. It is not surprising, then, that as the Council and its aftermath struggled with finding the correct balance between a theology of the incarnation and a theology of the Cross, Ratzinger placed his theological support decidedly in the latter space.

This was not only in evidence in his talk at Bamberg; it lay at the heart of his celebrated book, Introduction to Christianity, delivered as lectures in and published shortly afterwards, making him famous due to its enormous international success Ratzinger His fellow German theologian and colleague, Walter Kasper, praised in particular the two christological chapters of this book, pointing out that, in them, Ratzinger had succeeded in delivering a variety of valid new christological interpretations, among which Kasper mentioned was his drawing out of the dynamic of the theology of the cross in contradistinction to a one-sided and static theology of the incarnation.

Nor was Kasper the only one to refer to the Cross-orientation of Ratzinger's theological work. Another reviewer, Hubertus Mynarek, writing in the same place, made the same point Kasper , also Mynarek Thus, as Ratzinger's thinking unfolded, it became clearer that his theological leanings were very close to what he had referred to as "the eschatological phase" in his Bamberg talk. His emphases on closeness to the Scriptures and attentiveness to the Reformed critique of human nature were joined to other Reformation-congenial emphases also, which more or less naturally followed on from the two already mentioned.

Foremost among these was the centrality of conversion in Christian life Ratzinger and b Knowing that as creatures we owed everything to God and - above all, as sinners - that we stood as "beggars" Augustine before him, Ratzinger was always deeply conscious that we could do nothing to help ourselves Ratzinger c and Corkery Without "help from outside" Ratzinger 81 , we were doomed because the "compass" of nature, so smudged by the history of sin, could no longer be steered by with confidence in our search for the right way to live Corkery Thus, for Ratzinger, the grace of God had to be, first and foremost, healing because our concrete humanity was, first and foremost, sinful.

This has always been his emphasis. Hence, for him, grace does not so much build on nature created "good" pace Aquinas and an optimistic tradition of "elevating grace" as reverse it following a more sin-aware tradition rooted in Augustine. The discontinuities between nature and grace and the fact that the latter is much more a healing than an elevating divine gift are obvious, given our condition Corkery These emphases in Ratzinger's theology of grace cause him to be decidedly christocentric.

The "help from outside," the help that we cannot give ourselves but that we need if we are to be restored to what God intended us to be - relational, for others, following the pattern of Jesus' own life - can only come from Jesus Christ. He is "all relationship, all 'exodus', all self-outpouring love" Corkery Only he, "as the being-of-relation par excellence, the 'exemplary' human, can lead us back to love" Corkery Ratzinger's focus here is entirely christocentric echoing Bonaventure in particular, as I have said.

The route to be taken is the paschal one. The way of grace does not bypass sin and forget the Cross. In earlier writing, I put it like this:. With Jesus Christ, the second or 'last' Adam, the head of a new humanity, a new incarnation begins Ratzinger , He is not some special case of the human being but rather the exemplary human being in whom God's intention for humanity fully comes to light Ratzinger He is the restored image of God Ratzinger , 'the revelation and the beginning of the definitive mode of human existence' Ratzinger [b] , the complete answer to the question 'what is the human being?

Ratzinger In him, the second, the definitive Adam 1 Cor. Here suddenly 'the Easter mystery, the mystery of the grain of wheat that has died' Ratzinger appears in our midst, Ratzinger says, because it is only by entering upon Christ's wheat-grain existence, upon his path of dying and rising, that we will reach the goal revealed in him. The paschal mystery, the life-pattern of the last Adam, must be our life-pattern too; for it is the authentic mode of existence of every human being Ratzinger in Corkery The path of the Christian will be the same as that of Christ: walking the paschal way, bearing the Cross, dying to self.

Conversion and being forgiven reveal themselves as central; this is the Christian way. Ratzinger's emphasis on these - on the Cross of Christ and on grace understood fundamentally as healing - is extremely significant; and it is not the typical emphasis of many Roman Catholic theologians.

It is closer, rather, to Reformed theology. This should not surprise because Joseph Ratzinger, as a university professor in Germany, has, for many years, plied his theological trade side-by-side with colleagues from neighbouring theology faculties on the Evangelical-Protestant side; I think of Bonn, Munster and Tubingen especially, covering the ten-year period from to Corkery He is very knowledgeable about, and quite sympathetic towards, Martin Luther Ratzinger I shall make this a little more visible in the remaining parts of this paper by, first, looking just a little more at his theological roots and their effects.

Then, drawing on his Reformation-echoing polemic against works, I shall explore the influence of this on: 1 his approach to ethics and to living the Christian life; 2 his manner of handling the relationship between politics and theology, as this revealed itself in his disputes with liberation theologians in the s; and 3 the way in which he deals with the matter of the unity of the Christian Churches and "ecclesial communities", as he would surely add in his all-too-careful manner!

In an article after Ratzinger's election as Pope, a former student of his, the North American, Francis Fiorenza, referred to an early essay by him on nature and grace in which he had taken the line thus Fiorenza. Towards the end of the essay, Ratzinger had attempted a brief synthesis.

In it he pointed out that that which is genuinely human in us, while it was. Here he was pointing to our twilight character: still bearing the image of God from our creation, on the one hand, yet this image had become utterly marred and obscured, on the other hand. As such it needed reversal, transformation. But even if it did not, Ratzinger, following Bonaventure, might still have remained cautious about ascribing too much to it.

This is because Bonaventure, lacking the creaturely optimism of his colleague, Thomas Aquinas - although in his writings he did attempt to accord a certain excellence to human nature Ratzinger - found himself nervous of over-ascribing to nature what might properly be due to God and tended, in the end, towards a certain collapsing of nature into grace for fear that he might otherwise be guilty of eclipsing the divine at the expense of the human Ratzinger , Thus Bonaventure pulls back from ascribing excellence to the human and prefers to emphasise instead human dependence, indebtedness and nothingness.

Avery Dulles pointed to Ratzinger's Augustinianism when writing about the Extraordinary Synod of , which Pope John Paul II had convened to assess the achievement of the Second Vatican Council on the twentieth anniversary of its ending.

Of two schools of thought present at the Synod, Dulles said, the first, "supernaturalistic" in viewpoint, tended "to depict the church as an island of grace in a world given over to sin;" he called this outlook "neo-Augustinian" Dulles Dulles spoke of those who had this supernaturalistic outlook as considering that the world had fallen under the power of the Evil One, that collaboration with it was less to be recommended than taking a stance against it and that the Church had become contaminated by the world in the years following the Council Dulles It is not difficult to recognize these sentiments in Ratzinger, who responded as follows to a question about "restoration" that was put to him in the year that the Extraordinary Synod took place:.

If by 'restoration' is meant a turning back, no restoration of such kind is possible But if by restoration we understand the search for a new balance after all the exaggerations of an indiscriminate opening to the world, after the overly positive interpretations of an agnostic and atheistic world, well, then a restoration understood in this sense This is a typical Ratzinger response.

The world contaminates. Purification, about-turn, de-contamination are needed. Today he says that Europe needs this because what Europe is experiencing is ultimately a crisis of faith. With Augustine, Ratzinger sees sin, ultimately, as loss of faith in God Corkery , Faith is its antidote, fides purgans, faith that purifies, converts, turns us towards God and away from what is ungodly. It is a gift, un-manufacturable by us, bestowed through encounter with Jesus Christ. It is through encounter with him, not through any efforts of our own, that we are purified, forgiven, freed.

This is Joseph Ratzinger at his best. But does it not also echo Luther's and Calvin's repudiation of the doctrine of salvation by works and does it not echo, furthermore, the recent summing up by Professor Ruth Whelan of Jean Calvin's pastoral theology as "the unconditional mercy of God" Whelan 40?

The saving encounter with Jesus Christ, emphasized by Ratzinger perhaps not in classical evangelical language but in his stress on the fact that Christian life begins with conversion, reveals other aspects of his theology that show its closeness, also, to Reformation concerns.

It has been observed that Ratzinger eschews "moralism", an approach to ethics that. In such an approach, Christianity becomes Pelagian; and we are thought to be saved by the good that we do and by the obedience that we practice Rowland , drawing on a text of Lorenzo Albacete. Ratzinger, ever nervous of any flavour of works-righteousness, takes a completely different line, suggesting that being a Christian arises through an encounter - an encounter and an on-going relationship with Jesus Christ - and that it does not result from taking up a lofty idea or making an ethical choice.

Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction But I remember reading, in one of his earliest works, words similar to the above. He spoke simply of the Christian as having love Ratzinger , a love that we do not give ourselves but that is bestowed through encounter with the one who is all love.

He made it clear that he was not talking here about an adequate love - in us it will always be lacking - but, he quickly added, this is where faith comes in because it. Ratzinger's basic point was - back in the mids also, forty years before the first encyclical letter of Benedict XVI on love appeared - that we must be careful to recognize on whom it is that we depend and avoid all suggestion of adequacy on our own parts.

His talk of love may have many different nuances to that of Luther or Calvin , of course, but it hardly amounts to works-righteousness.

I am aware that one can be simplistic about the Reformation and that care must be taken not to reduce it to its more memorable dicta. I certainly do not wish to do that, not least when I recall its elimination of any role for "works" in the matter of salvation. Nevertheless it is fair to say that, for the great Reformation figures - Luther, Calvin - insistence on a salvation that depended utterly on God's mercy and not at all on human efforts was paramount.

Indeed, from what we know of their contexts, such insistence was vital. And to attribute it to Ratzinger today also is equally vital because it echoes throughout his theology, fashioned, as this was, in the context and presence of his neighbouring, Reformed theologians. Sometimes they - and he - are accused of an approach to humanity and the human world that is very rejecting, very pessimistic, and this pessimism is attributed, perhaps too easily, to the Augustinian heritage on which they draw.

Ruth Whelan allows "that Calvin opens the Institutes of the Christian Religion with a damning indictment of our humanity" but says that when he speaks of our "turpitude" often translated into English as "corruption" or "depravity" "it is important to replace Calvin's damning indictment of our 'turpitude' in the context of his time" Whelan And that context was one of fear, and of an enormous sense of inadequacy, on the part of people.

Our theologian incorporates constitutively the moment of speculation to the intellectus fidei. In effect, the well known quotation from Pascal could suggest that there are only two terms for comparing this pro- blem: on the one hand, the God who recognizes Christian faith the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — the God of the living and of the dead , and on the other, the philosophical God as the object of pure rational reflection.

If that text — and many others which came later — is properly read, however, one understands that Ratzinger bears in mind other aspects as well. That is why he has often asked himself about the rela- tionship between religion and philosophy, for instance with regards to their respective ways of searching for the truth.

His well known quotation from Tertullian on Christ being the truth and not the ha- bit, has as a background the different aims pursued by pagan reli- gions and philosophy and thence their different value as delegates of the nascent Christian faith. Now, in this philosophy a new precision is needed because the concept one may have of human reason and how one makes use of it bears essential differences in the way of thinking about God.

One of the battles Ratzinger has been continuously fighting is that against the rationalist reduction of knowledge, exhorting us to always use reason in an open and existential way. The value of definitions and concepts will be greater as they serve better this reality of God and do not hide Him by means of abstractions which substitute the reality they intend to point out. When speaking of the proofs of the existence of God, Ratzinger is coherent in his concept of reason.

The characteristics of human reason specify the nature of those proofs. No one can presume that his concrete existence has not consisted nor consists of these factors. However, facts do not impose their meaning automatically, but are presented so as to be interpreted by each one from the whole complexity of the circumstances of our life.

For some, these data will mean the existence of a limit, and perhaps even a dangerous threat to his own self-realization; for this reason they will have to be submitted to through the sovereign knowledge and power of the subject who prefers to make himself absolute in his loneliness. For the former, the facts show an unacceptable imposition — who from? Both reason and freedom are implied in that decision, so that the proofs of the existence of God can never be scientific ones in which the sub- ject remains outside the experiment, outside reasoning.

Man cannot place himself as a pure observer of the problem of God; he is always within the experiment. Once this explanation has been made, which he considers cru- cial, the Bavarian theologian has made use of almost all kinds of common proofs in the Treatment of God: the anthropological, the cosmological, and historical-religious ones.

In the anthropological sphere we have frequently seen the ap- peareance of his argument dealing with the sense and happiness of human life, as well as the moral argument on the relation between God and conscience.

His appeal to the history of humanity has not been less frequent when pointing to the existence of God: the examination of the triad polytheism-monotheism-atheism as it has appeared in different cul- tures and religions is a common reflection of his.

One may suggest that the history of religions offers him a privileged space on which to centre the anthropological questions on God. On the one hand, this shows his ability to display his speculative arguments within a historic context, and on the other, it confirms his inclination to compare the religious- philosophical arguments of humanity with those of the faith of Israel and that of the Church.

This is why God cannot be instrumentalized or manipulated as a legitimizing element of any instance of power, though unfortunately in history we have painful proofs of this idolatrizing temptation. In this tradition, the clue to the knowled- ge of God resides in the consideration of the knowing subject, as imago Dei.

The notion of imago Dei presupposes, in the first place, that man is endowed with the natural capacity which is nothing less than to know God — because he is the image of God — and moreo- ver presupposes that this capacity cannot embrace God precisely because man is a creature, he is an image which participates in the only divine model. In the second place, Ratzinger maintains that the nucleus of imago Dei is freedom: in order to establish the correspon- dence between God and man he privileges freedom, both divine and human.

This being so, the reason why God cannot be grasped com- prehensibly is not only because of his infinite character as if it were something indefinitely great , but because of his being spiritual and free.

God cannot be grasped as an object and unraveled in the uttermost of his being. His revelation is necessarily due to his own free decision. It is only in his free nature that his full identity is accessible in the reciprocal trust of he who gives himself and he who receives, that is to say, in interpersonal love. He thus wants to avoid an undue theorization or generalization which might diminish the value of the particular. Well, what characterizes the revelation of God in history is that He wants to manifest His Name freely.

He has allowed himself to be in- fluenced by the importance which the protestant Swiss theologian concedes to the fact that God reveals His Name, but does not accept the clues with which the latter reads the Scriptures.

How does the Bible speak of God? An unheard of event occu- rred in history, narrated in the book of Exodus. It is the irruption of Jewish monotheism which will fully become Christian monotheism.

Ratzinger concentrates in this scene and comments on its exegetical and philosophical-theological im- plications, so as to display the originality of biblical monotheism. He even affirms that all later reflection is the rethinking of this formula.

In that scene, God preserves in part His mysterious cha- racter by giving an answer which at first seems to hide His Name. This marks the essential difference with gods and idols; the di- vine incomprehensibility is respected. Yet He also freely wanted to reveal His identity by making us know his proper Name. In his judgment, polytheisms so- mehow also recognize that there is a final absolute towards which plurality must be led back, but it is unaccessible to mortals and per- haps to the gods themselves.

On the contrary, monotheism appears to be the assertion that the Absolute is not only One but that it can be appealed to by man: it is an infinite You with which the finite you can dialogue. The God of Exodus is not the God of some place but rather the God of the fathers, the God of somebody. In the deep questioning and searching that arises from wonder and perplexity reason gropes towards the divine ground of reality that Christianity testifies is given to and shared with human being.

Here Benedict evokes Etienne Gilson and to significant extent endorses the concept of Christian philosophy , which anti-Christian philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger have declared to be an oxymoron. In Introduction to Christianity both fideism and rationalism are regarded as noxious. Fideism fails to grasp the intelligibility of God as the Logos that governs the world, human intelligence, and establishes a relation between God and humanity where none could plausibly be expected.

As faith can come to be out of alignment, so also can reason. The ontophany Exod on Mount Sinai is a gift of divine self that refuses comprehension, while eliciting admiration, gratitude and obedience. In addition, Introduction to Christianity suggests, but does not elaborate, that the disclosure of the transcendent God of the Old Testament is repeated in the Transfiguration of Christ, refigured on the cross, indemnified in the resurrection, and theologically articulated in the mystery of Trinitarian love.

Crucially, for Benedict, this God is personal rather than impersonal, and ultimately tri-personal. The Trinitarian God is, however, an object of understanding to the degree to which understanding has its ground in faith. At the same time, since God is God, there is no knowledge of the Triune God that is fully adequate. In Introduction to Christianity the God of Christianity, who is the God of Jesus Christ, is a bounteous God who brings into being a world that is integral and free.

The world is pure gift: it is neither necessary, nor purely contingent. If the world is necessary, everything is explained; if the world is the fiat of a capricious creator, then all questions are futile, since the world has moved beyond mystery and even riddle to sheer meaninglessness.

If all of creation is a gift, then even more so, human being endowed with reason and freedom is gift. But this applies to all human beings, whatever their race or circumstance, and whatever the stage of their life. The dignity of a human being lies in being gift, not in their status, personal accomplishment, or utility to society or the State. In Introduction to Christianity Benedict demonstrates that he is an aesthetic as well as ascetic theologian.

He never says more than he has to, and the emphases he strikes are invariably proportionate to the emphases in the texts that are commented on. In Introduction to Christianity Benedict enthusiastically embraces the claim that Jesus is Lord, while having a clear sense of its momentousness. This is a claim unlike any other religious claim in history.

It is saying far more than in Jesus we find an avatar of the divine or a culturally relevant manifestation of the divine. The claim distinguishes Christianity in a radical way from the other two monotheistic faiths, both of which reject it. For Benedict the claim that God became man is not a truth of reason. It is an event that at once boggles the mind and elevates it. According to Introduction to Christianity that the Son, the divine Logos , becomes incarnate and that the incarnate Son would experience death only makes sense after the fact.

This God is a God of pure self-empting Love. To remind, in Introduction to Christianity the profession of the Lordship of Christ is a catechesis; it is also an intervention into a religious situation that everywhere shows the signs of secularization. Introduction to Christianity is similar to other texts of Benedict in understanding that secularity is inside all forms of Christian confession, Catholicism not excluded. Following in the footsteps of Newman , Benedict is convinced that in contemporary educated circles the operative default is a kind of Arianism in which Jesus of Nazareth is something like a moral teacher plus.

Not only has this belief being thoroughly rejected throughout Christian history, in line with the Church Fathers Benedict is persuaded that such an Arian Christ does not have the capacity to redeem us from our sins and bring us to everlasting life.