The Theology of Benedict XVI

A Protestant Appreciation

Tim Perry

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781683593461
• eBook ISBN: 9781683593478
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

There's no doubt about Benedict XVI's theological legacy. He's been at the center of every major theological controversy in the Catholic Church over the last fifty years. But he remains a polarizing figure, misunderstood by supporters and opponents alike. A deeper understanding of Benedict's theology reveals a man dedicated to the life and faith of the church. In this collection of essays, prominent Protestant theologians examine and commend the work of the Pope Emeritus. They present a full picture of Benedict's theology, particularly his understanding of the relationship between faith and reason and his pursuit of truth for the church. The global Christian faith can learn from Benedict's insight into the modern church and his desire to safeguard the future of the church by leaning on the wisdom of the ancient church. --Dustjacket Inside Front Flap.

1

“Truth, not Custom”

Joseph Ratzinger on Faith and Reason

BEN MYERS

Our Lord Christ called himself truth, not custom.

—Tertullian1

The hallmark of contemporary Protestant theology is its preoccupation with Christianity as a religion. The priority of communal belonging; spiritual formation through ritual practices; doctrine as the grammar of communal life; an emphasis on mystery and unknowability; the importance of narrative; the remythologizing of Christian belief; a profound yearning for the certainties of ancient traditions; the priority of desire over reason, praxis over truth, the Dionysian over the Apollonian: these are the great energizing forces of Protestant thought today.

Karl Barth rejected the nineteenth-century tendency (culminating most impressively in Ernst Troeltsch) to represent Christian faith as a sociological by-product of the Christian religion. A century later, the dominance of Troeltsch is evident even among theologians who invoke Barth’s legacy. The word “religion” has not quite recovered from Barth’s excoriating treatment. Hence Protestant theologians today prefer to speak of the priority of “the Christian community” and its “practices.” An important clue to the new theological mood is the widespread sense among Protestant thinkers that the Reformation was a mistake. How could Luther have been so wrong-headed as to prioritize the pursuit of truth over communal belonging? Luther once said, “If I were the only one in the entire world to adhere to the Word, I alone would be the church and would properly judge about the rest of the world that it is not the church.”2 A scandalous sentiment. Nothing could so bluntly reveal the spirit of contemporary Protestant theology as our instinctive reaction to those words. Faced with a choice between Word and church, we would choose the latter, with some reassuring qualifications about the communally conditioned nature of all biblical interpretation and all claims to truth. For us, Luther’s stance is not so much wrong as unintelligible.

That is our situation as Protestant theologians today. As theologians, we seek truth, but we seek first the community and its righteousness and trust that all these other things will be added as well.

In this context the theological work of Joseph Ratzinger seems a bit deflating at first glance. For over half a century Ratzinger has challenged the subordination of truth to communal belonging. From his academic career in the 1950s and 1960s to his papal ministry as Benedict XVI, one of Ratzinger’s most consistent themes has been the priority of reason and truth over communal identity. In his analysis, the most urgent theological task is the recovery of reason. It is, he thinks, the most urgent social and political task too.

Ratzinger sees the split between faith and reason as inimical to both religion and secular society. Religion becomes pathological when its claims are reduced to private exhortations to insiders with no link to a universally accessible rationality or a shared conception of the human good. And reason, for its part, becomes pathological when it is confined to the sphere of fact, measurement, and technical manipulation with no accountability to moral considerations of justice, goodness, and the ends of human life. Ratzinger calls for faith to be animated by rationality and for reason to be open to its transcendent foundations as revealed to faith. Faith and reason alike, he argues, arise from the manifestation of the divine Logos, who is ultimately revealed as Love: a rationality that is living, personal, and directed toward us for our good.

THE RATIONALITY OF FAITH

You would expect the bishop of Rome to be a champion of the Christian religion. But Ratzinger argues that Christianity is true in spite of being a religion, in the same way that Greek philosophy was true in spite of being Greek. Greek philosophy was a product of its own culture, but it became “philosophy” to the extent that it transcended its own cultural limitations in the search for a universal rational order. In the career of Socrates, philosophy achieved a stark critical distance from its own cultural context. The search for truth necessarily entailed a critique of the particular cultural conditions in which that search was carried out. If philosophy had been an articulation of the grammatical rules of the social order, why was Socrates condemned to die? And why did Plato expend so much effort trying to imagine a completely new society in which religion, myth, law, and education are reconfigured according to rational norms? Ratzinger sees the self-critical aspect of Greek philosophy as its essential characteristic.3

The criticism of Greek culture by Greek philosophers has a striking parallel in the prophets’ criticism of Israelite faith, and in the ministry of Jesus, which reaches through and beyond its own cultural context to proclaim a universal divine order, the kingdom of God. Biblical faith, like Greek thought, is directed toward a truth that transcends and relativizes its immediate context. Ratzinger argues that this move toward self-criticism—an unintended by-product of the search for universal truth—was the real point of contact between the gospel and Greek culture.

Since the start of his career Ratzinger has carried out a quiet but persistent polemic against the Protestant project of de-Hellenizing the Christian faith. From Luther’s repudiation of Aristotle to Kant’s banishment of metaphysics to Barth’s denial of the analogy of being, Protestant theology has policed the boundary between faith and reason, the God of the Bible and the God of the philosophers. Adolf von Harnack argued that the noble simplicity of biblical faith was contaminated by its contact with Greek culture. Contemporary contextual theologians insist that it was purely a matter of historical accident that the church took root in the soil of Greco-Roman culture. The message of the Bible (in its original, pre-Hellenized form) can be enculturated into any number of contexts. Greek thought, we are assured, is no better (or worse?) than any cultural medium. Ratzinger replies that the synthesis of biblical faith and Greek thought “was not only legitimate but necessary” for the full articulation of the meaning of the gospel.4 The gospel is a universal message. It is not gnostic but catholic: not a message addressed to a private spiritual zone but an interpretation of reality as a whole. Any truth, discovered by any means, is necessarily compatible with the truth of the gospel. This does not mean that Christianity holds in its grasp a synthesis of all knowledge. It only means that Christianity refuses to remain on one side of the border between faith and reason, since both stand under the one all-embracing manifestation of the divine Logos.5

Because Christianity is founded on knowledge, its message and mission are universal. This universalism emerged first in the witness of Israel’s prophets and sages who reached beyond the boundaries of a particular worshiping community and made universal claims founded on knowledge of the one God.6 The Christian message, like the message of the prophets, is not mythic and religious. It is not a communal and symbolic representation of an unknowable reality. It is a proclamation of the truth revealed by the divine Logos. As rational truth it commends itself to all. The earliest generations of believers understood themselves not as members of a new religious community with its own particular rites and ceremonies but as representatives of a new humanity. They proclaimed the risen Lord not as the founder of a sect but as the new Adam, the founder of humanity. The lordship of Jesus comprehended all things “in heaven and on earth and under the earth” (Phil 2:5–11). Christianity, Ratzinger observes, is a missionary faith only to the extent that it is more than a religion and so “transcends all traditions and constitutes an appeal to reason and an orientation toward the truth.”7

In his 1954 doctoral dissertation Ratzinger drew attention to the patristic understanding of faith as a fulfillment of the project of Greek philosophy. Augustine categorized Christian teaching not as one of the “mythic” or “civic” theologies but as one of the “natural” (that is, rational) theologies. He ranked Christianity not among the religions, founded on poetry and myth and oriented toward social cohesion, but among the philosophies founded on reason and the quest for truth. Christianity put itself forward not as a better religion but as the true philosophy.8

Ratzinger has returned to this theme throughout his career. His 1959 inaugural lecture at the University of Bonn criticized Pascal’s claim that the God of the philosophers is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.9 Based on his study of patristic sources, Ratzinger argued that in fact “early Christianity boldly and resolutely made its choice … by deciding for the God of the philosophers and against the gods of the various religions.”10 This was already St. Paul’s decision in the first chapter of Romans. Christianity is not based on myths; its justification does not lie in its social usefulness. It is not an instrument for achieving communal belonging through ancient rituals and powerful stories. The Christian faith is, like the philosophies, founded on knowledge.11 The early Christians were condemned not because they had a new religion—new religions were in vogue—but because they were perceived as “atheists.” They were a threat to the social order because they did not honor the gods. They refused to locate their faith among the other religious communities with their own stories, traditions, and practices. They denigrated all myths, denounced all gods, and proclaimed the universal truth of the lordship of Christ. “The suspicion of atheism with which early Christianity had to contend,” writes Ratzinger, makes clear “its intellectual orientation, its decision against religio and custom devoid of truth, its option in favor of the truth of Being.”12

In his extensive writing on the liturgy Ratzinger never retreats to religious and sociological conceptions of identity-formation through communal stories and practices. Christian worship, he argues, is ordered by revelation and oriented toward truth. It is rational service of the Logos.13 To cultivate religious practices for the sake of personal transformation or communal belonging or some perceived cultural benefit is, Ratzinger says (invoking Barth), “the very opposite of faith.”14 Without its rational content and its ordering toward the truth of reality, Christian worship reverts to some variety of “mythic” or “civic” paganism.

Ancient Christianity dissolved the power of the pagan cults not by putting forward a superior method of communal formation but by announcing a truth that freed the mind from its captivity to falsehoods. If Christianity was in later centuries able to commend itself as the “true religion,” it was only by laying hold of the hollowed-out shell of religion and investing it with a totally new content and a new orientation toward rational truth.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF REASON

When faith and reason are divided, Christianity loses its identity as a religion of truth. Reason, too, is affected by the division. Secular reason confines itself to an ever more efficient technical mastery while moral and metaphysical questions, including questions concerning the nature of the human person and the purpose of technology, remain unasked and unanswered. What Kant called “practical reason” is no longer admitted as a valid mode of reasoning. The domain of reason is restricted to whatever can be measured and manipulated.15 Under these conditions reason becomes aimless even as its technical achievements advance on every side. And the aimlessness of reason becomes destructive when its own tools turn irrationally against their maker. The most urgent challenge of our time, Ratzinger believes, is to address this “crisis of reason.”16

Ratzinger has given particular attention to the way materialist ideologies, precisely in their exclusive commitment to reason, end up turning against human nature and ultimately against reason itself. Ratzinger’s decades-long criticism of Marxist ideology centers on this point. The fundamental error of Marxism, he argues, is the denial of the priority of Logos. Irrational matter is at the basis of everything. The assumption of the priority of the irrational leads in turn to an application of scientific reason to the ostensibly raw materials of human nature.17 The history of Marxist social experiments gives ample proof of the theory’s delusions. Human nature proves to be peculiarly resistant to all attempts to remodel it technocratically. It breaks before it bends. There is a mysterious givenness to human nature. Its possibilities as well as its limitations need to be properly discerned. There is something in the human person that is not fully reducible to materiality and that frustrates the application of scientific techniques. Ratzinger’s relentless opposition to liberation theology has to be understood in this context. Liberation theology, in his analysis, is not a cure but only a symptom of the ailment of modernity. It uncritically mirrors—and even sacralizes—the loss of rationality in secular social theory. It supplants the priority of the Logos with a theory of irrational materialism; it trades the rational persuasiveness of faith for the promise of violent revolution. Such a system, Ratzinger argues, is not really a theology of liberation at all but a liberation from theology: an escape from the freedom of the Logos into ideological captivity.18

The enthusiasm for Marxism among Western intellectuals led to widespread disillusionment after the collapse of Soviet communism and the revelation of the degradations and horrors that had resulted wherever Marxist theory had been able to put its social-scientific methods to the test. The doctrine of inevitable progress through the application of social theory gave way to a climate of relativism. In contrast to the universalist pretensions of Marxism, the impossibility of obtaining universal truth now came to be seen as the necessary basis of a free society. A world-weary relativism in politics soon spread to other spheres of life, especially religion and morality. Ratzinger sees this mood of relativism as a threat to Western liberal democracies. He has written extensively in praise of the European project as a secularization of Christian universalism. More than a decade before the resurgence of European nationalisms and the rising tide of anti-EU sensibilities, Ratzinger warned of the threat that relativism posed to Europe’s spiritual foundations: “The complex problems left behind by Marxism continue to exist today. The loss of man’s primordial certainties about God, about himself, and about the universe—the loss of an awareness of intangible moral values—is still our problem, especially today, and it can le...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: A Lion or A Dog? (Tim Perry)
• Chapter 1: “Truth, Not Custom”: Joseph Ratzinger on Faith and Reason (Ben Myers)
• Part I: Dogmatic Theology
• Chapter 2: Writing Theology in a Secular Age: Joseph Ratzinger on Theological Method (Katherine Sonderegger)
• Chapter 3: Faith, Hope, and Love: Joseph Ratzinger on the Theological Virtues (Gregg R. Allison)
• Chapter 4: Expounding the Word of the Lord: Joseph Ratzinger on Revelation, Tradition, and Biblical Interpretation (Kevin J. Vanhoozer)
• Chapter 5: “Behold the Man”: Joseph Ratzinger on Theological Anthropology (R. Lucas Stamps)
• Chapter 6: Learning Jesus’ Prayer: Joseph Ratzinger on Christology (Christopher R. J. Holmes)
• Chapter 7: “Behold the Handmaid of the Lord”: Joseph Ratzinger on Mary (Tim Perry)
• Chapter 8: Undiminished, Transcendent, and Relevant: Joseph Ratzinger’s Teaching on the Trinity (Fred Sanders)
• Chapter 9: Is the Pope (Roman) Catholic?: Joseph Ratzinger on Ecumenism (Carl R. Trueman)
• Chapter 10: Recentering Ministry on Christ: Joseph Ratzinger on the Priesthood (David Ney)
• Part II: Liturgical Theology
• Chapter 11: One Book, One Body: Joseph Ratzinger on the Bible and the Liturgy (Peter J. Leithart)
• Chapter 12: “This Intimate Explosion of Good”: Joseph Ratzinger on the Eucharist (Joey Royal)
• Chapter 13: Servant of the Clear, Wide Word: Joseph Ratzinger on Preaching (Annette Brownlee)
• Chapter 14: Salvation, Will, and Agency: Joseph Ratzinger on Prayer (Preston D. S. Parsons)
• Chapter 15: Forming the Pilgrim Fellowship: Joseph Ratzinger on Catechesis (Jonathan Warren P. (Pagán))
• Afterword
• Ratzinger Sources
• Works Cited
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Old Testament