The large point I want to get at here is Benedict’s remarks in Brazil in May 2007 (and I place them here copying them from below): The crisis of the present moment is the loss of the “evidential character:”[1] EPISTEMOLGICAL REALISM
Benedict XVI: Aparecida, Brazil May 13, 2007.
Benedict XVI: Aparecida, Brazil May 13, 2007.
THEOLOGICAL EPISTEMOLOGY: WHAT IS THE “REAL”?
“As a first step, we can respond to this question with another: what is this "reality"? What is real? Are only material goods, social, economic and political problems "reality"? This was precisely the great error of the dominant tendencies of the last century, a most destructive error, as we can see from the results of both Marxist and capitalist systems. They falsify the notion of reality by detaching it from the foundational and decisive reality which is God. Anyone who excludes God from his horizons falsifies the notion of "reality" and, in consequence, can only end up in blind alleys or with recipes for destruction. “The first basic point to affirm, then, is the following: only those who recognize God know reality and are able to respond to it adequately and in a truly human manner. The truth of this thesis becomes evident in the face of the collapse of all the systems that marginalize God.
WHO KNOWS GOD?
”Yet here a further question immediately arises: who knows God? How can we know him? … For a Christian, the nucleus of the reply is simple: only God knows God, only his Son who is God from God, true God, knows him. And he "who is nearest to the Father’s heart has made him known" (John 1:18).
NOW!
LOSS OF THE “EVIDENTIAL CHARACTER” (=Loss of Reality)
There is “the great common area that present itself as the primal evidential character of human life: the doctrine of objective values expressed in the Being of the world; the belief that attitudes exist that correspond to the message of the universe and are true and therefore good, and that other attitudes likewise exist that genuinely and always false because they contradict Being.
“Men in the modern period have been persuaded that the moralities of mankind contradict each other radically, just as the religions do, In both cases, the simple conclusion has been drawn that all of this is a human construction, whose inconsistencies we now at last see through and can replace with rational knowledge. But this diagnosis is extremely superficial. It clings to a series of details that are lined up alongside each other in no particular order and thus arrives at its banal know-it-all attitude. In reality, the fundamental intuition about the moral character of Being itself and about the necessary harmony between the human being and thee message of nature is common to all the great cultures, and therefore t he great moral imperataives are likewise held in common.”[2]
“The developments of the twentieth century have taught us that this evidential character – as the subsistent and reliable basis of all freedom – no longer exists. It is perfectly possible for reason to lose sight of essential values. Nor is intuition… absolutely reliable… Freedom can abolish itself. Freedom can weary of itself when it has become empty.”[3]
HOW TO RECOVER THE PRIMAL EVIDENTIAL CHARACTER? EXPERIENCE GOD!
“Shared ethical convictions…cannot be the product of merely empirical reason…Such convictions demand corresponding human attitudes, but these attitudes cannot flourish unless the historical basis of a culture and the ethical-religious insights that it preserves are taken seriously. A culture and a nation that cuts itself off from the great ethical and religious forces of its own history commits suicide.
“It is here that I see the public tasks of the Christian churches in today’s world. It accords with the nature of the Church that it is separated from the state and that its faith may not be imposed by the state but is based on convictions that are freely arrived at…: ‘Christ does not win victory over anyone who does not wish it. He conquers only by convincing, for he is the Word of God ’ …On the basis of its own freedom, it must address the freedom of all human beings so that the moral forces of history may remain forces in the present. This will permit people, in continually changing circumstances, to grasp the evidential character of those values without which a shared freedom is impossible.”[4]
The Ongoing Crisis is the Absence of God.
Charles Taylor states in his new “A Secular Age:”
“(W)hereas the political organization of all pre-modern societies was in some way connected to, based on, guaranteed by some faith in, or adherence to God, or some notion of ultimate reality, the modern Western state is free from this connection. … Religion or its absence is largely a private matter. The political society is seen as that of believers (of all stripes) and non-believers alike.
“Put another way, in our ‘secular’ societies, you can engage fully in politics without ever encountering God, that is, coming to a point where the crucial importance of the God of Abraham for this whole enterprise is brought home forcefully and unmistakably. The few moments of vestigial ritual or prayer barely constitute such an encounter today, but this would have been inescapable in earlier centuries in Christendom.” [5]
Further on he remarks:
“Belief in God is no longer axiomatic. There are alternatives. And this will also likely mean that at least in certain milieux, it may be hard to sustain one’s faith. There will be people who feel bound to give it up, even though they mourn its loss.”[6]
Benedict XVI paraphrased in his “New Evangelization” of the year 2000 the thought of J.B. Metz:
“The true problem of our times is the ‘Crisis of God,’ the absence of God, disguised by an empty religiosity. Theology must go back to being truly theo-logy, speaking about and with God. Metz is right: the ‘unum necessarium’ to man is God. Everything changes, whether God exists or not. Unfortunately – we Christians also often live as if God did not exist (‘Si Deus non daretur’). We live according to the slogan: God does not exist, and if he exists, he does not belong.” [7]
The large point is that God cannot be seen. It is John 1, 18 that insists that “No one has at any time seen God.” God is simply invisible. He is not to be perceived by sight. And the reason for this is the relational character of the divine Persons. Sight can only perceive individual material beings, and the thought that is engendered by that sight is conceptual since it is derived by abstraction from sensible internal images. And, on the basis of that, we can know that God exists and induce and deduce from the abstract thought about Him, but we cannot “experience” Him that way.
However, “The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has revealed him” (Jn. 1, 18). The divine Person of the Son, who is Himself pure relation to the Father, cannot be known as pure relation by sight. But the humanity of the Son can be “seen” and if we enter into the likeness of the relationality that the Son is to the Father, we can “experience” Him in ourselves and become conscious of His Persona. And then, reflecting on that, we can “objectify” aspects of that consciousness and form concepts that we can communicate verbally.
St. Thomas, Apostle: Not “Blessed:”
The Incredulity of St. Thomas (Caravaggio). Click image to enlarge.
Thomas’s Self-Seeking Certitude: Not Blessed- Yet
This doubt of Thomas is the doubt of all who do not see for themselves. They believe, but on their own terms. John Henry Newman parades the context of Thomas before us to see how actually good and fine he was: “He was no coldhearted follower of his Lord, as…when he expressed a desire to share danger, and to suffer with Him. When Christ was setting out for Judaea to raise Lazarus from the dead, the disciples said, ‘Master, the Jews of late sought to stone Thee, and goest Thou thither again?’ When He remained in His intention, Thomas said to the rest, ‘Let us also go, that we may die with Him.’ This journey ended, as His Apostles foreboded, in their Lord’s death; they indeed escaped, but it was at the instance of Thomas that they hazarded their lives with Him.
“St.Thomas then loved his master, as became an Apostle, and was devoted to His service; but when He saw Him crucified, his faith failed for a season with that of the rest. At the same time we need not deny that his especial doubts of Christ’s resurrection were not altogether owing to circumstances, but in a measure arose from some faulty state of mind.”[8]
Again Newman: “When Christ said He was going to His Father, and by way which they all knew, Thomas interposed with an argument: ‘Lord, we know not whither Thou goest, and how can we know the way? That is, we do not see heaven, or the God of heaven, how can we know the way thither? He seems to have required some sensible insight into the unseen state, some infallible sign from heaven, a ladder of Angels like Jacob’s, which would remove anxiety by showing him the end of the journey at the time he set out. Some such secrete craving after certainty beset him.”[9]
3) Benedict’s Insight: What is that secret craving after certainty? In 1964, Joseph Ratzinger preached the following in Cologne: “Being a Christian means having love… If love is enough, why do we have your [the theologians] dogma? Why do we have faith, which is forever competing with science? Is it not really true, then, what liberal scholars have said, that Christiantiy has been corrupted by the fact that instead of talking with Christ about God the Father and being like brothers to each other, people have constructed a doctrine of Christ; by the fact that people, instead of leading others to mutual service, have invented an intolerant dogma; by the fact that instead of urging people to love, they have demanded belief and made being a Christian depend on a confession faith?”[10]
Why? Ratzinger states a crucial insight: “Being a Christian means having love; it means achieving the Copernican revolution in our existence, by which we cease to make ourselves the center of the universe, with everyone else revolving around us… Who among us would not have to admit that even in the acts of kindness he practices toward others, there is still an element of selfishness, something of self-satisfaction and looking back at ourselves? Who among us would not have to admit that he is more or less living in the pre-Copernican illusion and looking at other people, seeing them as real, only in their relationship to our own selves? Thus, the sublime and liberating message of love, as being the sole and sufficient content of Christianity, can also become something very demanding….”
Faith is stretching what I am capable of seeing and holding with the certitude that depends on me in preference to what another tells me. What I can sense and conceptualize with certainty is a very narrow parcel of reality, and it is not without the distortion that is built into my perception and my cogitative powers. Notice the figure of Thomas in the most perceptive painting of Caravaggio inspecting the wound in the side of Christ with wrinkled forehead, squinting eye, the calloused and insensitive hands of a fisherman, the finger guided by Jesus into the wound in His side, straining to see for himself and give himself certitude. It is not faith precisely because the self is at the center as the protagonist of certitude. And he is not blessed – yet. He will have to go out of himself, abandon the tower of himself as criterion. Newman says: “What the Apostle says of Abraham is a description of all true faith; it goes out not knowing whither it goes. It does no crave or bargain to see the end of the journey; it does not argue with St. Thomas, in the days of his ignorance, ‘we know not whither, and how can we know the way?’ it is persuaded that it has quite enough light to walk by, far more than sinful man has a right to expect, if it sees one step in advance; and it leaves all knowledge of the country over which it is journeying to Him who calls it on.”[11]
Notice that faith comes from hearing, not from seeing. When I see, it is I who am agent of the intellectual content and certainty of that knowing, and it is precisely the divine Personality that cannot be seen. The exact same situation obtains in the case of John the Baptist as will see below.
To be able to say “My Lord and my God” (Jn. 20, 26) had to come from a reversal and conversion of self from within which was undoubtedly done by Thomas in his interior – not with the certitude of sense or intellect, but with the certitude that comes from self surrender. This Lord and this God cannot be “known” with sense and abstracting intellect but with Love. “Who knows God?” “Only God knows God.”
2. Absolute Realism: Experiencing God
Joseph Ratzinger: “God in Karol Wojtyla is not only thought but also experienced. The pope expressly opposes the limitation of the concept of experience which occurred in Empiricism; he points out that the form of experience elaborated in the natural sciences is not the only kind, but that there are also other forms which are not less real and important; moral experience, human experience, religious experience.”[12]
Failure of Ideologies = Failure to Experience of God
Both Marxism and Capitalism
[Benedict XVI: Aparecida, Brazil May 13, 2007.
THEOLOGICAL EPISTEMOLOGY: WHAT IS THE “REAL”?
“As a first step, we can respond to this question with another: what is this "reality"? What is real? Are only material goods, social, economic and political problems "reality"? This was precisely the great error of the dominant tendencies of the last century, a most destructive error, as we can see from the results of both Marxist and capitalist systems. They falsify the notion of reality by detaching it from the foundational and decisive reality which is God. Anyone who excludes God from his horizons falsifies the notion of "reality" and, in consequence, can only end up in blind alleys or with recipes for destruction. “The first basic point to affirm, then, is the following: only those who recognize God know reality and are able to respond to it adequately and in a truly human manner. The truth of this thesis becomes evident in the face of the collapse of all the systems that marginalize God.
WHO KNOWS GOD?
”Yet here a further question immediately arises: who knows God? How can we know him? … For a Christian, the nucleus of the reply is simple: only God knows God, only his Son who is God from God, true God, knows him. And he "who is nearest to the Father’s heart has made him known" (John 1:18).]
Two Orders?
The knowing subject is constantly confronted with the sensibly experienced and the personally experienced, the visible and the invisible, the divine and the human, grace and nature, the supernatural and the natural, church and state, faith and reason. What is at stake in attempting to make sense of the two orders, whether they are “orders” at all, and if not, what are they dimensions of… is the very nature of man.
One of the most insightful forays into the topic of the divine and the human was a work of Robert Sokolowski in which he contrasted the gods of paganism and the God of Judeo-Christian revelation and faith. The pivotal concept is creation. The gods of the pagan cosmos are the “personalities” arrived at by inductions or lucubrations of sensible experience and who will exercise power in that one cosmic setting. The god or gods of Aristotle, the One of Plato, for example are “the best part – but still only a part – of the cosmos.”[13] They do not transcend the cosmos. They – being highest and most - are only a part.
Sokolowski contrasts this intra-cosmic location of pagan deity with the transcendence of the revealed and revealing Creator of Christian revelation. As he says, “It is natural for human reason to find itself within the context of the world, to come up against the world and its necessities as simply there, as the extreme margin of what can be thought. To think or to believe beyond the setting of the world and its necessities should be recognized for the unusual movement that it is.”[14] A move such as that is not to follow linear reasoning but to make an abrupt break and enter into a distinct epistemological horizon where one is able to imagine that the solid “world” that makes up the total context of lived experience before one’s eyes and in one’s visual memory could very well not be: “In Christian belief we understand the world as that which might not have been, and correlatively we understand God as capable of existing, in undiminished goodness and greatness, even if the world had not been. We know there is a world, so we appreciate the world as in fact created, but we acknowledge that it is meaningful to say that God could have been all that there is. Such a ‘solitary’ existence of God is counterfactual but it is meaningful, whereas it would not be meaningful for the pagan sense of the divine.”[15] Sokolowski will go on to show that this is exactly the thought missing to Anselm’s “proof” for the existence of God, namely that if the world did not exist, God would not be less; and that the world is, God is not more, so different is God’s way of being as Creator from the world as creature.
Sokolowski will base his insight into the different orders of being (that can be non-competitively precisely because of “otherness”) on the difference of Christian experience from every other kind of experience. I would go further here to suggest the subjective, personal and relational character of the act of Christian faith as the precise meaning of this Christian experience. The sensible experience of a thunderstorm, and the experience of spousal gift or prayer or any other form of self-giving, is to set up the contrast between these two levels of human experience corresponding to the two distinct (but not “incompenetrable”) levels of reality: sense experience and “moral” experience of the “I” as subject.
There is Only One Order: The God-man Jesus Christ
When one is aware only of sensible experience and the abstracted thought that issues from it as in St. Thomas the Apostle, the presumption is that there are two orders: the sensible world, and the world of the spirit with its thought. All the dualisms that were registered above: heaven/earth, supernatural/natural, faith/reason, grace/nature, church/state, etc. are instantiations of that binomial that has dominated Enlightenment thought for 500 years and profoundly affected Catholic theology and culture. That binomial responds to only one kind of experience: empirical and sensory that is “real.” Thought is derivative from sense experience, not experiential, and hence, “not real.”
Joseph Ratzinger, working with the texts of Scripture, explodes the fantasy that there are two orders of reality such as heaven and earth, as an “up there” and a “down here.” Rather, there is only one order of reality and that is the Person of Jesus Christ, God-man with two compenetrating (or “circumincessing”) “natures,” and that we, and the entire material creation, work within it.
Joseph Ratzinger, working with the texts of Scripture, explodes the fantasy that there are two orders of reality such as heaven and earth, as an “up there” and a “down here.” Rather, there is only one order of reality and that is the Person of Jesus Christ, God-man with two compenetrating (or “circumincessing”) “natures,” and that we, and the entire material creation, work within it.
Christian "Failures" to Reach – at First - the One Realist Order: John the Baptist and St. Thomas the Apostle
The first line of shocking exegesis of the full Gospel text is his sermon on John the Baptist. Very few have taken notice of the state of disbelief of John while he was in prison. He sent messengers to Jesus asking if He were the one who was to come – the Messiah, the Christ - or should we look for another. Ratzinger confronts the puzzling question of John and connects it with the exegesis of the kingdom of God that, like Christ, is present in the world, but no one sees it.
“In words of burning power John had prophesied the coming of the judge and had painted in fiery colors the great day of the Lord. He had portrayed the Messiah as the judge with the winnowing fan in his hand that would separate the chaff from the grain and throw the chaff once and for all into eternal fire. He had portrayed him as one who would cast out this adulterous generation and, if need be raise up children of Abraham from the very stones to replace the faithless people who called themselves the children of Abraham…. John had expected and proclaimed a clear message that the day would finally come when the hopeless darkness would be dispelled… The ambiguity would disappear….”[16]
But “nothing changed.”[17]”No fire fell from heaven to consume sinners and bear definitive witness to the just.”[18] John is put in jail. Injustice continues and no external retribution appears – as John had preached.
Finally, John sends messengers to ask Jesus: “Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” (Mt. 11, 3).
The response is made and the point comes clear: “Go and tell John what it is that you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them… And blessed is he who takes no offense at me” (Lk. 7, 22-23).
Ratzinger makes a telling exegesis of this. The presence of the God-man is not to impose justice and morality with a kind of religious structure and effecting a kind of Christendom. Rather, Love is present in the world, and if one does not have eyes to see and ears to hear it will be possible to not see or hear. He says: “In answer, Jesus reminds Johns messengers of that the prophet Isaiah had said in foretelling precisely this kind of peaceful, merciful Messiah who ‘will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street’ (Is. 42, 2), but will go about preaching and doing good.”[19] This means that for those who have not been softened and sensitized by conversion to likeness to Christ, “it is in fact possible for men to take offense at him. Even when he comes he does not bring such absolute clarity to the human situation as to eliminate all questions and solve all riddles; people can take offense at him, Blessed is he who takes no offense. Blessed is he who ceases to ask for signs and absolute certainty. Blessed is he who is able, even in this darkness, to go his way in faith and love.”[20]
And so the final task is conversion, to turn about interiorly and not set self up as criterion of certainty. Look at the face, eyes and probing finger of St. Thomas Apostle. “This is probably the final task set the Baptist as he lay in prison: to become blessed by this unquestioning acceptance of God’s obscure will; to reach the point of asking no further for external, visible, unequivocal clarity, but, instead, of discovering God precisely in the darkness of this world and of his own life, and thus becoming profoundly blessed. In point of fact, we cannot see God as we see an apple tree or a neon sign, that is, in a purely external way that requires no interior commitment. We can see him only by becoming liken him, by reaching the level or reality on which God exists.”[21] This is Trinity and relationality which is achieved by living faith that is obedience and prayer.
The Kingdom of God Is Here and Now!!
This exegesis of the figure of John the Baptist is an instantiation of the overall exegesis of the Kingdom of God and the Christology of the early Councils. The exegesis of the Kingdom of God is the following:
“The core content of the Gospel is this: The Kingdom of God is at hand. A milestone is set up in the flow of time something new takes place. And an answer to this is demanded of man: conversion and faith. The center of this announcement is the message that God’s Kingdom is at hand. This announcement is the actual core of Jesus’ words and works. A look at the statistics underscores this. The phrase ‘Kingdom of God’ occurs 122 times in the New Testament as a whole….One can say that whereas the axis of Jesus’ preaching before Eater is the Kingdom of God, Christology is the center of the preaching of the Apostles after Easter.”[22]
Ratzinger’s bold confrontation of the truth as presented in Scripture brings him to confront the scandal of Christians after 2,000 years of the presence of the God-man enfleshed and immanently present in the world. He surmises that “He, who is himself truth and righteousness, ought to rule everyone, so that well-being and justice among men should at last really be the only ruling powers…”[23] And so “(w)hat really torments us today, what bothers us much more [than “the theoretical question of whether God exists; or even the question of whether he is three or one; or even the question of whether Christ is God and man in one person”] is the inefficacy of Christianity…”[24].
This is the large point: “the discrepancy between expectation and fulfillment” of the Parousia or “presence begun” of the God-man, “turned the kingdom of God into a kingdom of heaven that is beyond this mortal life; the well-being of men became a salvation of souls, which again comes to pass beyond this life, after death.”[25] He expatiates: “For what is sublime in this message is precisely that the Lord was talking not just about another life, not just about men’s souls, but was addressing the body, the whole man, in his embodied form, with his involvement in history and society; that he promised the kingdom of God to the man who lives bodily with other men in this history.”[26]
On the first page of his “Eschatology,” Ratzinger says that “With the assistance of modern scholarship, people reestablished an insight which, in the age of the rationalist Enlightenment, had been virtually dismissed as the brainchild of eccentrics. This insight consisted in the awareness that Jesus’ preaching was soaked through with eschatology. The inner impetus of that preaching came from the fact that Jesus, in an authoritative fashion, proclaimed the imminent end of the world, the breaking-in of the Kingdom of God. The novelty and greatness of Jesus, his bursting of old wineskins, cannot be separated from the momentum which this expectation created. Without exception his sayings must be understood in the light of this central concern. Being a Christian in the sense Jesus intended is summed up in the central petition of the Our Father: ‘Thy Kingdom come.’ In this petition, early Christians prayed for the end of the world, and the breaking-in of a new reality which only God can create. ”[27]
The “end of the world” at the time of Christ was not the end of time. It was the end of a time when the God-man was not physically present in the world. But now He has “broken-into” the world. And things should happen such that we would be able to sensibly and visually appreciate the emergence of goodness and justice in that presence. But because of the discrepancy and, therefore, scandal, the theologians create the “Kingdom of Heaven” up-there and at the end of time. The secularization of the world accelerates. The two orders are established. On the one hand, a clericalized order; on the other, a secularized order. The truly human as image of God evaporates.
One Ontologically Real Order with Two Natures
There is only one realism. It is not achieved through sense experience alone, although never without it. One is contact with the reality of Being when one experiences the self in the act of self-transcendence. This experience of total transcendence takes place only in the act of faith in the encounter with the Person of Jesus Christ. Only God is real. Only God knows God. God is personal as Three Persons and yet one in that the Three are so relational as Self-giving that no one can be given without the others. If there were no Father, there would be no Son. If there were no Son, there would be no Father who is the act of engendering the Son. The Spirit – Love - is the personification of the self-gift of the other two.
Therefore, without God there is no realism. But the Father can only be known through the Son. Therefore, we experience realism only by experiencing ourselves in prayer to the Son, and therefore truly knowing Him.
The key to understanding the dualisms in realism - such that they aren’t dualisms -- is to understand the relation of the relation of the two natures in Christ. Benedict XVI presents the Magisterium of Constantinople III as two natures as wills “compenetrating” or “circumincessing” because there is a single Person Who does the willing with each. Since the Agent or Subject is one, the willing – even in the case of there being two distinct ontological realities as wills {and if there weren’t there would not be a redemption – is one personal “Yes” of obedience to the Father. Jesus Christ is the one defining prototype for all the “dualisms” that emerge in thought.
Hence, when we come to the topic of “human nature” and the downstream derivatives such as “moral criterion,” “natural law,” “object of knowledge,” it will be impossible to take them with full realism in their Greek heritage. Human nature in the Greek context is an abstraction that is not the full experience of the self going out of self and therefore experiencing the full-bodied being of the self as imaging the divine Persons. Greek abstraction is “first order abstraction.” Maurice Blondel wrote: “So long as a science recognizes itself as an abstraction bound up with a thought and a life from which it borrows its material, it is useful and legitimate. But the moment it claims to isolate itself as an abstraction, the moment a science concludes from its independence within its own field of research to a sort of self-sufficiency, it becomes guilty of fraudulently converting a simple method of word into a negative and tyrannical doctrine. Willy-nilly it is led into a subtly crude illusion…”[28]
Conclusion: The only way to enter into a full realism with an experiential consciousness of the world and self is to enter into an experiential engagement with the Person of Jesus Christ via human action.
The Christology of “Compenetrating” (Circumicessing) Wills in the One Divine Person: the Solution to all Dualisms.
“(W)hat unites the two wills is the Yes of Christ’s human will to the divine will of the Logos. Thus, in concrete terms - `existentially’ – the two wills become a single will while remaining, at the ontological level, two independent realities. The Council adds that, just as the Lord’s flesh may be called the flesh of the Logos, his human will may also be termed the Logos’ own will. In practice the Council is here applying the Trinitarian model (with the mandatory ever-greater difference in the analogy) to Christology: the highest unity there is – the unity of God – is not the unity of unstructured, amorphous substance but unity by communion, a unity which both creates and is love. Thus the Logos [Divine Person] adopts the being of the man Jesus [no human person] into his own being and speaks of it in terms of his own I: `For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me’ (Jn. 6, 38). In the Son’s obedience, where both wills become one in a single Yes to the will of the Father, communion takes place between human and divine being. The `wondrous exchange,’ the `alchemy of being,’ is realized here as a liberating and reconciling communication, which becomes a communion between Creator and creature. It is in the pain of this exchange, and only here, that that fundamental change takes place in man, the change which alone can redeem him and transform the conditions of the world. Here community is born, here the Church comes into being. The act whereby we participate in the son’s obedience, which involves man’s genuine transformation, is also the only really effective contribution toward renewing and transforming society and the world as a whole. Only where this act takes place is there a change for good – in the direction of the kingdom of God.”[29]
P.s. DeLubac spent his entire theological career showing “the untenability of the doctrine of the separation of the orders of nature and grace and restored a unitary vision of God’s plan for history that could embrace creation and redemption without sacrificing either the autonomy of the world or the gratuity of grace.”[30]
[1] J. Ratzinger, “Turning Point for Europe? Ignatius (1994) 28.
[2] Ibid 30.
[3] J. Ratzinger, “Freedom, Law, and the Good,” Values in a Time of Upheaval” Ignatius-Crossroad (2006) 50.
[4] Ibid 51-52.
[5] Charles Taylor, “A Secular Age,” The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (2007) 1.
[6] Ibid. 3.
[7] A conference given by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, during the Jubilee of catechists in the year 2000.
[8] John Henry Newman, “Faith Without Sight,” Plain and Parochial Sermons II, 2 Ignatius (1987) 234-235.
[9] Ibid. 235.
[10] J. Ratzinger, “Why Do We Need Faith?” What It Means to Be a Christian Ignatius (2006) 72-73.
[11] John Henry Newman, “Faith Without Sight” op. cit 239.
[12] J. Ratzinger, “God in Pope John Paul II’s Crossing the Threshold of Hope,” Communio 22 (Spring, 1995) 110.
[13] Robert Sokolowski, “The God of Faith and Reason,” UNDP (1982) 16.
[14] Ibid 19.
[15] Ibid
[16] J. Ratzinger, “Dogma and Preaching,” Franciscan Herald Press, (1985) 74-75.
[17] Ibid
[18] Ibid
[19] Ibid 76.
[20] Ibid
[21] Ibid
[22] Benedict XVI, “Jesus of Nazareth,” Doubleday (2007) 47-48.
[23] J. Ratzinger, “What It Means to Be a Christian,” Ignatius (2006) 27.
[24] Ibid 28.
[25] J. Ratzinger, “What It Means to Be a Christian” Ignatius (2006) 28.
[26] Ibid
[27]
[28] Maurice Blondel, “History and Dogma,” The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, Eerdman (1994).238.
[29] J. Ratzinger, “Behold the Pierced One,” Ignatius (1984) 90-93.
[30] Bruno forte, “Nature and Grace,” Communio 23 (Winter )1996) 729.
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