St. Irenaeus: On the Occasin of the Office of Readings, Wednesday of Week 1, Ordinary Time.

St. Irenaeus on the Knowledge of God by Experience: Mt. 11, 27.

“No one can know the Father apart from God’s Word, that is, unless the Son reveals him, and no one can know the Son unless the Father so wills. Now the Son fulfills the Father’s good pleasure: the Father sends, the Son is sent, and he comes. The Father is beyond our sight and comprehension; but he is known by his Word, who tells us of him who surpasses all telling. In turn, the Father alone has knowledge of his Word. And the Lord has revealed both truths. Therefore, the Son reveals the knowledge of the Father by his revelation of himself. Knowledge of the Father consists in the self-revelation of the Son, for all is revealed through the Word.

“The Father’s purpose in revealing the Son was to make himself known to us all and so to welcome into eternal rest those who believe in him, establishing them in justice, preserving them from death.[1] To believe in him means to do his will.

“Through creation itself the Word reveals God the Creator. Through the world he reveals the Lord who made the world. Through all that is fashioned he reveals the craftsman who fashioned it all. Through the Son the Word reveals the Father who begot him as Son. All speak of these things in the same language, but they do not believe them in the same way. Through the law and the prophets the Word revealed himself and his Father in the same way, and though al the people equally heard the message not all equally believed it. Through the Word, made visible and palpable, the Father was revealed, though not all equally believed it. But all saw the Father in the Son, for the Father of the Son cannot be seen, but the Son of the Father can be seen.

“The Son performs everything as a ministry to the Father, from beginning to end, and without the Son no one can know God. The way to know the Father is the Son. Knowledge of the Son is in the Father, and is revealed through the Son. For this reason the Lord said: No one knows the Son except the Father; and no one knows the Father except the Son, and those to whom the son has revealed him. The word ‘revealed’ refers not only to the future – as though the Word began to reveal the Father only when he was born of Mary; it refers equally to all time. From the beginning the Son is present to creation, reveals the Father to all, to those the Father chooses, when the Father chooses, and aw the Father chooses. So, there is in all and through all one God the Father, one Word and Son, and one Spirit, and one salvation for all who believe in him.”

* * * * * * * * * * *

The real God who is Creator and Lord of all is invisible but within the range of experience. But not sensible experience.

The pagan gods are projections by us of our sensible experience. They belong to the world of the senses. They become explanatory principles of order like laws of nature (cosmic evolution) or first causes of motion (Aristotle’s first unmoved Mover [self-contemplating intelligence]) or intelligibility (Plato’s “One”).

John Henry Newman says: “As regards the first principles expressed in such propositions as ‘There is aright and a wrong,’ ‘a true and a false,’ ‘a just and an unjust,’ ‘a beautiful and a deformed;’ they are abstractions to which we give a notional assent in consequence of our particular experiences of qualities in the concrete, to which we give a real assent. As we form our notion of whiteness from the actual sight of snow, milk, a lily, or a cloud, so, after experiencing the sentiment of approbation which arises in us on the sight of certain acts one by one, we go on to assign to that sentiment a cause, and to those acts a quality, and we give to this notional cause of quality the name of virtue, which is an abstraction not a thing.

And in like manner, when we have been affected by a certain specific admiring pleasure at the sight of this or that concrete object, we proceed by an arbitrary act of the mind to give a name to the hypothetical cause of quality in the abstract, which excites it. We speak of it as beautifulness, and henceforth, when we call a thing beautiful, we mean by the word a certain quality of things which creates in us this special sensation.

“These so-called first principles, I say, are really conclusions of abstraction from particular experiences; and an assent to their existence is not an assent to things or their images, but to notions, real assent being confined to the propositions directly embodying those experiences. Such notions indeed are an evidence of the reality of the special sentiments in particular instances, without which they would not have been formed; but in themselves they are abstractions from facts [sensible experience], not elementary truths prior to reasoning.”[2]

Newman’s Point: We do not “know” causality through sensible experience. Rather, we experience regularity in sensible experience for which the Ancients posited gods who populated the upper realms within the sensible cosmos.[3] The arrival at the notion of “cause” is not taken “from” sensible reality by way of abstraction, but rather by way of experience of the self exercising self-mastery as part of the sensible, corporeal world. Newman appears to be favoring Hume and Kant, but is doing something quite different. He is talking about a direct experience of the self-as-being-as-cause of one’s free corporeal action.

It is here that we experience the true God of revelation. The operative concept and word here is “experience God.” This is pure John Paul II and Benedict XVI. For brevity, I quote Ratzinger commenting on John Paul II’s “Crossing the Threshold of Hope:”

“‘Be not afraid:’ with these words the pope desires to renew in us that certainty which dwells in the depths of the human soul: ‘Someone exists who holds in his hands the destiny of this passing world; Someone who holds the keys to death and the netherworld (cf. Rev. 1, 18); Someone who is the Alpha and the Omega of human history (cf. Rev. 22, 13)… and this someone is Love (cf. 1 Jn. 4, 8, 16) (222). Here the question of God meets the question of man and the question of redemption, and this three-way connection is characteristic of the thought of Karol Wojtyla. He who knows God, the true God, the living God who loves men, is redeemed, set free from fear and kept safe in loving confidence.

“This knowledge of God, in which God is no longer merely thought, but is also experienced, ripens in that dialogue with God which we call prayer. ‘Prayer is a search for God, but it is also a revelation of God,’ says the pope (25): to pray is not just to talk, but also to listen….

“God in Karol Wojtyla is not only thought but also experience. 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 no less real and important: moral experience, human experience, religious experience (34).

Robert Sokolowski’ “The God of Faith and Reason”[4]

Sokolowski speaks of two levels of experience: one is of the senses and the material cosmos that appears. Within that one homogeneous experience and that cosmos there are things and, for both ancients and moderns, gods. The gods are the supreme beings of most power in the world, but they are always within the world delivered to us with that one seamless experience. Sokolowski says: “In Greek and Roman religions, and in Greek and Roman philosophies, god or the gods are appreciated as the most powerful, most independent and self-sufficient, most unchanging beings in the world, but they are accepted within the context of being. Although god or the gods are conceived as the steadiest and most complete beings, the possibility that they could be even though everything that is not divine were not, is not a possibility that occurs to anyone. The being of pagan gods is to be a part, thought the most important part, of what is; no matter how independent they are, the pagan gods must be with things that are not divine….Zeus, Poseidon, Ares and Aphrodite, the Muses, and Apollo are agents that rule over their particular domains, and they are the causes, the ones responsible for what happens.”[5] But the point is that they are within the sensible world, and they could not be if everything else were not.

The Christian understanding of God involves a notion of God that is distinct from the world in the sense that if the world did not exist, God would not be less. And that it does exist, God is not more. This means that there must be an experience of the God that is distinct from the experience of the world, which is in contradistinction to what we have just seen above. We saw above that the experience of the world and the gods was of the same type of experience, since the gods were/are “within” the world.

Since the Christian God and the world are two different notions, they are coming from two different kinds of experience. One is the experience of sensible reality through sensation. The other is an experience of the self as “being” different from the world.
Sokolowski says: “Christian theology is differentiated from pagan religious and philosophical reflection primarily by the introduction of a new distinction, the distinction between the world understood as possibly not having existed and God understood as possibly being all that there is, with no diminution of goodness or greatness. It is not the case that God and the world are each separately understood in this new way, and only subsequently related to each other; they are determined in the distinction, not each apart from the other. The Christian distinct on between the world and God may receive its precise verbal formulation in a theoretical context, since it is described especially by theologians and philosophers, but the distinction does not emerge for the first time in this theoretical setting. It receives its formulation in reflective thought because it has already been achieved in the life that goes on before reflective thinking occurs. The distinction is lived in Christian life, and most originally it was lived and expressed in the life of Jesus…”[6]

This corresponds to Ratzinger’s understanding of revelation and faith in his original habilitation thesis. Revelation is an action that is the Incarnation itself. Faith is the action of receiving that action and becoming one with it such that revelation takes place in the subject receiving who is believing. This is the experience of God in oneself that produces the consciousness of being that is not part of the world. Hence, on reflection, a distinction – the “Christian Distinction” – is made by the mind that understands God to be so transcendentally such that if the world did not exist, He would not be less. And this because what is experienced is of another level of being. It is being as relation, as self-transcending that is not perceived by the senses. It is precisely because of this that God is not able to be perceived by the senses, although He is eminently present and active “in” the world. He is in it, but not of it since He is Creator, and would not be less if the world were not. And so, the Christian perception involves two kinds of experience yielding two kinds of consciousness, both of which correspond to the two dimensions of being of the human person: the divine (as image) and the human.

Therefore, the pagan does not know the God that the Christian knows. And when we say “know” we mean that the Christian knows God experientially in himself because he, the Christian, has entered into the self-transcendence of faith that is a distinct ontological way of being (and therefore, knowing). And the Christian’s is a natural knowing according to a divine way of being (which makes sense since the prototype of the human person is Jesus Christ, and not Adam, nor the Greek abstraction of “individual substance of a rational nature”).There is no such thing as a “natural man” since his ontological constitution as embodied person tends toward the “supernatural” Trinitarian Life (see CCC #27: “Man’s Capacity for God: I. The Desire for God: 27: “The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for”).

[1] Consider Jn. 17, 3: “Now this is everlasting life, that they may know thee, the only true God, and him whom thou hast sent, Jesus Christ.”
[2] A Grammar of Assent, UNDP (1992) 69-75.
[3] Newman makes the major point that we experience causality – never through the external senses – only as the self exercising dominion over self and the external world. In apparent agreement with Hume and Kant, Newman posits causality in the self, but not as a false idol or an a priori category of the mind, but as the experience of the self: “One of the first experiences of an infant is that of his willing and doing; and, as time goes on, one of the first temptations of the boy is to bring home to himself the fact of his sovereign arbitrary power, though it be at the price of waywardness’, mischievousness, and disobedience. And when his parents, as antagonists of this willfulness, begins to restrain him, and to bring his mind and conduct into shape, then he has a second series of experiences of causes and effect, and that upon a principle or rule. Thus the notion of causation is one of the first lessons which he learns from experience that experience limiting it to agents possessed of intelligence and will. It is the notion of power combined with a purpose and an end. Physical phenomena, as such , are without sense; and experience teaches us nothing about physical phenomena as causes;” “(B)ut when we come to the question of cause, then, as I have said, we have no experience of any cause but Will. If, then, I must answer the question, What is to alter the order of nature? I reply, That which willed it; That which willed it, can unwill it; and invariableness of law depends on the unchangeableness of that Will;” A Grammar of Assent, UNDP (1992) 69-75.
[4] UNDP ((1982)
[5] R. Sokolowski, “The God of Faith and Reason,” UNDP (1981) 12.
[6] Ibid 23.

Baptism of the Lord: January 13, 2008

The Baptism Initiates the Public Ministry: Benedict XVI: “It formed part… of the apostolic preaching, as it constituted the starting point of a series of events and words on which the apostles were to give testimony (cf. Acts 1, 21-22; 10, 37-41).The apostolic community considered it very important, not only because in that circumstance, for the first time in history, the manifestation was taking place of the Trinitarian mystery in a clear and complete manner, but also because with that event Jesus’ public ministry began on the roads of Palestine.”[1]

The Mission of Jesus Christ: Preach

Isaiah, 61, 1-3: “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring glad tidings to the lowly, to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners, to announce a year of favor from the Lord and a day of vindication by our God, to comfort all who mourn; to place on those who mourn in Sion a diadem instead of ashes, to give them oil of gladness in place of mourning, a glorious mantle instead of a listless spirit.”

Mark, 1. 38-40: “And Simon, and those who were with him, followed him. And they found him and said to him, ‘They are all seeking thee.’ And he said to them, ‘Let us go into the neighboring villages and towns, that there also I may preach. For this is why I have come.’ And he was preaching in their synagogues, and throughout all Galilee, and casing out devils.”

Universally

Isaia, 49, 6-7: “It is too little, he says, for you to be my servant, to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and restore the survivors of Israel; I will make you a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth…When kings see you, they shall stand up, and princes shall prostrate themselves because of the Lord who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel who has chosen you.”

Baptism Activates the Priesthood of Christ that Consists in Mediating between His Persona and the Father for us. “Mediation” = Gift of Self.


The First Act of Priesthood is to Evangelize: To Preach the Word:

Ratzinger: “What does it mean to ‘evangelize?’ What really happens when someone doest this? And just what is this Gospel? The Council could certainly have referred to the Gospels to establish the primacy of preaching. I have in mind here a short but significant episode from the beginning of Mark. Everyone was seeking out our Lord for his miraculous powers, but he goes off to a remote place to pray (Mark 1, 35-39); when he is pressed by ‘Simon and those who were with him,’ our Lord says, ‘Let us go on to the nearby villages, so that I may preach there also, for this is what I have come out to do’ (1, 38). Jesus says that the purpose of his coming is to preach the Kingdom of God. Therefore this should also be the defining priority of all his ministers: they come out to proclaim the Kingdom, and that means, to make the living, powerful and ever-present God take first place in our lives.”[2]

This also means us: “As the Father has sent me, I also send you” (Jn. 20, 21).

Now, what is the Word to be preached? “Jesus does not convey a knowledge that is independent from his own person, as any teacher or storyteller would do. He is something different from, and more than, a Rabbi. As his preaching unfolds, it becomes every clearer that his parables refer to himself, that the Kingdom and his person belong together, that the Kingdom comes in his person. The decision that he demands is a decision about how one stands toward him, as with Peter, who said, ‘You are the Christ’ (Mk. 8, 29). Ultimately, the message of his preaching about the Kingdom of God turns out to be quite clearly Jesus’ own Paschal mystery, his destiny of death and resurrection.”

This, of course, solves an until-now, unresolved question: the oneness of the liturgy of the Word and the liturgy of the Eucharist. Ratzinger says: “We now understand that Jesus’ preaching can be called ‘sacramental’ in a deeper sense than we could have seen before. His word contains in itself the reality of the Incarnation and the theme of the Cross and the Resurrection. It is ‘deed/word/ in this very profound sense, instructing the Church in the mutual dependence of preaching and the Eucharist, and in the mutual dependence, as well, of preaching and an authentic, living witness….

“I would like to recall now an episode from the early days of Opus Dei, which illustrates the point. A young woman had the popportunity to listen for the first time to t talk given by Fr. Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei. She was very curious to hear a famous opreacher. But after participating in a Mass he celebrated, whe no longer wanted to listien to a human orator. She recounted later that from that moment on, her only interest was to discover the word and will of God.

“The ministry of the word requires that eh priest share in the kenosis of Christ, in his ‘[increasing and decreasing..’ The fact the priest does not speak about himself, but bears the message of another, certainly does not mean that he is no personally involved, but precisely the opposite: it is a giving-away-of-the-self, and communion with him who is the Word of God in person. This Paschal structure of the ‘not-self’ that turns out to be the ‘true self’ after all, shows, in the last analysis, that the ministry of the Word reaches beyond all ‘functions’ tot penetrate t he priest’s very being, and presupposes that the priesthood is a sacrament.”

May it be added that “Priesthood” belongs to both laity and ministers under the rubric of two distinct sacraments: Baptism and Orders. Both laity and priest-ministers are priests of Jesus Christ – mediators, by the gift of self [priests of their own existence] – in irreducibly different ways. But as priests, both are the Word (“Ipse Christus”) that must be given, and this is the meaning of “apostolate.”

[1] Benedict XVI Angelus, January 7, 2007 (Zenit).
[2] J. Ratzinger, “The Ministry and Life of Priests,” October 24, 1995 during the International Symposium organized by the Vatican Congregation for the Clergy on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the promulgation of Presbyterorum Ordinins.

The "Parrhesia" (Daring) of Benedict XVI

The Deep Message of Benedict XVI, spoken with “Parrhesia” (daring): Heaven is Not a Place. Men are Not Souls.

“The parrhesia [1]of faith must be matched by the boldness of reason”[2]

The positive part which the title contradicts is: Heaven and men are persons. Heaven is not a place; men are not souls. To put the message this way is epistemologically huge, in fact shocking. It changes the entire architecture of what we have come to understand as “reality.” It is shocking to the way we think. But this is precisely the point.

The “way” we think is to experience sensibly, to abstract from that experience, to construct - within that abstraction - symbols/signs that we call concepts, form propositions from which we establish propositions that we link with others and induce or deduce to conclusions that we then compare with the sensible reality from which we started.

Vatican II and John Paul II have not been understood for this very reason. Both are talking about a real experience that is not sensible reality. They are talking the “I” – real being – that is a resonating “process” (“man, the only earthly being God has loved for itself, finds himself by the sincere gift of himself;” Gaudium et spes #24) rather than as “thing-in-itself” (substance).

The task that Benedict XVI has taken on is precisely to attempt to render Vatican II and the 14 encyclicals of John Paul II intelligible to the modern mind. But that will demand a “raising of consciousness” of the modern mind. On October 16, 2005, he remarked on Polish television: “Initially, in speaking of the Pope's legacy, I forgot to mention the many documents that he left us -- 14 encyclicals, many pastoral letters, and others. All this is a rich patrimony that has not yet been assimilated by the Church. My personal mission is not to issue many new documents, but to ensure that his documents are assimilated, because they are a rich treasure, they are the authentic interpretation of Vatican II. We know that the Pope was a man of the Council, that he internalized the spirit and the word of the Council. Through these writings he helps us understand what the Council wanted and what it didn’t. This helps us to be the Church of our times and of the future.”

Since the parrhesia of God is His un-concealment in the Person of Jesus Christ, faith as the total gift of self is a parrhesia in return. And faith seeks understanding as we saw in the encounter of Old Testament faith with the pagan Greek mind in Babylon. There the Scriptures were composed in the fifth century because Israel, having lost its land and its customs, was beginning to lose its faith. Ratzinger remarks: “Israel always believed in the Creator God (but) (t)he moment when creation became a dominant theme occurred during the Babylonian Exile. It was then that the account… based, to be sure, on very ancient traditions- assumed its present form. Israel had lost its land and its temple. According to the mentality of the time this was something incomprehensible, for it meant that the God of Israel was vanquished – a God whose people, whose land, and whose worshipers could be snatched away from him. A God who could not defend his worshipers and his worship was seen to be, at the time, a weak God. Indeed, he was not God at all; he had abandoned his divinity. And so, being driven out of their own land and being erased from the map was for Israel a terrible trial: Has our God been vanquished, and is our faith void?

“At this moment the prophets opened a new page and taught Israel that it was only then that the true face of God appeared and that he was not restricted to that particular piece of land. He had never been: He had promised this piece of land to Abraham before he settled there, and he had been able to bring his people out of Egypt. He could do both things because he was not the God of one place but had power over heaven and earth. Therefore he could drive his faithless people into another land in order to make himself known there. And so it came to be understood that this God of Israel was not a God like the other gods, but that he was the God who held sway over every land and people. He could do this, however, because he himself had created everything in heaven and earth. It was in exile and in seeming defeat of Israel that there occurred an opening to the awareness of God who holds every people and all of history in his hands, who holds everything because he is the creator of everything and the source of all power.”[3]

The Present Crisis of Faith: An Occult but Most Dangerous Atheism.

We know about God conceptually, by we do not experience Him directly within ourselves.[4]

A similar epistemological crisis has set in for us now after 400 years of Enlightenment rationalism. If you can’t feel it and touch it, it is not real. The self has been relegated to pure consciousness and feeling, and is quite alone and individualized. Faith is reduced to a series of dogmas and creeds that are philosophically rendered as concepts, and orthodoxy consists in having the “right” ideas and becomes identified with “conservatism.” This conservatism looks toward the realization of those ideas in domestic, economic and political life which masquerades as a thinly veiled theocracy called “Christendom.” The blatant evil is “secular humanism” which co-ops the word secularity, if not the concept which involves theonomous freedom.

We masquerade with a veneer of religious performance and doctrinal orthodoxy but there is a lack of intimacy of the ontological self with Jesus Christ. This is best seen in the exegesis of the relation of John the Baptist with Jesus.

Ratzinger’s Exegesis of John the Baptist: The scriptural narrative yields the paradigm example. I transcribe from Ratzinger:


[Keep in mind that John had a visual take on the divinity of Jesus Christ. When Christ came to be baptized, “heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form as a dove, and a voice came from heaven, ‘Thou are my beloved Son, in thee I am well pleased’” (Lk. 22). He saw and heard the divine signs, but for all the input of sensible experience of those signs, John did not reach the level of the divinity of the Person of Christ. To do that, he would have to go through the experience of conversion that was to take place in the Ratzinger’s narrative below.]


“John’s real suffering, the real recasting as it were of his entire being in relation to God, began in earnest with the activity of Christ during the time when he John, was in prison. The darkness of the prison cell was not the most fearful darkness John had to endure. The true darkness was what Martin Buber has called ‘the eclipse of God;’ the abrupt uncertainty John experienced regarding his own mission and the identity of the one whose way he had sought to prepare.

“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 by, raise up children of Abraham from the very stones to replace the faithless people who called themselves the children of Abraham. Above all, amid the fearful ambivalence of this world where we are constantly waiting and hoping in darkness, John had expected and proclaimed a clear message: that the day would finally come when the hopeless darkness would be dispelled in which human beings wander to and fro and know not where they are going. The ambiguity would disappear, and men would no longer have to grope their way in the endless mist but would know for certain that this and no other is God’s unequivocal claim on them, that this and no other is their situation in relation to God.

“Meanwhile at God’s command, John’s prophetic finger was pointing out a man. ‘Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!’ (Jn. 1, 29). God’s presence had begun… but what a difference from what John had imagined! No fire fell from heaven to consume sinners and bear definitive witness to the just; in fact, nothing changed at all in the present world. Jesus went about preaching and doing good in the land, but the ambiguity remained. Human life continued t o be a dark mystery to which people had to entrust themselves with faith and hope amid the world’s darkness.

“Clearly, it was this utterly different personality of Jesus that most tormented John during the long nights in prison: The eclipse of God continued, and the imperturbable advance of a history that was so often a slap in the face to believers. In his distress John sent messengers to the Lord: Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?’ (Mt. 11, 3)… ‘Are you really he: the Redeemer of the world? Are you really here now as the Redeemer? Was that really all that God had to say to us?’

“In answer, Jesus reminds John’s messengers of what the prophet Isaiah had said in foretelling precisely this kind of peaceful, merciful Messiah who ‘will not cry or lift up his voice, preaching and doing good. Jesus adds the significant words: ‘Blessed is he who takes no offense at me.’ This means that 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, but ‘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.

“This was 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 be becoming like him, by reaching the level of reality on which God exists; in other words, by being liberated from what is anti-divine: the quest for pleasure, enjoyment, possessions, gain, or, in a word, from ourselves. In the final analysis it is usually the self that stands between us and God. We can see God only if we turn around, stop looking for him as we might look for a street sings and dollar bills, and begin looking away from the visible to the invisible.

“John, then, even in his prison cell had to respond once again and anew to this own call for metanoia or a change of mentality, in order that he might recognize his God in the night in which all things earthly exist. ‘Blessed is he who takes no offense at me.’

“The Christian of our day, too, can be shown no other way to friendship with God than the way of ceasing to look for external clarity and beginning to turn from the visible to the invisible and thus truly finding the Lord who is the real foundation and support of our existence. Only when we act in this manner does another and doubtless the greatest saying of the Baptist reveal its full significance: ‘He must increase, but I must decreases’ (Jn. 3, 30). We will know God to the extent that we are set free from ourselves. This brings us back to the main theme of Advent: We will know God to the extent that we give him room to be present in us. A person can spend his life seeking God in vain if he does not enable God to continue in his life the presence begun.”[5]

How “Heaven” and “Souls” Came About!


The "Parrhesia" (daring) of Josef Ratzinger:

Ratzinger (1964)

The Expectation of Justice to Our Measure

And the Discrepancy!!!!

à

Scandal!!!



“`The time is accomplished: the kingdom of God has arrived.’ Behind this saying lies the whole history of Israel, that little people who had been a plaything for the great powers, who had sampled, so to speak, all the empires, one after another, that had ever arisen in that highly congested area of world history, and know about the profligacy of any and every human rule, even that by their own people. They knew all too well that, wherever men rule, it is done in a very human way – that is, frequently in a very miserable and questionable fashion. Through this experience of a history full of disappointments, full of servitude and of injustice, there had grown up in Israel the demand for a kingdom that would not be any human rule, but the kingdom of God himself; the kingdom of God, in which he, the true ruler of the world and of history, would reign supreme. 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. The Lord is responding to the hopes, accumulated over centuries when he says: The time is not here; the kingdom of God has come. It is not difficult to understand the hopes aroused by such a saying. And our own disappointment, which sweeps over us when we look back at what has happened, is just as understandable.”[6]

The False Resolution to the Scandal: Create a Heaven “Above” Space and “Outside” of Time

The Kingdom of God is Not the kingdom of heaven:

Ratzinger’s Daring Text: “Christian theology, which was very soon confronted by this discrepancy between expectation and fulfillment, in the course of time 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. But theology did not thereby provide an answer. 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. As marvelous as the knowledge is that has been opened up for us by biblical scholarship in our century (that is, that Christ was not just looking forward to another life, but was talking about real people), it can also disappoint and unsettle us when we look at real history, which is in truth no kingdom of God.”[7]

To settle the epistemological landscape, recall Ratzinger’s remarks on Advent: that God did not drop out of eternity like a meteor and suddenly pitch his tent among us 2,000 years ago; that before that God was not in time, and after that He is not here either – really. He explains the meaning of the genealogy of Jesus Christ: “In his genealogy Matthew carefully plots the transition from the long and bewildering history set down in the Old Testament to the new reality that has begun with Jesus Christ. He sums up, as it were, this entire history in three sets of fourteen names and brings it down to him for whose sake alone, in the last analysis, it had existed. He shows that as it traveled its many ways and byways this history was, in a hidden manner, already bringing forth Christ; that during those centuries it was already, and at every point, one and the same God who was visiting his people and who now, in Jesus Christ, had become a brother to the human race. He brings out the inherent finality of history, which in the last analysis had no higher purpose than to produce this man Jesus.” Ratzinger specifies that the word “Advent” is a Latin translation for parousia “which means ‘presence’ or, more accurately ‘arrival,’ i.e., the beginning of a presence”[8].[9] He is saying that the goal of the whole creation is Jesus Christ, who is already present in the whole of creation from the very beginning, and toward whom the whole is tending by a kind of “super-evolution” in God’s original intention, mentioned in St. Paul: “For all things are your, whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas; or the world, or life, or death; or things present, or things to come – all are your, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s” (1 Cor. 3, 22-23). He goes on: “Advent reminds us, therefore, of two things: first, that God’s presence in the world has already begun, that he is present though in a hidden manner; second, that his presence has only begun and is not yet full and complete, that it is in a state of development, of becoming and progressing toward its full form. His presence has already begun, and we, the faithful, are the ones through whom he wishes to be present in the world.”

Let me add, by way of reminder, the experience of St. Josemaria Escriva on August 7, 1931 when he heard Christ’s words recorded in St. John 12, 32: “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all things to myself,” and the meaning of the words: that He wanted to placed at the summit of all human activities by the conversion of each of us into being “other Christs.”[10]

And let me add further exegetical theology of Benedict XVI on the nature of the Kingdom of God. To cut to the chase, the kingdom of God is a Person, and we become that kingdom of God insofar as we become “other Christs.” The kingdom, then, is wherever we are. The Kingdom of God is “personal” and is present and hidden and present now as persons are present and hidden to us.[11]

The Kingdom of Heaven

Perhaps the most daring statement - and for that the most clarifying – is the following:

“(H)eaven is not a place but a person, the person of him in whom God and man are forever and inseparably one. And we go to heaven and enter into heaven to the extent that we go to Jesus Christ and enter into him. In this sense, ‘ascension into heaven’ can be something that takes place in our everyday lives.”[12]

The Integral Text: “What, then, is the meaning of Christ’s ‘ascension into heaven’? It expresses our belief that in Christ human nature, the humanity in which we all share, has entered into the inner life of God in a new and hitherto unheard of way. It means that man has found an everlasting place in God. Heaven is not a place beyond the stars, but something much greater, something that requires far more audacity to assert: Heaven means that man now has a place in God.”

“The basis for this assertion is the interpenetration of humanity and divinity in the crucified and exalted man Jesus. Christ, the man who is in God and eternally one with God, is at the same time God’s abiding openness to all human beings. Thus Jesus himself is what we call ‘heaven.’”[13]

Ascension into Heaven is the Assumption of the humanity of Jesus into the Person of the Christ:

Ratzinger: “Thus the Logos adopts the being of the man Jesus 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.”[14]

The text of Chalcedon (451): 2 natures-one person: the definition presumes a static philosophy of nature.

“Therefore, following the holy fathers, we all teach that with one accord we confess one and the same son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in human nature, truly God and the same with a rational soul and a body truly man, consubstantial with the Father according to divinity, and consubstantial with us, according to human nature, like unto us in all things except sin,; indeed born of the Father before the ages according to divine nature, but in the last days the same born of the virgin Mary, Mother of God according to human nature; for us and for our deliverance, one and the same Christ only begotten Son our Lord, acknowledged in two natures, without mingling, without change, indivisibly, undividedly, the distinction of the natures nowhere removed on account of the union but rather the peculiarity of each nature being kept, and uniting in one person and substance, not divided or separated into two persons, but one and the same son only begotten God Word, Lord Jesus Christ, just as from the beginning the prophets taught about Him and the Lord Jesus Himself taught us, and the creed of our fathers has handed down to us.”


The Text of Constantinople III (680-681): Not merely two natures, but two autonomous and dynamic wills exercised by the same divine Person Who says “Yes” through them both as a single “Yes.” This gives us “compenetration” rather than “parallelism” that has engendered all the dualisms: supernatural/natural; grace/nature; faith/reason; church/state; priest/layman, etc.

“And we proclaim equally two natural volitions or wills in him and two natural principles of action which undergo no division, no change, no partition, no confusion, in accordance with the teaching of the holy fathers. And the two natural wills not in opposition, as the impious heretics said, far from it, but his human will following, and not resisting or struggling, rather in fact subject to his divine and all powerful will. For the will of the flesh had to be moved, and yet to be subjected to the divine will, according to the most wise Athanasius. For just as his flesh is said to be and is flesh of the Word of God, so too the natural will of his flesh is said to and does belong to the Word of God, just as he says himself: I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of the Father who sent me, calling his own will that of his flesh, since his flesh too became his own. For in the same way that his all holy and blameless animate flesh was not destroyed in being made divine but remained in its own limit and category, so his human will as well was not destroyed by being made divine, but rather was preserved, according to the theologian Gregory, who says: "For his willing, when he is considered as saviour, is not in opposition to God, being made divine in its entirety"… Therefore, protecting on all sides the "no confusion" and "no division", we announce the whole in these brief words: Believing our lord Jesus Christ, even after his incarnation, to be one of the holy Trinity and our true God, we say that he has two natures [naturas] shining forth in his one subsistence[subsistentia] in which he demonstrated the miracles and the sufferings throughout his entire providential dwelling here, not in appearance but in truth, the difference of the natures being made known in the same one subsistence in that each nature wills and performs the things that are proper to it in a communion with the other; then in accord with this reasoning we hold that two natural wills and principles of action meet in correspondence for the salvation of the human race.

"The key to understanding the unity of the divine and human in Christ is to understand that there is one divine Person Who has taken the humanity of the man Jesus of Nazareth epitomized in the human will as His own. It is critical to understand that it is not the will that wills, but the person. That is, the divine Person wills with His own human will. Only this can make sense of Jn. 6, 38: “For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me.” The divine “I” does not do His own human will, but that of the Father. The dynamic of self-mastery consists in the Person subduing the human will that has been “made to be sin” (2 Cor. 5, 21). [15] In a word, this is the radical self-gift of the Son as God-man."

Put more clearly, the relation of the divine and the human in Christ is not a parallelism of two natures bound together by the commonality of a Person as substance in itself. Rather, it is the compenetration of the divine and the human by the fact that the divine Person has taken the human will as His own and He, the divine Person, wills with the human will. The result is the “compenetration” of the two “wills,” the divine and the human because it is one and the same Person doing the willing.

And yet, the human will does not lose its autonomy and freedom, but rather has it radically enhanced by the fact that it is a divine Person living out the Trinitarian relation to the Father, now as man with a human will.

“Going to Heaven” = “Becoming Christ”

“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2, 20):

“To explain … that becoming and being a Christian rest upon conversion would still be much too weak a way of putting things. This is not to deny that such an interpretation is aiming in the right direction, but the point is that conversion in the Pauline sense is something much more radical than, say, the revision of a few opinions and attitudes. It is a death-event. In other words, it is an exchange of the old subject for another. The `I’ ceases to be an autonomous subject standing in itself. It is snatched away from itself and fitted into a new subject. The `I’ is not simply submerged, but it must really release its grip on itself in order then to receive itself anew in and together with a greater `I’

“In the Letter to the Galatians, the fundamental intuition about the nature of conversion – that it is the surrender of the old isolated subjectivity of the `I’ in order to find oneself within the unity of anew subject, which bursts the limits of the `I,’ thus making possible contact with the ground of all reality – appears again with new emphases in another context. Paul, with the help of the antithesis between the law and the promise, is pursuing the question whether man can, as it were, create himself on his own or whether he must receive himself as a gift. While doing so, he emphasizes quite vigorously that the promise was issued only in the singular. It is intended, not for a mass of juxtaposed subjects, but for `the offspring of Abraham’ in the singular (Gal 3, 16). There is only one bearer of the promise, outside of which is the chaotic world of self-realization where men compete with one another and desire to compete with God but succeed merely in working right past their true hope.”[8]Ratzinger then tops it off with this eye-opening hermeneutic of Paul:

St. Paul says: “As in an organism there are many members working in harmony, so it is with Christ” (1 Cor. 12, 12).Ratzinger does the exegesis:
“Paul does not say `as in an organism there are many members working in harmony, so too in the Church,’ as if he were proposing a purely sociological model of the Church, but at the very moment when he leaves behind the ancient simile, he shifts the idea to an entirely different level He affirms, in fact, that, just as there is one body but many members, `so it is with Christ…’ The term of the comparison is not the church, since, according to Paul the Church is in no wise a separate subject endowed with its own subsistence. The new subject is much rather `Christ’ himself, and the Church is nothing but the space of this new unitary subject, which is, therefore, much more than mere social interaction. It is an application of the same Christological singular found in the Letter to the Galatians. Here, too, it has a sacramental reference, though this time it points to the Eucharist, whose essence Paul defines two chapters before in the bold assertion: `Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body’ (10, 17)… soma, may be translated as `one subject…”[9]This is startling. We must understand that we are being invited to enter into a new epistemological horizon, that of the “I.” In this horizon, the being of the “I” is, as they say, “constitutively” relational (to distinguish it from the “accidentally” relational), in the sense that I, as image of the Trinitarian Persons who are nothing but Relation (“I and the Father are one" (Jn. 10, 30); "the Father is greater than I” (Jn.14, 29) “find myself… by the sincere gift of myself” (Gaudium et Spes #24)

The Conclusion: Contemplative Secularity[16]

“You must realize now, more clearly than ever, that God is calling you to serve him in and from the ordinary, secular, and civil activities of human life. He waits for us everyday, in the laboratory, in the operating theater, in the army barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fields, in the home, and in all the immense panorama of work. Understand this well: there is something holy, something divine hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it.”

“I often said to the university students and workers who were with me in the thirties that they had to know how to materialize their spiritual lives. I wanted to warn them of the temptation, so common then and now, to lead a kind of double life: on the one hand, an inner life, a life related to God; and on the other, as something separate and distinct, their professional, social, and family lives, made up of small earthly realities.

“No, my children! We cannot lead a double life. We cannot have a split personality if we want to be Christians. There is only one life, made of flesh and spirit. And it is that life which has to become, in both body and soul, holy and filled with God: we discover the invisible God in the most visible and material things.

There is no other way, my daughters and sons: either we learn to find our Lord in ordinary, everyday life, or we shall never find him. That is why I tell you that our age needs to give back to matter and to the apparently trivial events of life their noble, original meaning. It needs to place them at the service of the kingdom of God; it needs to spiritualize them, turning them into a means and an occasion for a continuous meeting with Jesus Christ.”[17]





























Rev. Robert A. Connor

January11, 2008



[1] A related use of parrhesia is found in the Greek New Testament, where it means "bold speech," the ability of believers to hold their own in discourse before political and religious authorities (e.g. Acts 4:13: "Now when they saw the boldness [την παρρησίαν] of Peter and John and realized that they were uneducated and ordinary men, they were amazed and recognized them as companions of Jesus."). See Heinrich Schlier, "παρρησία, παρρησιάζομαι," Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, Eds. Ann Arbor: Eerdmans, 1967. Vol. V, pp. 871ff. “Parrhesia” appears in Psalm 79 as “O Shepherd of Israel… shine forth before Ephraim…”

[2] John Paul II, “Fides et ratio,” #48.
[3] J. Ratzinger, “In the Beginning…” Eerdmans (1995) 10-12.
[4] The core of the philosophic work of Karol Wojtyla centers on the experience the “I” has of itself. This experience of self-determination in every moral moment is the experience – and therefore, the consciousness – of self-mastery that is the unique moment of freedom. The only being that I have the freedom to control is myself. That experience of existentially shaping who I am in each of the moments in which personal freedom is exercised in this self-mastery is totally unique to me. I cannot experience that self-determination in another self. But in a community of common action, I can “transfer” to another the experience and the consciousness that accrues to it, to another, and therefore “know” another “from within” by the transference of that experience and its consciousness to that other.
This is the philosophic basis of the theological epistemology of Simon-son-of-John – when praying with Jesus - being able to say to Jesus (Who is the constant act of prayer to the Father), “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt. 16, 16). Like is known by like. Since the human person, as image of the divine relations, is constitutively relational in potency awaiting act, Simon’s being is transformed from being merely potentially relational to actually being relational by the act of praying with Jesus (Lk. 9, 18). Hence, Jesus changes his name from Simon to His own as “Rock:” Peter. Hence, the only way to “re-cognize” Jesus the Christ (the Son of God) in Jesus of Nazareth (the son of man) is to make the gift of self in prayer. This explains the re-cognition of God in the Child hidden in the decayed Throne of David – the stable – in the Davidic town of Bethlehem. It also explains our task to re-cognize Christ in the ordinary hiddenness of secular life, and thus enter into the realism that the “place” of heaven as the Kingdom of God is here and now in persons who have become “other Christ.” The great task is to give the secular here and now its true ontological and divinizing weight.
[5] J. Ratzinger, “Dogma and Preaching,” Franciscan Herald Press (1985) 74-77.
[6] J. Ratzinger, “What It Means to Be a Christian,” Ignatius (2006) 27-28.
[7] Ibid
[8] Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium #48 says in this regard: “The end of the ages is already with us (1 Cor 10, 11: “Now all these things happened to them as a type, and they were written for our correction, upon whom the final age of the world has come”). The renewal of the world has been established, and cannot be revoked. IN our era it is in a true sense anticipated: the church on earth already sealed oby genuine, if imperfect, holiness…”
[9] J. Ratzinger, “Dogma and Preaching,” Franciscan Herald Press (1985) 71-72.
[10] Andres Vazquez de Prada, “The Founder of Opus Dei,” Volume I: The Early Years, Scepter (2001) 287: “A voice, perfectly clear as always, said, Et ego, si exaltatus fuero a terra, omnia traham ad me ipsum! [‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself!’ (Jn. 12, 32). “And here is what I mean by this: I am not saying it in the sense in which it is said in Scripture. I say it to you meaning that you should put me at the pinnacle of all human activities, so that in every place in the world there will be Christians with a dedication that is personal and totally free – Christians who will be other Christs.”
[11]From my blog on November 29, 2007 where “Kingdom of God, 2007” is developed in full:” Benedict XVI: “Speaking of God, we are touching precisely on the subject which, in Jesus’ earthly preaching, was his main focus. The fundamental subject of this preaching is God’s realm, the ‘Kingdom of God.’ This does not mean something that will come to pass at one time or another in an indeterminate future. Nor does it mean that better the better world which we seek to created, step by step, with our own strength. In the term ‘Kingdom of God,’ the word ‘God’ is a subjective genitive. This means: God is not something added to the ‘Kingdom’ which one might even perhaps drop.“God is the subject. Kingdom of God actually means: God reigns. He himself is present and crucial to human beings in the world. He is the subject, and wherever this subject is absent, nothing remains of Jesus’ message.“Therefore, Jesus tells us: the Kingdom of God does not come in such a way that one may, so to speak, line the wayside to watch its arrival. ‘The Kingdom of God is in the midst of you!’ (cf. Lk. 17, 20ff).“It develops wherever God’s will is done. It is present wherever there are people who are open to his arrival and so let God enter the world. Thus, Jesus is the Kingdom of God in person: the man in whom God is among us and through whom we can touch God, draw close to God. Wherever this happens, the world is saved.” (Benedict XVI, Bavaria, September 14, 2006).
[12] J. Ratzinger “Dogma and Preaching,” Franciscan Herald Press (1985) 63
[13] Ibid
[14] J. Ratzinger, “Behold the Pierced One,” Ignatius (1986) 92.
[15] “Made to be sin” is to enter into the loneliness of sin as the rejection of the Triune God, and therefore of the others. This is Benedict’s interpretation of Jesus death cry, `My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (Mark 15, 34) which is the first and only time that Jesus refers to the Father as “El” and not as “Abba.” Benedict says: “In this last prayer of Jesus , as in the scene on the Mount of Olives, what appears as the innermost heart of his passion is not any physical pain but radical loneliness, complete abandonment;” “Introduction to Christianity,” op. cit 227.
[16] See Christifideles laici, #15 and Gaudium et spes #36.
[17] St. Josemaria Escriva, “Passionately Loving the World,” A homily delivered at a Mass celebrated for the Friends of the University of Navarre in October, 1967 (5-6.).

Epiphany 2008: The Faith of Abraham Becomes Universal

“Salvation is From the Jews” (Jn. 4, 22)

The one true God has revealed Himself to the Jews. That is why the God of Israel has become the God of all the nations of the world - and this through Jesus Christ.

1) The revelation of God to Abram: “Then the Lord led him outside and said, ‘Look at the heavens and, if you can, count the stars.’ And he said to him, ‘So shall your posterity be…. Abram believed the Lord, who credited the act to him as justice….[1] “This is my covenant with you: You shall be the father of a multitude of nations; you shall no longer be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I will make you the father of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; I shall make nations of you, and kings shall descend from you.”[2] This is the covenant that is not “testament” but a kind of “bilateralism” - "covenant," - between God and Abram.

Ratzinger (“Many Religions – One Covenant, Israel, the Church and the World”[3]) teases out the distinction between “covenant” and “testament” on the basis of two protagonists of an asymmetrical equality (the notion of person as relation) in the case of covenant – or one principal protagonist who “proclaims” or speaks out His revelation as Old or New “Testaments.” Ratzinger raises the question, “Which is correct? St. Jerome spoke about “New and Old ‘Covenants,’ both in theology and in the liturgy.”[4] He finds that the exegetical scholarship has opted for the correctness of the term “Testament.”

However, the controlling theological epistemology in all of Ratzinger’s thought is the mutuality between Revelation and Faith. Consider his 1956 thesis on Revelation and Faith in the Middle Ages where he discovers in Bonaventure that Revelation did not mean “words” either conceptual or written on a page, but an “act in which God shows himself… And because this is so, the receiving subject is always also a part of the concept of ‘revelation.’ Where there is no one to perceive ‘revelation,’ no re-vel-ation has occurred, because no veil has been removed. By definition, revelation requires a someone who apprehends it. These insights, gained through my reading of Bonaventure, were later on very important for me at the time of the conciliar discussion on revelation, Scripture, and tradition. Because, if Bonaventure is right, then revelation precedes Scripture and becomes deposited in Scripture but is not simply identical with it. This in turn means that revelation is always something greater than what is merely written down. And this again means that there can be no such thing as pure sola scriptura (‘by Scripture alone’), because an essential element of Scripture is the Church as understanding subject, and with this the fundamental sense of tradition is already given.”[5] Attention should be paid to the word “act” that is both on the side of God and the side of the believer. The act in question is the act of self-giving that is the very Person of Christ as revelation of the Father, and the act of self-giving that is the receptivity of Christ within the believer (as in the case of our Lady at the Annunciation). What is in play here is the meaning of person as "act of self-gift" that is the trinitarian prototype of an image as "'work-in-progress."

So also, rather than Old and New “Testaments,” we are dealing with Old and New “Covenants” where there is a certain “equality” between the protagonists – God and man – in the act of revelation and faith.

The large picture that Ratzinger wants to communicate here is that the Covenant between God and Abram is not a testament but a promise that will be existentially and historically fulfilled (because God is faithful to His Word [which is His very Self]) in the New Covenant between Jesus Christ and all men through His Church. The fatherhood of Abram (now become Abraham) will extend far beyond the Jews, and reach all the nations.


2) Babylonian Exile: Judaic faith becomes universalized. The Bible is translated into Greek by the Septuagint. This, of course, means that there will have to be an historical shaping of this universalization since until the time of the Exile to Babylon, the revelation of God was limited to the narrowness of the Jews. But at the time of the exile – and this was the burden of his Regensburg remarks – the faith-experience of the God of Israel was to become a new experience: that of “the God of Israel, an Israel now deprived of its land and worship, was proclaimed as the God of heaven and earth and described in a simple formula which echoes the words uttered at the burning bush: ‘I am.’

“This new understanding of God is accompanied by a kind of enlightenment, which[6] finds stark expression in the mockery of gods who are merely the work of human hands.” Ratzinger goes on: “Thus despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sought to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level…”

“Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria – the Septuagint – is more than a simple (and in that sense perhaps less than satisfactory) translation of the Hebrew test: It is an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of Revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity. A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion.” [7]

3) The Wise Men From the East: At a third remove, we come to the event of the Epiphany. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC #528) reads:

“The magi’s coming to Jerusalem in order to pay homage to the king of the Jews shows that they seek in Israel, in the messianic light of the star of David, the one who will be king of the nations. Their coming means that the pagans can discover Jesus and worship him as Son of God and Savior of the world only by turning toward the Jews and receiving from them the messianic promise as contained in the Old Testament. The Epiphany shows that the `full number of the nations’ now takes its `place in the family of the patriarchs,’ and acquires Israelitica dignitas (are made `worthy of the heritage of Israel’)


4) The Mission of Jesus: to unite Jews and “pagans:” Ratzinger comments: “In this text, we can see how the Catechism views the relationship between Jews and the nations of the world as communicated by Jesus; in addition, it offers at the same time a first presentation of the mission of Jesus. Accordingly, we say that the mission of Jesus is to unite Jews and pagans into a single People of God in which the universalist promises of the Scriptures are fulfilled that speak again and again of the nations worshiping the God of Israel…. In order to present this unification of Israel, and the nations, the brief text – still interpreting Matthew 2 [the Magi] - gives a lesson on the relationship of the world religions, the faith of Israel, and the mission of Jesus: the world religions can become the star that enlightens men’s path that leads them in search of the kingdom of God. The star of the religions points to Jerusalem, it is extinguished and lights up anew in the Word of God, in the Sacred Scripture of Israel. The Word of God preserved herein shows itself to be the true star without which, or bypassing which, the goal cannot found.”“What does all this mean? The mission of Jesus consists in bringing together the histories of the nations in the community of the history of Abraham, the history of Israel…. The history of Israel should become the history of all, Abraham’s sonship is to be extended to the `many.’ This course of events has two aspects to it: the nations can enter into the community of the promises of Israel in entering into the community of the one God, who now becomes and must become the way of all because there is only one God and because his will is therefore truth for all. Conversely, this means that all nations, without the abolishment of the special omission of Israel, become brothers and receivers of the promises of the chosen People; the become People of God with Israel through adherence to the will of God and through acceptance of the Davidic kingdom.”[8]

5) Jesus Christ is the Meaning of “Man.” The Source for the Universal Truth “Person” Originates in the Experience Self as Gift in Secular Work (= Prayer).

This is derived from an understanding of how human nature was assumed by the divine Person as “his.” The human will does not will in Jesus Christ. He wills with “his” human will. It is a divine Person willing with a human will. That is, He wills as a divine Person wills, but it is humanly. Therefore, the freedom of self-giving that is the meaning of freedom is enhanced and becomes truly itself as image of God, not annulled, in Christ’s human will. So also, the experience of what it means to be “person,” the truth of human personhood, can only be found in the experience of Christ that is self-expropriation (gift).

Consider the case of the three wise men who have left their land, their power and their time to follow the star to the obscure stable in which they are confronted by a child, a young mother, a carpenter, shepherds and animals. Benedict asks: “How was this possible? What convinced the Magi that the Child was ‘the King of the Jews’ and the King of the peoples? There is no doubt that they were persuaded by the sign of the star that they had seen ‘in its rising’ and which had come to rest precisely over the place where the Child was found (cf. Mt. 2, 9). But even the star would not have sufficed had the Magi not been people inwardly open to the truth.”[9]

The conditions of being able to re-cognize the Child in the child are purity and detachment, whereby the self is dispossessed and liberated from itself. Only then can there be the experience and the cognizing in self of that tiny sensible figure who is then re-cognized as Creator of the world hidden in his creation.

This experience of self-expropriation, while yielding a cognizing of the Person of Christ in the child, is an experience and consciousness of self as person imaging the divine Persons. This yield is the self-evident truth of the dignity of the human person and his inalienable rights. This truth is secular, although religiously based. It is not a conceptual truth but a truth of and in consciousness that is the context of all further conceptual thinking. It is the ground of what we understand by “meaning.” This is the truth on which a true globalization can rest, a globalization that will affirm the freedom of autonomy to persons and nations. That truth has been formulated in Gaudium et spes #24: “man, the only earthly being that God has willed for itself, finds himself by the sincere gift of himself.” The ontological reality in play here, the meaning of “to be,” is “to-be-in-relation.” This is mysterious as transcending a proper conceptualizing, but it is not irrational. On the contrary, it is the root and ground of all rationality. It is the truth of faith that makes reason reasonable.

[Finally, consider the "rescue" of the abrahamic covenant by the Logos as both God and man who feeds us with His Flesh and Blood. Ratzinger said: "It is because the Son has handed himself over to God that his 'blood' is now given to men as the blood of the covenant. Body has become word, and word has become body in the act of love that is the specifically divine mode of being...(I)t is important to note that the Last Supper sees itself as making a covenant: it is the prolongation of the Sinai covenant, which is not abrogated, but renewed. Here renewal of the covenant, which from earliest times was doubtless an essential element in Israel's liturgy, attains its highest form possible. In this perspective we should see the Last Supper as one further renewal of the covenant, but one in which, what heretofore was performed ritually, is not given a depth and density - by the sovereign power of Jesus - which could not possibly have been envisaged" (J. Ratzinger, "Many Religions - One Covenant" Ignatius (1999) 60-62).

Previously, Ratzinger said: "When Jesus offers the cup to the disciples and says, 'This is the blood of the covenant,' the words of Sinai are heightened to a staggering realism, and at the same time we begin to see a totally unsuspected depth in them. What takes place here is both spiritualization and the greatest possible realism. For the sacramental blood fellowship that now becomes a possibilitiy brings those who accept it into an utterly concrete - and corporeal - community with this incarnate human being, Jesus, and hence with his divine mystery" (citation above).

[1] Genesis 15, 5-8;
[2] Ibid 17, 4-7.
[3] Ignatius (1999) 47-113.
[4] J. Ratzinger, “Many Religions – One Covenant,” Ignatius (1999) 48.
[5] J. Ratzinger, “Milestones…” Ignatius (1997) 108-109.
[6] Benedict XVI, “The Integration of Faith and Reason,” Regensburg 2006.
[7] Ibid
[8] . J. Ratzinger, “Many Religions – One Covenant,” Ignatius (1999) 26.
[9] Benedict XVI, Solemnity of the Epiphany, Saturday, January 6, 2007.

St. John, The Apostle: Trustworthy Evangelist

St. John, “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” knew Jesus in a way the other evangelists (Matthew, Mark and Luke) did not. His Gospel shows it. John recorded Jesus’ discourses around images; the others recorded parables. The reason for this felicitous discrepancy was that John (together with Peter and James) knew Jesus “from the inside,” while the others were progressing from the outside in.

I take this insight from Benedict XVI:

“Listening to the Synoptics, we have realized that the mystery of Jesus’ openness with the Father is ever present and determines everything, even though it remains hidden beneath his humanity. On one hand, it was perceived by his sharp eyed opponents. On the other hand, the disciples, who experienced Jesus at prayer and were privileged to know him intimately from the inside, were beginning – step by step, at key moments with great immediacy, and despite all their misunderstandings – to recognize this absolutely new reality. In John Jesus’ divinity appears unveiled. His disputes with the Jewish Temple authorities, taken together, could be said to anticipate his trial before the Sanhedrin, which John, unlike the Synoptics, does not mention specifically.

“John’s Gospel is different: Instead of parables, we hear extended discourses built around images, and the main theater of Jesus’ activity shifts from Galilee to Jerusalem.”[1]

Doubt Concerning John's Authorship

That John the Apostle was the Evangelist was clear in Christian tradition until c. 330 when Eusebius, the Church historian, “tells us about a five-volume work of the bishop of Hierapolis, Papias, who died around 220. Papias mentions there that he had not known or seen the holy Apostles himself, but that he had received the teaching of the faith from people who had been close to the Apostles. He also speaks of others who were likewise disciples of the Lord, and he mentions the names Aristion and ‘Presbyter John.’ [2]Now, the important point is that he distinguishes between the Apostle and Evangelist John, on one hand, and ‘Presbyter John,’ on the other. Although he had not personally known the former, he had met the latter.”[3]

Benedict comments: “This information is very remarkable indeed: When combined with related pieces of evidence, it suggests that in Ephesus there was something like a Johannine school, which traced its origins to Jesus’ favorite disciple himself, but in which a certain ‘Presbyter John’ presided as the ultimate authority. This ‘presbyter’ John appears as the sender and author of the Second and Third Letter of John (in each case in the first verse of the first chapter) simply under the title ‘the presbyter’ (without reference to the name John). He is evidently not the same as the Apostle, which means that here in the canonical text we encounter expressly the mysterious figure of the presbyter. He must have been closely connected with the Apostle; perhaps he had even been acquainted with Jesus himself.”[4]

Benedict concludes: “I entirely concur with the conclusion that Peter Stuhlmacher has drawn from the above data. He holds ‘that the contents of the Gospel go back to the disciple whom Jesus (especially) loved. The presbyter understood himself as his transmitter and mouthpiece… In a similar vein Stuhlmacher cites E. Ruckstuhl and P. Schullnigg to the effect that ‘the author of the Gospel of John is, as it were, the literary executor of the favorite disciple’ …

“With these observations, we have already taken a decisive step toward answering the question of the historical credibility of the Fourth Gospel. This Gospel ultimately goes back to an eyewitness, and even the actual redaction of the text was substantially the work of one of his closest followers within the living circle of his disciples.

“Thinking along similar lines, Peter Stuhlmacher writes that there are grounds for the conjecture ‘that the Johannine school carried on the style of thinking and teaching that before Easter set the tone of Jesus’ internal didactic discourses with Peter, James, and John (as well as with the whole group of the Twelve)… While the Synoptic tradition reflects the way in which the apostles and their disciples spoke about Jesus as they were teaching on Church missions or in Church communities, the Johannine circle took this instruction as the basis and premise for further thinking about, and discussion of, the mystery of revelation, of God’s self-disclosure in “the Son”…’”[5]

John’s Gospel as “Remembering”

John’s account of Jesus is always a “remembering.” As the proclamation of Jesus is addressed to an anamnesis in us of our being created in the image and likeness of the divine Persons, so also John’s Gospel and first Letter is an anamnesis that he has of Jesus. Benedict says: “For, on one hand, the author of the Fourth Gospel gives a very personal accent to his own remembrance, as we see from his observation at the end of the Crucifixion scene (cf. Jn. 19, 35); on the other hand, it is never a merely private remembering, but a remembering in and with the ‘we’ of the Church: ‘that which… we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands.’ With John, the subject who remembers is always the ‘we’ – he remembers in and with the community of the disciples, in and with the Church. However much the author stands out as an individual witness, the remembering subject that speaks here is always the ‘we’ of the community of disciples, the ‘we’ of the Church. Because the personal recollection that provides the foundation of the Gospel is purified and deepened by being inserted into the memory of the Church, it does indeed transcend the banal recollection of facts.”[6]

The point of remembering is always significant with Ratzinger-Benedict because the experience and consciousness of revelation (knowing God) is the always the whole self that is given, and therefore, memory is always of the self given, never merely facts like scientific digits or telephone numbers. As he remarked concerning Our Lady: “Mary kept the word in her heart and pondered it (Lk. 1, 29)…) First of all, then, she is portrayed as a source of the tradition. The word is kept in her memory; therefore she is a reliable witness for what took place. But memory requires more than a merely external registering of events. We can only receive and hold fast to the uttered word if we are involved inwardly. If something does not touch me, it will not penetrate; it will dissolve in the flux of memories and lose its particular face. Above all it is a fact that understanding and preserving what is understood go together. If I have not really understood a thing, I will not be able to communicate it properly. Only by understanding do I receive reality at all; and understanding, in turn, depends on a certain measure of inner identification with what is to be understood. It depends on love. I cannot really understand something for which I have no love whatsoever. So the transmission of the message needs more than the kind of memory that stores telephone numbers: what is required is a memory of the heart, in which I invest something of myself. Involvement and faithfulness are not opposites: they are interdependent.”[7]

Conclusion: “This means that the Gospel of John, because it is a ‘pneumatic Gospel,’ does not simply transmit a stenographic transcripts of Jesus’ words and ways; ti escorts us, in virtue of understanding-through-remembering, beyond the external into the depth of words and events that come from God and lead back to him. As such, the Gospel is ‘remembering,’ which means that it remains faithful to what really happened and is not a ‘Jesus poem,’ not a violation of the historical evernts. Rather, it truly shows us who Jesus was, and thereby it shows us someone who not only was, but is; who can always say ‘I am’ in the present tense. “Before Abraham was, I am (Jn. 8, 58). It shows us the real Jesus, and we can confidently make use of it as a source of information about him.”[8]

[1] J. Ratzinger-Benedict XVI, “Jesus of Nazareth,” Doubleday (2007) 218-219.
[2] Eusebius (260-339 A.D.) writes: “Here it should be observed that he (Papias) twice includes the name of John. The first John he pouts in the same list as Peter, James, Matthew, and the rest of the apostles, obviously with the evangelist in mind; the second, with a changed form of expression, he places in a second group outside the number of the apostles, giving precedence to Aristion and clearly calling John a presbyter. He thus confirms the truth of the story that two men in Asia had the same name, and that there were two tombs in Ephesus, each of which is still called John’s. This is highly significant, for it is likely that the second – if we cannot accept the first – saw the Revelation that bears the name of John. Papias, whom we are now discussing, owns that he learnt the words of the apostles from their former followers, but says that he listened to Aristion and the presbyter John with his own ears. Certainly he often mentions them by name, and reproduces their teachings in his writings;” “The History of the Church,” Penguin Books (1965), Revised and edited with a new introduction by Andrew Louth, Bk. III, #39.
[3] Ibid 226.
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid. 226-227.
[6] Ibid 231.
[7] J. Ratzinger, “Seek That Which is Above,” Ignatius (1986) 100-101.
[8] “Jesus of Nazareth,” op. cit. 234-235.