A Year with Ratzinger

In the same section of The Nature and Mission of Theology that I mentioned in my last post, Ratzinger develops a neat argument about why theology needs the Church.  Dropping a bunch of nuances, let me try to summarize it.

Theology depends on faith, because only faith gives that word prior to human reasoning that makes theology distinct from philosophy.  Faith depends on conversion, because we go from unfaith to faith through conversion.  Christian conversion requires a renunciation of self so as to turn to God in Christ and be incorporated into his larger “I”, the mystical body.

The problem is that it is very, very easy to remake Christ in our own image when we just think about and read about him.  (See all the “Quest for the Historical Jesus” movements.)  We need to encounter Christ in a very concrete way that does not resolve back to our thoughts about him.  This need is met when we meet him in his mystical body, the Church, which is a very concrete and offensive thing.  No one meeting Christ in the Church is meeting a figment of his own creation!

So the Church is needed for authentic conversion, which is needed for true faith, which is needed for theology.  Ta-da.

One particularly impressive section of The Nature and Mission of Theology is the chapter on “The Spiritual Basis and Ecclesial Identity of Theology.”  There he notes that theology presupposes faith, that faith presupposes conversion, and that conversion means losing my self-sufficient “I” to be incorporated into the mystical body of Christ.

Clearly, in this chapter he uses the word “faith” to mean what scholastics would call “formed faith”, a faith inseparable from hope and love.  But this seems to me the right way to use the word:  “faith” without any qualifications means formed faith both in the Fathers and in the New Testament, and we fall into strange errors when we suppose that “faith” without qualifiers is unformed faith.  For example, the discussion of justification by faith takes on a whole new light if we mean to discuss justification by faith-hope-love.

Perhaps none of my readers (or, I should say, neither of my readers) has fallen into the habit of thinking of faith simply speaking as faith all by itself.  I’ve fallen into that at times, and I’m trying to reform.

Ratzinger’s The Nature and Mission of Theology is one of his best books, if not his very best.  In Salt of the Earth (pgs 66-67), commenting on his early years as a theologian, Ratzinger says,

In the beginning, this theme [truth and reality] wasn’t so central for me.  In the course of my intellectual life I experienced very acutely the problem of whether it isn’t actually presumptuous to say that we can know the truth–in the face of all our limitations.  I also asked myself to what extent it might not be better to suppress this category.  In pursuing this question, however, I was able to observe and also to grasp that relinquishing truth doesn’t solve anything but, on the contrary, leads to the tyranny of caprice.  In that case, the only thing that can remain is really what we decide on and can replace at will.  Man is degraded if he can’t know truth, if everything, in the final analysis, is just the product of an individual or collective decision.

This the early Ratzinger’s struggle was the preparation for The Nature and Mission of Theology, in which the dominant insight is that man is made for truth, faith gives access to truth, and the true crisis of faith today is a despair about truth.  It is a beautiful and moving book–probably because it came from real, gut-wrenching questions in Ratzinger’s own life.

Joseph Bolin has asked me to collect as I go passages from Ratzinger about salvation outside the Church.  He will teach a graduate course on this theme at the ITI this fall, and no doubt he will post about it on his blog.

If you go to Google Books, find The Mission and Nature of Theology, and perform a word search for “missionary”, you will find many of the texts I have come across recently.  Click this link to see the results.  While I do not want to type all of them out here, a good representative is the passage on page 25:

Whoever…would draw faith back into paradox or into a pure historical symbolism fails to perceive its unique historical position, whose defense engaged both the prophets and the apostles in equal measure.  The universality of faith, which is a basic presupposition of the missionary task, is both meaningful and morally defensible only if this faith really is oriented beyond all symbolism of the religions toward an answer meant for all, an answer which also appeals to the common reason of mankind.

Throughout Ratzinger’s work from the 80s and 90s, one finds this emphasis on how Christian faith is different from myth in that it actually claims to offer truth to reason.  In a few places, like this one, he draws out the consequence:  if faith were a myth like other myths, missionary work would be indefensible; but because faith by its nature offers truth to reason, the Church by her nature is a missionary institution.

Ratzinger’s most extensive treatment of salvation outside the Church is found in Truth and Tolerance–see especially pages 202ff., but the theme comes up throughout.  For those who want to find a few texts quickly, go to this book on Google Books and do word searches on “missionary” and then on “salvation”.

But because I have not yet reached Truth and Tolerance in my read-through, I will offer here a text from the book I am currently reading, Salt of the Earth.  On page 23, Seewald asks whether other religions are equal to Catholicism, and Ratzinger responds rather firmly in the negative.  Then on page 24, Seewald asks, “But could we not also accept that someone can be saved through a faith other than the Church?”  Ratzinger responds:

That’s a different question altogether.  It is definitely possible for someone to receive from his religion directives that help him become a pure person, which also, if we want to use the word, help him to please God and reach salvation.  This is not at all excluded by what I said; on the contrary, this undoubtedly happens on a large scale.  It is just that it would be misguided to deduce from this fact that the religions themselves all stand in simple equality to one another, as in one big concert, one big symphony in which ultimately all mean the same thing.

Religions can also make it harder for man to be good.  This can happen even in Christianity because of false ways of living the Christian reality, sectarian deformations, and so forth.  In this sense, in the history and universe of religions, there is always a great necessity to purify religion so that it does not become an obstacle to the right relation to God but in fact puts man on the right path.

I would say that if Christianity, appealing to the figure of Christ, has claimed to be the true religion among the religions of history, this means [in connection with what I have just said] that in the figure of Christ the truly purifying power has appeared out of the Word of God.  Christians do not always live this power well and as they should, but it furnishes the criterion and the orientation for the purifications that are indispensable for keeping religion from becoming a system of oppression and alienation, so that it may really become a way for man to God and to himself.

At one point in The Ratzinger Report, the Cardinal explains that he has not changed over the years:  rather, his fellow theologians from earlier days have drifted more and more away from tradition.  This seems true to me, as I read him.

But inevitably, every thinker changes somewhat over the years.  One significant evolution in the Cardinal’s theology is reported on page 105:

As a young theologian in the time before (and also during) the Council, I had, as many did then and still do today, some reservations in regard to certain ancient formulas, as, for example, that famous De Maria nunquam satis, “concerning Mary one can never say enough.”  It seemed exaggerated to me.  So it was difficult for me later to understand the true meaning of another famous expression. . . .  The declaration, namely, that designated the Virgin as “the conqueror of all heresies.”  Now–in this confused period where truly every type of heretical aberration seems to be pressing upon the doors of the authentic faith–now I understand that it was not a matter of pious exaggerations but of truths that today are more valid than ever.

In response to Vittorio Messori’s question about why the CDF didn’t crack down on more of the world’s bad theologian’s, Ratzinger said something pretty interesting (page 68):  the whole CDF has only about thirty theologians, and not much in the way of secretarial staff and so on.  Practically speaking, they can’t actually track everyone in the world and conduct the (very complicated and protracted) dialogue process necessary to judge and deal with every heretic out there.

That’s understandable.  But it hits me that the whole question is unfair:  Rome shouldn’t have to track everyone and judge everything.  Somewhere along the way, bishops have abdicated their role as local guardians of the faith.  So while Vatican II moved toward a renewed understanding of the episcopacy as a true power rather than simply a lackey of the papacy, the effect of the “spirit of Vatican II” was to centralize doctrinal supervision more than ever in Rome.

Now that’s what I would call ironic.