The section on “I believe in God” in Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity offers a stimulating approach to the question of God’s existence. In an effort to make clear the specifically Christian notion of God, Ratzinger points on the one hand to the ancient pantheon of gods who were available as helpers in time of need because they were close to man and took interest in his affairs.
He notes on the other hand that the ancients typically believed in one, all-embracing cosmic power that stood even above the gods as the ultimate ground of reality—“El” in Caananite culture, but named differently in other cultures. This being was all-powerful, supreme, but at the same time aloof and unavailable. Because he was not a useful god, so to speak, ready to help in time of need, he tended to fade further and further into the background. (While Ratzinger does not cite him, Eliade offers a great account of this phenomenon in his Myth and Reality.) This latter rendering of the deity was more like the god of the philosophers, who tended to be cosmic but aloof, in contrast to the gods of the state religion who were rationally untenable and deplorably anthropomorphic but close and receptive to prayer.
The God of Judaism combined the strengths of both: Yahweh is not the god of a particular people or place but the cosmic God of all; at the same time, he is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, close to man and ready to help in time of need. He is “the greatest in the smallest”, as Ratzinger says. The God who structures the galaxies attends to the unfolding of each flower in the spring and the descent of each leaf in the fall.
In fact, he goes on to say, it is precisely because God is infinite, cosmic, all-powerful, he is able to rule the cosmos while being present to the smallest details of creation. To think that the cosmic, all-powerful one could not possibly care about or notice the smallest movements of the smallest creatures in this immense universe is to think that he is not really all-powerful. We divide the infinite and cosmic from the close and available because we unwittingly conceive of the infinite as finite and the cosmic as parochial. Men make anthropomorphic deities and push El into the background for one and the same reason.
