Review: Joseph Ratzinger's *Introduction to Christianity*

I just finished reading Joseph Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity, and it took some doing. The actual reading time per page was very high variance. There are some sections where you could read 20 pages in half an hour, and there are some sections where, to really understand it, you had to dig into it, and it would take an hour to get 2 pages. There's also a lot of scholarly references, so it's very easy to get sucked into rabbit holes. He also says a lot of things that really ought to be reflected on, and it is the sort of book that lends itself well to thinking a bit ahead or recalling what you've already read. He encourages this in the way he writes. He'll say, "and if you think about the thing that we've just said, it leads to a natural conclusion." It's very nice to have this kind of active, participatory reading experience rather than something that is more dry and dogmatic. Not only is it a lively book, he's in conversation with a lot of scholars from many different traditions and eras.

There's a criticism that a Protestant modernist, writing in the early 1900s — made of small-o orthodox theology: that if you look at science, and you're a young man just starting out in the world, science says to you, "hey, you can take up this challenge and make your impact and make it your own, you can make your own contribution." Whereas with religion, sadly, in many cases, there's this idea of being able to think and say whatever you want, as long as you come to the agreed-upon conclusion. That's a criticism that Ratzinger's manner destroys. He really manages to keep things fresh. He tries to speak to the modern reader, but at the same time he is rooted in the faith. He is standing in his faith. And it's a beautiful thing.

He has this image of Christ as the one whose love of the whole world is stretching him to his limit as his arms are stretched out on the cross. And one feels that, at his best, Ratzinger embodies this aspect of Christ. There are so, so many absolute solid-gold images and ideas in this book. I found myself again and again writing in the margins. I didn't agree with everything he said, But would often add an exclamation point because I was astonished at his willingness to admit certain things. The fact that this man who would one day become Pope was really willing to engage in a genuine dialogue is very heartwarming to me. And it may be — no, it is — the strongest argument I have heard for continued faith in the Roman Catholic Church. Now, sadly, most Catholics are not like this man. It's very sad. But here is a real Christian, a real scholar, a real thinker.

It's very clear that he is writing with his heart in the right place. He is trying to make us see what he cherishes in Christianity, what is so beautiful and amazing about it. He's not trying to shame anybody, and he's also not writing in an apologetic way. He's generally not writing in a dishonest way. There are certain things he does write with a sort of theologian's sycophancy. For example, he says something like, "oh, yes, the church is sinful, but what could be more beautiful than Christ's embracing the sinful" — and yeah, this is all well and good, but then if you look at what the church actually does, the church is very much staking a claim here on being the true church, and so he doesn't really engage with the real argument there. This is really the only point where I felt he was wearing thin my trust in his good faith.

He doesn't appear to be at all interested in engaging in certain debates. He engages really fully in certain questions, and one can tell this is a man who has really mapped out the area, because he explicitly says, "this is something I don't have enough time to go into, but here's the broad strokes," or "this is something I just am not going to get into here."

After having read this book, I feel now, for the first time, that I can give a full-throated defense of the faith, and I can really stand firm in the faith as something that is intellectually rigorous — not necessarily because I stand behind this book or because I've memorized it or anything like that. It's not even that it really changed my mind or convinced me intellectually of some sticking point. It's more that it's a book that touched my heart and made me feel that a curious spirit is welcome inside the faith.

This is a book that I will return to. I hope that I live long enough to return to this book. It's unlike any theology I've read before, because it really touched my heart, and I want to look back on it one day as an old friend.

The Clown in the Burning Circus

Now, I am going to go through my marginalia. I'll just flip through the book and remark on the things I've noted.

It's really nice that he makes a very full-throated and articulate criticism of Marxism, without getting obsessive about it. He's writing in a milieu of the student protests of 1968, and part of the motivation clearly is to talk about what Christianity means in history, not as some thing. You often see this in Western society, in society where the idea of the secular exists — you see this idea of religion as this sort of compartment in your life. You go to work, you go to the gym, you go to church. It's like some aspect of your health, like your diet or the language you speak. I think actually the language you speak is a better analogy, because properly construed, one's faith is something that informs one's entire life. It's not some separate arena, it's not some wellness activity you take place in like going to a sauna. Of course, it can have rituals, it can have communities, it can involve intellectual ideas, it can involve systems of ethics — but it's really something that's more total. It's really a form of spiritual sight. That's the only way to describe it. And if you try to dismember this totality, it's not a good path.

He's motivating the introduction by looking at Marxism and looking at how people feel as if it's the only possible philosophical or metaphysical or ethical system, and just saying, "oh, how wrong that is." The book is structured as an expansion and explanation of the Apostle's Creed.

The very first thing he talks about is this parable of a circus set up outside of town where a fire has broken out. They send the clown, for some reason, to the village, and he is really doing everything he can to warn them of the fire — because they need to come help put it out, or it will destroy the circus, and if it destroys the circus, it will spread across the fields and might even destroy the town. But everyone sees that he's a clown and they just laugh. They know what he is. They have this little box, and they can't fathom that what he's saying is real or important.

This is the situation that Ratzinger says he finds himself in in 1968 in Germany. This odd person, this odd man, talking about things that are very real and very important, but which people seem categorically predisposed not to take seriously. "Oh, this is just a fun make-believe game." There is a certain frankness that Ratzinger has when it comes to these philosophical matters, and he can be somewhat frank when it comes to social dynamics — but that's what I think is missing from this book. This is such a beautiful book, but I would love to see, perhaps as an adjunct to it, someone who is really willing to do what he did, but to deal with social dynamics in religion, to speak honestly about these things, and about what it is that we're really doing when we try to communicate with the divine, and when we try to worship.

He says, and I'll quote:

It is certainly true that anyone who tries to preach the faith amid people involved in modern life and thought can really feel like a clown, or rather perhaps like someone who, rising from an ancient sarcophagus, walks into the midst of the world of today, dressed and thinking in the ancient fashion, and can neither understand nor be understood in this world of ours. Nevertheless, if he who seeks to preach the faith is sufficiently self-critical, he will soon notice that it is not only a question of form, of the kind of dress in which theology enters upon the scene, and the strangeness of theology's aims to the men of our time. He who takes his calling seriously will clearly recognize not only the difficulty of the task of interpretation, but also the insecurity of his own faith.

Doubt and the Human Condition

He segues from this into talking about Teresa of Ávila — that even someone so insulated in medieval Christianity had these terrible moments of doubt. We can also think of the apostles. These are people who touched Christ, and yet they are racked with the most severe doubts. This is not because of who Christ is, but because of who they are — their distance from him, their hardness of heart, really.

And it's tough, because (speaking on my own here) in a modern world, if one takes an empirical approach, if one takes an inductive approach, people who make fantastical claims of miraculous abilities and such are very often trying to take advantage of people. There are a lot of quack treatments that make appeals to the authority of science — quantum mechanics or other such things. This doesn't mean quantum mechanics isn't real or useful, but quantum mechanics is so far beyond the ken of most people that it can be hard to even say what "believing in quantum mechanics" means. There's no reason to doubt quantum mechanics simply because there's so much nonsense. If you look at the use of the word "quantum," most uses are fraudulent — they're either pump-and-dump stocks or some kind of past-life hypnosis woo, psychic stuff, or quack medical treatments.

That's a little bit of what we're talking about here: when you have a story that's unbelievable or too good to be true. The funny thing is, there is a part of us that desperately needs or wants the story of the Bible to be true, but it's also very far beyond our understanding. Ratzinger makes this point elsewhere: Adam and Satan think to be like God is to stand on one's own, but God's sovereignty is rather found in relationship.

Ratzinger writes about Christianity in a way that seems almost self-evident, almost impossible to object to. It is very philosophical, but also very grounded in the phenomenon of being a human. It's literary, almost. And he does a fantastic job of connecting this to the Bible, to all we know about history, to the history of Christian thought, Greek thought, and Jewish thought.

He talks about St. Thérèse, raised in "complete religious security", and admits that the sisters toned down her literary remains and her despair, and that it has only come to light now in the new verbatim editions. She says, "I am assailed by the worst temptations of atheism."

What is at stake is not some specific dogma, like the Assumption or the proper use of confession. What's at stake is the whole structure. It's a question of all or nothing.

There's this image of the man fastened to the cross, adrift at sea with the cross fastened to nothing, drifting over the abyss.

In this, we do share in the brotherhood of humanity: just as the believer knows himself to be constantly threatened by unbelief, which he must experience as a continual temptation, so for the unbeliever, faith remains a temptation and a threat to his apparently permanently closed world. In short, there is no escape from the dilemma of being a man.

What a lovely way of putting it — the "perhaps it is true" of the nonbeliever. And he returns to this "perhaps," throughout the book.

There's a lovely quality to the extent to which he's referencing Jewish scholars, he's referencing Protestant scholars. He does draw necessary distinctions, for example between Christianity and Marxism, Christianity and Hinduism. But one never feels he is trying to thereby devalue the others, rather simply explain why they represent a wrong choice. So he isn't sychophantic or trying to be The Most Open Minded or be an appeaser. It's lovely to see someone who is not afraid or not trying to draw divisions, but who is trying to take what is good and leave the rest, and find commonalities.

Understanding, Not Knowing

He says, in a statement that I agree with strongly in part, and in part completely escapes me:

It is nonsense to plead the mystery, as people certainly do too often, by way of an excuse for the failure of reason. If theology arrives at all kinds of absurdities and tries not only to excuse them, but even where possible to canonize them by pointing to the mystery, then we are confronted with a misuse of the true idea of mystery, the purpose of which is not to destroy reason, but rather to render belief possible as understanding.

I appreciate what he says: that you can't just say "oh, it's mysterious" if you've done a bad job reasoning out your theology. But I also think there's something like particle–wave duality here, which he alludes to later. How can an electron or photon be both a particle and a wave? Who knows, but it is. We and are models are limited. I think that's the way to think about God as well: how can God be one, but also three? Isn't that a contradiction? Well, yes, but God is beyond — God is plurality, but God is also singular. I'm going to have to return to this. I don't quite get it, but that's exciting.

He talks about understanding versus knowing and making. There's a lot of reference to German philosophy there.

The tool with which man is equipped to deal with the truth of being is not knowledge, but understanding — understanding of the meaning to which he has entrusted himself. And we must certainly add that understanding only reveals itself in standing, not apart from it… Understanding means seizing and grasping as meaning the meaning that man has received as ground. I think this is the precise significance of what we mean by understanding: that we learn to grasp the ground on which we have taken our stand as meaning and truth, that we learn to perceive that ground represents meaning. If this is so, understanding not only implies no contradiction with belief, it represents its most intrinsic property. For knowledge of the functional aspect of the world, as procured for us so splendidly by present-day technical and scientific thinking, brings with it no understanding of the world and of being. Understanding grows only out of belief. That is why theology, as the understanding logos-like discussion of God, is a fundamental task of Christian faith… I'm convinced that at bottom, it was no mere accident that the Christian message, in the period when it was taking shape, first encountered the Greek world and there merged with the inquiry into understanding and into truth.

So he asks: what is understanding? It's like standing; it grows out of belief. It's rational, but it's not knowledge. Knowledge of the functional aspect brings with it no understanding. There's something there — in the same way that one can belong to a social group, one can belong to God, or the world, or what have you. It's a felt sense of belonging and love. It's not a way to manipulate — it's not know-how, not technique. The Lord of Spirits podcast would just use the Greek, techne, which I think is more straightforward.

Speaking of greek words, he also handles that troublesome translation of metanoiete, obliquely. He talks about conversion as "an about-turn, a shift of being." It's not just "changing one's mind" — it's more profound than the common usage of the Greek word metanoia would imply. It's more total. He talks about the liturgical context of the Credo: "I believe," Latin, credo. It is part of the initiation rite, part of the baptismal rite. It's a dialogue. A great quote from Paul: "Faith comes from what is heard."

In faith, the word takes precedence over the thought, a precedence that differentiates it structurally from the architecture of philosophy. In philosophy, the thought precedes the word. It is, after all, a product of the reflection that one then tries to put into words. The words always remain secondary to the thought and, in the last resort, can always be replaced by other words. Faith, on the other hand, comes to man from outside. And this very fact is fundamental to us. It's not something thought up by myself; it is something said to me, which hits me as something that has not been thought out and could not be thought out, and lays an obligation on me.

There's a call and a response.

A sweet little passage on Marius Victorinus:

Nevertheless, one day he joined the church and turned from Platonist into Christian. This was an expression of his perception of the fundamental error implicit in this view. The great Platonist had come to understand that a church is something more and something other than an external institutionalization, an organization of ideas. He had understood that Christianity is not a system of knowledge but a way.

So it's "we." He talks about how, in the Nicene Creed for example, you say we. You don't say I.

What Is God, Really?

This is not an easy book. Book One, Part One: God. Chapter One: Prolegomena to the Subject of God. Section I: The Scope of the Question.

What in fact is God really? In other ages, this question may have seemed quite clear and unproblematical; for us, it has become a genuine inquiry again. What can this word "God" signify?

He's not shying away from these really hard-hitting questions. He doesn't answer them, but he engages in the most lovely conversation about them. Uses words like "adumbrated." (I don't know how it's pronounced.)

If to treat the question very schematically: monotheism starts from the assumption that the absolute is consciousness, which knows man and can speak to him. For materialism, the absolute being matter is devoid of all personal predicates, and can in no way be brought into contact with the concepts of call and answer. The most one could say is that man himself must liberate what is divine from matter…

So, a sort of Gnosticism

so that he would then no longer have God behind him as something that had gone before him, but only in front of him, as something to be created, as his own better future (which is Marxism, in a sense).

He also deals with polytheism in this section:

Finally, polytheism can be closely related to both monotheism and atheism, because the powers of which it speaks imply the oneness of a supporting power, which can be thought of in either way. Thus, it would not be difficult to show how in antiquity, polytheism went perfectly well with a metaphysical atheism, but was also combined with philosophical monotheism.

He explicitly says that the Christian God did not identify with Zeus or the Roman cults and rituals — it was identified with the philosophers' God. His discussion on the connection between worship, metaphysics, and social consequences is reminiscent of the best of what I've seen in the Eastern Orthodox world. He's talking about monotheism here:

Faith is not a matter of playing with ideas, but a very serious business. It says no, and must say no, to the absoluteness of political power and to the worship of the might of the mighty in general. "He has put down the mighty from their thrones" (Luke). And in doing so, it has shattered the political principle's claim to totality once and for all. In this sense, the profession "there is only one God" — precisely because it has itself no political aims — is a program of decisive political importance.

Say that again: precisely because it has itself no political aims, a program of decisive political importance. One thinks of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

Through the absoluteness that it lends the individual from his God, and through the relativization to which it relegates all political communities in comparison with the unity of the God who embraces them all, it forms the only definitive protection against the power of the collective, the power of the mob, and at the same time implies a complete abolition of any idea of exclusiveness in humanity as a whole. So what is monotheism in contrast to polytheism? Spoken simply, it signifies the courage to entrust oneself to the power that governs the whole world without grasping the divine in one's hands.

This really hit me because I'm thinking back to David Wootton and his book Power, Pleasure, and Profit. The closer you look in the modern era, in the post-Enlightenment era, it's very easy to forget this, but I don't think the Enlightenment writers were forgetting this. I think they were reading the pagans. They were reading the pagans and they knew what they were doing. Utilitarianism and modern hedonic liberalism really is a sort of despiritualized paganism. Because there's no one God, there's no summum bonum. And so metaphysically, there are many gods and one can just choose one's god. There's a sense that one constructs one's God. One's god is something that you fashion, rather than something that you receive, some word from outside.

And so, of course, Voltaire and Jefferson were not re-constituting the greek mystery cults or building temples to sacrifice bulls in. But, there's something unmistakably polytheistic the spirit of it.

He goes into the weeds on "Yahweh", for example. "The full form of the name Yahweh first occurs in Israel." He talks about the scandal of the name, which was a new concept to me. It's so lovely reading him because he is so deeply rooted — in his faith, in these intellectual currents. It's just such a pleasure. And yet it took me so long to read through this book.

"For Maximus the Confessor, in his view, heathen polytheism and Jewish monotheism are reconciled in the Gospel. The former is contradictory multiplicity, unchecked. The latter is unity without any inner riches." What I wrote in the margins: there are multiple kinds of divine things, and God is all of them.

The Jews rejected the notion of God current in the surrounding areas under the names of Baal and Melech (or Moloch), which mean "the Lord" and "the King" respectively. What was renounced here was fertility worship and the local connection of the divine that it brings with it. And the no to the god-king Melech also involved the rejection of a certain social pattern. The God of Israel is not moved away to the aristocratic distance of a king. He is the near-at-hand God, who fundamentally can be the God of each and every man — not the god of a place, not the god of some area where a fence can be put up, but a personal God. So there is a Christian option for the personal god, not a place god. Later on, there is an option for the Greek Philosopher's God, and not Zeus, for example.

He has a lot of these phrases like "Christianity is the option for X." It is an option. It is a choice we make. But it's very easy to see, in the way he describes it, why one wants to make that choice — why one wants to choose for monotheism against polytheism, for example. He says things like "Deutero-Isaiah." He's not indulging in a sort of sentimentalist hyper-traditionality, but neither is he engaging with the historical-critical stuff with a bad heart — a heart that seeks to mock and disparage God, which is what you really see from a lot of people.

This is one of the things that made me write an exclamation mark:

The proceeding involved a choice no less fateful and formative for ages to come than the choice of El and Yah as opposed to Moloch and Baal had been in its time — which the subsequent development of the two into Elohim and towards Yahweh, the idea of being. The choice thus made when opting for the logos, as against any kind of myth, meant the definitive demythologization of the world and of religion. Was this decision for the logos rather than the myth the right one?

He's just going to out and ask it. His frankness consistently astonishes me. Here he talks about the disenchantment of the Pagan world:

The Christian religion would have to expect just the same fate if it were to accept a similar amputation of reason, and were to embark on a corresponding withdrawal into the purely religious, as advocated by Schleiermacher and present, paradoxically enough, in a certain sense, in Schleiermacher's great critic and opponent, Karl Barth.

He is, after all, German.

Before Jordan Peterson was really a thing, he criticizes that sort of move by saying: "what can go on existing only through interpretation has in reality ceased to exist." Talking about the demythologization of the pagan world: "Both procedures have something frighteningly contemporary about them." He's willing to admit the situation. He's fighting the good fight. I love this:

Not to be encompassed by the greatest, but to let oneself be encompassed by the smallest — that is divine.

Describing God, he really gets into it:

At the summit stands a freedom that thinks, and by thinking creates freedoms, thus making freedom the structural form of all being.

What is freedom? Can it be defined mathematically? I have somewhat different intuitions on this than most people. It is something that preoccupies me and probably will until I am called home.

The whole thing means that this thinking knows its thought in its distinct being, loves it, and loving, upholds it.

This is why this book takes a while to read. There's so much there to digest.

The Triune God

This assertion, which follows by an inner necessity from the Christian option, leads of its own accord to a transcending of the concept of a god who is mere oneness.

Now he's talking about God as triune — a perfect segue into the triune section. He mentions Hegel. Some of this did rustle my jimmies:

We can only speak rightly about God if we renounce the attempt to comprehend and let him be the uncomprehended. Any doctrine of the Trinity, therefore, cannot aim at being a perfect comprehension of God.

Fantastic. But if we are renouncing an attempt to comprehend, then why are we doing all this reasoning? What are we doing here? There are some things like that which bother me in all theology, and still bother me here.

In other words, all these statements are not so much gravestones as the bricks of a cathedral, which are, of course, only useful when they do not remain alone, but are inserted into something bigger. Just as even the positively accepted formulas are valid only if they are at the same time aware of their own inadequacy.

This is not a contradiction. This is a productive tension. Particle–wave duality mentioned! He talks about the impossibility of true objectivity.

Even dogmatic formulas such as "one being in three persons" include this refraction of the human element. They reflect, in this case, the man of late antiquity, whose questions and experiments are governed by the categories of late-antique philosophy.

He is attempting to separate what is truly eternal and what is truly human about our understanding and our experience — in history — of the divine, from things that are historically situated. He has a lot of negative things to say about St. Anselm and penal substitutionary atonement. He's very blunt about that, which I love.

Divinity lies beyond our categories of unity and plurality. The multi-unity that grows in love is a more radical, truer unity than the unity of the atom.

I believe that. I like that he's willing to ask these questions. He's really fully man. He's a real human being. He is so confident in certain things he says, and he is so willing to just ask questions and admit uncertainties or flaws in arguments.

The ratio stands beside the substance as an equally primordial form of being.

I've been reading a ton of stuff, especially from Eastern sources, talking about how "word" is a terrible translation. Here on page 189, he takes the concept of logos and asks what this means in the Jewish context, what it means in the Greek context:

He who is here is word. The concept of the logos, which to the Greeks meant meaning, ratio, changes here really into word, verbum. He who is here is word, is consequently spoken, and hence the pure relation between the speaker and the spoken-to. Thus logos Christology as word theology is once again the opening up of being to the idea of relationship. For once again it's true that word comes essentially from someone else and to someone else — word is an existence that is entirely way and openness.

Jesus Christ

Now we come to Jesus Christ. This is probably the best part. Oh man, it's so good. If you read only a subsection of the book, read this one.

"I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord." The problem of faith in Jesus today. He points out this problem: all the other stuff he's talking about, about God and monotheism, is super airtight, super defensible, very philosophically rigorous. And then we just run up against, "oh, some guy in Palestine, 2000 years ago." Once again, that frankness.

Even the things he says about things that are not religious are very reasonable:

The methods of physics are followed as far as they possibly can be. The limit is set to the process by the fact that history cannot carry verification, which forms the core of the modern scientific approach, to the point of repetition, on which the unique certainty of scientific statements rests. The historian is denied that satisfaction. Past history cannot be re-enacted, and the verification must be content with the demonstrable soundness of the evidence on which the historian bases his view. A consequence of this methodological approach is that, as with a natural science, only the phenomenal or outer surface of what happens comes into view. But this phenomenal aspect — the surface that can be checked by documentary evidence — is more questionable than the positivism of physics from two points of view. Firstly, because it has to rely on the availability of documents, that is, on chance, while physics at any rate always has the necessary material realities before it. It is also more questionable because the expression of the human element in the written evidence is less accurate than the self-expressions of nature. Its reflection of human depths is inadequate and often positively conceals them, and its interpretation involves man in his personal mode of thinking far more extensively than the interpretation of physical phenomena does.

Just facts here. Then he really dives into it. These are the two pages I have so many notes on. The German theologian stuff. He speaks in these really dense sentences that are really impenetrable to someone who is not familiar with these things. But once I understood these debates, the few sentences really are a fantastic summary.

Thus today we meet here and there the attempt to establish Christology securely on the historical plane — to make it visible in spite of everything, and by this method of the "accurate" and "demonstrable," or the very much simpler enterprise of straightforwardly reducing it to the demonstrable. The first course cannot succeed, because, as we have seen, the historical, in the strict sense of the word, denotes a mode of thought that restricts investigation to the phenomenon, to the demonstrable, and thus can no more produce faith than physics can produce the profession of belief in God. But the second course can bring no satisfaction, because the whole of what happened then cannot be grasped in this fashion, and what is offered as a statement of fact is in reality the expression of a personal view, not the pure result of historical research.

He does a tremendous job of summarizing decades of theological work in these statements. It's easy to get lost in the weeds. I definitely got down some rabbit holes reading these theologians. Basically, there's a real zigzag. There's an emphasis on Christ's resurrection — "it is therefore the task of Christology to base on the history of Jesus the true perception of his significance" (Pannenberg). Then there's an earlier guy (Harnack) talking about the teaching of Jesus as primary, stripping away the "husk" of the Gospel. Then later we have a criticism of Harnack, that "the liberals looked into the long well of history only to see their own face" — the face of the 19th-century German social-progressive moralist.

He also talks about how some in the historical-Jesus camp think that Jesus believed in an imminent apocalypse and was simply mistaken, which I think really contradicts all the descriptions of the kingdom of God in the Gospels. It's clearly a spiritual kingdom. We've got Bultmann — not Harnack — whose demythologization is not about stripping away the "husk", but reconstituting the myth in the current idiom. "Away from dogma, onward to love." If only it were that simple.

This funny situation where it seems like, "ah, yes, we found the historical Jesus," and then, "oh, I guess not really":

The attempt to outflank historical Christianity and, out of the historian's retorts, to construct a pure Jesus by whom one should then be able to live, is intrinsically absurd.

Get 'em, Joe. Get 'em.

Next section: Jesus the Christ — it's like Kaiser Wilhelm, Jesus Christ. He's so German. He doesn't mention the Nazis once. I guess it was still too soon.

On the Progressive Divinization view of Christology:

To anyone accustomed to think historically, the whole theory is absurd, even if today hordes of people believe it. For my part, I must confess that, quite apart from the Christian faith and simply from my acquaintance with history, I find it preferable and easier to believe that God became man than that such a conglomeration of hypotheses represents the truth. In the space at our disposal here, I cannot, I fear, go into the details of the historical problems involved. This would demand a very comprehensive and tedious investigation. Instead, we must — and are entitled to — confine ourselves to the crucial point around which the whole question revolves: the divine sonship of Jesus.

This is the development of Christology. I think it rightly applies to many of these sort of conspiracy-theory-type things that you see commonly in the academy in the study of religion. But enough negativity.

"He who does not cling to himself, but is pure relatedness, coincides in this with the absolute and thus becomes Lord" — talking about kenosis, emptying, of Christ.

He makes a really good point that will always stay with me: there are certain things that come to us in the original Aramaic even though the books are in Greek. The word abba. "Abba, father."

They struck those who heard them as so surprisingly new, and mirrored so well the special quality of the Lord, his uniqueness, that they were remembered word for word. In them we can still hear him, as it were, speaking in his own voice: Abba.

It would have seemed almost blasphemous — indeed, blasphemous — at the time. He is someone who is being-from and being-for. He is from the Father. He is the word of the Father, and he is for the Father. He is his mission for the redemption of the world.

The Cross and Sacrifice

He has really negative things to say about penal substitutionary atonement. There is a good point with PSA, though — a sad thing about the quality of man: we can infinite destruction, but we don't really have an infinite capacity for creation. Even from the qualities of Man (not just the infinite quality of God), it is possible to create an infinitely large offense against God, but it is not possible for us to repay it.

It cannot be denied that this theory takes account of crucial biblical and human insights. Anyone who studies it with a little patience will have no difficulty in seeing this. Men live not only directly from God, but from one another, and in the last analysis from the one who lived for all. And who could fail to see that thus, in the schematization of the satisfaction theory, the breadth of the biblical idea of election remains clear — the idea that makes election not a privilege of the elected, but the call to live for others. The call of that "for."

So there are some good things about it. But even if all that is admitted:

It cannot be denied, on the other hand, that the perfectly logical divine-cum-human legal system erected by Anselm distorts the perspectives, and with its rigid logic can make the image of God appear in a sinister light. We shall have to go into this in detail when we come to talk about the meaning of the cross. For the time being, it will suffice to say that things immediately look different when, in place of the division of Jesus into work and person, it becomes clear that with Jesus Christ it is not a question of some work separate from himself, or a feat that God must demand because he himself is under an obligation to the concept of order — that with him it is not a question (to use Gabriel Marcel's terminology) of having humanity, but of being human.

The future of man hangs on the cross. The redemption of man is on the cross. This is a hard thing to accept.

If there were only God and individuals — a collection of individuals — Christianity would be unnecessary. The salvation of the individual as individual can and could always be looked after directly and immediately by God, and this does happen again and again. He needs no intermediary channels. But Christian faith is not based on the atomized individual, but comes from the knowledge that there is no such thing as the mere individual. On the contrary, man is himself only when he is fitted into the whole: into mankind, spirit and body. Man — as being set entirely in a context of relationship — cannot come to himself through himself, although he cannot do it without himself either.

A man who is violently robbed of the future is a man already robbed of life itself.

Talking about people who kill themselves because they thought the world was ending — "the peak of absurdity: people took their own lives so as not to die. Senseless reaction." The Church and Christianity's purpose is to save history as history, and to break through or transform the collective grid that forms the site of human existence. "Talk of original sin means just this: that no man can start from scratch anymore, in a status integritatis completely unimpaired by history." We have all this karma to work through.

Jesus of Nazareth was crucified by the milieu — public opinion — and on his cross broke this very power of the conventional, the everyone, the power of anonymity, which holds man captive. This power is now confronted by the name of this individual, Jesus Christ, who calls on man to follow him — that is, to take up the cross as he did, and by being crucified, to overcome the world and to contribute to the renewal of history.

How could you not be a follower of Christ? What a clarion call. But he rejects a Martyr Complex of false, prideful self-sacrifice as well. On the importance of reception:

He who only wants to give and is not ready to receive; he who only wants to exist for others and is unwilling to recognize that he, for his part too, lives on the unexpected, unprovokable gift of others — fails to recognize the basic mood of human existence, and is thus bound to destroy the true meaning of living for one another. To be fruitful, all self-sacrifices demand acceptance by others, and in the last analysis by the other who is truly other of all mankind, and at the same time completely one with it: the God-man, Jesus Christ.

Beautifully stated. He soon gets a bit overheated however:

But should not that in itself prove him to be the really entirely other — the one who casts overboard our notions of otherness, and thereby shows himself to be the only one who genuinely is entirely other?

This is getting a little too galaxy-brain for me.

The Church

He's willing to let loose some absolute heaters on the church:

Precisely when the church believed, in all the glory of the Renaissance princedom, that she would cast off this hiddenness and be directly the gate of heaven, the house of God, she became once again — and almost more than before — God's disguise, with God scarcely to be found behind it.

Wow.

His doctrine of the development of revelation is interesting.

It cannot mean that the revelation is concluded. Naturally, this cannot mean that a certain number of truths have now been imparted and God has decided to make no further communications. On the contrary, it means that God's dialogue with man, God's entry into mankind in Jesus, has achieved its goal. The point of this dialogue was not and is not to say something, but to utter himself in the world, in the word. Thus his purpose is fulfilled not when the greatest possible sum of knowledge has been communicated, but when, through the word, love becomes visible — when the "word" you and you make contact. Its meaning does not lie in a third thing, in some kind of factual knowledge, but in the partners themselves. The goal attained is not a rigid boundary, but an open space.

An open space. There's room for things in that open space, but the goal is the creation of that relationship. This reminds me of a course I'm taking in facilitation — how to facilitate workshops. That's one of the things they talk about: you have to create the container first. You have to establish people as part of a group first, and then real learning can happen. Then real growth can happen.

This does not mean that these formulas cannot open further in the course of history, and thus be understood in fresh ways — just as the individual must continually learn to understand the faith afresh as a result of his own experiences in life. But it does mean that in the course of his understanding and maturing, the unity of what is understood neither can nor may be destroyed.

Can't be destroyed. New understandings, yes; destroyed, no.

He also returns to argue against Marxism:

The cross of Christ is a suffering for. As the Marxist views it, the passion of the proletariat takes the form of a struggle against. If the cross is essentially the work of one individual for the whole, this Marxist passion is essentially the activity of a mass organized as a party on behalf of itself. Thus, although they start very close together, the two paths lead off in opposite directions.

It's not a preoccupation of his — he really is focused on Jesus — but he's very willing to take aim at Marxism, and, implicitly, Liberation Theology.

Man comes in the most profound sense to himself not through what he does, but through what he accepts.

The whole history of mankind. Talking about Adam: he thought God was an independent, autonomous being sufficient to himself. But instead, God is infinite pleasure in another. Talks about grace:

This grace alone makes it possible to do the things of this world in a spirit of responsibility, yet at the same time in an uncramped, cheerful, free way, and to put them at the service of redemptive love. The contingent, the external, is what is necessary to man; only in the arrival of something from outside does he open up inwardly.

Just solid gold.

This is the biggest section — I just highlighted the entire thing:

Such a center does exist, and I think we can say, after all that we have said and without any danger of using a merely sentimental phrase, that the six principles finally coalesce into the one principle of love. Let us be blunt, even at the risk of being misunderstood: the true Christian is not the denominational party member, but he who through being a Christian has become truly human. Not he who slavishly observes a system of norms, thinking as he does so only of himself, but he who has become freed to simple human goodness. Of course, the principle of love, if it is to be genuine, includes faith. Only thus does it remain what it is, for without faith — which we have come to understand is a term expressing man's ultimate need to receive, and the inadequacy of all personal achievement — love becomes an arbitrary deed; it cancels itself out and becomes self-righteousness. Faith and love condition and demand each other reciprocally. Similarly, in the principle of love there is also present the principle of hope, which looks beyond the moment and its isolation and seeks the whole. Thus our reflections finally lead of their own accord to the words in which Paul named the main supporting pillars of Christianity: "So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love."

More controversial dogmas

He mentions Papal infallibility ex cathedra, but describes it, accurately, as the "latest and lowest" way of forming dogma.

He talks about the Virgin Birth. He's very frank here, and, characteristically, represents his opponents quite well.

The birth of Jesus from a virgin of whom things like these are reported in the Gospels has long been a thorn in the flesh of rationalizers of every kind. Distinguishing various sources is supposed to minimize the New Testament testimony; references to the unhistorical thinking of the ancients are supposed to remove the event to the realm of the symbolical; and insertion into the context of the history of religions is supposed to show that it is a variant of a myth. The myth of the miraculous birth of the child savior is, indeed, found all over the world.

He then elaborates what is unique about the Christian concept: unlike earlier pagan (and, I would add, even later Muslim accounts), CHrist's birth is an "overshadowing" of the power of the most high, and does not mix in biological conceptions of fatherhood.

But this is not to say God is unreachable, in fact as Christians we must believe in a God that acts in the world. So many of his statements are so dialed in. He is very willing to say that either the Virgin Birth actually happened, or we're building something on air.

At a moment when we have investigated the corporality of the man with every fiber of our existence and can understand his spirit only as something incarnate, something that is body, not has body, people try to save the Christian faith by completely disembodying it, by taking refuge in a region of mere “mind”, of pure self-satisfying interpretation, which seems to be immune from criticism only through its lack of contact with reality. But Christian faith really means precisely the acknowledgment that God is not the prisoner of his own eternity, not limited to the solely spiritual; that he is capable of operating here and now, in the midst of my world, and that he did operate in it through Jesus, the new Adam, who was born of the Virgin Mary through the creative power of God, whose spirit hovered over the waters at the very beginning, who created being out of nothing.

Mariology shouldn't be like a mini-Christology:

She does not contest or endanger the exclusiveness of salvation through Christ; she points to it. She represents mankind, which as a whole is expectation, and which needs this image all the more when it is in danger of giving up waiting, and putting its trust in doing — which, indispensable as it is, can never fill the void that threatens man when he does not find that absolute love which gives him meaning, salvation, and all that is truly necessary in order to live.

And, returning from Mary to Christ,

We worship him by dropping the fiction of a realm in which we could face Christ as independent business partners, whereas in truth we can only exist at all in him and from him. Christian sacrifice does not consist of giving what God would not have without us, but in our becoming totally receptive and letting ourselves be completely taken over by him.

Returning to the cross. The way he talks about sacrifice is so accurate, and I wish more Catholics understood this. He gets it.

God does not seek bulls and goats, but man's unqualified yes to God, which alone forms true worship. He took from man's hands the sacrificial offerings and put in their place his sacrificed person — his own "I" — the concrete expression of a love of which it is said that it extends to the end (John 13:1). Just as Adam's attempt at justification was an excuse, a pushing of the guilt onto the other — indeed, in the last analysis, an attempt to accuse God himself… The fundamental principle of the sacrifice is not destruction, but love.

We return to the strong statements against certain medieval preoccupations of the Church:

It is not pain as such that counts, but the breadth of the love that spans existence so completely that it unites the distant and the near, bringing God-forsaken man into relation with God. It alone gives the pain an aim and a meaning. Were it otherwise, then the executioners around the cross would have been the real priests — they who had caused the pain would have offered the sacrifice. But this is not the point. The point was that inner center which bears and fulfills the pain. And therefore, the executioners were not the priests. The priest was Jesus, who reunited the two separated ends of the world in his love.

And now, with his crosshairs dialed in on Penal Substitutionary Atonement:

This also answers the question with which we started: whether it is not an unworthy concept of God to imagine for ourselves a God who demands the slaughter of his son to pacify his wrath. To such a question one can only reply: indeed, God must not be thought of in this way. But in any case, such a concept of God has nothing to do with the idea of God to be found in the New Testament. The God of the New Testament is someone who wished to become, in Christ, the Omega — the last letter in the alphabet of creation — who himself is the act of love, the pure "for," and who therefore necessarily puts on the disguise of the smallest worm, who identifies himself with his creature, and displays in so doing that excess that identifies him as God.

He talks about the image of the cross and abruptly shifts to a higher register, marked by use of the word "thou." and addressing Man in his sins. It's a beautiful reverie:

Thou art such because, unjust thyself, thou dost always need the injustice of the next man in order to feel excused, and thus canst not tolerate the just man who seems to rob thee of this excuse. Such art thou. St. John summarized all this in the Ecce Homo of Pilate, which he means quite fundamentally: this is how it is.

And this is something Plato came to 400 years before Christ: the just man would be crucified.

As fulfilled love, heaven can only ever be granted to man; but hell is the loneliness of the man who will not accept it, who declines the status of beggar, and withdraws into himself.

I have challenges with this. It sounds right and good, but what does it mean concretely and specifically? I think good fences make good neighbors. Love does not imply the dissolution of the self, but does imply a soft of transformation to a new mode of collective being. If we're all part of the body of Christ, the lung should have a barrier between it and the rest of the organs, and so on. But we are all one in Christ.

Again, with characteristic frankness, he asks if God is really capable, as the eternal creator, in answering our petitions:

Surely the whole thing serves solely to set men in motion, somehow or other, towards transcendence, though in reality nothing can happen or be changed as a result of his prayers, for what is eternal is eternal and what is temporal is temporal. No path seems to lead from one to the other.

He is willing to really clearly state the question the skeptic would have. And it's great — the way he answers it is something like "well, we don't have enough time to go in depth, but it really has to do with how you conceptualize time and eternity." He is willing to summarize without condescending or reducing himself to rhetorical tricks.

At bottom, they take for granted the dual form, the dualism of antiquity — something that we cannot go into here — and are signs of an intellectual naïveté that looks at God in human terms. For one thinks that God cannot alter retrospectively what he planned before eternity; then unwittingly one is again conceiving eternity in terms of time, with its distinction between before and after. But eternity is not the very ancient which existed before time began, but the entirely other, which is related to every passing age as its today, and is really contemporary with it. It is not itself barred off into a before and after.

Put simply, God has dominion over time.

Eschatology

He talks about eschatology. He really gets into Omega Point stuff, which is crazy, because that was considered borderline heretical not very long before he wrote this.

Since the days of the early church fathers, it has always been an essential task of Christian preaching to make people aware of this identity of responsibility, and to contrast it with a false confidence engendered by merely saying "Lord, Lord." No one can escape giving account of the way he has lived his life.

This is stated quite directly against certain Evangelical formulations of Justification. He also addresses the changing conception of the end times over Christian history:

The early Christians, with their cry "our Lord, come!" interpreted the second coming of Jesus as an event full of hope and joy, stretching their arms out longingly towards it as a moment of the great fulfillment. But to the Christians of the Middle Ages, on the other hand, that moment appeared as the terrifying Day of Wrath — Dies Irae — which makes man feel like dying of woe and terror, into which he looks forward with fear and dread. Such a view forgets a decisive aspect of Christianity, which is thus reduced for all practical purposes to moralism, and robbed of that hope and joy which are the very breath of its life.

Yes, it's judgment — but "fear not, it is I." It's Christ, full of Grace and Truth. Wow.

The Church

He makes the very good point that the Holy Spirit is not some disconnected person of the Trinity, but is intimately involved with the workings of the Church. Especially at the time the Apostles Creed was written, it would make sense for statemtns about the Holy Spirit and the Church to cluster together.

I have to say, though, after the passages on Trinitarian and Christological subjects that so gripped me, the section on The Spirit and The Church feels almost like an appendix.

To return to a passage I mentioned in the introduction, he quotes a medieval bishop of Paris, who describes the church as not a bride, but as a "monster of terrible deformity and ferocity." He doesn't really engage with this in a satisfying way. That's the one thing I am left wanting to dig into further from this work, because it feels incomplete. The fundamental argument that holiness is to be found in the church, not individual people, is a good one, but this just isn't covered in sufficient detail or depth. So, at some point, I will have to do some further leg work myself.

P.S. If this contains too much material from Ignatius Press, feel free to leave a comment and I can redact as requested!