Introduction to Christianity (1968)
Joseph Ratzinger (Ignatius, 2004)

380 pp.  First reading.
Posted 19 April 2006.
 

In the immediate wake of Cardinal Ratzinger's election to the papacy in April 2005, he suddenly became one of the best-selling authors in the world, even displacing, for a time, Harry Potter at the top of the charts.  Many of those browsing his books settled, I suspect, on Introduction to Christianity on the grounds that it sounded invitingly friendly.  Alas for them!  The book was originally published in Germany in 1968 and Ratzinger, then a young academic, makes blessed few concessions to his reader.  While it is a far cry from being the most abstruse academic prose, it is certainly more difficult than most of his subsequent books.  Not only is it an ambitious book of theology and intellectual history, but I'm afraid he is often guilty of saying too much to say too little.  I imagine that many of the copies purchased in the book-buying frenzy that followed the election are languishing unread.  And that is a shame.

I finished my copy, however.  The book is an attempt to restate the Apostle's Creed, unpacking the meaning of this foundational text in language that has a greater contemporary resonance than the Creed itself.  The contemporaneity has already faded somewhat - the need to bring Marx, Bultmann, and de Chardin into the discussion now seems less pressing than it must have at the time - but the overall project is admirable.  Like the Creed itself, the book takes up, in sequence, the doctrines pertaining to the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.

The book opens, however, with an essay on belief per se in the modern world, and then on Christian belief in particular.  What is belief?  He argues, correctly in my view, that the problem of belief is not really a specifically religious problem; some kind of faith or belief is unavoidable.  He develops the idea of belief as "standing firm and understanding".  Belief is a way of taking a stand in the face of reality, a way of interpreting experience - or, in a venerable theological formulation, it is "a way of seeing".  Belief is foundational, and not reducible (though certainly related) to practical knowledge. It is something demanded of everyone.  But in order for this "standing firm" to be truly firm, he argues, the belief cannot be something we make up ourselves, but must, if it is to have any strength and power, be received.  Thus the problem of belief opens up onto history, society, and -- potentially -- revelation.

But what does it mean to be a Christian today? Is it just a way of being eccentric or intellectually irresponsible? Several obstacles to Christian belief are discussed, such as the offense of its exclusive truth claims, or the belief that it is "out-of-date".  The superficial form of this latter obstacle stresses its antiquity and conservatism; the honourable form contends that Christian doctrine has been superseded by advances in knowledge, and is simply untenable.  In answer to this challenge, Ratzinger charts a miniature intellectual history of the West's understanding of truth, from the ancient understanding of truth as being, to the early modern idea of truth as facts, to the late modern concept of truth as making. As there are irreducible metaphysical and historical elements in Christian belief, it seems less secure to the modern mind than it once did. Whereas the ancients believed that the mind could penetrate to being as such, modernity contented itself with knowledge of history and science, but now as the objectivity even of facts comes into doubt, the domain of true knowledge shrinks to those things of our own making. Thus the modern world beholds the ascendency of techne, and the contemplation of being, which in the ancient world was the highest human activity, seems to us useless.  This is a very interesting argument, and deserves more attention than I can give it here.

But let's return to the general question of the significance of Christian belief.  Ratzinger tries to sketch the basic orientation toward reality natural to the Christian faith.  There is, for instance, its commitment to the primacy of the invisible over the immediately evident. It asserts that thought and the whole world of the mind are not an accidental by-product of matter, but that mind precedes matter, that the world is intelligible because it is conceived by the logos, and that our mind may comprehend reality because it, too, shares in this fundamental rationality. Christianity is communal and historical, teaching that each person can only truly understand themselves as a contextualized creature; it therefore opposes ahistorical or radically individualistic interpretations of human life.  It overturns the standards of power and weakness, identifying the weakest things with the strongest. It proclaims a world of prodigality and excess, of a power that oversteps the rational boundaries out of love. I have already alluded to its privileging of receiving over making, for it places a gift at the center of human existence.  These, of course, are not specific doctrines, but they are elements of the foundational attitude that will find Christian belief reasonable.

After that prelude, he moves to the formal discussion of the Apostle's Creed.  The Creed itself dates from the second and third centuries, and was originally used in a question and answer format during the baptismal liturgy ("Do you believe...?", "I believe...").  It is still used in that way today.  It existed with minor variations throughout the West until the reign of Charlemagne, when it was standardized throughout the Church.  It was, in fact, used by Charlemagne as a means to imperial unity, which only underscores Ratzinger's point that belief may not be legitimately abstracted from the earthy tangle of history.

Trinitarian doctrine is rooted, not in philosophy, but in history.  It is an attempt to harmonize a number of seemingly incompatible beliefs: that God is in some sense the Being spoken of by the philosophers, that God revealed himself in a particularly direct way in Jesus of Nazareth, and that there is nevertheless only one God!  The doctrine implies a commitment to the view that history reveals God as he is, rather than just revealing our variable modes of experiencing God.  Ratzinger suggests that the Trinity is a kind of banner announcing the inscrutability of God, a "discouraging gesture pointing over to unchartable territory."

The doctrine of God the Father is inherited in large measure from classical philosophy.  Monotheism is a renunciaton of the deification of earthly political powers, or of nature, or of the myriad gods of the ancient world.  Yet while the God of the philosophers was mighty and transcendent, Christianity teaches that he is also personal.  They said that he was mind and thought, but the Church teaches that he is also love.  They said that he existed in sovereign contemplation of goodness and truth, which was his very self, but the doctrine of the Trinity teaches that he is also inherently relational.  The Creed calls God "Father Almighty", and in this title summarizes this understanding of God, the supremely powerful being who is also tender and loving.  The Father is also Creator, who first thinks the world, and then gives it true being.  Ratzinger remarks how this doctrine threads a middle way between materialism and idealism.

Concerning the second person of the Trinity, he argues first that the doctrine of the divinity of Christ owes nothing to Greek ideas about divine men, nor even to the Virgin birth, but rests on statements of Jesus in the Gospels. The Virgin birth is not meant to suggest that Jesus was some kind of God-man hybrid, for the doctrine asserts that he was fully both, nor is it stating that at the birth of Jesus a new God -- God the Son -- came into being, for God the Son existed from eternity. Instead, the Virgin birth is important because it emphasizes that salvation is a gift.  He also points out the interesting fact that all of the statements about Jesus in the Creed are statements about events, rather than about his teaching.  This is an implicit acknowledgment that the person and the teaching of Jesus are one and the same:

This same unity of person and purpose are captured succinctly in the very title "Jesus Christ".

The final section of the Creed contains the doctrines on the Holy Spirit and the Church.  These are essentially statements about the same thing, for the Spirit is understood as God in the world. The Paraclete is 'the one who comes alongside', and the doctrine of the Holy Spirit unites metaphysical speculation and history. The life of the Spirit in the Church is sacramental: "the communion of saints" refers to the Eucharistic community of worship, and "the forgiveness of sins" to the sacraments of baptism and penance.  The ultimate transformation wrought by the Spirit is resurrection and life.

And with that, the book ends abruptly.  This summary does the same.

[Catholicism unites philosophy and religion in an unprecedented way]
“One need only point to the fact that ancient philosophy embraced both philosophical atheists (Epicurus, Lucretius, et al.) and philosophical monotheists (Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus), and that both groups were by religion polytheists – a state of affairs that…is seldom given sufficient attention.  It is only against this background that one can see clearly the revolutionary nature of the Christian attitude, in which philosophical and religious orientation become identical.”

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