Introduction to Christianity: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Introduction to Christianity: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

by

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

“If God has truly assumed manhood

then he participates, as man, in the presence

of God, which embraces all ages.”

Since this work was first published, more than thirty years have passed, in which world history has moved along at a brisk pace. In retrospect, two years seem to be particularly important milestones in the final decades of the millennium that has just come to an end: 1968 and 1989. The year 1968 marked the rebellion of a new generation, which not only considered post-war reconstruction in Europe as inadequate, full of injustice, full of selfishness and greed, but also viewed the entire course of history since the triumph of Christianity as a mistake and a failure. These young people wanted to improve things at last, to bring about freedom, equality, and justice, and they were convinced that they had found the way to this better world in the mainstream of Marxist thought. The year 1989 brought the surprising collapse of the socialist regimes in Europe, which left behind a sorry legacy of ruined land and ruined souls. Anyone who expected that the hour had come again for the Christian message was disappointed. Although the number of believing Christians throughout the world is not small, Christianity failed at that historical moment to make itself heard as an epoch making alternative. Basically, the Marxist doctrine of salvation (in several differently orchestrated variations, of course) had taken a stand as the sole ethically motivated guide to the future that was at the same time consistent with a scientific worldview. Therefore, even after the shock of 1989, it did not simply abdicate. We need only to recall how little was said about the horrors of the Communist gulag, how isolated Solzhenitsyn’s voice remained: no one speaks about any of that. A sort of shame forbids it; even Pol Pot’s murderous regime is mentioned only occasionally in passing. But there were still disappointment and a deep-seated perplexity. People no longer trust grand moral promises, and after all, that is what Marxism had understood itself to be. It was about justice for all, about peace, about doing away with unfair master-servant relationships, and so on. Marxism believed that it had to dispense with ethical principles for the time being and that it was allowed to use terror as a beneficial means to these noble ends. Once the resulting human devastation became visible, even for a moment, the former ideologues preferred to retreat to a pragmatic position or else declared quite openly their contempt for ethics. We can observe a tragic example of this in Colombia, where a campaign was started, under the Marxist banner at first, to liberate the small farmers who had been downtrodden by the wealthy financiers. Today, instead, a rebel republic has developed, beyond governmental control, which quite openly depends on drug trafficking and no longer seeks any moral justification for this, especially since it thereby satisfies a demand in wealthy nations and at the same time gives bread to people who would otherwise not be able to expect much of anything from the world economy. In such a perplexing situation, shouldn’t Christianity try very seriously to rediscover its voice, so as to “introduce” the new millennium to its message, and to make it comprehensible as a general guide for the future?

Anyway, where was the voice of the Christian faith at that time? In 1967, when the book was being written, the fermentation of the early post-conciliar period was in full swing. This is precisely what the Second Vatican Council had intended: to endow Christianity once more with the power to shape history. The nineteenth century had seen the formulation of the opinion that religion belonged to the subjective, private realm and should have its place there. But precisely because it was to be categorized as something subjective, it could not be a determining factor in the overall course of history and in the epochal decisions that must be made as part of it. Now, following the council, it was supposed to become evident again that the faith of Christians embraces all of life, that it stands in the midst of history and in time and has relevance beyond the realm of subjective notions. Christianity—at least from the viewpoint of the Catholic Church—was trying to emerge again from the ghetto to which it had been relegated since the nineteenth century and to become involved once more in the world at large. We do not need to discuss here the intra-ecclesiastical disputes and frictions that arose over the interpretation and assimilation of the council. The main thing affecting the status of Christianity in that period was the idea of a new relationship between the Church and the world. Although Romano Guardini in the 1930s had coined the expression, “Unterscheidung des Christlichen” [distinguishing what is Christian]— something that was extremely necessary then—such distinctions now no longer seemed to be important; on the contrary, the spirit of the age called for crossing boundaries, reaching out to the world, and becoming involved in it. It was already demonstrated upon the Parisian barricades in 1968 how quickly these ideas could emerge from the academic discussions of churchmen and find a very practical application: a revolutionary Eucharist was celebrated there, thus putting into practice a new fusion of the Church and the world under the banner of the revolution that was supposed to bring, at last, the dawn of a better age. The leading role played by Catholic and Protestant student groups in the revolutionary upheavals at universities, both in Europe and beyond, confirmed this trend.

This new translation of ideas into practice, this new fusion of the Christian impulse with secular and political action, was like a lightning-bolt; the real fires that it set, however, were in Latin America. The theology of liberation seemed for more than a decade to point the way by which the faith might again shape the world, because it was making common cause with the findings and worldly wisdom of the hour. No one could dispute the fact that there was in Latin America, to a horrifying extent, oppression, unjust rule, the concentration of property and power in the hands of a few, and the exploitation of the poor, and there was no disputing either that something had to be done. And since it was a question of countries with a Catholic majority, there could be no doubt that the Church bore the responsibility here and that the faith had to prove itself as a force for justice. But how? Now Marx appeared to be the great guidebook. He was said to be playing now the role that had fallen to Aristotle in the thirteenth century; the latter’s pre-Christian (that is, “pagan”) philosophy had to be baptized, in order to bring faith and reason into the proper relation to one another. But anyone who accepts Marx (in whatever neo-Marxist variation he may choose) as the representative of worldly reason, not only accepts a philosophy, a vision of the origin and meaning of existence, but also and especially adopts a practical program. For this “philosophy” is essentially a “praxis,” which does not presuppose a “truth” but rather creates one. Anyone who makes Marx the philosopher of theology adopts the primacy of politics and economics, which now become the real powers that can bring about salvation (and, if misused, can wreak havoc). The redemption of mankind, to this way of thinking, occurs through politics and economics, in which the form of the future is determined. This primacy of praxis and politics meant, above all, that God could not be categorized as something “practical.” The “reality” in which one had to get involved now was solely the material reality of given historical circumstances, which were to be viewed critically and reformed, redirected to the right goals by using the appropriate means, among which violence was indispensable. From this perspective, speaking about God belongs neither to the realm of the practical nor to that of reality. If it was to be indulged in at all, it would have to be postponed until the more important work had been done. What remained was the figure of Jesus, who of course no longer appeared now as the Christ, but rather as the embodiment of all the suffering and oppressed and as their spokesman, who calls us to rise up, to change society. What was new in all this was that the program of changing the world, which in Marx was intended to be not only atheistic but also anti-religious, was now filled with religious passion and was based on religious principles: a new reading of the Bible (especially of the Old Testament) and a liturgy that was celebrated as a symbolic fulfillment of the revolution and as a preparation for it.

It must be admitted: by means of this remarkable synthesis, Christianity had stepped once more onto the world stage and had become an “epoch-making” message. It is no surprise that the socialist states took a stand in favor of this movement. More noteworthy is the fact that, even in the “capitalist” countries, liberation theology was the darling of public opinion; to contradict it was viewed positively as a sin against humanity and mankind, even though no one, naturally, wanted to see the practical measures applied in their own situation, because they of course had already arrived at a just social order. Now it cannot be denied that in the various liberation theologies there really were some worthwhile insights as well. All of these plans for an epoch-making synthesis of Christianity and the world had to step aside, however, the moment that that faith in politics as a salvific force collapsed. Man is, indeed, as Aristotle says, a “political being,” but he cannot be reduced to politics and economics. I see the real and most profound problem with the liberation theologies in their effective omission of the idea of God, which of course also changed the figure of Christ fundamentally (as we have indicated). Not as though God had been denied—not on your life! It’s just that he was not needed in regard to the “reality” that mankind had to deal with. God had nothing to do.

One is struck by this point and suddenly wonders: Was that the case only in liberation theology? Or was this theory able to arrive at such an assessment of the question about God—that the question was not a practical one for the long-overdue business of changing the world—only because the Christian world thought much the same thing, or rather, lived in much the same way, without reflecting on it or noticing it? Hasn’t Christian consciousness acquiesced to a great extent—without being aware of it—in the attitude that faith in God is something subjective, which belongs in the private realm and not in the common activities of public life where, in order to be able to get along, we all have to behave now “etsi Deus non daretur” (“as if there were no God”)? Wasn’t it necessary to find a way that would be valid, in case it turned out that God doesn’t exist? And, indeed it happened automatically that, when the faith stepped out of the inner sanctum of ecclesiastical matters into the general public, it had nothing for God to do and left him where he was: in the private realm, in the intimate sphere that doesn’t concern anyone else. It didn’t take any particular negligence, and certainly not a deliberate denial, to leave God as a God with nothing to do, especially since his Name had been misused so often. But the faith would really have come out of the ghetto only if it had brought its most distinctive feature with it into the public arena: the God who judges and suffers, the God who sets limits and standards for us; the God from whom we come and to whom we are going. But as it was, it really remained in the ghetto, having by now absolutely nothing to do.

Yet God is “practical” and not just some theoretical conclusion of a consoling worldview that one may adhere to or simply disregard. We see that today in every place where the deliberate denial of him has become a matter of principle and where his absence is no longer mitigated at all. For at first, when God is left out of the picture, everything apparently goes on as before. Mature decisions and the basic structures of life remain in place, even though they have lost their foundations. But, as Nietzsche describes it, once the news really reaches people that “God is dead,” and they take it to heart, then everything changes. This is demonstrated today, on the one hand, in the way that science treats human life: man is becoming a technological object while vanishing to an ever-greater degree as a human subject, and he has only himself to blame. When human embryos are artificially “cultivated” so as to have “research material” and to obtain a supply of organs, which then are supposed to benefit other human beings, there is scarcely an outcry, because so few are horrified any more. Progress demands all this, and they really are noble goals: improving the quality of life—at least for those who can afford to have recourse to such services. But if man, in his origin and at his very roots, is only an object to himself, if he is “produced” and comes off the production line with selected features and accessories, what on earth is man then supposed to think of man? How should he act toward him? What will be man’s attitude toward man, when he can no longer find anything of the divine mystery in the other, but only his own know-how? What is happening in the “high-tech” areas of science is reflected wherever the culture, broadly speaking, has managed to tear God out of men’s hearts. Today there are places where trafficking in human beings goes on quite openly: a cynical consumption of humanity while society looks on helplessly. For example, organized crime constantly brings women out of Albania on various pretexts and delivers them to the mainland across the sea as prostitutes, and because there are enough cynics there waiting for such “wares,” organized crime becomes more powerful, and those who try to put a stop to it discover that the Hydra of evil keeps growing new heads, no matter how many they may cut off. And do we not see everywhere around us, in seemingly orderly neighborhoods, an increase in violence, which is taken more and more for granted and is becoming more and more reckless? I do not want to extend this horror-scenario any further. But we ought to wonder whether God might not in fact be the genuine reality, the basic prerequisite for any “realism,” so that, without him, nothing is safe.

Let us return to the course of historical developments since 1967. The year 1989, as I was saying, brought with it no new answers, but rather deepened the general perplexity and nourished skepticism about great ideals. But something did happen. Religion became modern again. Its disappearance is no longer anticipated; on the contrary, various new forms of it are growing luxuriantly. In the leaden loneliness of a God-forsaken world, in its interior boredom, the search for mysticism, for any sort of contact with the divine, has sprung up anew. Everywhere there is talk about visions and messages from the other world, and wherever there is a report of an apparition, thousands travel there, in order to discover, perhaps, a crack in the world, through which heaven might look down on them and send them consolation. Some complain that this new search for religion, to a great extent, is passing the traditional Christian churches by. An institution is inconvenient, and dogma is bothersome. What is sought is an experience, an encounter with the Absolutely-Other. I cannot say that I am in unqualified agreement with this complaint. At the World Youth Days, such as the one recently in Paris, faith becomes experience and provides the joy of fellowship. Something of an ecstasy, in the good sense, is communicated. The dismal and destructive ecstasy of drugs, of hammering rhythms, noise, and drunkenness is confronted with a bright ecstasy of light, of joyful encounter in God’s sunshine. Let it not be said that this is only a momentary thing. Often it is so, no doubt. But it can also be a moment that brings about a lasting change and begins a journey. Similar things happen in the many lay movements that have sprung up in the last few decades. Here, too, faith becomes a form of lived experience, the joy of setting out on a journey and of participating in the mystery of the leaven that permeates the whole mass from within and renews it. Eventually, provided that the root is sound, even apparition sites can be incentives to go again in search of God in a sober way. Anyone who expected that Christianity would now become a mass movement was, of course, disappointed. But mass movements are not the ones that bear the promise of the future within them. The future is made wherever people find their way to one another in life-shaping convictions. And a good future grows wherever these convictions come from the truth and lead to it.

The rediscovery of religion, however, has another side to it. We have already seen that this trend looks for religion as an experience, that the “mystical” aspect of religion is an important part of it: religion that offers me contact with the Absolutely- Other. In our historical situation, this means that the mystical religions of Asia (parts of Hinduism and of Buddhism), with their renunciation of dogma and their minimal degree of institutionalization, appear to be more suitable for enlightened humanity than dogmatically determined and institutionally structured Christianity. In general, however, the result is that individual religions are relativized; for all the differences and, yes, the contradictions among these various sorts of belief, the only thing that matters, ultimately, is the inside of all these different forms, the contact with the ineffable, with the hidden mystery. And to a great extent people agree that this mystery is not completely manifested in any one form of revelation, that it is always glimpsed in random and fragmentary ways and yet is always sought as one and the same thing. That we cannot know God himself, that everything which can be stated and described can only be a symbol: this is nothing short of a fundamental certainty for modern man, which he also understands somehow as his humility in the presence of the infinite. Associated with this relativizing is the notion of a great peace among religions, which recognize each other as different ways of reflecting the One Eternal Being and which should leave up to the individual the path he will grope along to find the One who nevertheless unites them all. Through such a relativizing process, the Christian faith is radically changed, especially at two fundamental places in its essential message:

1. The figure of Christ is interpreted in a completely new way, not only in reference to dogma, but also and precisely with regard to the Gospels. The belief that Christ is the only Son of God, that God really dwells among us as man in him, and that the man Jesus is eternally in God, is God himself, and therefore is not a figure in which God appears, but rather the sole and irreplaceable God—this belief is thereby excluded. Instead of being the man who is God, Christ becomes the one who has experienced God in a special way. He is an enlightened one and therein is no longer fundamentally different from other enlightened individuals, for instance, Buddha. But in such an interpretation the figure of Jesus loses its inner logic. It is torn out of the historical setting in which it is anchored and forced into a scheme of things which is alien to it. Buddha—and in this he is comparable to Socrates—directs the attention of his disciples away from himself: his own person doesn’t matter, but only the path that he has pointed out. Someone who finds the way can forget Buddha. But with Jesus, what matters is precisely his Person, Christ himself. When he says, “I am he,” we hear the tones of the “I AM” on Mount Horeb. The way consists precisely in following him, for “I am the way, the truth and the life” (Jn 14:6). He himself is the way, and there is no way that is independent of him, on which he would no longer matter. Since the real message that he brings is not a doctrine but his very person, we must of course add that this “I” of Jesus refers absolutely to the “Thou” of the Father and is not self-sufficient, but rather is indeed truly a “way.” “My teaching is not mine” (Jn 7:16). “I seek not my own will, but the will of him who sent me” (Jn 5:30). The “I” is important, because it draws us completely into the dynamic of mission, because it leads to the surpassing of self and to union with him unto whom we have been created. If the figure of Jesus is taken out of this inevitably scandalous dimension, if it is separated from his Godhead, then it becomes self-contradictory. All that is left are shreds that leave us perplexed or else become excuses for selfaffirmation.

2. The concept of God is fundamentally changed. The question as to whether God should be thought of as a person or impersonally now seems to be of secondary importance; no longer can an essential difference be noted between theistic and nontheistic forms of religion. This view is spreading with astonishing rapidity. Even believing and theologically trained Catholics, who want to share in the responsibilities of the Church’s life, will ask the question (as though the answer were self-evident): “Can it really be that important, whether someone understands God as a person or impersonally?” After all, we should be broad-minded—so goes the opinion—since the mystery of God is in any case beyond all concepts and images. But such concessions strike at the heart of the biblical faith. The shema, the “Hear, O Israel” from Deuteronomy 6:4-9, was and still is the real core of the believer’s identity, not only for Israel, but also for Christianity. The believing Jew dies reciting this profession; the Jewish martyrs breathed their last declaring it and gave their lives for it: “Hear, O Israel. He is our God. He is one.” The fact that this God now shows us his face in Jesus Christ (Jn 14:9)—a face that Moses was not allowed to see (Ex 33:20)—does not alter this profession in the least and changes nothing essential in this identity. Of course, the Bible does not use the term “person” to say that God is personal, but the divine personality is apparent nevertheless, inasmuch as there is a Name of God. A name implies the ability to be called on, to speak, to hear, to answer. This is essential for the biblical God, and if this is taken away, the faith of the Bible has been abandoned. It cannot be disputed that there have been and there are false, superficial ways of understanding God as personal. Precisely when we apply the concept of person to God, the difference between our idea of person and the reality of God—as the Fourth Lateran Council says about all speech concerning God—is always infinitely greater than what they have in common. False applications of the concept of person are sure to be present, whenever God is monopolized for one’s own human interests and thus his Name is sullied. It is not by chance that the Second Commandment, which is supposed to protect the Name of God, follows directly after the First, which teaches us to adore him. In this respect we can always learn something new from the way in which the “mystical” religions, with their purely negative theology, speak about God, and in this respect there are avenues for dialogue. But with the disappearance of what is meant by “the Name of God,” that is, God’s personal nature, his Name is no longer protected and honored, but abandoned outright instead.

But what is actually meant, then, by God’s Name, by his being personal? Precisely this: not only that we can experience him, beyond all [earthly] experience, but also that he can express and communicate himself. When God is understood in a completely impersonal way, for instance in Buddhism, as sheer negation with respect to everything that appears real to us, then there is no positive relationship between “God” and the world. Then the world has to be overcome as a source of suffering, but it no longer can be shaped. Religion then points out ways to overcome the world, to free people from the burden of its seeming, but it offers no standards by which we can live in the world, no forms of societal responsibility within it. The situation is somewhat different in Hinduism. The essential thing there is the experience of identity: At bottom I am one with the hidden ground of reality itself—the famous tat tvam asi of the Upanishads. Salvation consists in liberation from individuality, from being-a-person, in overcoming the differentiation from all other beings that is rooted in being-aperson: the deception of the self concerning itself must be put aside. The problem with this view of being has come very much to the fore in Neo-Hinduism. Where there is no uniqueness of persons, the inviolable dignity of each individual person has no foundation, either. In order to bring about the reforms that are now underway (the abolition of caste laws and of immolating widows, etc.) it was specifically necessary to break with this fundamental understanding and to introduce into the overall system of Indian thought the concept of person, as it has developed in the Christian faith out of the encounter with the personal God. The search for the correct “praxis,” for right action, in this case has begun to correct the “theory”: We can see to some extent how “practical” the Christian belief in God is, and how unfair it is to brush these disputed but important distinctions aside as being ultimately irrelevant.

With these considerations we have reached the point from which an “Introduction to Christianity” must set out today. Before I attempt to extend a bit farther the line of argument that I have suggested, another reference to the present status of faith in God and in Christ is called for. There is a fear of Christian “imperialism,” a nostalgia for the beautiful multiplicity of religions and their supposedly primordial cheerfulness and freedom. Colonialism is said to be essentially bound up with historical Christianity, which was unwilling to accept the other in his otherness and tried to bring everything under its own protection. Thus, according to this view, the religions and cultures of South America were trodden down and stamped out and violence was done to the soul of the native peoples, who could not find themselves in the new order and were forcibly deprived of the old. Now there are milder and harsher variants of this opinion. The milder version says that we should finally grant to these lost cultures the right of domicile within the Christian faith and allow them to devise for themselves an aboriginal form of Christianity. The more radical view regards Christianity in its entirety as a sort of alienation, from which the native peoples must be liberated. The demand for an aboriginal Christianity, properly understood, should be taken as an extremely important task. All great cultures are open to one another and to the truth. They all have something to contribute to the Bride’s “many coloured robes” mentioned in Psalm 45:14, which patristic writers applied to the Church. To be sure, many opportunities have been missed and new ones present themselves. Let us not forget, however, that those native peoples, to a notable extent, have already found their own expression of the Christian faith in popular devotions. That the suffering God and the kindly Mother in particular have become for them the central images of the faith, which have given them access to the God of the Bible, has some thing to say to us, too, today. But of course, much still remains to be done.

Let us return to the question about God and about Christ as the centerpiece of an introduction to the Christian faith. One thing has already become evident: the mystical dimension of the concept of God, which the Asian religions bring with them as a challenge to us, must clearly be decisive for our thinking, too, and for our faith. God has become quite concrete in Christ, but in this way his mystery has also become still greater. God is always infinitely greater than all our concepts and all our images and names. The fact that we now acknowledge him to be triune does not mean that we have meanwhile learned everything about him. On the contrary: he is only showing us how little we know about him and how little we can comprehend him or even begin to take his measure. Today, after the horrors of the [twentieth-century] totalitarian regimes (I remind the reader of the memorial at Auschwitz), the problem of theodicy urgently and mightily [mit brennender Gewalt] demands the attention of us all; this is just one more indication of how little we are capable of defining God, much less fathoming him. After all, God’s answer to Job explains nothing, but rather sets boundaries to our mania for judging everything and being able to say the final word on a subject, and reminds us of our limitations. It admonishes us to trust the mystery of God in its incomprehensibility.

Having said this, we must still emphasize the brightness of God, too, along with the darkness. Ever since the Prologue to the Gospel of John, the concept of Logos has been at the very center of our Christian faith in God. Logos signifies reason, meaning, or even “word”—a meaning, therefore, which is Word, which is relationship, which is creative. The God who is Logos guarantees the intelligibility of the world, the intelligibility of our existence, reason’s accord with God, and God’s accord with reason, even though his understanding infinitely surpasses ours and to us may so often appear to be darkness. The world comes from reason and this reason is a Person, is Love—this is what our biblical faith tells us about God. Reason can speak about God, it must speak about God, or else it cuts itself short. Included in this is the concept of creation. The world is not just maya, appearance, which we must ultimately leave behind. It is not merely the endless wheel of sufferings, from which we must try to escape. It is something positive. It is good, despite all the evil in it and despite all the sorrow, and it is good to live in it. God, who is the creator and declares himself in his creation, also gives direction and measure to human action. We are living today in a crisis of moral values [Ethos], which by now is no longer merely an academic question about the ultimate foundations of ethical theories, but rather an entirely practical matter. The news is getting around that moral values cannot be grounded in something else, and the consequences of this view are working themselves out. The published works on the theme of moral values are stacked high and almost toppling over, which on the one hand indicates the urgency of the question, but on the other hand also suggests the prevailing perplexity. Kolakowski, in his line of thinking, has very emphatically pointed out that deleting faith in God, however one may try to spin or turn it, ultimately deprives moral values of their grounding. If the world and man do not come from a creative intelligence, which stores within itself their measure and plots the path of human existence, then all that is left are traffic rules for human behavior, which can be discarded or maintained according to their usefulness. All that remains is the calculus of consequences—what is called teleological ethics or proportionalism. But who can really make a judgment beyond the consequences of the present moment? Won’t a new ruling class, then, take hold of the keys to human existence and become the managers of mankind? When dealing with a calculus of consequences, the inviolability of human dignity no longer exists, because nothing is good or bad in itself any more. The problem of moral values is back on the table today, and it is an item of great urgency. Faith in the Logos, the Word who is in the beginning, understands moral values as responsibility, as a response to the Word, and thus gives them their intelligibility as well as their essential orientation. Connected with this also is the task of searching for a common understanding of responsibility, together with all honest, rational inquiry and with the great religious traditions. In this endeavor there is not only the intrinsic proximity of the three great monotheistic religions, but also significant lines of convergence with the other strand of Asian religiosity we encounter in Confucianism and Taoism.

If it is true that the term Logos—the Word in the beginning, creative reason, and love—is decisive for the Christian image of God, and if the concept of Logos simultaneously forms the core of Christology, of faith in Christ, then the indivisibility of faith in God and faith in his incarnate Son Jesus Christ is only confirmed once more. We will not understand Jesus any better or come any closer to him, if we bracket off faith in his divinity. The fear that belief in his divinity might alienate him from us is widespread today. It is not only for the sake of the other religions that some would like to de-emphasize this faith as much as possible. It is first and foremost a question of our own Western fears. All of this seems incompatible with our modern worldview. It must just be a question of mythological interpretations, which were then transformed by the Greek mentality into metaphysics. But when we separate Christ and God, behind this effort there is also a doubt as to whether God is at all capable of being so close to us, whether he is allowed to bow down so low. The fact that we don’t want this appears to be humility. But Romano Guardini correctly pointed out that the higher form of humility consists in allowing God to do precisely what appears to us to be unfitting, and to bow down to what he does, not to what we contrive about him and for him. A notion of God’s remoteness from the world is behind our apparently humble realism, and therefore a loss of God’s presence is also connected with it. If God is not in Christ, then he retreats into an immeasurable distance, and if God is no longer a God-with-us, then he is plainly an absent God and thus no God at all: a god who cannot work is not God. As for the fear that Jesus moves us too far away if we believe in his Divine Sonship, precisely the opposite is true: were he only a man, then he has retreated irrevocably into the past, and only a distant recollection can perceive him more or less clearly. But if God has truly assumed manhood and thus is at the same time true man and true God in Jesus, then he participates, as man, in the presence of God, which embraces all ages. Then, and only then, is he not just something that happened yesterday, but is present among us, our contemporary in our today. That is why I am firmly convinced that a renewal of Christology must have the courage to see Christ in all of his greatness, as he is presented by the four Gospels together in the many tensions of their unity.

If I had this Introduction to Christianity to write over again today, all of the experiences of the last thirty years would have to go into the text, which would then also have to include the context of interreligious discussions to a much greater degree than seemed fitting at the time. But I believe that I was not mistaken as to the fundamental approach, in that I put the question of God and the question about Christ in the very center, which then leads to a “narrative Christology” and demonstrates that the place for faith is in the Church. This basic orientation, I think, was correct. That is Introduction to Christianity: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow 495 why I venture to place this book once more in the hands of the reader today.*—Translated by Michael J. Miller.

JOSEPH CARDINAL RATZINGER is prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

*Preface to the new German edition (2000). English translation originally published in Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004). Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved

Communio 31 (Fall 2004). © 2004 by Communio: International Catholic Review

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Communio: A Program

"Communio: A Program"
by
Joseph Ratzinger

“Communio was founded to attract and bring together Christians simply on the basis of their common faith.”

When the first issue of the International Catholic Review: Communio appeared at the beginning of 1972, there were two editions, one in German and one in Italian. A Croatian edition was also conceived at the outset. A preface by Franz Greiner served as the introduction to the German edition. Common to the two editions was the fundamental theological contribution of Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Communio: A Programme.” When we read these pages twenty years later, we are astonished at the relevance of what was then said. Its effect could still be explosive in the contemporary theological landscape. Of course, we could ask to what degree the review retained its guiding principles and what can be done now to do greater justice to them. An examination of conscience of this sort cannot however be the topic of my talk. I will only try to refresh our memory and strengthen the resolve which was present at the beginning.

The origins of the review Communio.

To achieve this goal, it may be helpful to reexamine for a moment the formation of the review. In spite of many obstacles, it appears today in thirteen languages. Communio can no longer be removed from the contemporary theological conversation. At the beginning, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s initiative was not aimed at founding a journal. The great theologian from Basel had not participated in the event of the Council. Considering the contribution that he could have made, one must admit a great loss. But there was also a good side to his absence. Balthasar was able to view the whole from a distance, and this gave him an independence and clarity of judgment which would have been impossible had he spent four years experiencing the event from within. He understood and accepted without reservation the greatness of the conciliar texts, but also saw the round-about fashion to which so many small-minded men had become accustomed. They sought to take advantage of the conciliar atmosphere by going on and on about the standard of faith. Their demands corresponded to the taste of their contemporaries and appeared exciting because people had previously assumed that these opinions were irreconcilable with the faith of the Church. Origen once said: “Heretics think more profoundly but not more truly.” (1) For the postconciliar period I think that we must modify that statement slightly and say: “Their thinking appears more interesting but at the cost of the truth.” What was previously impossible to state was passed off as a continuation of the spirit of the Council. Without having produced anything genuinely new, people could pretend to be interesting at a cheap price. They sold goods from the old liberal flea market as if they were new Catholic theology.

From the very beginning, Balthasar perceived with great acuity the process by which relevance became more important than truth. He opposed it with the inexorability characteristic of his thought and faith. More and more we are recognizing that The Moment of Christian Witness (Cordula oder der Ernstfall), which first appeared in 1966, is a classic of impartial polemics. This work worthily joins the great polemical works of the Fathers, which taught us to differentiate gnosis from Christianity. Prior to that, he had written a little book in 1965 called Who is a Christian? which made us sit up and take notice of the clarity of his standards. He taught us to distinguish between what is authentically Christian and homemade fantasies about Christianity. This book accomplished exactly what Balthasar had described in 1972 as the task of Communio: “It is not a matter of bravado, but of Christian courage, to expose oneself to risk.” (2) He had made himself vulnerable with the hope that these trumpet blasts would herald a return to the real subject matter of theological thinking. Once theology was no longer being measured according to its content but rather according to the purely formal categories of conservative and progressive, the learned man from Basel must have seen very quickly that his own voice alone was not sufficient. What was classified as conservative in this situation was immediately judged to be irrelevant and no further arguments were required.

So Balthasar went about seeking allies. He planned a common project, “Elucidations” (Klarstellungen), a book of no more than one hundred fifty pages. The book was supposed to include brief summaries, by the best specialists of the individual disciplines, of whatever was essential for the foundations of the faith. He worked out a thematic plan and wrote a thirty-five page preliminary draft, in which he tried to show the prospective authors the inner logic of the work as a whole. He was in conversation with many theologians, but because of the demands placed upon the authors whom he had in mind, the project never really got off the ground. In addition, he realized that rapid changes in theological terminology required another change in the arrangement of question and answer. Sometime in the late sixties, Balthasar discerned that his project could not be realized. It was clear that a single anthology would not suffice but that a continual conversation with different currents was necessary.

Thus the idea for a journal occurred to him, an idea which took shape in conversation with the first session of the International Theological Commission (1969). This setting made him realize that a medium of conversation such as this must be international. Otherwise it would not display the real breadth of Catholicism, and the diversity of Catholicism’s cultural expressions would be forgotten. The decisive element in “Elucidations,” which was lacking in the earlier, polemical writing, now became fully clear. The undertaking would only achieve permanence and attract loyalty if based upon a Yes and not upon a No. Only an affirmative foundation would be capable of responding to the questions which had been posed. Balthasar, de Lubac, L. Bouyer, J. Medina, M. J. Le Guillou, and I arranged to meet in the fall of 1969 apart from the official consultations of the Commission. There the project took on concrete form. The participants first thought that there should be a German-French collaboration. Le Guillou, who was then completely healthy and capable of getting work done, was supposed to be in charge of the French side. Balthasar made himself father of the joint project with special responsibility for the German branch.

Obviously, it took a long time for the idea to be realized. They had to find a publisher, an editor, financial means, and a relatively solid core of authors. There was also the question of the title. Many different possibilities were tested. For example, I remember a conversation with the founders of the journal Les quatres fleuves, which was then being started in Paris with similar objectives. Not only did our French edition never get off the ground, but Le Guillou for all practical purposes dropped out because of his illness. Two events were decisive in order for the project to get started. Balthasar contacted the movement Communione e Liberazione, which had been conceived in Italy and was just beginning to blossom. The young people who came together in the community founded by Don Giussani displayed the vitality, the willingness to take risks, and the courage of faith which was needed. Thus, the Italian partner was found. In Germany the publishing house Kösel decided to abandon the traditional cultural journal Hochland in order to replace it with the short-lived Neues Hochland. The word “new” in Neues Hochland referred to a decisive change of course. The last editor of Hochland, Franz Greiner, was prepared to offer his experience and services to the new journal. He did so with great selflessness and even founded a new publishing house to secure the independence of the project. Consequently, he not only disclaimed any remuneration for himself but also made available his own personal means for the whole project. Without him, starting the journal would not have been possible. Today we need to thank him once again for what he did.

I no longer remember exactly when the name Communio first entered into the conversation, but I believe it occurred through contact with Communione e Liberazione. The word appeared all of a sudden, like the illumination of a room. It actually expressed everything we wanted to say. There were some initial difficulties because the name had already been taken. In France there was a small journal with this title and in Rome a book series. For this reason, “International Catholic Review” was chosen as the main title. “Communio” could then be added as a subtitle without violating the rights of others.

Because of the new guiding concept and because of our contact with the Italian partners, we were able to clarify the physiognomy of the journal even further. We also wanted to be structurally different from previous journals. This new structure was supposed to show the creativity and breadth that we were looking for. There were basically two new elements which we wanted to introduce. We were looking for a new kind of internationality. As opposed to the centralized approach of Concilium, we thought that the meaning of the word communio required a harmonious coexistence of unity and difference. Hans Urs von Balthasar was aware from his experience as a publisher that even today a great deal still separated European cultures from one another. For example, he had founded a series Theologia Romanica, in which the best works of French theology were published in German. He must have realized that the reason for their being largely unmarketable in Germany was because the Germans did not understand the culture upon which they were based. The journal was also supposed to open up cultures to one another, to bring them into real conversation with one another, and at the same time to leave one another enough room to develop on their own. The situations in Church and society are so different that what counts as a burning question for one culture remains completely foreign to another. We agreed to publish a primary part with major theological articles designed through common planning. This way, authors from the different countries participating were allowed to have something to say in every edition. The second part was intended to remain in the hands of hte editorial staff of the individual countries. Following the Hochland tradition, we decided in Germany to dedicate the second part to general cultural issues as much as possible. The combination of theology and culture was also supposed to be a distinguishing feature of the journal. If the journal was to become a forum for conversation between faith and culture, then it was also necessary that the editorial staff consist of priests and laity, as well as theologians and representatives of other disciplines.

The notion of communio also suggested another characteristic to us. We did not want simply to throw Communio out into the neutral marketplace and wait to see where we would find customers. We thought that the title required that the journal form a community that would always develop on the basis of communio. Communio circles were supposed to arise with distinct foci. We considered the journal as a kind of intellectual and spiritual foundation for each focus and hoped that it would be discussed as such. Conversely, new ideas as well as criticism of what we were doing could come from each of these circles. In short, we thought that we could have a new kind of dialogue with readers. The journal was not intended to offer intellectual goods for sale but needed a living context to support it. In the same vein, we thought that a new kind of financing might have been possible, one not based upon fixed capital but sustained by the common initiative of every author and every reader who was judged to be a true supporter of the whole project. Unfortunately, after some modest starts in Germany and more decisive attempts in France, we discovered that this plan was not effective. A fragment of what was then attempted has still survived among the contributors to Communio in Germany. In any case, we were forced to accept that one cannot found a community with a journal but that the community precedes the journal and must render it necessary, as is the case with Communione e Liberazione. Communio was never intended to be an instrument of this movement. Rather, Communio was founded to attract and bring together Christians simply on the basis of their common faith, independently of their membership in particular communities.

The name as a program

When our journal started out twenty years ago, the word communio had not yet been discovered by progressive postconciliar theology. At that time everything centered on the “people of God,” a concept which was thought to be a genuine innovation of the Second Vatican Council and was quickly contrasted with a hierarchical understanding of the Church. More and more, “people of God” was understood in the sense of popular sovereignty, as a right to a common, democratic determination over everything that the Church is and over everything that she should do. God was taken to be the creator and sovereign of the people because the phrase contained the words “of God,” but even with this awareness he was left out. He was amalgamated with the notion of a people who create and form themselves. (3) The word communio, which no one used to notice, was now surprisingly fashionable—if only as a foil. According to this interpretation, Vatican II had abandoned the hierarchical ecclesiology of Vatican I and replaced it with an ecclesiology of communio. Thereby, communio was apparently understood in much the same way the “people of God” had been understood, i.e., as an essentially horizontal notion. On the one hand, this notion supposedly expresses the egalitarian moment of equality under the universal decree of everyone. On the other hand, it also emphasizes as one of its most fundamental ideas an ecclesiology based entirely on the local Church. The Church appears as a network of groups, which as such precede the whole and achieve harmony with one another by building a consensus. (4)

This kind of interpretation of the Second Vatican Council will only be defended by those who refuse to read its texts or who divide them into two parts: an acceptable rogressive part and an unacceptable old-fashioned part. In the conciliar documents concerning the Church itself, for example, Vatican I and Vatican II are inextricably bound together. It is simply out of the question to separate an earlier, unsuitable ecclesiology from a new and different one. Ideas like these not only confuse conciliar texts with party platforms and councils with political conventions, but they also reduce the Church to the level of a political party. After a while political parties can throw away an old platform and replace it with one which they regard as better, at least until yet another one appears on the scene.

The Church does not have the right to exchange the faith for something else and at the same time to expect the faithful to stay with her. Councils can therefore neither discover ecclesiologies or other doctrines nor can they repudiate them. In the words of Vatican II, the Church is “not higher than the Word of God but serves it and therefore teaches only what is handed on to it.” (5) Our understanding of the depth and breadth of the tradition develops because the Holy Spirit broadens and deepens the memory of the Church in order to guide her “into all the truth” (Jn 16:13). According to the Council, growth in the perception (Wahrnehmung, perceptio) of what is inherent to the tradition occurs in three ways: through the meditation and study of the faithful, through an interior understanding which stems from the spiritual life, and through the proclamation of those “who have received the sure charism of truth by succeeding to the office of the bishop.” (6) The following words basically paraphrase the spiritual position of a council as well as its possibilities and tasks: the council is committed from within to the Word of God and to the tradition. It can only teach what is handed on. As a rule, it must find new language to hand on the tradition in each new context so that—to put it a different way—the tradition remains genuinely the same. If the Second Vatican Council brought the notion of communio to the forefront of our attention, it did not do so in order to create a new ecclesiology or even a new Church. Rather, careful study and the spiritual discernment which comes from the experience of the faithful made it possible at this moment to express more completely and more comprehensively what the tradition states.

Even after this excursus we might still ask what communio means in the tradition and in the continuation of the tradition which occurs in the Second Vatican Council. First of all, communio is not a sociological but a theological notion, one which even extends to the realm of ontology. O. Saier worked this out accurately in his thorough-going study of 1973, which details the position of the Second Vatican Council on communio. The first chapter, which investigates “the way of speaking of Vatican II,” claims that the communio between God and man comes first and the communio of the faithful among one another follows from this. Even the second chapter, which describes the place of communio in theology, repeats this sequence. In the third chapter, Word and sacrament finally appear as the genuine constructive elements of the Communio ecclesiae. With his majestic knowledge of the philosophical and theological sources, Hans Urs von Balthasar described the foundations of what the last Council developed on this point. I do not want to repeat what he said, but I will briefly refer to some of the major elements because they were and still are the basis for what we wanted to accomplish in our journal. In the first place, we must remember that “communion” between men and women is only possible when embraced by a third element. In other words, common human nature creates the very possibility that we can communicate with one another. We are not only nature but also persons, and in such a way that each person represents a unique way of being human different from everyone else. Therefore, nature alone is not sufficient to communicate the inner sensibility of persons. If we want to draw another distinction between individuality and personality, then we could say that individuality divides and being a person opens. Being a person is by nature being related. But why does it open? Because both in its very depths and in its highest aspirations being a person goes beyond its own boundaries towards a greater, universal “something” and even toward a greater, universal “someone.” The all-embracing third, to which we return so often can only bind when it is greater and higher than individuals. On the other hand, the third it itself within each individual because it touches each one from within. Augustine once described this as “higher than my heights, more interior than I am to myself.” This third, which in truth is the first, we call God. We touch ourselves in him. Through him and only through him, a communio which grasps our own depths comes into being.

We have to proceed one stop further. God communicated himself to humanity by himself becoming man. His humanity in Christ is opened up through the Holy Spirit in such a way that it embraces all of us as if we could all be united in a single body, in a single common flesh. Trinitarian faith and faith in the Incarnation guide the idea of communion with God away from the realm of philosophical concepts and locate it in the historical reality of our lives. One can therefore see why the Christian tradition interprets koinōnía-communio in 2 Corinthians 13:13 as an outright description of the Holy Spirit.

To put it in the form of a concrete statement: the communion of people with one another is possible because of God, who unites us through Christ in the Holy Spirit so that communion becomes a community, a “church” in the genuine sense of the word. The church discussed in the New Testament is a church “from above,” not from a humanly fabricated “above” but from the real “above” about which Jesus says: “You belong to what is below, I belong to what is above” (Jn 8:23). Jesus clearly gave new meaning to the “below,” for “he descended into the lower regions of the earth” (Eph 4:9). The ecclesiology “from below” which is commended to us today presupposes that one regards the Church as a purely sociological quantity and that Christ as an acting subject has no real significance. But in this case, one is no longer speaking about a church at all but about a society which has also set religious goals for itself. According to the logic of this position, such a church will also be “from below” in a theological sense, namely, “of this world,” which is how Jesus defines “below” in the Gospel of John (Jn 8:23). An ecclesiology based upon communio consists of thinking and loving from the real “above.” This “above” relativizes every human “above” and “below” because before him the first will be last and the last will be first.

A principal task of the review Communio had to be, and therefore must still be, to steer us toward this real “above,” the one which disappears from view when understood in merely sociological and psychological terms. The “dreams of the Church” for tomorrow unleash a blind yearning to be committed to forming a church which has disintegrated whatever is essential. Such aspirations can only provoke further disappointments, as Georg Muschalek has shown. (7) Only in the light of the real “above” can one exercise a serious and constructive critique of the hierarchy, the basis of which must not be the philosophy of envy but the Word of God. A journal which goes by the name of Communio must therefore keep alive and become engrossed in God’s speech before all else, the speech of the trinitarian God, of his revelation in the history of salvation in the Old and New Covenants, in the middle of which stands the Incarnation of the Son, God’s being with us. The journal must speak about the Creator, the Redeemer, our likeness to God, and about the sins of humanity as well. It must never lose sight of our eternal destination, and together with theology it must develop an anthropology which gets at the heart of the matter. It must render the Word of God into a response to everyone’s questions. This means that it cannot hide behind a group of specialists, of theologians, and of “church-makers,” who rush from one meeting to another and manage to strengthen discontent with the Church among themselves and others. A journal whose thought is based upon communio is not permitted to hand over its ideology and its recipes to such groups. It must approach those who are questioning and seeking, and in conversation with such people, it must learn to receive anew the light of God’s Word itself.

We might also add that they have to be missionary in the proper sense of the word. Europe is about to become pagan again, but among these new pagans there is also a new thirst for God. This situation can often be misleading. The thirst will definitely not be quenched by dreaming about the Church, and not by creating a church which strives to reinvent itself through endless discussions. One is better off escaping in the esoteric, in magic, in places which seem to create an atmosphere of mystery, of something totally other. Faith does not confirm the convictions of those who have time for such things. Faith is the gift of life and must once again become recognizable as such.

We must say a brief word, before we conclude, about two other dimensions of communio which we have not yet discussed. Even in pre-Christian literature, the primary meaning of communio referred to God and to gods, and the secondary, more concrete meaning referred to the mysteries which mediate communion with God. (8) This scheme prepares the way for the Christian use of language. Communio must first be understood theologically. Only then can one draw implications for a sacramental notion of communio, and only after that for an ecclesiological notion. Communio is a communion of the body and blood of Christ (e.g., 1 Cor 10:16). Now the Whole attains its full concreteness; everyone eats the one bread and thus they themselves become one. “Receive what is yours,” says Augustine, presupposing that through the sacraments human existence itself is joined to and transformed into communion with Christ. The Church is entirely herself only in the sacrament, ie., wherever she hands herself over to him and wherever he hands himself over to her creating her over and over again. As the one who has descended into the deepest depths of the earth and of human existence, he guides her over and over again back to the heights. Only in this context is it possible to speak about a hierarchical dimension and to renew our understanding of tradition as growth into identity. More than anything else, this clarifies what it means to be Catholic. The Lord is whole wherever he is found, but that also means that together we are but one Church and that the union of humanity is the indispensable definition of the Church. Therefore, “he is our peace.” “Through him we both have our access in one Spirit to the Father” (Eph 2:14–18).

For this reason, Hans Urs von Balthasar has dealt a severe blow to the sociology of groups. He reminds us that the ecclesiastical community appears to quite a number of people today as no more than a skeleton of institutions. As a result, “the small group . . . will become more and more the criterion of ecclesiastical vitality. For these people, the Church as Catholic and universal seems to hover like a disconnected roof over the buildings which they inhabit.” Balthasar provides an alternative vision:

“Paul’s whole endeavour was to rescue the Church communion from the clutches of charismatic ‘experience’ and through the apostolic ministry to carry it beyond itself to what is catholic, universal. Ministry in the Church is certainly service, not domination, but it is service with the authority to demolish all the bulwarks which the charismatics set up against the universal communion, and to bring them ‘into obedience to Christ’ (2 Cor 10:5). Anyone who charismatically (democratically) levels down Church ministry, thereby loses the factor which inexorably and crucifyingly carries every special task beyond itself and raises it to the plane of the Church universal, whose bond of unity is not experience (gnosis) but self-sacrificing love (agape)." (9)

It goes without saying that this is not a denial of the unique significance of the local Church nor a repudiation of movements and new communities in which the Church and faith can be experience with new vigor. Every time that the Church has been in a period of crisis and the rusty structures were no longer resisting the maelstrom of universal degeneration, such movements have been the basis for renewal, forces of rebirth. (10) This always presupposes that within these movements there is an opening up to the whole of Catholicism and that they fit in with the unity of the tradition. Finally, the word agape points to another essential dimension of the notion of communio. Communion with God cannot be lived without real care for the human community. The ethical and social dimension found within the idea of God thus belongs to the essence of communio. A journal which follows this program also has to take the time to expose itself to the great ethical and social questions of the day. Its role is not to be political, but it must still illuminate the problems of the economy and of politics with the light of God’s Word by attending equally to critical and constructive commentary. Before concluding, we might at least make a preliminary remark about the examination of conscience which I declined to address at the beginning. How successfully has the review carried out its original program in the first twenty years of its existence? The fact that it has taken root in thirteen different editions speaks for its necessity and breadth even if the proper balance between the universal and the particular still causes many difficulties for the individual editions. It has addressed major issues of faith: the Creed, the sacraments, and the Beatitudes, just to name the most important of the ongoing series. It has surely helped many to move closer to the communio of the Church or even not to abandon their home in the Church in spite of many hardships. There is still no reason to be self-satisfied. I cannot help but think about a sentence of Hans Urs von Balthasar: “It is not a matter of bravado, but of Christian courage, to expose oneself to risk.” Have we been courageous enough? Or have we in fact preferred to hide behind theological learnedness and tried too often to show that we too are up-to-date? Have we really spoken the Word of faith intelligibly and reached the hearts of a hungering world? Or do we mostly try to remain within an inner circle throwing the ball back and forth with technical language? With that I conclude, for along with these questions I also want to express my congratulations and best wishes for the next twenty years of Communio.

—Translated by Peter Casarella.

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(1) Origen, Commentary on the Psalms, 36, 23 (PG 17, 133 B), quoted in Hans Urs von Balthasar, Origenes, Geist und Feuer (Einsiedeln/Freiburg, 1991), 115 [for an English translation, see Origen: Spirit and Fire, trans. Robert J. Daley (Washington, D.C., 1984).
(2) Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Communio—A Programme,” International Catholic Review: Communio 1, no. 1 (1972): 12.
(3) I have sought to explain the correct, biblical sense of the concept, “People of God” in my book, Church, Ecumenism and Politics (New York, 1988); see also my small book, Zur Gemeinschaft gerufen (Freiburg, 1991), 27–30.
(4) Cf also, in this regard, Zur Gemeinschaft gerufen, 70–97. Also noteworthy is the document of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to the bishops of the Catholic Church on “Some Aspects of the Church as Communio” (Vatican City, 1992).
(5) Dei Verbum, no. 10.
(6) Ibid., no. 8.
(7) G. Muschalek, Kirche—noch heilsnotwendig? Über das Gewissen, die Empörung und das Verlangen (Tübingen, 1990); this small book offers a thought-provoking analysis and diagnosis of the contemporary crisis in the Church.

(8) The most important reference is found in W. Bauer, Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament (Berlin, 1958, 5th ed.). Keywords: koinōneō, koinōnía, koinōnos, cols. 867–870.
(9) Balthasar, “Communio—A Programme,” 10.
(10) This is illustrated very well in the book by B. Hubensteiner, Vom Geist des Barock (Munich, 1978, 2nd ed.), esp. 58–158. Cf. Also P. J. Cordes, Mitten in unserer Welt. Kräfte: geistlicher Erneuerung (Freiburg, 1987) [for an English translation, see In the Midst of Our World: Forces of Spiritual Renewal (San Francisco, 1988). Communio 19 (Fall, 1992): 436–449.

Published in Fall 1992.
© Copyright 1992 by Communio: International Catholic Review