Excerpts from

"Introduction to Christianity "

 

Pope Benedict XVI wrote Introduction to Christianity, in an earlier dispensation, in 1967 when, as Professor Joseph Ratzinger he was a lecturer at Tubingen University. 

Introduction started as a series of open lectures for any students who wished to attend.  We cannot, the author says, just stick to "the precious metal of the fixed formulas of days gone by, for then it remains just a lump of metal, a burden instead of something offering by virtue of its value the possibility of true freedom. This is where the present book comes in: its aim is to help understand faith afresh as something which makes possible true humanity in the world of today". These excerpts, gratefully reproduced here, do not constitute the whole argument but a series of points for meditation.  The foundations of the culture of love start here....
 

Belief in the world  of today

Both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief, if they do not hide away from themselves and the truth of their being. Neither can quite escape either doubt or belief; for the one, faith is present against doubt, for the other through doubt and in the form of doubt.

It is the basic pattern of man's destiny only to be allowed to find the finality of his existence in this rivalry between doubt and belief, temptation and certainty. Perhaps in this way doubt, which saves both sides from being shut up in their own worlds, could become the avenue of communication.

The Old Testament asserts that God is not just he who at present lies in fact outside the field of vision but could be seen if it were possible to go further; no, he is the being who stands essentially outside it, however far our field of vision may be extended. 
xtended
The word "Credo" signifies the deliberate view that what cannot be seen, what can in no wise move into the field of vision, is not unreal; that on the contrary what cannot be seen in fact represents the true reality, the element that supports and makes possible all the rest of reality.

Belief signifies the decision that at the very core of human existence there is a point which cannot be nourished and supported on the visible and tangible, which encounters and comes into contact with what cannot be seen and finds that it is a necessity for its own existence.

Man's natural centre of gravity draws him to the visible, to what he can take in his hand and hold as his own. He has to turn round inwardly to recognise how blind he is if he trusts only what he sees with his eyes.

Belief is  the con-version in which man discovers he is following an illusion if he devotes himself only to the tangible. This is at the same time the fundamental reason why belief is not demonstrable: it is an about-turn; only he who turns about is receptive to it.  the 

Belief has always meant a leap across an infinite gulf, a leap namely out of the tangible world that presses on man from every side.

Belief was never simply the attitude obviously corresponding to the whole slant of human life; it has always been a decision calling on the depths of existence, a decision that in every age demanded a turnabout by man that can only be achieved by an effort of will.

Today belief no longer appears as the bold but challenging leap out of the apparent all of our visible world and into the apparent void of the invisible and intangible; it looks much more like a demand to bind oneself to yesterday and to accept it as eternally valid. And who wants to do that in our age when the idea of "tradition" has been replaced by the idea of "progress"?

Top

Christian belief is not merely concerned with the "eternal', which as the "quite other" would remain completely outside the human world and time; on the contrary, it is much more concerned with God in history, with God as man.

By thus seeming to bridge the gulf between eternal and temporal, between visible and invisible, by making us meet God as a man, the eternal as the temporal, as one os us, Christian belief knows itself as revelation. Its claim to be revelation is indeed based on the fact that it has, so to speak, introduced the eternal into our world. "No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known" (John 1:18).

Jesus has really made God known, drawn him out of himself or, as the First Epistle of St John puts it even more drastically, made him manifest for us to look upon and touch, so that he whom no one has ever seen stands open to our historical touch.

The very thing which at first seems to bring God quite close to us, so that we can touch him as a fellow man, follow his footsteps and measure them precisely, also became in a very profound sense the precondition for the "death of God" which henceforth puts an ineradicable stamp on the course of history and the human relationship with God. God has come so near to us that we can kill him and that he thereby, so it seems, ceases to be God for us.

The Christian today is not at liberty to remain satisfied by finding out that by all kinds of twists and turns an interpretation of Christianity can still be found which no longer offends anybody. Is there not some serious dishonesty in seeking to maintain Christianity as a viable proposition by such artifices of interpretation?

To the creative original spirit, the Creator Spiritus, thinking and making are one and the same thing. His thinking is a creative process. Things are, because they are thought.

In the ancient and medieval view all being is therefore what has been thought, the thought of the absolute spirit. Conversely, this means that since all being is thought, all being is meaningful, "logos",  truth.",  truth

If you do not believe (if you do not hold  firm to Yahweh), then you will have no hold. (Isaiah 7:9) The one  root 'mn (Amen) embraces a variety of meanings - truth, firmness, firm ground, ground, and furthermore the meanings loyalty, to trust, entrust oneself, take one's stand on something, believe in something; thus faith in God appears as a holding on to God through which man gains a firm hold for his life. Faith is therefore defined as taking up a position, as taking a stand trustfully on the ground of the word of God. The Christian attitude of belief is expressed in the little word "Amen", in which the meanings trust, entrust, fidelity, firmness, firm ground, stand, truth all interpenetrate each other; this means that the thing on which man can finally take his stand and which can give him meaning can only be truth itself.

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. I think that the significance of what we mean by understanding  is 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.
                   
Christian  faith is more than the option in favour of a spiritual ground to the world; its central formula is not "I believe in something", but "I believe in Thee."  It is the encounter with the human being Jesus, and in this encounter it experiences the meaning of the world as a person.

Jesus is God's witness, through whom the intangible has become tangible, the distant has drawn near. And further, he is not simply the witness whose evidence we trust, he is the presence of the eternal itself in this world.

In the life of Jesus, in the unconditional devotion of himself to men, the meaning of the world is present before us; it vouchsafes itself to us as a love which loves even me and makes life worth living by this incomprehensible gift of a love free from any threat of fading away or any tinge of egoism.

Faith is the finding of a "You" that bears me up and all the unfulfilled - and in the last resort unfulfillable - hope of human encounters gives me the promise of an indestructible love which not only longs for eternity but guarantees it.

In the last analysis believing, trusting and loving are one, and all the theses around which belief revolves are only concrete expressions of the all-embracing about-turn, of the assertion "I believe in You" - of the discovery of God in the countenance of the man Jesus of Nazareth.

"Are you really He?" The believer will repeatedly experience the darkness in which the negation of unbelief surrounds him like a gloomy prison from which there is no escape, and the indifference of the world, which goes its way unchanged as if nothing had happened, seems only to mock his hope.

We have to pose the question, "Are you really He?", not only through honesty of thought and because of reason's responsibility but also in accordance with the intrinsic law of love, which wants to know more and more to whom it has given its "Yes", so as to be able to love him more.

"Are you really He?" In the last resort all reflections on the Creed are subordinate to this question and thus revolves around the basic form of the confession of faith: "I believe in You, Jesus of Nazareth, as the meaning (logos)  of the world and of my life."

The Creed

Faith is located in the act of conversion, in the shift of gravity from worship of the visible and practicable to trust in the invisible. The phrase "I believe" could here be literally translated by "I hand myself over to", "I assent to."

"Faith comes from what is heard", says St Paul (Rom 10:17). Faith does in fact come from "hearing", not - like philosophy - from "reflection". It  is the reception of something that I have not thought out, so that in the last analysis thinking in the context of faith is always a thinking-over of something previously heard and received.

Philosophy is by its nature the work of the solitary individual, who ponders as an individual on truth. It only becomes communicable later when it is put into words. In philosophy, what comes first is the private search for truth, which then, secondarily, seeks out travelling companions. Faith, on the other hand, is first of all a call to community, to unity of mind through the unity of the word. Only secondarily will it then open the way for each individual's private venture in search of truth.

By the inner structure of faith our relationship to God and our fellowship with man cannot be separated from each other; the relationship to God, to the "You" and the "We" are intertwined; they do not stand alongside each other.

God wishes to approach man only through man; he seeks out man in no other way but in his fellow humanity. Just as in the field of music we find the creative, the receptive and finally those who are completely unmusical, so it seems to be in religion too. Here too one meets people who are religiously "talented" and others who are "untalented". Here too those capable of religious experience and thus of something like religious creativity  through a living awareness of the religious world are few and far between.

Over against the few, for whom the divine thus becomes undisguised certainty, stand the many whose religious gift is limited to receptivity, who are denied the direct experience of the holy, yet are not so deaf to it as to be unable to appreciate an encounter with it through the medium of the man granted such an experience.

God's dialogue with men operates only through men's dialogue with each other. The difference in religious gifts which divides men into "prophets" and hearers forces them into speaking to and for one another.

The programme of the early Augustine, "God and the soul - nothing else", is impracticable and it is also unchristian. In the last analysis there is no religion along the solitary path of the mystic, but only in the community of proclaiming and hearing.

Perhaps the mystery of God is from the start the most compulsive challenge - one that can never be carried to a final conclusion - ever issued to man to take up the dia-logue which, however much it may be obstructed and disturbed, causes the logos to resound, the real word from which all words proceed and which all words are always seeking to express.

No real dialogue yet takes place where men are still only talking about something. The conversation between men only comes into its own when they are no longer trying to express something, but to express themselves, when dialogue becomes communication.

When dialogue becomes communication, when man brings himself into the conversation, then God too is involved in some way or other, for he has been the real theme of controversy between men since the beginning of their history. Moreover, only when man brings himself into the conversation does the logos  of all being enter, along with the logos  of human being, into the words of human speech.
              
Perhaps the difficulty we find today in speaking about God arises precisely from the very fact that our language is tending to become more and more a mere means of passing on technical information, less and less a means for our common being to make contact in the logos,  a process in which consciously or unconsciously contact is also made with the ground of all things.

Christian doctrine does not exist in the form of analysable propositions but  in the unity of the symbolum,  as the Ancient Church called the baptismal profession of faith. "Symbolum"  comes from "symballein" - to fall together, to cast together. The background to the word's etymology is an ancient usage: two corresponding halves of a ring, a staff or a tablet were used as tokens of identity  for guests, messengers or partners to a treaty. Possession of the corresponding piece entitled the holder to receive a thing or simply to hospitality. A symbolum  is something which points to its complementary other half and thus creates mutual recognition and unity. It is the expression and means of unity.

The description of the creed or profession of faith as the symbolum  is a profound interpretation of its true nature. As sym-bolum  it points to the other person, to the unity of the spirit in the one Word. It unites people in the community of the confessing word. It is not a piece of doctrine standing isolated in and for itself, but the form of our worship of God, the form of our conversion, which is not only a turn to God but also a turn to one another in the common glorification of God. It is only in this context that Christian doctrine assumes its proper place.

Every man holds the faith only as a "symbolon", a broken incomplete piece that can only attain unity and completeness when it is laid together with the others. Only in "symballein",  the fitting together with them, can the "symballein",  the fitting together with God take place. Faith demands unity and calls for the fellow believer; it is by nature related to a Church. A Church is not a secondary organisation of ideas, quite out of accordance with them and hence at best a necessary evil; it belongs necessarily to a faith whose significance lies in the interplay of common confession and worship.

Even the Church itself, as a  whole, still only holds the faith as a symbolon, as a broken half, which signifies truth only in its endless reference to something beyond itself, to the quite other. It is only through that infinitely broken nature of the symbol that faith presses forward as man's continual effort to excel himself and reach up to God.

Christian faith is not based on the atomised individual but comes from the knowledge that there is no such thing as the mere individual, that on the contrary man is himself only when he is fitted into the whole; into mankind, history, the cosmos, as is right and proper for a being who is "spirit in body."
           
The purpose of Church and Christianity is to save history as history and to break through or transform the collective grid that forms the site of human existence.
           
The boundless spirit who bears within himself the totality of Being reaches beyond the 'greatest' so that to him it is small, and he reaches into the smallest because to him nothing is too small.
           
The overstepping of the greatest and the reaching down into the smallest is the true nature of absolute spirit.
           
Any attempt to reduce God to the scope of our own comprehension leads to the absurd.
           
The mere neutral curiosity of the mind which wants to remain uninvolved can never enable one to see - even in dealing with a human being, and much less in dealing with God.
           
The Christian confession of faith in God as the Three-in-One, signifies the conviction that divinity lies beyond our categories of unity and plurality.

God is Three-in-One. He stands above singular and plural. He bursts both categories.
           
To him who believes in God as tri-une, the highest unity is not the unity of inflexible monotony. The multi-unity which grows in love is a more radical, truer unity.
           
The acknowledgement that God is a person in the guise of a triple personality explodes the naive anthropomorphic concept of person.
           
The meaning of all being is no longer simply given in the world of ideas, it is to be found in the midst of time, in the countenance of one man.
           
Faith which is not love is not a really Christian  faith - it only seems to be such.

He who humbled himself to the very point of emptying himself of his own being is for that very reason the ruler of the world.
           
At bottom the teaching of Jesus is he himself. He as a totality is Son, Word and mission; his activity reaches right down to the ground of being and is one with it.
           
Man is finally intended for the other, the truly other, for God; he is all the more himself the more he is with the quite other, with God.
           
The future of man hangs on the cross - the redemption of man is the cross. And he can only come to himself by letting the walls of his existence be broken down, by looking on him who has been pierced (John 19:37) and by following him who as the pierced and opened one has opened the path into the future.
           
Man, as a being set entirely in a context of relationship, cannot come to himself through himself, although he cannot do it without himself either
Möhler (quoted by Cardinal Ratzinger).
           
Christ, who from the ecclesiastical point of view was a layman and held no office in Israel's religious organisation, was - so the Epistle to the Hebrews says - the one true priest in the world.
           
It is just as absurd to deduce the knowledge of God and the knowledge of all other intelligences and non-intelligences from self-knowledge (self-awareness) as to deduce all love from self-love.
           
Human righteousness can only be attained by abandoning one's own claims and being generous to man and God.
           
The gesture of the love that gives all - this, and this alone, was the real means by which the world was reconciled; therefore the hour of the cross is the cosmic day of reconciliation, the true and final feast of reconciliation. There is no other kind of worship and no other priest but he who accomplished it: Jesus Christ.
           
Christ's death, which from a purely historical angle represented a completely profane event - the execution of a man condemned to death as a political offender - was in reality the one and only liturgy of the world, a cosmic liturgy, in which Jesus stepped, not in the limited arena of the liturgical performance, the temple, but publicly, before the eyes of the world, into the real temple, that is, before the face of God himself, in order to offer, not things, the blood of animals or anything like that, but himself (Hebrews 9:11).
           
In the Bible, the cross does not appear as part of a mechanism of injured right; on the contrary, in the Bible, the cross is quite the reverse: it is the expression of the radical nature of the love which gives itself completely, of the process in which one is what one does, and does what one is; it is the expression of a life that is completely being for others.
           
It is not man who goes to God with a compensatory gift, but God who comes to man, in order to give to him. He restores disturbed right on the initiative of his own power to love, by making unjust man just again, the dead living again, through his own creative mercy.
           
God's righteousness is grace; it is active righteousness, which sets crooked man right, that is, bends him straight, makes him right.
           
In the New Testament the cross appears primarily as a movement from above to below. It does not stand there as the work of expiation which mankind offers to the wrathful God, but as the expression of that foolish love of God's which gives itself away to the point of humiliation in order thus to save man; it is  his approach to us, not the other way around.
           
Mary appears as the temple on to which descends the cloud in which Christ walks into the midst of history.
           
We are not allowed neutrality when faced with the question of God. We can only say yes or no, and this with all the consequences extending down to the smallest detail of life.
           
Man's stretching out towards God, the quest for the creative ground of all things, is something very different from precritical or uncritical thinking. On the contrary: rejecting the question of God, renouncing this supreme human openness, is an act of shutting in on oneself; it is to forget the inner call of our being.
           
Those who make themselves lords of truth and end by leaving truth on one side when it does not allow itself to be dominated ultimately place power above truth. Their criterion becomes power, ability. But precisely in this way they lose themselves: the throne on which they place themselves is a false throne; what they think is ascending the throne is in reality their fall.
           
"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." The "pure" heart is the one that is open and humble. The impure heart according to this is the opposite, the presumptuous heart that is shut in on itself, that is completely filled up with itself and incapable of finding room for the majesty of truth that demands reverence and ultimately worship.
           
The light of Jesus is reflected in the saints and shines out again from them.
           
"Saints," however, are not just those canonised by name. There are always hidden saints who in their fellowship with Jesus receive a ray of his brightness, actual and real experience of God. Perhaps in order to make this more exact we should pick up a remarkable saying used by the Old Testament in connection with the story of Moses: if they cannot see God full in the face they do nevertheless see God, they at least see God's back (Exodus 33:23). And just as Moses' face shone after this encounter with God, so the light of Jesus shines from the life of men and women of this kind.
           
Theology becomes an empty intellectual game and loses its scientific character without the realism of the saints, without their contact with the reality it is all about.
           
Believers who let themselves be formed and led by the faith of the Church should in all their weaknesses and difficulties be windows for the light of the living God; and if they truly believe, this is what they are.
           
The believer should be a countervailing force against the powers that suppress the truth, against this wall of prejudice that blocks our view of God.
           
The conversion of the ancient world to Christianity was not the result of any planned activity on the part of the Church but the fruit of the proof of the faith as it became visible in the lives of Christians and of the community of the Church. The actual invitation from experience to experience - humanly speaking, the missionary strength of the early Church was nothing else.
           
Christians today should be reference points of faith as people who know about God, should in their lives demonstrate faith as truth, and should thus become signposts for others.
           
The act of faith is a sharing in the vision of Jesus, propping oneself up on Jesus. John, who leant on Jesus' breast, is a symbol for what faith means.
           
Faith by its inmost essential nature involves other people: it is a breaking out of the isolation of my own ego that is its own illness. . I find myself united not only with Jesus but with everybody who has followed the same path.
           
Truth as mere perception, as mere idea, remains bereft of force; it only becomes man's truth as a way which makes a claim on him, which he can and must tread.

Christian belief is not an idea but life; it is not mind existing for itself but incarnation, mind in the body of history and its "We". It is not the mysticism of the self-identification of the mind with God, but obedience and service: the outstripping of oneself, liberation of the self precisely through its being taken into service by something not made or thought out by myself, the liberation of being taken into service for the whole.

I believe in God ...

"The Lord, thy God, is an only God" - this fundamental confession which forms the background to our creed, making it possible, is in its original sense a renunciation of the surrounding gods. It is not the registration of one view alongside others but an existential decision. As a renunciation of the gods it also implies the renunciation both of the deification of political powers and of the deification of cosmic ones

If one can say that hunger, love and power are the forces which motivate man, then one can point out that the three main forms of polytheism are the worship of bread, the worship of love and the idolisation of power. All three paths are aberrations, they make absolutes out of what is not in itself the absolute and thereby make slaves of men

Israel's confession of faith is a renunciation of the deification of one's own possessions. It is simultaneously a renunciation of the attempt to keep one's own possessions safe, a renunciation of the fear which tries to tame the mysterious by worshipping it, and an assent to the one God of heaven as the power that guarantees everything; it signifies the courage to entrust oneself to the power that governs the whole world without grasping the divine in one's hands.

Much the same as has been said about the Christian faith as the struggle against the worship of power could be demonstrated in the realm of the striving for the true pattern of human love as against the false worship of sex and Eros, which was and still is responsible for just as great an enslavement of humanity as the misuse of power.

The unity, finality and indivisibility of the love between man and woman can in the last analysis only be made a reality and understood in the light of belief in the unity and indivisibility of the love of God.   

We are also coming to understand more and more clearly, that the apparent liberation of love and its conversion into a matter of impulse mean the delivery of man to the self-styled powers of sex and Eros, to whose merciless slavery he falls a victim just when he is under the illusion he has freed himself.
  
When man eludes God, the gods put out their hands to grasp him; he can only be liberated by allowing himself to be liberated and by ceasing to try to rely on himself.

The Biblical belief in God

John in his gospel depicts Christ as him in whom the story of the burning bush first attains its true meaning. All chapter 17 - the so-called "high priest's prayer", perhaps the heart of the whole gospel - centres round the idea of "Jesus as the revealer of the name of God"  and thus assumes the position of New Testament counterpart to the story of the burning bush: Christ himself, so to speak, appears as the burning bush from which the name of God issues to mankind. The idea of the name here enters a decisive new phase. The name is no longer a word but a person, Jesus himself.

When God names himself he is not so much expressing his inner nature as making himself nameable; he is handing himself over to men in such a way that he can be called upon by them. And by doing this he enters into co-existence with them, he puts himself within their reach, he is "there" for them.

In Jesus God has really become he who can be invoked. In him God has entered for ever into co-existence with us. The name is no longer just a word at which we clutch; it is now flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone. God is one of us.
 

Faith in God today

A world created and willed on the risk of freedom and love is no longer just mathematics. As the arena of love it is also the playground of freedom and also incurs the risk of evil. It accepts the mystery of darkness for the sake of the great light constituted by freedom and love.   

In a world which in the last analysis is not mathematics but love, the minimum is a maximum; the smallest thing that can love is one of the biggest things; the particular is more than the universal; the person, the unique and unrepeatable, is at the same time the highest and ultimate thing.   
 

Belief in the Triune God

In Jesus Christ one meets a man who at the same time knows and professes himself to be the Son of God. One finds God in the shape of the ambassador who is completely God and not some kind of intermediary being, yet with us says to God "Father". The result is a curious paradox: on the one hand this man calls God his Father as speaks to him as someone facing him; if this is not to be a piece of empty theatricality but truth, which alone befits God, then Christ must be someone other than the Father to whom he speaks and to whom we speak. But on the other hand he is the real proximity of God coming to meet us, God's mediation to us, and that precisely because he himself is God as man, in human form and nature, God-with-us ("Emmanuel").   

Christ's mediation would indeed basically cancel itself out and become a separation instead of a mediation, if he were someone other than God, if he were an intermediate being. He would then be guiding us not towards God but away from him.

As mediator Christ is God himself and "man himself" - both with equal reality and totality. But this means that God meets me here not as Father but as Son and as my brother, whereby - both incomprehensibly and quite comprehensibly - a duality appears in God: God as "I" and God as "You" in one.

This new experience of God is followed finally by a third, the experience of the Spirit, the presence of God in us, in our innermost being. And again it turns out that this "Spirit" is not simply identical with the Father or the Son, nor yet a third thing erected between God and us; it is the mode in which God gives himself to us, so that he is in man, yet in the midst of this "indwelling" is infinitely above him.   

Is the triplicity of this form in which God is experienced perhaps only his historical mask, in which he approaches man in different roles yet always as the One? Does this triplicity only tell us something about man and the various modes of his relationship with God, or does it shed light on what God is in himself?   

The point at issue here is whether man in his relations with God is only dealing with the reflections of his own consciousness or whether it is given to him to reach out beyond himself and encounter God himself. If the first hypothesis is true, then prayer too is only an occupation of man with himself; there is no more grounds for worship proper than there are for prayers of petition - and this inference is in fact drawn to an increasing degree. If the other answer is the correct one worship and prayer are not only possible, they are enjoined, that is, they are a postulate of the being "man" who is open to God.   

Anyone who sees the profundity of the question will at the same time understand the passionate nature of the struggle that was fought out round it in the ancient Church; he will understand that anything but hair-splitting and formula-worship was involved, as a superficial view might easily suggest. Indeed, he will realise that the strife of those days is flaring up afresh today in just the same form - the one constant struggle of man for God and for himself - and that we cannot endure as Christians if we think it permissible to make it easier for ourselves today than it was then.   

Let us anticipate the answer found in those days to the parting between the path of faith and a path bound to lead to the mere appearance of faith: God is as he shows himself; God does not show himself in a way which he is not. On this assertion rests the Christian relation with God; in it is grounded the doctrine of the Trinity; indeed it is this doctrine.   

Although it is true that we only know God as he is reflected in human thought, the Christian faith holds firmly to the view that in this reflection it is him that we know. Even if we are not capable of breaking out of the narrow bonds of our consciousness, God can nevertheless break into this consciousness and show himself in it.   

If the painful history of the human and Christian striving for God proves anything, it surely proves this: that any attempt to reduce God to the scope of our own comprehension leads to the absurd. We can only speak rightly about him if we renounce the attempt to comprehend and leave him as the uncomprehended.    

Any doctrine of the Trinity  cannot therefore aim at being a perfect comprehension of God. It is a frontier notice, a discouraging gesture pointing over to unchartable territory. It is not a definition that confines a thing to the pigeonholes of human knowledge, nor is it a concept which would put the thing within the grasp of the human mind.
  
All the attempted solutions in the history of the dogmas of the Trinity which were finally thrown out as dead-ends and hence heresies are not just mere gravestones to the vanity of human endeavour, monuments which confirm how often thinking has come to grief. On the contrary, every heresy is at the same time a cipher for an abiding truth, a cipher which we must now preserve with other simultaneously valid statements, separated from which it produces a false impression. 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  in something bigger, just as even the positively accepted formulas are only valid if they are at the same time aware of their own inadequacy.

The Jansenist Saint-Cyran once made the thought-provoking remark that faith consists of a series of contradictions held together by grace. He thereby expressed in the realm  of theology a discovery which today in physics, as the law of complementarity, belongs to the realm of scientific thought. The physicist is becoming increasingly aware today that we cannot embrace given realities - the structure of light, for example, or matter as a whole - in one form of experiment and so in one form of statement; that on the contrary from different sides we glimpse different aspects, which cannot be traced back to each other.

We have to take the different aspects together - say the structure of the corpuscle and wave - without being able to find any all-embracing aspect - as a provisional assessment of the whole, which is not accessible to us as a unified whole because of the limitations implicit in our point of view.

What is true here in the physical realm as a result of the deficiencies in our vision is true in an incomparably greater degree of the spiritual realities and of God. Here too we can always look from one side and so grasp only one particular aspect, which seems to contradict the other, yet only when combined with it is a pointer to the whole which we are incapable of stating or grasping. Only by circling round, by looking and describing from different, apparently contrary angles can we succeed in alluding to the truth, which is never visible to us in its totality.

We know today that in a physical experiment the observer himself enters into the experiment and only by doing so can arrive at a physical experience. This means that there is no such thing as pure objectivity even in physics, that even the result of the experiment, nature's answer, depends on the question put to it. In the answer there is always a bit of the question and of the questioner himself; it reflects not only nature-in-itself, in its pure objectivity, but also gives back something of man, of our individuality, a bit of the human subject. This too, mutatis mutandis, is true of the question of God. There is no such thing as a mere observer. There is no such thing as pure objectivity.

One can even say that the higher an object stands in human terms, the more it penetrates the centre of the individuality, and the more it engages the beholder's individuality, then the smaller the possibility of the mere distancing involved in pure objectivity. Thus, whenever an answer is presented as unemotionally objective, as a statement that finally goes beyond the prejudices of the pious and provides purely factual, scientific information, then it has to be said that the speaker has here fallen a victim to self-deception. This kind of objectivity is simply denied to man. He cannot ask and exist as a mere observer. Even the reality "God" can only impinge on the vision of him who enters into the experiment with God - the experiment that we call faith. Only by entering does one experience; only by co-operating in the experiment does one ask at all, and only he who asks receives an answer.   

The Christian confession of faith in God as the Three-in-One, as him who is simultaneously the "monas" and the "trias", absolute unity and fulness, signifies the conviction that divinity lies beyond our categories of unity and plurality. Although to us, the non-divine, it is one and single, the one and only divine as opposed to all that is not divine, nevertheless in itself it is truly fulness and plurality, so that creaturely unity and plurality are both in the same degree copy and share of the divine.   

Not only unity is divine; plurality is not just primordial and has its inner ground in God. Plurality is not just disintegration which sets in outside the divinity; it does not arise simply through the intervention of the "dyas", of disintegration; it is not the result of the dualism of two opposing powers; it corresponds to the creative fulness of God, who himself stands above plurality and unity, encompassing both.

At bottom the belief in the Trinity, which recognises the plural in the unity of God, is the only way to the final elimination of dualism as a means of explaining plurality alongside unity; only through this belief is the positive validation of plurality given a definitive base. God stands above singular and plural. He bursts both categories.

To him who believes in God as tri-une, the highest unity is not that of inflexible monotony. The model of unity or oneness towards which one should strive is consequently not the indivisibility of the atom, the smallest unity, too small to be divided up; the authentic acme of unity is the unity created by love. The multi-unity which grows in love is a more radical, truer unity than the unity of the "atom".

Inasmuch as Christian faith acknowledges God, the creative meaning, as person it acknowledges him as knowledge, word and love. But the confession of faith in God as a person necessarily includes the acknowledgement of God as relatedness, as communicability, as fruitfulness. The unrelated, unrelatable, absolutely one could not be person. There is no such thing as person in the categorical singular.

We can say from the history of ideas that the concept and idea of "person" dawned on the human mind in no other way than in the struggle over the Christian image of God and the interpretation of the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. First it was clear that, seen absolutely, God is only One, that there is not a plurality of divine principles. Once this has been established it is also clear that the oneness lies on the plane of substance; consequently the three-ness, which must also be mentioned is not to be sought here. It must therefore exist on a different level, on that of relation, of the "relative".

In the Bible one met the fact that God seems to converse with himself: "Let us make man" ... The discovery of the dialogue within God led to the assumption of the presence in God of an "I" and a "You", an element of relationship, of co-existent diversity and affinity, for which the concept "persona" absolutely dictated itself.  The experience of the God who conducts a dialogue, of the God who is not only logos but also dia-logos, not only idea and meaning but speech and word in the reciprocal exchanges of conversation - this exploded the ancient division of reality into substance, the real thing, and accidents, the purely circumstantial. It now became clear that the dialogue, the relation, stands beside the substance as an equally primordial form of being.

The "three persons" who exist in God are the reality of word and love in their attachment to each other. They are not substances, personalities in the modern sense, but the relatedness whose pure actuality does not impair the unity of the highest being but fills it out. St Augustine once enshrined this idea in the following formula: "He is not called Father with reference to himself but only in relation to the Son; seen by himself he is simply God." Here the decisive point comes beautifully to light. "Father" is purely a concept of relationship. Only in being-for the other is he Father; in his own being-in-himself he is simply God. Person is the pure relation of being related, nothing else. Relationship is not something extra added to the person, as it is with us; it only exists at all as relatedness.   

The Son as Son, and in so far as he is Son, does not proceed in any way from himself and so is completely one with the Father; since he is nothing beside him, claims no special position as his own, confronts the Father with nothing belonging only to him, retains no ground for his own individuality, therefore he is completely equal to the Father. The logic is compelling: if there is nothing in which he is just he, no kind of fenced-off private ground, then he coincides with the Father, is "one" with him. It is precisely this totality of interplay that the word "Son" aims at expressing.   

To John "Son" means being-from-another; thus with the word he defines the being of this man as being from another and for others, as a being that is completely open on both sides, knows no reserved area of the mere "I". When it thus becomes clear that the being of Jesus Christ is a completely open being, a being "from" and "towards", that nowhere clings to itself and nowhere stands on its own, then it is also clear at the same time that this being is pure relation (not substantiality) and, as pure relation, pure unity. This fundamental statement about Christ becomes, as we have seen, at the same time the explanation of Christian existence.   

To John, being a Christian means being like the Son, becoming a son; that is, not standing on one's own and in oneself, but living completely open in the 'from" and "towards". In so far as the Christian is a Christian this is true of him. And certainly such utterances will make him aware to how small an extent he is a Christian.   

When John characterises the Lord as logos he is employing a term widely current in both Greek and Jewish thought and taking over with it a series of ideas implicit in it which are to that extent transferred to Christ. But  perhaps one can say that the new element that John has added to the logos-concept lies not least in the fact that to him "logos" does not mean simply the idea of the eternal rationality of being, as it did essentially in Greek thought. By its application to Jesus of Nazareth the concept "logos" acquires a new dimension. It no longer denotes simply the permeation of all being by meaning; it characterises this man: He who is here is "Word". The concept "logos", which to the Greeks meant "meaning" (ratio), changes here really into "word" (verbum). He who is here is Word; he 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 again it is true that "word" comes essentially "from someone else" and "to someone else"; word is an existence that is entirely way and openness.   

"My teaching is not my teaching but that of the Father who sent me" (John 7.16).  St Augustine asks what really is the teaching of Jesus which is simultaneously his and not his? Jesus is "word", and thus it becomes clear that his teaching is he himself. If one reads the sentence again from this angle it then says: I am by no means just I; I am not mine at all; my I is that of another. With this we have moved out of Christology and arrived at ourselves: "What is so much yours as yourself and what is so little yours as yourself?" (St Augustine)
 

I believe in Jesus Christ ...

"I believe in Jesus Christ, his only-begotten Son, our Lord". If faith in the "logos", the meaningfulness of being, corresponds perfectly with a  tendency in the human reason, this second article of the Creed proclaims the absolutely staggering alliance of logos and sarx, of meaning and a single historical figure. The meaning that sustains all being has become flesh; that is, it has entered history and become one individual in it; it is no longer simply what encompasses and sustains history but a point in it. According to this the meaning of all being is first of all no longer to be found in the sweep of the mind which rises above the individual, the limited, into the universal; it is no longer simply given in the world of ideas, which transcends the individual and is reflected in it only in a fragmentary fashion; it is to be found in the midst of time, in the countenance of one man.
 

The Cross

The birthplace of the faith in Jesus as the Christ, that is, the birthplace of the "Christ"-ian faith as a whole, is the cross. Jesus did not call himself unequivocally the Messiah (Christ); it was Pilate who gave him this name, proclaiming Jesus on the cross, in an execution notice drawn up in all the international languages of the day, as the executed king (=Messiah, Christus) of the Jews. This execution notice, the death sentence of history, became with paradoxical unity the "confession of faith", the real starting-point and rooting-point of the Christian faith, which holds Jesus to be the Christ: as the crucified criminal this Jesus is the Christ, the king. His crucifixion is his coronation; his coronation or kingship is his surrender of himself to men, the identification of word, mission and existence in the yielding up of his very existence. His existence is thus his word. He is word because he is love.
                      
From the cross faith understands in increasing measure that this Jesus did not just do and say something; that in him message and person are identical, that he always already is what he says. John needed only to draw the final straightforward inference: if that is so - and this is the christological basis of his gospel - then this Jesus Christ is "word"; but a person who not only has words but is his word and his work is the logos ("the Word", meaning, mind) itself; that person has always existed and will always exist; he is the ground on which the world stands - if we ever meet such a person, then he is the meaning which sustains us all and by which we are all sustained.

Christians first hit upon the identification of person, word and work through the cross. Through it they recognised the really and finally decisive factor, before which all else becomes of secondary importance. For this reason their confession of faith could be restricted to the simple association of the words Jesus and Christ - this combination said it all. Jesus is seen from the cross, which speaks louder than any words: he is the Christ - no more need be said. The crucified "I" of the Lord is such an abundant reality that all else can retire into the background.

From the understanding of Jesus thus acquired, people looked back at his words. When the community began to think back like this it was forced to note, to its amazement, that the same concentration on his "I" was to be found in the words of Jesus; that his message itself, studied retrospectively, is such that it always leads to and flows into this "I", into the identity of word and person.

For anyone who recognises the Christ in Jesus, and only in him, and who recognises Jesus as the Christ, anyone who grasps the total oneness of person and work as the decisive factor, has abandoned the exclusiveness of faith and its antithesis to love; he has combined both in one and made their mutual separation unthinkable. The hyphen between Jesus and Christ, the inseparability of person and work, the identity of one man with the act of sacrifice - these also signify the hyphen between love and faith.

For the peculiarity of Jesus" "I", of his person, which now certainly moves right into the centre of the stage, lies in the fact that this "I" is not at all something exclusive and independent but Being completely derived from the "Thou" of the Father and lived for the "You" of men. It is identity of logos (truth) and love, and thus makes love into the logos, the truth of human existence. The essence of a faith demanded by a Christology so understood is consequently entry into the universal openness of unconditional love. For to believe in a Christ so understood means simply to make love the content of faith, so that from this angle one can perfectly well say, love is faith.

Therefore it is also true that faith which is not love is not a really Christian faith - it only seems to be such.

Jesus Christ - true God and true man

"I believe in Jesus Christ, his only-begotten Son, Our Lord" ..  If faith in the "logos", the meaningfulness of being, corresponds perfectly with a tendency in the human reason, this second article of the Creed proclaims the staggering alliance of logos and sarx, of meaning and a single historical figure. The meaning that sustains all being has become flesh; that is, it has entered history and become one individual in it; it is no longer simply what encompasses and sustains history but a point in it.

According to this the meaning of all being is first of all no longer to be found in the sweep of the mind which rises above the individual, the limited, into the universal; it is no longer simply given in the world of ideas, which transcends the universal and is reflected in it only in a fragmentary fashion; it is to be found in the midst of time, in the countenance of one man. One is reminded of the moving conclusion of Dante's "Divine Comedy', where, looking on the mystery of God, in the midst of that "all-powerful love which, quiet and united, leads round in a circle the sun and all the stars", the poet discovers in blissful wonder his own likeness, a human countenance.
 

Theology of the Incarnation and theology of the Cross

In the history of the Christian faith two divergent lines of approach to the contemplation of Jesus have appeared again and again: the theology of the incarnation, which sprang from Greek thought and became dominant in the Catholic tradition of East and West, and the theology of the cross, which based itself on St Paul and the earliest forms of Christian belief and made a decisive breakthrough in the thinking of the Reformers. The former talks of "being" and centres round the fact that here a man is God and that accordingly at the same time God is man; this astounding fact is seen as the all-decisive one. All the individual events that followed pale before this one event of the one-ness of man and God, of God's becoming man. In face of this they can only be secondary; the interlocking of God and man appears as the truly decisive, redemptive factor, as the real future of man, on which all lines must finally converge.
  
Theology of the cross, on the other hand, speaks instead of the event; it follows the testimony of the early days, when people did not yet enquire about being but about the activity of God in the cross and resurrection, an activity which conquered death and pointed to Jesus as the Lord and as the hope of humanity. The differing tendencies of these two theologies result from their respective approaches.

Theology of the incarnation tends towards a static, optimistic view. The sin of man appears quite easily as a transitional stage of fairly minor importance. The decisive factor is then not that man is in a state of sin and must be saved; the aim goes far beyond any such atonement for the past and lies in making progress towards the convergence of man and God.

The theology of the cross, on the other hand, leads rather to a dynamic, topical, anti-world conception of Christianity, a conception which understands Christianity only as a discontinuously but constantly appearing breach in the self-confidence and self-assurance of man and of his institutions, including the Church.

These two great historical forms of Christian self-comprehension must remain present as polarities which mutually correct each other and only by complementing each other point towards the whole. Nevertheless, our reflections may perhaps have given us a glimpse of that unity which makes these polarities possible and prevents them from falling apart as contradictions. For we have found that the being of Christ ("incarnation" theology!) is actualitas, stepping beyond and out of oneself, the exodus of departure from self; it is not a being that rests in itself, but the act of being sent, of being son, of serving.

Conversely, this "doing" is not just "doing" but "being"; it reaches down into the depths of being and coincides with it. This being is exodus, transformation. So at this point a properly understood theology of being and of the incarnation must pass over into the theology of the cross and become one with it; conversely, a theology of the cross that gives its full measure must pass over into the theology of the Son and of being.

The Doctrine of Redemption

Saint Anselm argued  that since God is infinite the offence to him implicit in humanity's sin is also infinitely important. The right thus damaged must be restored, because God is a God of order and justice; indeed, he is justice itself. But the measure of the offence demands an infinite reparation, which man is not capable of making. He can offend infinitely - his capacity extends that far - but he cannot produce an infinite reparation; what he, as a finite being, gives will always be only finite. His powers of destruction extend further than his power to reconstruct, Thus between all the reparations that man may attempt and the greatness of his guilt there remains an infinite gulf which he can never bridge. Any gesture of expiation can only demonstrate his powerlessness to close the infinite gulf which he himself opened up.   

Is order to be destroyed for ever, then, and man to remain eternally imprisoned in the abyss of his guilt? Anselm's answer runs thus: God himself removes the injustice; not (as he could) by a simple amnesty, which cannot after all overcome from inside what has happened, but by the infinite Being's himself becoming man and then as a man - who thus belongs to the race of the offenders yet possesses the power, denied to man, of infinite reparation - making the required expiation. Thus the redemption takes place entirely through grace and at the same time entirely as the restoration of right.

Anselm's view has put a decisive stamp on the second millennium of Western Christendom, which takes it for granted that Christ had to die on the cross in order to make good the infinite offence which had been committed and in this way to restore the damaged order of things. It will always command respect as an attempt to synthesise the individual elements in the biblical evidence in one great all-embracing system. It is not hard to see that in spite of all the philosophical and juridical terminology employed, the guiding thread remains that truth which the Bible expresses in that little word "For", in which it makes clear that we as men live not only directly from God but from one another, and in the last analysis from the One who lived for all.

But it cannot be denied 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. Things look immediately different when, in place of the division into work and person, it becomes clear that with Jesus Christ it is not a question of a piece of work separate from himself, of a feat which God must demand because he himself is under an obligation to the concept of order; that with him it is not a question of having humanity, but of being human. And how different things look further on when one picks up the Pauline key, which teaches us to understand Christ as the "last man" (1 Cor 1:45) - the final man, who takes man into his future, which consists of his being not just man but one with God.

Christian faith believes in Jesus as the exemplary man (this is probably the best way to translate the Pauline concept of the "last Adam.") But precisely because he is the exemplary, the authoritative man, he oversteps the bounds of humanity; only thus and only thereby is he the truly exemplary man. For man is the more himself the more he is with "the other". He only comes to himself by moving away from himself. Only through "the other" and through "being" with "the other" does he come to himself.

If the "other" is just anyone he can also cause man to lose himself. Man is finally intended for the other, the truly other, for God; he is all the more himself the more he is with the quite other, with God. Accordingly he is completely himself when he has ceased to stand in himself, to shut himself off in himself and to assert himself, when in fact he is pure openness to God. To put it again in different terms: man comes to himself by moving out beyond himself. Jesus Christ is he who has moved right out beyond himself and thus is the man who has truly come to himself.
                          
The Rubicon of becoming man, of "hominization", was first crossed by the step from animal to logos, from mere life to mind. Man came into existence out of the "clay" at the moment when a creature was no longer merely "there" but, over and above just being there and filling his needs, was aware of the whole. But this step, trough which "logos", understanding, mind, first came into this world, is only completed when the logos itself, the whole creative meaning, and man merge into each other.
                     - - - - -
Man's full "hominization" presupposes God's becoming man; only by this event is the Rubicon dividing the "animal" from the "logical" finally crossed for ever and the highest possible development accorded to the process which began when a creature of dust and earth looked out beyond itself and its environment and was able to address God as "You".

It is openness to the whole, to the infinite, that makes man complete. Man is man by reaching out infinitely beyond himself and he is consequently more of a man the less enclosed he is in himself, the less "limited" he is. For that man is most man, indeed the true man, who is most unlimited, who not only has contact with the infinite - the infinite being! - but is one with him: Jesus Christ. In him "hominization" has reached its true goal.    

If Jesus is the exemplary man, in whom the true figure of man, God's intention for him, comes fully to light, then he cannot be destined to be merely an absolute exception, a curiosity, in which God demonstrates to us just what is possible. His existence concerns all mankind. The New Testament makes this perceptible by calling him an "Adam"; in the Bible this word expresses the unity of the whole creature "man", so that one can speak of the biblical idea of a "corporate  personality"> So if Jesus is called "Adam" this implies that he is intended to gather the whole creature "Adam" in himself. But this means that the reality which Paul calls, in a way that is largely incomprehensible to us today, the "body of Christ" is an intrinsic postulate of this existence, which cannot remain an exception but must "draw to itself" the whole of mankind (cf John 12.32)

It must be regarded as an important service of Teilhard de Chardin's that he rethought these ideas from the angle of the modern view of the world and, in spite of a not entirely unobjectionable tendency towards the biological approach, nevertheless on the whole grasped them correctly and in any case made them accessible once again. Let us listen to his own words: the human monad "can only be absolutely itself by ceasing to be alone."

In the background is the idea that in the cosmos, alongside the two orders or classes of the infinitely small and the infinitely big, there is a third order, which determines the real drift of evolution, namely the order of the infinitely complex. It is the real goal of the ascending powers of growth or becoming; it reaches a first peak in the genesis of living things and then continues to advance to those highly complex creations which give the cosmos a new centre.

"Imperceptible and accidental as the position which they hold may be in the history of the heavenly bodies, in the last analysis the planets are nothing less than the vital points of the universe.  It is through them that the axis now runs, on them is henceforth concentrated the main effort of an evolution aiming principally at the production of large molecules." (Chardin)

The examination of the world by the dynamic criterion of complexity thus signifies "a complete inversion of values. A  reversal of the perspective."

Man is so far the maximum in complexity. But even he as mere man-monad cannot represent an end; his growth itself demands a further advance in complexity. "At the same time as he represents an individual centred on himself (that is, a "person"), does not Man also represent an element in relation to some new and higher synthesis?" (Chardin). That is to say, man is indeed on the one hand already an end that can no longer be reversed, no longer be melted down again; yet in the juxtaposition of individual men he is not yet at the goal but shows himself to be an element, as it were, that longs for a whole which will embrace it without destroying it.   

Let us look at a further text, in order to see in what directions such ideas lead: "Contrary to the appearances still accepted by Physics, the Great Stability is not below - in the infra-elemental - but above - in the ultra-synthetic." (Chardin).

So it must be discovered that "If things hold and hold together, it is only by virtue of 'complexification' from the top." I think that we are confronted here with a crucial statement; at this point the dynamic view of the world destroys the positivistic conception, so near to all of us, that stability is located only in the "mass", in hard material. That the world is in the last resort put together and held together "from above" here becomes evident in a way that is particularly striking because we are so little accustomed to it.

This leads to a further passage in Teilhard de Chardin which it is worth quoting in order to give at least some indication here, by means of a few fragmentary excerpts, of his general outlook. "The Universal Energy must be a Thinking Energy if it is not to be less highly evolved than the ends animated by its action. And consequently ... the attributes of cosmic value with which it is surrounded in our modern eyes do not affect in the slightest the necessity obliging us to recognise in it a transcendent form of Personality." From here it is possible to understand the final aim of the whole movement as Teilhard understands it: the cosmic drift moves "in the direction of an incredible "mono-molecular' state, so to speak , in which each ego is destined to attain its climax in a sort of mysterious super-ego."     

As an "I", man is indeed an end, but the whole tendency of his being and of his own existence shows him also to be a creature belonging to a "super-I" that does not blot him out but encompasses him; only such an association can bring out the form of the future man, in which humanity will achieve complete fulfilment of itself.

One can safely say that here the tendency of Pauline Christology is in essentials grasped from the modern angle and rendered comprehensible again, even if the vocabulary employed is certainly rather too biological.

Faith sees in Jesus the man in whom - on the biological plane - the next evolutionary leap, as it were, has been accomplished; the man in whom the breakthrough out of the limited scope of humanity, out of its monadic enclosure, has occurred; the man in whom personalisation and socialisation no longer exclude each other but support each other; the  man in whom perfect unity - "The body of Christ", says Saint Paul, and even more pointedly "You are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal 3:33) - and perfect individuality are one; the man in whom humanity comes in contact with its future and in the highest extent itself becomes its future, because through him it makes contact with God himself, shares in him and thus realises its most intrinsic possibility.

From here onwards faith in Christ will see the beginning of a movement in which dismembered humanity is gathered together more and more into the being of one single Adam, one single body - the man to come. It will see in him that movement to the future of man in which he is completely "socialised", incorporated in one single being, but in such a way that the separate individual is not extinguished but brought completely to himself.    

Johannine theology points in the same direction. One has only to recall the words: "And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself" (John 12.32). This sentence is intended to explain the meaning of Christ's death on the cross; it thus expresses, since the cross forms the centre of Johannine theology, the direction in which the whole Gospel is intended to point. The event of the crucifixion appears there as a process of opening, in which the scattered man-monads are drawn into the embrace of Jesus Christ, into the wide span of his outstretched arms, in order to arrive,, in this union, at their goal, the goal of humanity. But if this is so, then Christ as the man to come is not man for himself but essentially man for others; it is precisely his complete openness that makes him the man of the future.

John concludes his portrait of the earthly Jesus with the image of an existence whose walls are torn down, which knows no more firm boundaries but is essentially openness. "One of the soldiers thrust a lance into his side and immediately blood and water came out" John 19:34). For John, the picture of the pierced side forms not only the climax of the crucifixion scene but of the whole story of Jesus. Now, after the lance-thrust that  ends his earthly life, his existence is completely open; now he is entirely "for", now he is truly no longer a single individual but "Adam", from whose side Eve, a new mankind is formed.

The open side of the new Adam repeats the creative mystery of the "open side" of man: it is the beginning of a new definitive community of men with one another, a community symbolised here by blood and water, in which John points to the basic Christian sacraments of baptism and Eucharist and through them to the Church as the sign of the new community of men. The fully opened Christ, who completes the transformation of being into reception and transmission, is thus visible as what at the deepest level he always was; as "Son". So Jesus on the cross has truly entered on his hour, as once again John says.

But the whole thing also shows what demands the talk of the man to come involves, and how little it really has to do with the cheerful romanticism of progress. For to be the man for others, the man who is open and thereby opens up a new beginning, means being the man in the sacrifice, sacrificed man. The future of man hangs on the cross - the redemption of man is the cross. And he can only come to himself by letting the walls of his existence be broken down, by looking on him who has been pierced (John 19:37), and by following him who as the pierced and opened one has opened the path into the future.

This means in the end that Christianity, which as belief in the creation acknowledges the primacy of the logos, the creative meaning as beginning and origin, also acknowledges it" in a specific way as the end, the future, the coming one. Indeed, in this gaze at him who is coming lies the real historical dynamism of the Christian approach, which in the Old and New Testaments perfects faith into hope of the promise.   

Christian faith is not just a backward gaze at what has happened in the past, an anchorage in a source that lies behind us in time; a conception of this sort would finally end in mere romanticism and reaction. Nor is it just gazing out at the eternal; that would be Platonism and metaphysics. It is also above all things a looking forward, a reaching-out of hope. Not only that, certainly; hope would become utopianism, with only man's own product as the goal.   

It is true hope precisely because it is located at the intersection of all three dimensions: the past, that is, the breakthrough that has already taken place; the present of the eternal, which makes divided time like unity; and him who is to come, in whom God and world will touch each other and thus God in world, world in God will truly be the omega of history.

Since Abraham and until the return of the Lord, faith advances to meet him who is coming. But in Christ the countenance of him who is to come is already revealed: it will be the man who can embrace all men because he has lost himself and them to God. For this reason the emblem of him who is to come must be the cross, and his face in this era of the world must be a countenance of blood and wounds: the "last man", that is, the real, the future man reveals himself in this age in the last men; whoever wishes to stand on his side must therefore stand on their side (cf Matt 25:31-46)    

The Individual and the Whole

Does God dwell in institutions, events or words? As the eternal Being, does he not make contact with each of us from within? To this we must first of all simply say "yes", and then go on to say that if there were only God and 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 by which to enter the soul of the individual, to which he is more intrinsic than he is to himself; nothing can reach more intimately and deeply into man than he, who touches this creature man in the very innermost heart of his being.                          
For the salvation of the mere individual there would be no need of either the Church, or a history of salvation, an incarnation or a passion. But precisely at this point we must also add the further statement: Christian faith is not based on the atomised individual but comes from the knowledge that there is no such thing as the mere individual, that on the contrary man is himself only when he is fitted into the whole: into mankind, history, the cosmos, as is right and proper for a being who is "spirit in body".    

The principle of "body" and "corporality" by which man is governed means two things: on the one hand the body separates men from one another, makes them impenetrable to each other. As a space-filling and sharply defined shape the body makes it impossible for one to be completely in the other; it erects a dividing line which defines distances and limit; it keeps us at a distance from one another and is to that extent a dissociating principle.

But at the same time existence in a corporal form necessarily also embraces history and community, for if pure spirit can be thought of as existing strictly for itself, corporality implies descent from one another: human beings live and depend in a very real and at the same time very complex sense on one another. For if this dependence is first of all a physical one (and even in this sphere it extends from parentage down to the manifold exchanges of mutual daily care), it means for him who is spirit only in a body and as body that the spirit too - in short, the one, whole man - is deeply marked by his membership of the whole of mankind - the one "Adam".

Being a man means being a fellow man in every aspect, not just in the respective past but in such a way that every man also contains the past and future of mankind, which really does emerge, the closer one looks, as one single "Adam".  .. One needs only to point to the fact that our mental life depends entirely on the medium of language and to add then that language was not invented today. It comes from a long way off; the whole of history has contributed to it and through it enters into us as the unavoidable premise of our present, indeed as a constant part of it. And, vice versa, man is a being who lives for the future, who continually takes care to plan ahead beyond the passing moment and could no longer exist if he suddenly found himself without a future. We are therefore bound to say that such a thing as the mere individual, the man-monad of the Renaissance, the pure Cogito-ergo-sum-being does not exist.    
Humanity comes to man only in the web of history that impinges on the individual through speech and social communication; and the individual for his part lives his life on the collective pattern in which he is already previously included and which forms the scene of his self-realization. It is simply not the case that every man plans himself anew from the zero of his own freedom, as it seemed to the German idealist philosophers. He is not a being who keeps starting again from scratch: he can only work out his own new approach within the framework of the already existing whole of human life which stamps and moulds him.

The Church and being a Christian have to do with man so understood. They would have no function to fulfil if the only thing that existed was the man-monad, the being implied by "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"). They are related to the man who is a fellow being and only subsists in the collective entanglements that follow from the principle of corporality. Church and Christianity itself exist on account of history, because of the collective involvements which stamp  man; they are to be understood in this plane. Their purpose is to save history as history and to break through or transform the collective grid that forms the site of human existence.

According to the epistle to the Ephesians, Christ's work of salvation consisted precisely in bring to their knees the forces and powers seen by Origen in his commentary on this passage as the collective powers that encircle man: the power of the milieu, of national tradition; the conventional "they" or "one" that oppresses and destroys man. Terms like original sin, resurrection of the flesh, last judgement, and so on, are only to be understood at all from this angle, for the seat of original sin is to be sought precisely in this collective net that precedes the individual existence as a sort of spiritual datum, not in any biological legacy passed on between otherwise utterly separated individuals.
- - - - -
Talk of original sin means just this, that no man can start from scratch any more, in a status integritatis (=completely unimpaired by history). No one starts off in an unimpaired condition in which he would only need to develop himself freely and lay out his own grounds; everyone lives in a web that is part of his existence itself. Last judgement is the answer to these collective entanglements. Resurrection expresses the idea that the immortality of man can only exist and be thought of in the fellowship of men, in man as the creature of fellowship. Finally, even the concept of redemption only has a meaning on this plane; it does not refer to the detached monadic existence of the individual.

Being a Christian is in its first aim not an individual but a social charisma. One is not a Christian because only Christians are saved; one is a Christian because for history the Christian diaconate (ministry of service) has a meaning and is a necessity.
                  
If one is a Christian in order to share in a diaconate for the whole, then this means that precisely because of this relation to the whole Christianity lives from the individual and for the individual, because only by the action of the individual can the transformation of history, the destruction of the dictatorship of the milieu come to pass.

It seems to me that this is the reason for what to the other world religions and to the man of today is always completely incomprehensible, namely that in Christianity everything hangs in the last resort on one individual, on the man Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified by the milieu - public opinion - and who on the cross broke this very power of the conventional "one", 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 like him, and by being crucified to overcome the world and contribute to the renewal of history.

Precisely because Christianity wants history as a whole its challenge is directed fundamentally at the individual; precisely for this reason it hangs on the single individual in whom the bursting of the bondage to the forces and powers took place.   

Because Christianity relates to the whole and can only be understood from the idea of community and with reference to it, because it does not mean the salvation of the isolated individual but acceptance of service to the whole, which he neither can nor may escape, for this very reason it is committed to the principle of "the individual" in its most radical form. Here lies the intrinsic necessity of the unheard-of scandal that a single individual, Jesus Christ, is acknowledged as the salvation of the world. The individual is the salvation of the whole, and the whole receives its salvation only from the individual who truly is it and who precisely for this reason ceases to exist for himself alone.

The Principle of "For"

Because Christian faith demands the individual, but wants him for the whole and not for himself, the real basic law of Christian existence is expressed in the preposition "For". That is why in the chief Christian sacrament, which forms the centre of Christian worship, the existence of Jesus Christ is explained as existence "for the many", "for you", as an open existence which makes possible and creates the communication of all between one another through communication in him.   

That is why Christ's existence, as exemplary existence, is fulfilled and perfected, as we have seen, in his being opened on the cross. That is why he can say, announcing and expounding his death: "I go away, and I will come to you" (John 14.28): by my going away the wall of my existence is broken down, and thus this happening is my real coming, in which I make a reality of what I really am, he who draws all into the unity of his new being, he who is not boundary but unity.

All man's own efforts to step outside himself can never suffice. He who only wants to give and is not ready to receive, he who only wants to exist for others and is unwilling to recognise that he for his part too lives on the unexpected, unprovokable gift of others' "For", fails to recognise the basic mode 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 the truly "other" of all mankind and at the same time one with it: the God-man Jesus Christ.
 

The Law of Disguise

Even philosophy, man's own reflections on God, leads to the realisation that God is the quite other, the absolutely hidden and unparalleled. "As blind as the eyes of night-birds", Aristotle had already said, "are our eyes before what is in itself the brightest thing of all." In fact, on the basis of faith in Jesus Christ, we shall reply: "God is the quite other,invisible, unrecognisable. But when he really did appear on the scene, so other, so invisible in regard to his divinity, so unrecognisable, it was not the kind of otherness and strangeness that we had foreseen and expected, and he thus remained in fact unrecognised. But should  not that in itself prove him to be the really quite other, he who casts overboard our notions of otherness and thereby shows himself to be the one and only genuine quite other."   

However much we may rebel against proofs of the existence of God and whatever objections philosophical reflection may justifiably make to individual steps in the arguments, the fact remains that the radiance of the original creative idea and of its power to build does shimmer through the world and its spiritual structure.

But this is only one way in which God appears in the world. The other sign which he has adopted and which, by concealing him more, shows more truly his intrinsic nature, is the sign of the lowly, which, measured cosmically, quantitatively, is comparatively insignificant, actually a pure nothing. One could cite in this connection the series Earth-Israel-Nazareth-Cross-Church, in which God seems to keep disappearing more and more, and precisely in this way becomes more and more manifest as himself.

At the end there was the cross on which a man was to hang, a man whose life had been a failure; yet this was to be the point at which one can actually touch God. Finally there is the Church, the questionable figure of human history, which claims to be the abiding site of his revelation. We know today only too well how little, even in it, concealment of the divine presence is abolished. Precisely when the Church believed, in all the glory of the  Renaissance princedom, that it could strip away this concealment and be directly the "gate of heaven", the "house of God", it has become once again, and almost more than before, God's disguise, with God scarcely to be found behind it.   
 

The Law of Excess or Superfluity

To the Bible, the limits of human righteousness, of human power as a whole, become an indication  of the way in which man is thrown back upon the unquestioning gift of love, a gift which unexpectedly opens itself to him and thereby opens up man himself, and without which man would remain shut up in all his "righteousness" and thus unrighteous. Only the man who accepts this gift can come to himself. Thus the proved speciousness of man's "righteousness" becomes at the same time a pointer to the  righteousness of God, the excess of which is called Jesus Christ. He is the righteousness of God, which goes far beyond what need be, which does not calculate, which really overflows; the "notwithstanding" of his greater love, in which he infinitely surpasses the failing efforts of man.   

Being a Christian does not mean duly making a certain obligatory contribution and perhaps, as a specially perfect person, even going a little further than is required for the fulfilment of the obligation. On the contrary, a Christian is someone who knows that apart from all this he lives first and foremost as the beneficiary of a bounty; and consequently all righteousness can only consist in being himself a donor, like the beggar who is grateful for what he receives and generously passes part of it on to others. The calculatingly righteous man, who thinks he can keep his own shirtfront white and build himself up inside it, is the unrighteous man. Human righteousness can only be obtained by abandoning one's own claims and by being generous to man and to God.   

It is the righteousness of "Forgive, as we have forgiven" - this request turns out to be the proper formula of human righteousness as understood in the Christian sense: it consists in continuing to forgive, since man himself lives essentially on the forgiveness he has received himself.

Finality and Hope

The fact that in Christ the goal of revelation and the goal of humanity is attained, because in him divine and human existence touch and unite, means at the same time that the goal attained is not a rigid boundary but an open space. For the union which has taken place at the one point "Jesus of Nazareth" must attain the whole of mankind, the whole one "Adam", and transform it into the "body of Christ." So long as this totality is not achieved, so long as it remains confined to one point, what has happened in Christ remains simultaneously both end and beginning. Mankind can advance no further or higher than it has, for God is the furthest and highest; any apparent progress beyond him is a plunge into the void. Humanity cannot go beyond him - to that extent Christ is the end, but it must enter into him - to that extent he is the real beginning.  
 

The Spirit  of Christianity

Man comes in the profoundest sense to himself not through what he does but through what he accepts. He must wait for the gift of love, and love can only be received as a gift. It cannot be "made" on its own, without anyone else; one must wait for it, let it be given to one. And one cannot become wholly man in any other way than by being loved, by letting oneself be loved. That love represents simultaneously both man's highest possibility and his deepest need, and that this most necessary thing is at the same time the freest and the most unforceable, means that precisely for his "salvation" man is meant to rely on receiving. If he declines to let himself be presented with the gift, then he destroys himself. Activity that makes itself into an absolute, that achieves at attaining humanity by its own efforts alone, is in contradiction with man's being.

Let us be plain, 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   

Without faith, which we have come to understand as 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 them is love" (1 Cor 13.13)
 

Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary ...

"The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God. (Luke 1.35). Our gaze is led beyond the covenant with Israel to the creation: in the Old Testament, the spirit of God is the power of creation; he it was who hovered over the waters in the beginning and shaped chaos into cosmos (Gen 1,2); when he is sent, living things are created (Ps 104 {103} 30). So what is to happen here to Mary is new creation: the God who called forth being out of nothing makes a new beginning among humanity: his Word becomes flesh.

The other image in this text - the "overshadowing by the power of the Most High" - points to the Temple of Israel and to the holy tent in the wilderness where God's presence was revealed in the cloud, which hides his glory as well as revealing it (Exod 40.34; 1 Kings 8.11). Just as Mary was depicted earlier as the new Israel, the true "daughter of Sion", so now she appears as the temple on to which descends the cloud in which God walks into the midst of history. Whoever puts himself at God's disposal disappears with him in the cloud, into oblivion and insignificance, and precisely in this way acquires a share in his glory.

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 rationalisers of every kind. Clarifications of sources are supposed to minimise 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 saviour is indeed found all over the world. It expresses a longing on the part of humanity, the longing for the austere and pure embodied in the intact virgin; the longing for the truly maternal, protective, mature and kind, and finally the hope that always arises again when a man is born - the hope and joy signified by a child. It may be regarded as probable that Israel too had myths of this sort; Isaiah 7.14 ("Behold, a virgin shall conceive ...") could certainly be explained as the echo of an expectation of this sort, even though it is not absolutely clear from the text of this passage that a virgin in the strict sense  of the term is meant. If the passage should properly be understood by reference to such sources, this would mean that via this detour the New Testament had taken up humanity's confused hopes in the virgin-mother. Such a primordial theme in human history is certainly not just meaningless.

But at the same time it is quite clear that the immediate antecedents of the New Testament accounts of Jesus' birth from the Virgin Mary lie not in the realm of the history of religions but in the Old Testament. Extra-biblical stories of this kind differ profoundly in vocabulary and imagery from the story of the birth of Jesus. The main contrast consists in the fact that in pagan texts the Godhead almost always appears as a fertilising, procreative power, thus under a more or less sexual aspect and hence in a physical sense as the "father" of the saviour-child. As we have seen, nothing of this sort appears in the New Testament.

The conception of Jesus is new creation, not begetting by God. God does not become the biological father of Jesus, and neither the New Testament nor the theology of the Church has fundamentally ever seen in this narrative of the Annunciation or in the event recounted in it the real ground for the divinity of Jesus, his "Sonship" of God. For this does not mean that Jesus is half God, half man; it has always been a basic tenet of the Christian faith that Jesus is completely God and completely man.   

According to the faith of the Church the Sonship of Jesus does not rest on the fact that Jesus had no human father; the doctrine of Jesus' divinity would not be affected if Jesus had been the product of a normal human marriage. For the Sonship of which faith speaks is not a biological but an ontological fact, an event not in time but in God's eternity; God is always Father, Son and Spirit; the conception of Jesus does not mean that a new God-the-Son comes into being, but that God as Son in the man Jesus draws the creature man to himself, so that he himself "is" man.   

So far as the theology of the Church is concerned, does it not speak continually of the "physical" Sonship of Jesus, and does it not thereby reveal its mythical background? Indubitably the formula about the "physical" Sonship of Jesus is extremely unfortunate and wide open to misunderstanding; it shows that in about two thousand years theology has not succeeded in freeing its conceptual terminology from the shell of its Hellenistic origin. "Physical" is meant here in the sense of the ancient concept of "physis", that is, nature, or, better, "being". It signifies that which belongs to being.

"Physical Sonship" therefore means that Jesus is from God in his being, not just in his conscious being; the word consequently expresses opposition to the idea of the mere adoption of Jesus by God. Obviously the being-from-God indicated by the word "physical" is meant to be taken not on the plane of biological generation but on the plane of the divine being and its eternity. The word is asserting that in Jesus human nature was assumed by him who from eternity belongs "physically" (= really, by his being) to the tri-une relationship of the divine love.

If the conception of Jesus by the Virgin through God's creative power has nothing to do with his Sonship, at any rate directly, what kind of meaning does it possess?  The phrase "Son of God", in contrast to the simple expression "the Son", belongs to the Old Testament theology of election and hope, and marks out Jesus as the true heir to the promises, the king of Israel and of the world. The context in which the phrase is to be understood now becomes clearly visible: it is Israel's faith and hope, which, as we have said, did not remain completely unaffected by heathen hopes of miraculous births but gave them a completely new form and a totally changed meaning.

The Old Testament contains a whole series of miraculous births, always at decisive turning-points in the history of salvation: Isaac's mother, Sarah (Gen 18), Samuel's mother (1 Sam. 1-3)) and the anonymous mother of Samson (Judges 13) are all barren and all human hope of their being blessed with children has been abandoned. With all three the birth of the child who eventually contributes to Israel's salvation comes to pass as a gracious manifestation of the mercy of God, who makes the impossible possible (Gen 18.14; Luke 1.37), elevates the lowly (1 Sam 2.7; 1.11; Luke 1.52; 1.48) and puts down the mighty from their thrones. With Elizabeth, John the Baptist's mother, this process is continued (Luke 1.7-25, 36), and it reaches its climax and goal in Mary.

The meaning of the occurrence is always the same: the salvation of the world does not come from man and his own power; man must let it be bestowed upon him, and he can only receive it as a pure gift. The virgin birth is not a lesson in asceticism nor does it belong directly to the doctrine of Jesus' Sonship; it is first and last theology of grace, a proclamation of how salvation comes to us: in the simplicity of acceptance, as the voluntary gift of the love that redeems the world. This idea of salvation through God's power alone is formulated magnificently in the Book of Isaiah in the passage which runs: "Sing, O barren one, who did not bear; break forth into singing and cry aloud, you who have not been in travail! For the children of the desolate one will be more than the children of her that is married, says the Lord" (Is 54.1; cf Gal 4.27; Rom 4.17-22)

In Jesus, God has placed, in the midst of barren, despairing mankind, a new beginning which is not the product of human history but a gift from above. Even every mere human being represents something  unspeakably new, something more than the sum of its chromosomes and the product of a certain environment, in fact a new creature of God; but Jesus is the truly new, coming not from mankind's own resources but from the spirit of God. For this reason he is Adam for the second time (1 Cor 15.47) - a new incarnation begins with him.

In contrast to all those chosen before him Jesus not only receives the spirit of God; in his earthly existence he is only through the spirit and therefore he is the fulfillment of all prophets: he is the true prophet.

It should not be necessary to point out that all these assertions only have a meaning on the assumption that the happening whose meaning they seek to elucidate really took place. They are the interpretation of an event; if this event were removed they become downright dishonest.

Christian faith really means precisely the acknowledgement 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 though the creative power of God, whose spirit hovered over the waters at the very beginning, who created being out of nothing.   

The meaning of the divine symbol of the virgin birth, if properly understood, indicates at the same time the proper theological place for a devotion to Mary that lets itself be guided by the faith of the New Testament. Devotion to Mary cannot be based on a Mariology that represents a sort of miniature second edition of Christology - such a duplication is neither right nor justifiable on the evidence. If one wanted to indicate a department of theology to which Mariology belonged as its concrete illustration, it would probably be the doctrine of grace, which of course goes to form a whole with ecclesiology and anthropology. As the true "daughter of Sion", Mary is the image of the Church, the image of believing man, who can only come to salvation and to himself through the gift of love - through grace.

The saying with which Bernanos ends his 'Diary of a Country Priest' - "Everything is grace" - a saying in which a life which seemed to be only weakness and futility can see itself as full of riches and fulfilment - truly becomes in Mary, "full of grace" (Luke 1.28), a concrete reality. 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 laying aside waiting and putting its trust in doing, which -indispensable as it is - can never fill the void which threatens man when he does not find that absolute love which gives him, meaning, salvation, all that life really needs.
 

He Suffered ... was Crucified, Died and was Buried

Many devotional texts actually force one to think that Christian faith in the cross visualises a God whose unrelenting righteousness demanded a human sacrifice, the sacrifice of his own Son, and one turns away in horror from a righteousness whose sinister wrath makes the message of love incredible.
  This picture is as false as it is widespread. In the Bible the cross does not appear as part of a mechanism of injured right; on the contrary, in the Bible the cross is quite the reverse: it is the expression of the radical nature of the love which gives itself completely, in the process in which one is what one does, and does what one is; it is the expression of a life that is completely being for others.

The scriptural theology of the cross represents a real revolution as compared with the notions of expiation and redemption entertained by non-Christian religions, though it certainly cannot be denied that in the later Christian consciousness this revolution was largely neutralised and its whole scope seldom recognised. In other world religions expiation usually means the restoration of the damaged relationship with God by means of expiatory actions on the part of men. Almost all religions centre round the problem of expiation; they arise out of man's knowledge of his guilt before God and signify the attempt to remove this feeling of guilt, to surmount the guilt through conciliatory actions offered up to God. The expiatory activity by which men hope to conciliate the divinity and put him in a gracious mood stands at the heart of the history of religion.

In the New Testament the situation is almost completely reversed. It is not man who goes to God with a compensatory gift, but God who comes to man in order to give to him. He restores disturbed right on the initiative of his own power to love, by making unjust man just again, the dead living again, through his own creative mercy. His righteousness is grace; it is active righteousness, which sets crooked man straight, that is, bends him straight, makes him right. Here we stand before the twist which Christianity put into the history of religion.

The New Testament does not say that men conciliate God, as we really ought to expect, since after all it is they who have failed, not God. It says on the contrary that "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself" (2 Cor. 5:19). This is truly something new, something unheard of - the starting-point of Christian existence and the centre of New Testament theology of the cross: God does not wait until the guilty come to be reconciled; he goes to meet them and reconciles them. Here we can see the true direction of the incarnation, of the cross.

Accordingly, in the New Testament the cross appears primarily as a movement from above to below. It does not stand there as the work of expiation which mankind offers to the wrathful God, but as the expression of that foolish love of God's which gives itself away to the point of humiliation in order thus to save man; it is his approach to us, not the other way about. With this twist in the idea of expiation, and thus in the whole axis of religion, worship too, man's whole existence, acquires in Christianity a new direction. Worship follows in Christianity first of all in thankful acceptance of the divine deed of salvation. The essential form of Christian worship is therefore rightly called "Eucharistia", thanksgiving.   

Christian sacrifice does not consist in a giving of what God would not have without us but in our becoming totally receptive and letting ourselves be completely taken over by him. Letting God act on us - that is Christian sacrifice.

This is not the whole story, it is true. .. We find that in the New Testament the cross is explained by, among other things, ideas taken from Old Testament cult theology. The most consistent execution of this project is to be found in the Epistle to the Hebrews, which connects the death of Jesus on the cross with the ritual and theology of the Jewish feast of reconciliation and expounds it as the true reconciliation feast.

The Epistle to the Hebrews stresses the fruitlessness of ritual effort.  God does not seek bulls and goats but man; man's unqualified "yes" to God could alone form true worship. Everything belongs to God, but to man is lent the freedom to say yes or not, the freedom to love or to reject; love's free "yes" is the only thing for which God must wait - the only worship or sacrifice that can have any meaning.

In the light of faith in Christ, the Epistle to the Hebrews can dare to draw up this devastating balance sheet of the history of religion, although to express this view in a world seething with sacrifices must have  seemed a tremendous outrage. It can dare to make this unqualified assertion that religions have run aground because it knows that in Christ the idea  of the substitute, of the proxy, has acquired a new meaning. Christ, who from the ecclesiastical point of view was a layman and held no office in Israel's religious organisation, was - so the Epistle to the Hebrews says - the one true priest in the world.

Christ's death, which from a purely historical angle represented a completely profane event - the execution of a man condemned to death as a political offender - was in reality the one and only liturgy of the world, a cosmic liturgy, in which Jesus stepped, not in the limited arena of the liturgical performance, the temple, but publicly, before the eyes of the world, into the real temple, that is, before the face of God himself, in order to offer, not things, the blood of animals or anything like that, but himself (Heb 9.11ff).    

Let us note the fundamental reversal involved in the central idea of this epistle: what from the earthly point of view was a secular happening is the true worship for mankind, for he who performed it broke through the confines of the liturgical act and made truth: he gave himself. He took from man's hands the sacrificial offerings and put in their place his sacrificed personality, his own "I". When our text says that Jesus accomplished his expiation through his blood (Heb 9,12), this blood is again not to be understood as a material gift, a quantitatively measurable means of expiation; it is simply the concrete expression of a love  of which it is said that it extends "to the end."

The gesture of the love that gives all - this, and this alone, according to the Epistle to the Hebrews, was the real means by which the world was reconciled; therefore the hour of the cross is the cosmic day of reconciliation, the true and final feast of reconciliation. There is no other kind of worship and no other priest but he who accomplished it: Jesus Christ.   

Accordingly, the nature of Christian worship does not consist in the surrender of things, nor in any kind of destruction, an idea that has continually recurred since the 16th century in theories of the sacrifice of the Mass. .. Christian worship consists in the absoluteness of love, as it could only be poured out by the one in whom God's own love had become human love; and it consists in the new form of representation included in this love, namely that he stood for us and we let ourselves be taken over by him.

This love means that we can put aside our own attempts at justification, which at bottom are only excuses and range us against each other - just as Adam's attempt at justification was an excuse, a pushing of the guilt on  to the other, indeed in the last analysis an attempt to accuse God himself: "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate ..." (Gen 3.12). It demands that instead of indulging in the destructive rivalry of self-justification we accept the love of Jesus Christ that "stands in" for us, let ourselves be united in it, and thus become worshippers with him and in him.

In view of the New Testament's message of love, there is more and more of a tendency today to resolve the Christian religion completely into brotherly love, "fellowship", and not to admit any direct love of God or adoration of God: only the horizontal is recognised; the vertical of immediate relationship to God is denied. It is not difficult to see, after what we have said, how this at first sight very attractive conception fails to grasp not only the substance of Christianity but also that of true humanity. Brotherly love that aimed at self-sufficiency would become for this very reason the extreme egoism of self-assertion. It refuses its last openness, tranquility and selflessness if is does not also accept this love's need for redemption through him who alone loves sufficiently.

Man cannot perfect himself in the reciprocity of human fellowship alone; he can only do this in the co-operation of that pointless love which God himself glorifies. The pointlessness of simple adoration is humanity's highest possibility; it alone forms his true and final liberation.

According to the conclusions which we reached above, the Christian sacrifice is nothing other than the "For" that abandons itself, a process perfected in the man who is all exodus, all self-surpassing love. The governing principle of Christian worship is consequently this movement of exodus with its two-in-one direction towards God and fellow man. By carrying humanity to God, Christ incorporates it in his salvation. The reason why the happening on the cross is the bread of life " for the many" (Luke 22.19) is that he who was crucified has smelted the body of humanity into the "yes" of worship. It is completely "anthropocentric", entirely related to man, because it was radical theocentricity, delivery of the "I" and therefore of the creature man to God.

Now to the extent that this exodus of love is the ec-stasy of man outside himself, in which he is stretched out infinitely beyond himself, torn apart, as it were, far beyond is apparent capacity for being stretched, to the same extent worship (sacrifice) is always at the same time the cross, the pain of being torn apart, the dying of the grain of wheat that can only come to fruition in death. But it is thus at the same time clear that this element of pain is a secondary one, resulting only from a preceding primary one, from which alone it draws its meaning. The governing principle of the sacrifice is not destruction, but love. And even this principle only belongs to the sacrifice to the extent that love breaks down, opens up, crucifies, tears - as the form that love takes in a world characterised by death and self-seeking.

In the last analysis pain is the product and expression of Jesus Christ's being stretched out from being in God right down to the hell of "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Anyone who has stretched his existence so wide that he is simultaneously immersed in God and in the depths of the God-forsaken creature is bound to be torn asunder, as it were; such a one is truly "crucified". But this process of being torn apart is identical with love; it is its realisation to the extreme (John 13.1) and the concrete expression of the breadth that it creates.

Why should God take pleasure in the suffering of his own creature, indeed his own Son, or even see in it the currency with which reconciliation has to be purchased from him? The Bible and right Christian belief are far removed from such ideas. It is not pain as such that counts, but the breadth  of the love which spans existence so completely that it unites the distant and near, bringing God-forsaken man into relation with God. It alone gives the pain an aim and a meaning.

Is it not an unworthy concept of God to imagine for oneself 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 New Testament is the story of the God who of his own accord wished to become, in Christ, the omega - the last letter- in the alphabet of creation. It is the story of the God who is himself the act of love, the pure "For", and who therefore necessarily put on the disguise of the smallest worm (Psalm 22{21},7) It is the story of the God who identifies himself with his creature and in this contineri a minimo, in being grasped and overpowered by the least of his creatures, displays that "excess" which identifies him as God.

The cross is revelation. It does not reveal any particular thing, but God and man. It reveals who God is and who man is. .. The truth about man is that he is constantly assailing truth; the just man crucified is thus a mirror held up to man in which he sees himself unadorned. But the cross does not only reveal man; it also reveals God. God is such that he identifies himself with man right down into this abyss and that he judges him by saving him. In the abyss of human denial is revealed the still more inexhaustible abyss of the divine love. The cross is thus truly the centre of revelation, a revelation that does not reveal any previous unknown principles but reveals us to ourselves, by revealing us before God and God in our midst.
 

He Descended into Hell

On Good Friday our gaze remains fixed on the crucified Christ, but Holy Saturday is the day of the "death of God", the day which expresses the unparalleled experience of our age, anticipating the fact that God is simply absent, that the grave hides him, that he no longer awakes, no longer speaks, so that one no longer needs to gainsay him but can simply overlook him. "God is dead and ewe have killed him." This saying of Nietzsche's belongs linguistically to the tradition of Christian Passiontide piety; it expresses the content of Holy Saturday, "descended into hell."

In the Emmaus story (Luke 24:13-35), the disturbed disciples are talking of the death of their hope. To them, something like the death of God has happened: the point at which God finally seemed to have spoken has disappeared. God's envoy is dead, and so there seems to be a complete void. Nothing replies any more. But while they are there speaking of the death of their hope and can no longer see God they do not notice that this very hope stands alive in their midst; that "God", or rather the image they had formed of his promise, had to die so that he could live on a bigger scale. The image which they had formed of God, and into which they sought to compress him, had to be destroyed, so that over the ruins of the demolished house, as it were, they could see the sky again and him who remains the infinitely greater.

The article in the Creed about the Lord's descent into hell reminds us that not only God's speech but also his silence is part of the Christian revelation. God is not only the comprehensible word that comes to us; he is also the silent, inaccessible, uncomprehended and incomprehensible ground that eludes us. To be sure, in Christianity there is a primacy of the logos, of the word, over silence; God has spoken. God is word. But this does not entitle us to forget the truth of God's abiding concealment. Only when we have experienced him as silence may we hope to hear his speech too, which proceeds in silence. Christology reaches out beyond the cross, the moment when the divine love is tangible, into the death, the silence, and the eclipse of God. Can we wonder that the Church and the life of the individual are led again and again into this hour of silence, into the forgotten and almost discarded article, "Descended into hell"?

In Jesus' death-cry, (cf. Psalm 22 {21} .2) the prayer that rises from the sheer misery of God's seeming eclipse ends in praise of God's greatness. This cry of Jesus has been described as a prayer from hell, as the erection of the first commandment in the wilderness of God's apparent absence. "The Son still holds on to faith when faith seems to have become meaningless and the earthly reality proclaims the absent God of whom the first thief and the mocking crowd speak - not for nothing. His cry is not for life and survival, not for himself, but for the Father. His cry stands against the reality of the whole world." (Ernst Käsemann). After this do we still need to ask what prayer in our hour of darkness must be? Can it be anything else but the cry from the depths in company with the Lord who "has descended into hell" and who has established the nearness of God in the midst of abandonment by God?

In this last prayer of Jesus, as in the scene on the Mount of Olives, what appears as the innermost heart of his passion is not any physical pain but radical loneliness, complete abandonment. But in the last analysis what comes to light here is simply the abyss of loneliness of man in general, man who is alone in his innermost being. This loneliness, which is usually thickly overlaid but is nevertheless the true situation of man, is at the same time in fundamental contradiction with the nature of man, who cannot exist alone; he needs company. That is why loneliness is the region of fear, which is rooted in the exposure of a being that must exist but is pushed out into a situation which he cannot endure.

If there were such a thing as a loneliness which could no longer be penetrated and transformed by the word of another; if a state of abandonment were to arise which was so deep that no "You" could reach into it any more, then we should have real, total loneliness and frightfulness, what theology calls "hell". We can now define exactly what this word means: it denotes a loneliness which the word love can no longer penetrate and which therefore indicates the exposed nature of existence in itself.

In truth - one thing is certain: there exists a night into whose solitude no voice reaches; there is a door through which we can only walk alone - the door of death. In the last analysis all the fear in the world is fear of this loneliness. From this point of view it is possible to understand why the Old Testament has only one word for hell and death, the word sheol; in the last resort it regards both as identical. Death is absolute loneliness. But the loneliness into which love can no longer reach is - hell.

The Creed speaks of the descent into hell. This article asserts that Christ strode through the gate of our final loneliness, that in his passion he went down into the abyss of our abandonment. Where no voice can reach us any longer, there is he. Hell is thereby overcome, or, to be more accurate, death, which was previously hell, is hell no longer. Neither is the same any longer because there is life in the midst of death, because love dwells in it. Now only deliberate self-enclosure is hell or, as the Bible calls it, the second death (Rev 20.14, for example).

But death is no longer the path into icy solitude; the gates of the sheol have been opened. From this angle, I think, one can understand the images - which at first sight look so mythological - of the Fathers, who speak of fetching up the dead, of the opening of the gates. The apparently mythical passage in St Matthew's gospel becomes comprehensible too, the passage which says that at the death of Jesus tombs opened and the bodies of the saints were raised (Matt 27.52). The door of death stands open since life - love- has dwelt in death.
 

Rose Again From the Dead

Man's attempt "to be like God", his striving for autonomy, through which he wishes to stand on his own feet alone, means his death, for he just cannot stand on his own. If man - and this is the real nature of sin - nevertheless refuses to recognise his own limits and tries to be completely self-sufficient, then precisely by adopting this attitude he delivers himself up to death.

Of course man does understand that his life alone does not endure and that he must therefore strive to exist in others, so as to remain through them and in them in the land of the living. Two ways in particular have been tried. First, living on in one's children .... Secondly, by taking refuge in the idea of fame, which should make him really immortal if he lives on through all ages in the memory of others. But this second attempt of man to give himself immortality by existing-in-others fails just as badly as the first: what remains is not the self but only its echo, a mere shadow. So self-made immortality is really only a Hades a sheol: more non-being than being. The inadequacy of both ways lies partly in the fact that he who holds my being after  my death cannot carry this being itself but only its echo; and even more in the fact that even the other person to whom I have, so to speak, entrusted my continuance will not last - he too will perish.

Man has no permanence in himself and consequently can only continue to exist in another, but his existence in another is only shadowy and once again not final, because this other must perish too. If this is so, then only one could give me lasting stability: he who is, who does not come into existence and pass away again but abides in the midst of transience: the God of the living, who does not hold just the shadow and echo of my being, whose ideas are not just copies of reality. I myself am his thought, which establishes me more securely, so to speak, than I am in myself; his thought is not the posthumous shadow but the original source and strength of my being. In him I can stand as more than a shadow; in him I am truly closer to myself than I should be if I just tried to stay by myself.

We could see this from a different viewpoint. Only where someone is ready to put life second to love, for the sake of love, can love be stronger and more than death. If it is to be more than death, then it first must be more than mere life. But if it could be this, not just in intention but in reality, then that would mean at the same time that the power of love had risen superior to the power of the merely biological and taken it into its service. To use Teilhard de Chardin's terminology, where that took place, the decisive complexity or "complexification" would have occurred; bios too would be encompassed by and incorporated in the power of love. It would cross the boundary -death - and create unity where death divides.

We had said that as man has no permanence in himself his survival could only be brought about by his living on in another. And we had said, from the point of view of this "other", that only the love which takes up the beloved in itself, into its own being, could make possible this existence in the other. These two complementary aspects are mirrored again, so it seems to me, in the two New Testament ways of describing the resurrection of the Lord: "Jesus has risen" and "God (the Father) has awoken Jesus." Both formulas meet in the fact that Jesus' total love for men, which leads him to the cross, is perfected in total stepping-over to the Father and therein becomes stronger than death, because in this it is at the same time total "being held" by him.

Love founds immortality, and immortality proceeds from love alone. This statement to which we have now worked our way also means that he who has love for all has also founded immortality for all. That is precisely the meaning of the biblical statement that his resurrection is our life. The - to us - curious reasoning of St Paul in his first Epistle to the Corinthians now becomes comprehensible: if he has risen, then we have too, for then love is stronger than death; if he has not risen, then we have not either, for then the situation is still that death has the last word, nothing else (1 Cor 15.16ff)   

Either love is stronger than death or it is not. If it has become so in him, then it became so precisely as love for others. This also means, it is true, that our own love, left to itself, is not sufficient to overcome death; taken in itself it would have to remain an unanswered cry. It means that only his love, coinciding with God's own power of life and love, can found our immortality. Nevertheless, it still remains true that the mode of our immortality will depend on our mode of living.

It is quite clear that after his resurrection Christ did not go back to his previous earthly life, as we are told the young man of Naim and Lazarus did. He rose again to definitive life, which is no longer governed by the chemical and biological laws and therefore stands outside the possibility of death, in the eternity conferred by love. That is why the encounters with him are "appearances"; that is why he with whom people had sat at table two days earlier is not recognised by his best friends and, even when he is recognised remains alien: only where he grants vision is he seen; only when he opens men's eyes and makes their hearts open can the countenance of the eternal love that conquers death become recognisable in our mortal world, and in the new, different world, the world of him who is to come.

The resurrection narratives are something other and more than disguised liturgical scenes: they make visible the founding event on which all Christian liturgy rests. They testify to an approach which did not rise from the hearts of the disciples but came to them from outside, convinced them against their doubts and made them certain that the Lord had truly risen. He who lay in the grave is no longer there; he - really he himself - lives. He who had been transposed into the other world of God showed himself powerful enough to make it palpably clear that he himself stood opposite them again, that in him the power of love had really proved itself stronger than the power of death.

The comfortable attempt to spare oneself the belief in the mystery of God's mighty actions in this world and yet at the same time to have the satisfaction of remaining on the foundation of the Biblical message leads nowhere; it measures up neither to the honesty of reason nor the claims of faith. One cannot have both the Christian faith and "religion within the bounds of pure reason"; a choice is unavoidable. He who believes will see more and more clearly, it is true, how rational it is to have faith in the love that has conquered death.
 

Ascended into Heaven

There is no longer such a thing as a world arranged literally in three storeys. But was such a conception ever really intended in the articles of faith about the Lord's descent into hell and ascension into heaven? It certainly provided the imagery for them but it was just as certainly not the decisive factual element in them. On the contrary, the two assertions, together with faith in the historical Jesus, express the total range of human existence, which certainly spans three metaphysical dimensions if not three cosmic storeys. To that extent it is only logical that the "modern' attitude should dispense not only with the ascension and descent into hell but also with the historical Jesus, that is, with all three dimensions of human existence; what is left can only be a variously draped ghost, on which - understandably - no one any longer wishes to build anything serious.

Hell, existence in the definitive rejection of "being for", is not a cosmographical destination but a dimension of human nature, the abyss into which it reaches down at its lower end. We know today better than ever before that everyone's existence touches these depths; and since in the last analysis mankind is "one man" these depths affect not only the individual but also the one body of the whole human race, which must therefore bear the burden of them as a corporate whole. From this angle it can be understood once again how Christ, the "new Adam", undertook to bear the burden of these depths with us and did not wish to remain sublimely unaffected by them; conversely, of course, total rejection in all its unfathomability has only now become possible.

On the other hand, the ascension of Christ points to the opposite end of human existence, which stretches out an infinite distance above and below itself. This existence embraces, as the opposite pole to utter solitude, to the untouchability of rejected love, the possibility of contact with all  other men through the medium of contact with the divine love itself, so that human existence can find its geometrical resting place, so to speak, inside God's own being. The two possibilities of man thus covered by the words heaven and hell are, it is true, completely different in nature and can be quite clearly distinguished from each other. The depths we call hell man can only give to himself. Indeed, we must put it more pointedly: hell consists in man's being unwilling to receive anything, in his desire to be self-sufficient. It is the expression of enclosure in one's own being alone.

These depths of hell accordingly consist by nature of just this: that man will not accept, not take anything, but wants to stand entirely on his own feet, to be sufficient unto himself. If this becomes utterly radical, than man has become the untouchable, the solitary, the rejecter. Hell is wanting-only-to-be-oneself; what happens when man barricades himself up in himself. Conversely, it is the nature of that upper end of the scale which we have called heaven that it can only be received, just as one can only give hell to oneself. "Heaven" is by nature what one has not made oneself and cannot make oneself; in scholastic language it was said to be, as grace, a "donum indebitum et superadditum naturae" ("an unowed gift added on top of nature"). As fulfilled love, heaven can always only be granted to man; but hell is the loneliness of the man who will not accept it, who declines the status of a beggar and withdraws into himself.

Heaven is not to be understood as an everlasting place above the world, nor simply as an eternal metaphysical region. On the contrary, "heaven" and "the ascension of Christ" are indivisibly connected; it is only this connection that makes clear the christological, personal, history-centred meaning of the Christian tidings of heaven. Let us look at it from another angle: heaven is not a place which before Christ's ascension was barred off by a positive, primitive decree of God's, to be opened up one day in just as positive a way. On the contrary the reality of heaven only comes into existence through the confluence of God and man.

Heaven is to be defined as the contact of the being "man" with the being "God"; this confluence of God and man took place once for all in Christ with his stride over bios through death to new life. Heaven is accordingly that future of man and of mankind which the latter cannot give to itself, which is therefore closed to it so long as it waits for itself, and which was first and thoroughly opened up in the man whose field of existence was God and through whom God entered into the creature "man".

We described resurrection and ascension as the final merging of the being "man" with the being "God", a process that offers man the possibility of everlasting existence. We have tried to understand the two happenings as love's being stronger than death and thus as the decisive "mutation" of man and cosmos, in which the frontier of bios is broken down and a new field of existence created. If this is all correct, then it means the beginning of "eschatology", of the end of the world. With the crossing of the frontier of death the future dimension of mankind is opened up and its future has in fact already begun. It also thus becomes evident how the individual's hope of immortality and the possibility of immortality for mankind as a whole intertwine and meet in Christ, who may just as well be called the "centre" as, properly understood, the "end" of history.

Modern thinking usually lets itself be guided by the idea that eternity is imprisoned, so to speak, in its unchangeableness; God appears as the prisoner of his eternal plan conceived "before all ages". "Being" and "becoming" do not mingle. Eternity is thus understood in a purely negative sense as timelessness, as the opposite to time, as something that cannot make its influence felt in time for the simple reason that it would therefore cease to be unchangeable and itself become temporal. Fundamentally these ideas remain the products of a pre-Christian mentality which takes no account of a concept of God that finds utterance in a belief in creation and incarnation

But eternity is not the very ancient, which existed before time began, but the quite 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"; it is much rather the power of the present in all time. Eternity does not stand by the side of time, quite unrelated to it; it is the creatively supporting power of all time, embracing passing time in its own present and thus giving it the ability to  be. It is not timelessness but control of time. As the present that is contemporary with all ages it can also make its influence felt in any age.

The incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, by virtue of which the eternal God and temporal man meet in one single person, is nothing else than the last concrete manifestation of God's control of time. At this point of Jesus' human existence God took hold of time and drew it into himself. His power over time stands embodied before us, as it were, in Christ. Christ is really, as St John's gospel says, the "door" between God and man (John 10.9), the "mediator" (1 Tim 2.5), in whom the Eternal One has time. In Jesus we temporal beings can speak to the temporal one, our con-temporary; but in him, who with us is time, we simultaneously make contact with the Eternal One, because with us Jesus is time and with God eternity.

In his earthly life Jesus did not stand above time and space but lived from the midst of his time and in time. The humanity of Jesus, which placed him in the midst of that age, hits us in every line of the gospels; and we have, from many points of view, a clearer and more living picture of him than was vouchsafed to earlier periods. But this "standing in time" is not just an outward cultural and historical framework, behind which could be found somewhere ot other, untouched by it, the supratemporal essence of his real being; it is much rather an anthropological state of affairs, which profoundly affects the form of human existence itself.

Jesus has time and does not anticipate in sinful impatience the will of the Father. "Therefore the Son, who in the world has time for God, is the original place where God has time for the world. God has no other time for the world than in his Son; but in him he has all time" (Urs von Balthasar). God is not the prisoner of his eternity: in Jesus he has time - for us, and Jesus is thus in actual fact the "throne of grace" to which at any time we can "draw near with confidence" (Heb 4.16).
 

He Will Come Again to Judge the Living and the Dead

The cosmos is not just an outward framework of human history, not a static mould - a kind of container holding all kinds of living creatures which could just as well be poured into a different container. This means, on the positive side, that the cosmos is movement; that it is not just a case of history existing in it, that the cosmos itself is history. It does not merely form the scene of human history; before human history began and later with it, it is itself "history".

Finally, there is only one single all-embracing world-history, which for all the ups and downs, all the forwards and backwards that it exhibits, nevertheless has a general direction and goes "forward". Of course, to him who only sees a section of it, this piece, even though it may be relatively big, looks like a circling in the same spot. No direction is perceptible. It is only observed by him who begins to see the whole. But in this cosmic movement, as we have already seen, spirit is not just some chance by-product of development, of no importance to the whole; on the contrary, we were able to establish that, in this movement or process, matter and its evolution form the pre-history of spirit or mind.

The belief in the return of Jesus Christ and in the consummation of the world could be explained as the conviction that our history is advancing to an "omega" point, at which it will become finally and unmistakably clear that the element of stability which seems to us to be the supporting ground of reality, so to speak, is not mere unconscious matter; that on the contrary the real firm ground is mind. Mind holds being together, gives it reality, indeed is reality: it is not from below but from above that being receives its capacity to subsist. That there is such a thing as this process of "complexification" of material being through spirit, and from the latter its combination into a new kind of unity, can already be seen today in a certain sense in the remodelling of the world by technology.

In reality's susceptibility to manipulation the boundaries between nature and technology are already beginning to disappear; the two cannot be clearly separated from each other. To be sure, this analogy must be regarded as questionable in more than one respect. Yet such processes hint at a kind of world in which spirit and nature do not simply stand alongside each other, but spirit, in a new "complexification", draws the apparently merely natural into itself, thereby creating a new world which at the same time necessarily means the end of the old one. Now the "end of the world" in which the Christian believes is certainly something quite different from the total victory of technology. But the welding together of nature and spirit which occurs in it enables us to grasp in a new way how the reality of belief in the return of Christ is to be conceived: as faith in the final unification of reality by spirit or mind.

This assertion of the increasing "complexification" of the world through mind necessarily implies its unification round a personal centre, for mind is not just an undefined something or other; where it exists in its own specific nature it subsists as individuality, as person. It is true that there is such a thing as "objective mind", mind invested in machines, in works of the most varied kind; but in all these cases mind does not exist in its original, specific form; "objective mind" is always derived from subjective mind; it points back to person, mind's only real mode of existence. Thus the assertion that the world is moving towards a "complexification" through mind also implies that the cosmos is moving towards a unification in the personal.

This confirms once again the infinite precedence of the individual over the universal. This principle evolved earlier appears again her in all its importance The world is in motion towards unity in the person. The whole draws its meaning from the individual, not the other way about. Perception of this also justifies once again Christology's apparent positivism, the conviction - a scandal to men of all periods - that makes one individual the centre of history and of the whole. The intrinsic necessity of this "positivism" here becomes apparent afresh: if it is true that at the end stands the triumph of spirit, that is, the triumph of truth, freedom and love, then it is not just some force or other than finally ends up victorious; what stands at the end is a countenance. The omega of the world is a "you", a person, an individual.

The all-encompassing "complexification", the unification infinitely embracing all, is at the same time the final denial of all collectivism, the denial of the fanaticism of the mere idea, even the so-called "idea of Christianity". Man, person always takes precedence over the mere idea.

If the breakthrough to the ultra-complexity of the final phase is based on spirit and freedom, then it is by no means a neutral, cosmic drift; it includes responsibility. It does not happen of its own accord, like a physical progress, but rests on decisions. That is why the return of the Lord is not only salvation, not only the omega that sets everything right, but also judgement. Indeed at this stage we can actually define the meaning of judgement. It means precisely this, that the final stage of the world is not the result of a natural current but the result of responsibility based on freedom.

The New Testament clings fast, in spite of its message of grace, to the assertion that at the end men are judged "by their works" and no one can escape giving account of the way he has lived his life. There is a freedom which is not cancelled out even by race and indeed is brought by it face to face with itself: man's final fate is not forced upon him regardless of the decisions he has made in his life. This assertion is any case also necessary as a warning sign against false dogmatism and a false Christian self-confidence. It alone confirms the equality of men by confirming the identity of their responsibility. Since the days of the early Christian 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 the false confidence engendered by merely appealing to the Lord.

In himself man lives with the dreadful knowledge that his power to destroy is infinitely greater than his power to build up. But this same man knows that in Christ the power to build up has proved itself infinitely stronger. This is the source of a profound freedom, a knowledge of God's unrepining love; he sees through all our errors and remains well disposed to us. It becomes possible to do one's own work fearlessly; it has shed its sinister aspect because it has lost its power to destroy: the issue of the world does not depend on us but lies in God's hands

At the same time the Christian knows on the other hand that he is not free to do whatever he pleases, that his activity is not a game which God allows him and does not take seriously. He knows that he must answer for his actions, that he owes an account as a steward of what has been entrusted to him. There can only be responsibility where there is someone to be responsible to, someone to put the questions. Faith in the last judgement holds this questioning of our life over our heads so that we cannot forget it for a moment. Nothing and no one empowers us to trivialise the tremendous seriousness involved in such knowledge; it shows our life to be a serious business and precisely by doping so gives it its dignity.

"To judge the living and the dead" - this also means that no one but he has the right to judge in the end. This implies that the unrighteousness of the world does not have the last word, not even by being wiped out indifferently in a universal act of grace; on the contrary, there is a last court of appeal which preserves justice, in order thus to be able to perfect love. A love that overthrew justice would create injustice and thus cease to be anything but a caricature of love. true love is excess of justice, excess that goes further than justice, but never destruction of justice, which must be and must remain the basic form of love.

Of course, one must guard against the opposite extreme. It cannot be denied that faith in the judgement has at times assumed in the Christian consciousness a form in which, in practice, it was bound to lead to the destruction of the full faith in the redemption and the promise of mercy. The example always adduced is the profound contrast between "Maran atha" and "Dies irae" The early Christians, with their cry, "Our Lord, come" (Maran atha), interpreted the second coming of Jesus as an event full of hope and joy, stretching their arms out longingly towards it as the moment of the great fulfilment.   

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 pain and terror, and to which he looks forward with fear and dread. The return of Christ is then only judgement, the day of the great reckoning which threatens everyone. 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.   

"From thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead." Of course, in the circles which formed the spiritual home of the Creed the original Christian tradition was very much alive; the phrase about the last judgement was taken in self-evident conjunction with the message of mercy. The statement that it is Jesus who judges immediately tinged the judgement with hope.

I should just like to quote a passage from the so-called "Second Epistle of Clement" in which this becomes quite clear: "Brothers, we must think of Jesus as God, as him who judges the living and the dead. We must not think little of our salvation, for by thinking little of him we also think little of our hope." Here the real emphasis of the Creed becomes evident: it is not simply - as one might expect - God, the Infinite, the Unknown, the Eternal, who judges. On the contrary, he has handed the judgement over to one who, as man, is our brother. It is not a stranger who judges us but he whom we know in faith. The judge will not advance to meet us as the quite other, but as one of us, who knows human existence from the inside and has suffered.

Thus over the judgement glows the dawn of hope; it is not only the day of wrath but the second coming of our Lord. One is reminded of the mighty vision of Christ with which the Book of Revelation begins (1.9-19): the seer sinks down as though dead before this being full of sinister power. But the Lord lays his hand on him and says to him as once in the days when they were crossing the Lake of Genessaret in wind and storm: "Fear not, it is I" (1.17). The Lord of all power is that Jesus whose comrade the visionary had once been in faith. The Creed's article about the judgement transfers this very idea to our meeting with the judge of the world.

On that day of fear the Christian will be allowed to see in happy wonder that he "to whom all power is given in heaven and on earth" (Matt. 28.18) was the companion in faith of his days on earth, and it is as if through the words of the Creed Jesus were already laying his hands on him and saying: Be without fear, it is I. Perhaps the problem of the intertwining of justice and mercy can be answered in no more beautiful way than it is in the idea that stands in the background of our Creed.
 

The Spirit and the Church

In the Creed, "I believe in the Holy Spirit" speaks, not of God's inner life but of "God facing outward", of the Holy Spirit as the power through which the risen Lord remains present in the history of the world as the principle of a new history and a new world ...

Teaching about the Church must take its departure from the teaching about the Holy Spirit and its gifts. But its goal lies in a doctrine of the history of God with men or, alternatively, of the function of the story of Christ for mankind as a whole. This indicates at the same time in what direction Christology must evolve. It is not to be developed as a doctrine of God's taking root in the world, a doctrine which, starting from Jesus' humanity, interprets the Church in an all too worldly fashion. Christ remains present through the Holy Spirit with all his openness and breadth and freedom, which by no means exclude the institutional form but limit its claims and do not allow it simply to make itself the same as worldly institutions.

"I believe ... in the communion of saints, in the forgiveness of sins ..". Both statements are to be understood as concretisations of the words about the Holy Spirit, as descriptions of the way in which this Spirit works in history. Both have a directly sacramental meaning of which we are hardly aware today. The saying about the communion of saints refers first of all to the Eucharistic community which through the body of the Lord binds the Churches scattered all over the earth into one Church. Thus originally the word "sanctorum" ("of the holy ones") does not refer to persons but means the holy gifts, the holy thing, granted to the Church in her Eucharistic feast as the real bond of unity. Thus the Church is not defined as a matter of offices and organisation but on the basis of her worship of God: as a community at one table round the risen Christ who gathers and unites them everywhere.

Of course, very soon people began to include in this idea the persons who themselves are united among themselves and sanctified by God's one, holy gift. The Church began to be seen not just as the unity of the Eucharistic table but also as the community of those who through this table are united among themselves. Then from this point a cosmic breadth very soon entered into the concept of Church: the communion of saints spoken of here extends beyond the frontier of death; it binds together all those who have received the one Spirit and his one, life-giving power.

The phrase about the forgiveness of sins, on the other hand, refers to the other fundamental sacrament of the Church, namely baptism; and from there it came very soon to include the sacrament of penance .. The fact remains even now that one cannot become a Christian by birth, but only by rebirth: Christianity only ever comes into being by a man's turning his life round, turning away from the self-satisfaction of mere existence and being "converted". In this sense baptism remains, as the start of a lifelong conversion, the fundamental pattern of the Christian existence, as the phrase about the "remission of sins" is intended to remind us.

The Church is understood as proceeding from the Holy Spirit, as the centre of the Spirit's activity in the world. In concrete terms, it is seen from the two angles of Baptism (Penance) and the Eucharist. This sacramental approach produces a completely theocentric understanding of the Church: the foreground is occupied not by the group of men composing it but by the gift of God which turns man round towards a new being which he cannot give to himself, to a communion which he can only receive as a gift. Yet precisely this theocentric image of the Church is entirely human, entirely real; by centring around conversion and unification, and understanding both as a process that cannot be brought to completion within history, it reveals the human connection in meaning between sacrament and Church.

Thus the "objective" view (from the angle of the gift of God) brings the personal element into play of its own accord: the new being of forgiveness leads us into fellowship with those who live from forgiveness, forgiveness establishes communion, and communion with the Lord in the Eucharist leads necessarily to the communion of the converted, who all eat one and the same bread, to become in it "one body" (1 Cor 10.17) and indeed "one single new man" (cf  Eph 2.15)

The profession of faith in the "resurrection of the flesh" and "life everlasting", are to be understood as the unfolding of faith in the Holy Spirit and in his transforming power, whose final effect they depict. For the prospect of resurrection, on which the whole section here converges, follows necessarily from faith in the transformation of history that started with the resurrection of Jesus. With this event, as we have seen, the frontier of bios, in other words death, was crossed and a new continuum was opened up: the biological has been overtaken by the spirit, by love, which is stronger than death. The barrier of death has been broken through and a definitive future opened up for man and world.

The sight of the omega of world history, in which everything will be fulfilled, results from an inner necessity from faith in the God who himself wished to be, in the cross, the omega of the world, its last letter. Precisely by this he has made the omega into his point, so that one day love is definitively stronger than death and out of the "complexification" of bios by love the final complex emerges, the finality of the person and the finality of the unity that comes from love. Because God himself became a mere worm, the last letter in the alphabet of creation, the last letter has become his letter and thereby turned history towards the final victory of love: the cross really is the salvation of the world.
 

The Holy Catholic Church

We are tempted to say, if we are honest with ourselves, that the Church is neither holy nor Catholic: the Second Vatican Council itself ventured to the point of speaking no longer merely of the holy Church but of the sinful Church, and the only reproach it incurred was that of still being far too timorous; so deeply aware are we all of the sinfulness of the Church. This may well be partly due to the Lutheran theology of sin and also to an assumption arising out of dogmatic prejudgements. But what makes these "dogmatics" so reasonable is their harmony with our own experience.

The centuries of the Church's history are so filled with human failure that we can quite understand Dante's ghastly vision of the Babylonian whore sitting in the Church's chariot; and the dreadful words of William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris in the thirteenth century, seem perfectly comprehensible. William said that the barbarism of the Church must make everyone who saw it go rigid with horror: "Bride is she no more, but a monster of frightful ugliness and ferocity ..."

The catholicity of the Church seems just as questionable as its holiness. The one rock of the Lord is torn between the disputing parties, the one Church is divided up into many Churches, every one of which claims more or less insistently to be alone in the right. And so for many people today the Church has become the main obstacle to belief. They can no longer see in it anything but the human struggle for power, the petty spectacle of those who, with their claim to administer official Christianity, seem to stand most in the way of the true spirit of Christianity.

There is no theory in existence that could refute such ideas by mere reason, just as conversely these ideas themselves do not proceed from mere reason but from the bitterness of a heart which may perhaps have been disappointed in its high hopes and now, in the pain of wronged love, can see only the destruction of its hopes. How, the, are we to reply? In the last analysis one can only confess why one can still love this Church in faith, why one still dares to recognise in the distorted features the countenance of the holy Church.

As we have already seen, in all these statements of faith the word "holy" does not apply in the first place to the holiness of human persons but refers to the divine gift which bestows holiness in the midst of human unholiness. The Church is not called "holy" in the Creed because its members, collectively and individually, are holy, sinless men  - this dream, which appears afresh in every century, has no place in the waking world of our text, however movingly it may express a human longing which man will never abandon until a new heaven and a new earth really grant him what this age  will never give him. Even at this point we can say that the sharpest critics of the Church in our time secretly live on this dream and, when they find it disappointed, bang the door of the house shut again and denounce it as a deceit.

The holiness of the Church consists in that power of sanctification which God exerts in it in spite of human sinfulness. We come up here against the real mark of the "New Covenant": in Christ God has bound himself to men, has let himself be bound by them. The New Covenant no longer rests on the reciprocal keeping of the agreement; it is granted  by God as grace which abides even in the face of man's faithlessness. it is the expression of God's love, which will not let itself be defeated by man's incapacity but always remains well-disposed towards him, welcomes him again and again precisely because he is sinful, turns to him, sanctifies him and loves him.   

Because of the Lord's devotion, never more to be revoked, the Church is the institution sanctified by him for ever, an institution in which the holiness of the Lord becomes present among men. But it is really and truly the holiness of the Lord that becomes present in it and that chooses again and again as the vessel of his presence - with a paradoxical love - the dirty hands of men. It is holiness that radiates as the holiness of Christ from the midst of the Church's sin. So to the faithful the paradoxical figure of the Church, in which the divine so often presents itself in such unworthy hands, in which the divine is only ever present in the form of a "nevertheless" , is the sign of the "nevertheless" of the ever greater love shown by God.

The existing interplay of God's loyalty and man's disloyalty which characterises the structure of the Church is grace in dramatic form, so to speak, through which the reality of grace as the pardoning of those who are in themselves unworthy continually becomes visibly present in history. One could actually say that precisely in its paradoxical combination of holiness and unholiness the Church is in fact the shape taken by grace in this world.

In the human dream of a perfect world, holiness is always envisaged as untouchability by sin and evil, as something unmixed with the latter; there always remains in some form or other a tendency to think in terms of black and white, a tendency to cut out and reject mercilessly the current form of the negative (which can be conceived in widely varying terms). In contemporary criticism of society and in the actions in which it vents itself, this merciless side always present in human ideals is once again only too evident.

The aspect of Christ's holiness that upset his contemporaries was the complete absence of this condemnatory note - fire did not fall on the unworthy nor were the zealous allowed to pull up the weeds which they saw growing luxuriantly on all sides. On the contrary, this holiness expressed itself precisely as mingling with the sinners whom Jesus drew into his vicinity, as mingling to the point where he himself was made "to be sin" and bore the curse of the law in execution as a criminal - complete community of fate with the lost (cf. 2 Cor 5.21; Gal 3.13). He has drawn sin to himself, made it his lot and so revealed what true "holiness" is: not separation but union, not judgement but redeeming love.

Is the Church not simply the continuation God's deliberate plunge into human wretchedness, of Jesus' habit of sitting at table with sinners, of his mingling with the misery of sin to the point where he actually seems to sink under its weight? Is there not revealed in the unholy holiness of the Church, as opposed to man's expectation of purity, God's true holiness, which is love, love which does not keep its distance in a sort of aristocratic, untouchable purity but mixes with the dirt of the world, in order thus to overcome it? Can therefore the holiness of the Church be anything else but the mutual support which comes, of course, from the fact that all of us are supported by Christ?

I must admit that to me this unholy holiness of the Church has in itself something  infinitely comforting about it. Would one not be bound to despair in face of a holiness that was spotless and could only operate on us by judging us and consuming us by fire? Who would dare to assert of himself that he did not need to be borne by others, indeed borne up by them? And how can someone who lives on the forbearance of others himself renounce forbearance? Is it not the only gift he can offer in return, the only comfort remaining to him, that he endures just as he too is endured?

Holiness in the Church begins with forbearance and leads to bearing up; where there is no more bearing there is no more bearing up either, and existence, lacking support, can only sink into the void. People may say that such words express a weakly existence - but it is part of being a Christian to accept the impossibility of autonomy and the weakness of one's own resources. At bottom there is always hidden pride at work when criticism of the Church adopts that tone of rancourous bitterness which today is already beginning to become a fashionable habit.

Unfortunately it is accompanied only too often by a spiritual emptiness in which the specific nature of the Church as a whole is no longer seen, in which it is only regarded as a political instrument whose organisation is felt to be pitiable or brutal, as the case may be, as if the real function of the Church did not lie beyond organisation, in the comfort of the Word and of the sacraments which she provides in good and bad days alike.

Those who really believe do not attribute too much importance to the struggle for the reform of ecclesiastical ritual. They live on what the Church always is; and if one wants to know what the Church really is, one must go to them. For the Church is most present not where organising, reforming and governing are going on but in those who simply believe and receive from her the gift of faith that is life to them. Only he who has experienced how, regardless of changes in her ministers and forms, the Church raises men up, gives them a home and a hope, a home that is hope - the path to eternal life - only he who has experienced this knows what the Church is, both in days gone by and now.

The Church lives from the struggle of the unholy to gain holiness, just as of course this struggle lives from the gift of God, without which it could not exist. But this effort only becomes fruitful and constructive if it is inspired by the spirit of forbearance, by real love. And here we have arrived at the criterion by which that critical struggle for better holiness must always be judged, a criterion that is not only not in contradiction with forbearance but is demanded by it, This criterion is constructiveness. A bitterness that can only destroy stands self-condemned. A slammed door can, it is true, become a sign that shakes up those inside. But the idea that one can do more constructive work in isolation than in fellowship with others is just as much of an illusion as the notion of a Church of "holy people" instead of a "holy Church" that is holy because the Lord bestows holiness on her as a quite unmerited gift.

The basic  elements of the Church appear as forgiveness, conversion, penance, eucharistic communion, and hence plurality and unity: plurality of the local Churches which yet only remain "the Church" through incorporation in the unity of the one Church. This unity is first and foremost the unity of Word and sacrament: the Church is one through the one Word and the one bread. The episcopal organisation stands in the background as the means to this unity. It is not there for its own sake but belongs to the category of means; its position is summed up by the phrase "in order to ": it serves to turn the unity of the local Churches in themselves and among themselves into a reality. The function of the Bishop of Rome would thus be to form the next stage in the category of means.

One thing is clear: the Church is not to be deduced from her organisation; the organisation is to be understood from the Church. But at the same time it is clear that for the visible Church visible unity is more than "organisation". The concrete unity of the common faith testifying to itself in the word and in the common table of Jesus Christ, is an essential part of the sign which the Church is to erect in the world. Only if she is "catholic", that is, visibly one in spite of all her variety, does she correspond to the demand of the Creed.

In a world torn apart the Church is to be the sign and means of unity, she is to bridge nations, races and classes and unite them. How often she has failed in this, we know: even in antiquity it was infinitely difficult for her to be simultaneously the Church of the barbarians and of the Romans; in modern times she was unable to prevent strife between the Christian nations; and today she is till not succeeding in so uniting rich and poor that the excess of the former becomes the satisfaction of the latter - the ideal of sitting at a common table remains largely unfulfilled. Yet even so one must not forget all the imperatives that have issued from the claim of catholicity; above all, instead of reckoning up the past, we should face the challenge of the present and try in it not only to profess catholicity in the Creed but to make it a reality in the life of our torn world.
 

The Resurrection of the Body

The idea of immortality denoted in the Bible by the word "resurrection" is an immortality of the "person" of the one creation "man". In Greek thought the typical man is a perishable creature which as such does not live on but goes two different ways in accordance with its heterogeneous formation out of body and soul; but according to the biblical belief it is precisely this being, man, that as such goes on existing, even if transformed.

It is a question of a "dialogic" immortality (= awakening); that is, immortality results not simply from the self-evident inability-to-die of the indivisible but from the saving deed of the lover who has the necessary power: man can no longer totally perish because he is known and loved by God. All love wants eternity, and God's love not only wants it but effects it and is it. In fact the biblical idea of awakening grew directly out of this dialogal theme: he who prays knows in faith that God will restore the right (Job 19.25ff; Ps 73.23ff); faith is convinced that those who have suffered in the interests of God will also receive a share in the redemption of the promise (2 Macc 7.9ff).

Immortality as conceived by the Bible proceeds not from the personal force of what is in itself indestructible but from being drawn into the dialogue with the Creator; that is why it must be called awakening. Because the Creator means not just the soul but the man physically existing in the midst of history and gives him immortality, it must be called "awakening of the dead" = "of men". It should be noted here that even in the formula of the Creed, which speaks of the "resurrection of the body", the word "body" means in effect  "the world of man" (in the sense of biblical expressions like "all flesh will see God's salvation" etc; even here the word is not meant in the sense of a corporality isolated from the soul.

In the last analysis the Old Testament by itself leaves the question of the future of man in the air. Only with Christ, the man who is "one with the Father", the man through whom the being "man" has entered into God's eternity, does the future of man finally appear open. Only in him, the "second Adam", is the question of man's identity finally answered. Christ is man, completely; to that extent the question who we men are is present in him. But he is at the same time God speaking to us, the "Word of God". In him the conversation between God and man which has been going  on since the beginning of history has entered a new phase: in him the Word of God became "flesh" and was really injected into our existence.

But if the dialogue of God with man means life, if it is true that God's partner in the dialogue himself has life precisely by being addressed by him who lives for ever, then this means that Christ, as God's word to us, is himself "the resurrection and the life" (John 11.25). It also means that the entry into Christ known as faith becomes in a qualified sense an entry into that being known and loved by God which is immortality: "Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life" (John 3.15; 3.36; 5.24). Only from this angle is it possible to understand the train of thought of the fourth evangelist, who in his account of the Lazarus episode wants to make the reader understand that resurrection is not just a distant happening at the end of the world but happens now through faith. Whoever believes is in the conversation with God which is life and which outlast death.

At this point, too, the "dialogic" strand in the biblical concept of immortality, the one related directly to God, and the "human fellowship" strand meet and join. For in Christ, the man, we meet God; but in him we also meet the community of those others whose path to God runs through him and so towards one another. The orientation towards God is in him at the same time towards the community of mankind, and only the acceptance of this community is movement towards God, who does not exist apart from Christ and thus not apart either from the whole context of the history of human and its common task.

The essential content of the biblical pronouncements about the resurrection is not the conception of a restoration of bodies to souls after a long interval; their aim is to tell men that they, they themselves, live on; not by virtue of their own power but because they are known and loved by God in such a way that they can no longer perish. In contrast to the dualistic conception of immortality expressed in the Greek body-soul schema, the biblical formula of immortality through awakening is trying to impart a collective and dialogic conception of immortality: the essential part of man, the person, remains; that which has ripened in the course of this earthly existence of corporeal spirituality and spiritualised corporeality goes on existing in a different fashion. It goes on existing because it lives in God's memory.

Because it is the man himself who will live, not just an isolated soul, the element of human fellowship is also part of the future; for this reason the future of the individual man will only then be full when the future of humanity is fulfilled.

The immortality which we have called, precisely because of its dialogic character, "awakening" falls to the lot of man, every man, as man, and is not some secondary "supernatural" addition. But we must then go on to ask: What really makes man into man? To that we shall have to answer: The distinguishing mark of man, seen from above, is his being addressed by God, the fact that he is God's partner in a dialogue, the being called by God. Seen from below, this means that man is the being that can think of God, that being opened on to transcendence. The point here is not whether he really does think of God, really does open himself to him, but that he is fundamentally the being who is in himself capable of doing so, even if in fact, for whatever reasons, he is perhaps never able to utilise this capacity.

"Having a spiritual soul" means precisely being willed, known and loved by God in a special way; it means being a creature called by God to an eternal dialogue and therefore capable for its own part of knowing God and of replying to him. What we call in substantialist language "having a soul" will be described in a more historical, actual language as "being God's partner in a dialogue". This does not mean that talk of the soul is false (as is sometimes asserted today by a one-sided and uncritical biblical approach); in one respect it is indeed even necessary to describe the whole of what is involved here. But on the other hand it also needs to be complemented if we are not to fall back into a dualistic conception which cannot do justice to the dialogic and personalistic view of the Bible.

Is there really such a thing as a resurrected body or can the whole thing be reduced to a mere symbol for the immortality of the person? In 1 Cor 15, St Paul tries to provide an answer, so far as such a thing is at all possible on this point which lies beyond the limits of our imagination and those of the world accessible to us. Many of the images employed by Paul have become alien to us: but his answer as a whole is still the noblest, boldest and most convincing one ever formulated to this question.

In 1 Corinthians 15, verse 50 seems to me to be a sort of key to the whole; "I tell you this, brethren: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable." It seems to me that this sentence occupies much the same position in its text as John 6:63 in his gospel. There it says, just after the real presence  of the flesh and blood of Jesus in the Eucharist has been sharply emphasised: "It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail." In both the Johannine and the Pauline texts it is a question of developing the Christian realism of "the Flesh."

In John the realism of the sacraments, that is, the realism of Jesus' resurrection and of his "flesh" that comes to us from it, is emphasised; in Paul it is a question of the realism of the resurrection of the "flesh, of the resurrection of Christians and of the salvation achieved for us in it. But both passages also contain a sharp counterpoint which emphasises Christian realism as realism beyond the physical world, realism of the Holy Spirit, as opposed to a purely worldly, quasi-physical realism.

Here English cannot compete with the ambiguity of biblical Greek. In Greek the word "soma" means something like "body", but at the same time it also means "the self". And this "soma" can be "sarx", that is, "body" in the earthly, historical, and thus chemical, physical, sense; but it can also be "breath" - according to the dictionary it would then have to be translated "spirit"; in reality this means that the self, which now appears in a body that can be conceived in chemico-physical terms, can, again, appear definitively in the guise of a trans-physical reality.

In Paul's' language "body" and "spirit" are not opposites; the opposites are called "fleshly body" and "body in the fashion of the spirit". We do not need to try here to pursue the complicated historical and philosophical problems posed by this. One thing at any rate may be fairly clear: Both John (6.53) and Paul (1 Cor 15.50) state with all possible emphasis that the "resurrection of the flesh", the "resurrection of the body" is not a "resurrection of physical bodies."

Paul teaches not the resurrection of physical bodies but the resurrection of persons, and this is not the return of the "fleshly body", that is, the biological structure, an idea which he expressly describes as impossible ("the perishable cannot become imperishable"), but in the different form of the life of the resurrection as shown in the risen Lord. Has then the resurrection no relation at all to matter? And does this make the "Last Day" completely pointless in comparison with the life that always comes from the call of the Lord?

Basically we have already answered this last question in our reflections on the return of Christ. If cosmos is history and if matter represents a moment in the history of spirit, then there is no such thing as an eternal, neutral combination of matter and spirit but a final "complexity" in which the world finds its omega and unity. In that case there is a final connection between matter and spirit in which the destiny of man and of the world is consummated, even if it is impossible for us today to define the nature of this connection. In that case there is such a thing as a "last Day", on which the destiny of the individual man becomes full because the destiny of mankind is fulfilled.

The goal of the Christian is not private bliss but the whole. He believes in Christ, and for that reason he believes in the future of the world, not just in his own future. He knows that this future is more than he can himself create. He knows that there is a meaning which he is quite incapable of destroying. Is he therefore to sit quietly with his hands in his lap? On the contrary; because he knows that there is such a thing as meaning he can and must cheerfully and undismayed do the work of history, even though from his little section of it he will have the feeling that it is a task like that of Sisyphus and that the stone of human destiny is rolled anew, generation after generation, up the hill only to roll down again once more and nullify all previous efforts.

Whoever believes knows that things move forward, not in a circle. Whoever believes knows that history is not like Penelope's tapestry, which was always being woven anew only to be undone again. Even the Christian may be assailed by the nightmares, induced by the fear of fruitlessness, out of which the pre-Christian world created these moving images of the anxiety that all human activity is vain. But his nightmare is pierced by the saving, transforming voice of reality: "Have courage, I have conquered the world "(John 16.33). The new world, with the description of which, in the image of the final Jerusalem, the Bible ends, is no Utopia but certainty, which we advance to meet in faith. A salvation of the world does exist - that is the confidence which supports the Christian and which still makes it rewarding even today to be a Christian.

PLEASE READ IT ALL!

Introduction to Christianity
by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
Available from
Ignatius Press
ISBN 1586170295