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.

Top

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.

Top

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.
m to Yahweh),
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.

Top

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."

Top

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.

Top

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.

Top

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.

Top

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. f
            to a
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.

Top

    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.".
            a
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.
            a
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.
            a
The overstepping of the greatest and the reaching down into the smallest is the true nature of absolute spirit.
            a
Any attempt to reduce God to the scope of our own comprehension leads to the absurd.
            a
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.
            a
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.
c             a
God is Three-in-One. He stands above singular and plural. He bursts both categories.
            a
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.
            a
The acknowledgement that God is a person in the guise of a triple personality explodes the naive anthropomorphic concept of person.
            a
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.
            a
Faith which is not love is not a really Christian  faith - it only seems to be such.

Top

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.
            a
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.
            a
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.
            a
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.
            a
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).
            a
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.
            a
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.
            a
Human righteousness can only be attained by abandoning one's own claims and being generous to man and God.
            a
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.
            a
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).
            a
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.
            a
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.
            a
God's righteousness is grace; it is active righteousness, which sets crooked man right, that is, bends him straight, makes him right.
            a
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.
            a
Mary appears as the temple on to which descends the cloud in which Christ walks into the midst of history.
            a
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.
            a
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.
            a
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.
            a
"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.
            a
The light of Jesus is reflected in the saints and shines out again from them.
            a
"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.
            a
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.
            a
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.
            a
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.
            a
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.
            a
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.
            a
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.
            a
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.
            a
a
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.

Top

I believe in God ..

"Yahweh, 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.

Top

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.

Top

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.    

Top

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.    

Top

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.    

Top

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.

Top

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.    

Top

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.

Top

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.    

Top

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)

Top

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.

Top

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. 

Top

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.

Top

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.

Top

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.

Top

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.

Top

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".

Top

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."

Top

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."

Top

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."      

Top

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.

Top

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.    

Top

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)     

Top

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".     

Top

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. 

Top

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.

Top

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.

Top

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.

Top

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.    

Top

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.

Top

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 hm - to that extent Christ is the end, but it must enter into him - to that extent he is the real beginning.    

Top

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)

Top

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.

Top

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.

Top

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.

Top

"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.

Top

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 fulfilment 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.

T