On the Way to Jesus Christ

by Joseph Ratzinger

“No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known”, says the Gospel of John (1:18). Indeed, no one has seen God. The visions of the great enlightened personages in the history of religion still remain visions from afar, “in shadows and images”. Only God knows himself completely. Only God sees God. And therefore only someone who is God can really bring tidings about him and put the contradictory visions together into a whole—even though, of course, what is said in human words can only reflect from a distance the splendor of the incomprehensible and, for us, blinding light of God’s own truth.

Only HE is God; all the others are groping at a distance for God. Only he can say: “I am the way, the truth, and the life”; all the others may point out stretches along the way, but they are not the way. Above all: in Jesus Christ, God and man, the Infinite and the finite, the Creator and the creature are joined together. Man has found a place in God. Christ alone can overcome the infinite distance between Creator and creature. Only he who is both man and God can be the ontological bridge leading from the one to the other. And therefore he is this for everyone, not only for some. Just as truth is only one for all, so too, only God himself, the One, can be the bridge leading from himself to himself and also from himself to man and back to God: in the humanity of the Son.

Today it has become an irresistibly forceful prejudice to dismiss as simplistic and at the same time arrogant those who are reputed to believe that they “have” the truth. Such people are supposedly incapable of dialogue and ultimately cannot be taken seriously. For nobody “has” the truth.

what kind of a search is this that can never reach a conclusion? Is it really searching, or is it just an unwillingness to find, because what is found is not supposed to exist? And in reality does it not distort to the point of caricature the thinking of those who are said to believe that they “have” the truth? Naturally, truth cannot be a possession; my relationship to it must always be a humble acceptance,

Is it not a degradation of man and of his longing for God to claim that we human beings are merely groping in the dark forever? Hand in hand with this, furthermore, goes the real presumption, namely, that we and we alone would like to take God’s place and determine who we are and what we do

In the writings of Gregory of Nyssa as well as Augustine there are magnificent passages that set forth the infinitude of God’s greatness and declare that all finding prompts further searching and that it will be our eternal joy to seek God’s face, that is, to walk endlessly into the infinite in an ever-new and joyful discovery, and thus to receive the adventure of eternal love as an answer to our thirst for happiness.

Only in this way can the missionary task be understood. It cannot mean spiritual colonialism, the subjection of others to my culture and my ideas. The model for the missions is clearly prescribed in the way of the apostles and of the early Church, especially in the commissioning discourses of Jesus. Missionary work requires, first and foremost, being prepared for martyrdom, a willingness to lose oneself for the sake of the truth and for the sake of others.

For he knows that he finds himself by losing himself, that only the grain of wheat that has died bears much fruit. Someone who can both believe and say, “We have found Love”, has to pass this gift on. He knows that in doing so he does no one violence, does not destroy anyone’s identity, does not disrupt cultures, but rather sets them free to realize their own great potential; he knows that he is fulfilling a responsibility: “Necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” (1 Cor 9:16).

The “talent” that is given to us, the treasure of the truth, must not be hidden; it must be spent boldly and courageously, so that it will take effect and (to change the metaphor) permeate and renew humanity as leaven. Today we in the West are busy burying the treasure—out of cowardice when faced with the challenge of investing it in this tumultuous period of history, and perhaps thereby losing something (which is sheer lack of faith), and also out of laziness. We bury it, because we ourselves do not want to be illuminated by it, either—because we would like to lead our own lives, untroubled by the burden of this responsibility.

The Word-made-man did not simply enter a world that knew nothing whatsoever about him. He sent his radiance ahead of himself into the world and thus awakened the yearning of humanity. He is the light, enlightening every man, that comes into the world (Jn 1:9). In this connection the Church Fathers have spoken of the “seeds of the Word”, which they sought and found in the pre-Christian world. Today this concept has rightly become a central idea in the quest to determine the correct relationship between the Christian faith and the world religions.

The Church Fathers found the seeds of the Word, not in the religions of the world, but rather in philosophy, that is, in the process of critical reason directed against the [pagan] religions, in the history of progressive reason, and not in the history of religion.

In this sense the Fathers did not associate Christianity primarily with the realm of religion and did not regard it as one of many religions; rather, they associated it with the process of reasoning and discernment. Here we should note parenthetically that the general term “religion”—which we use today to refer to the most varied phenomena and, among other things, Christianity, too—was developed only in the course of the modern period and as such represents a problematic generalization that already contains questionable prejudices within it.16 There is no way of approaching the uniqueness of the Christian faith and of its specific position in the intellectual history of humanity if one skips over this fact. Reason is critical of religion in its search for the truth; yet at its very origins, Christianity sides with reason and considers this ally to be its principal forerunner.

Now of course this does not mean that Christianity simply classified itself as a philosophy in contrast to various religions, although Christianity’s description of itself as the true philosophy is one of the fundamental elements of the early Church. Nevertheless, Karl Barth was wrong when he maintained that Christianity has absolutely nothing to do with religion, thus starting a trend that postulated a “Christianity without religion” and eventually managed to include the “death of God” in its repertoire. No, Christianity was able to relate to the religions [of antiquity] in its forms of worship, in the structure of its liturgy, and in many forms of life (monasticism!); it also established a continuity with regard to places of worship, while at the same time renewing other cults through its own contributions.

To speak of the unique and universal Mediator of salvation, Jesus Christ, in no way implies disdain for other religions; but it is decidedly opposed to the resignation of those who say that man is incapable of truth and to the convenient inaction of letting everything continue as before. The Christian message appeals to the yearning deep in the heart of all men, to the longing that awaits something greater, God himself, the truth that is common to all. Moreover, this applies to Christians as well: they, too, must not content themselves with habitual Christianity, with mere ritualized observances and the customs with which they were brought up. They, too, must break with custom, again and again, in order to encounter the truth that has taken flesh in Jesus Christ.

But this christological presence is called Church. Church is based on the fact that Christ perpetually keeps his promise: “Behold, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Mt 28: 20). This “being with” occurs in such a way that he perpetually creates a body for himself, in which he constantly gathers people, in whom his bodily existence continues. Indeed, he is not only the Christ yesterday, but he is Christ today and forever (Heb 13:8). But if he is one, then this “body”, in turn, can only be one—despite the fragmentation that is empirically evident. And so this unity cannot be relegated to a utopia or to eschatological times; it must then be present corporeally, so to speak, in a bodily manner in history itself.