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The year 1968 marked the rebellion of a new generation, which not only considered postwar reconstruction in Europe as inadequate, full of injustice, full of selfishness and greed, but also viewed the entire course of history since the triumph of Christianity as a mistake and a failure.
the Marxist doctrine of salvation (in several differently orchestrated variations, of course) had taken a stand as the sole ethically motivated guide to the future that was at the same time consistent with a scientific world view.
This is precisely what the Second Vatican Council had intended: to endow Christianity once more with the power to shape history.
following the Council, it was supposed to become evident again that the faith of Christians embraces all of life, that it stands in the midst of history and in time and has relevance beyond the realm of subjective notions. Christianity—at least from the viewpoint of the Catholic Church—was trying to emerge again from the ghetto to which it had been relegated since the nineteenth century and to become involved once more in the world at large.
More noteworthy is the fact that, even in the “capitalist” countries, liberation theology was the darling of public opinion; to contradict it was viewed positively as a sin against humanity and mankind, even though no one, naturally, wanted to see the practical measures applied in his own situation, because he, of course, had already arrived at a just social order.
Man is, indeed, as Aristotle says, a “political being”, but he cannot be reduced to politics and economics. I see the real and most profound problem with the liberation theologies in their effective omission of the idea of God, which, of course, also changed the figure of Christ fundamentally (as we have indicated). Not as though God had been denied—not on your life! He simply was not needed in regard to the “reality” that mankind had to deal with. God had nothing to do.
Has not Christian consciousness acquiesced to a great extent—without being aware of it—in the attitude that faith in God is something subjective, which belongs in the private realm and not in the common activities of public life where, in order to be able to get along, we all have to behave now etsi Deus non daretur (as if there were no God).
This seems to be thr crux of the issue. We have allowed ourselves to believe we aree to keep our faith -- the standard by which we live -- as a private thing. This eas not so in the beginning and must not be true now.
This os the point of that time traveling movie.
Was it not necessary to find a way that would be valid in case it turned out that God did not exist?
Cowardly Christians.
This is demonstrated today, on the one hand, in the way that science treats human life:
When we no longer value life because God created it, people become objects of no value.
The future is made wherever people find their way to one another in life-shaping convictions. And a good future grows wherever these convictions come from the truth and lead to it.
The shema, the “Hear, O Israel” from Deuteronomy 6:4-9, was and still is the real core of the believer’s identity, not only for Israel,
considerations
- that people are prefering a mystic religon rather than a personal one
- that people want a eeligon with dogma or institutions
God’s answer to Job explains nothing; rather, it sets boundaries to our mania for judging everything and being able to say the final word on a subject, and it reminds us of our limitations.
We are living today in a crisis of moral values [Ethos], which by now is, no longer merely an academic question about the ultimate foundations of ethical theories, but rather an entirely practical matter.
To be willing to accept the moral life God proposes, we must first accept Him.
If the world and man do not come from a creative intelligence, which stores within itself their measures and plots the path of human existence, then all that is left are traffic rules for human behavior, which can be discarded or maintained according to their usefulness.
If we don't accept the supremacy of God and therefore accept His standards, we will end up with a world of no standards.
When dealing with a calculus of consequences, the inviolability of human dignity no longer exists, because nothing is good or bad in itself any more.
Faith in the Logos, the Word in the beginning, understands moral values as responsibility, as a response to the Word, and thus gives them their intelligibility as well as their essential orientation.
To be a Christian is to follow in His ways.
In this endeavor there is, not only the intrinsic proximity of the three great monotheistic religions, but also significant lines of convergence with another strand of Asian religiosity, as we encounter it in Confucianism and Taoism.
This seems to be because each ultimately find their source in I AM, though i do not know much of the two Eastern philosophies.
The fear that belief in his divinity might alienate him from us is widespread today.
That He was more than a great teacher, as is true with Budah and Mohammed.
That is why I am firmly convinced that a renewal of Christology must have the courage to see Christ in all of his greatness, as he is presented by the four Gospels together in the many tensions of their unity.
Karl Adam accomplished almost half a century ago at the same university in such a masterly fashion with his Spirit of Catholicism.
however strange a guise—a very precise description of the situation of man confronted with the question of God.
He spends the rest of this section on the oerhaps. Perhaps everything Christianity teaches is true and perhaps it is not.
“What is the meaning and significance of the Christian profession ‘I believe’ today, in the context of our present existence and our present attitude to reality as a whole?”
We generally assume rather unthinkingly that “religion” and “belief” are always the same thing and that every religion can therefore just as well be described as a “belief”. But this is true only to a limited extent; many of the other religions have other names for themselves and thus establish different centers of gravity.
This is why religon is often defined as a set of beliefs.
It seems that the mature response to Credo is a xhabge in our life. Christ gave us His way. If we Credo, we accept His way.
The Old Testament as a whole classified itself, not as “belief”, but as “law”. It is primarily a way of life, in which, to be sure, the act of belief acquires by degrees more and more importance.
As it was essentially a system of rites, the crucial factor was the careful observance of these.
it is by no means self-evident that the central expression of Christianity should be the word credo, that the Christian should describe this attitude to reality as being that of “belief”.
Cafetiria Catholicism only believes in the religion; they do not allow the King to chang them.
We now begin to discern a first vague outline of the attitude signified by the word credo. It means that man does not regard seeing, hearing, and touching as the totality of what concerns him, that he does not view the area of his world as marked off by what he can see and touch but seeks a second mode of access to reality, a mode he calls in fact belief, and in such a way that he finds in it the decisive enlargement of his whole view of the world.
We are willing to accept as truth what we cannot perceive with our senses. This is what Credo means.
belief signifies the decision that at the very core of human existence there is a point that cannot be nourished and supported on the visible and tangible, that encounters and comes into contact with what cannot be seen and finds that it is a necessity for its own existence.
He must turn around to recognize how blind he is if he trusts only what he sees with his eyes.
Is this where we get into principles, values, and beliefs.
belief is the conversion in which man discovers that he is following an illusion if he devotes himself only to the tangible.
because our inclination does not cease to point us in another direction, it remains a turn that is new every day; only in a lifelong conversion can we become aware of what it means to say “I believe”.
It sounds like Credo is an everyday decision against our inclinations.
Belief has always had something of an adventurous break or leap about it, because in every age it represents the risky enterprise of accepting what plainly cannot be seen as the truly real and fundamental. Belief was never simply the attitude automatically 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.
In reading this, i was thinking about those who attended a parish for cultural and practical reasons versus thosrs who are on the path of holiness.
All attempts at modernization,
This is a point of struggle for me. There are some things that ahoukd nit be modernized such as principles and virtue.
And who wants to do that in an age when the idea of “tradition” has been replaced by the idea of “progress”?
Progress must be measured against our guiding values and principles. We keep what is good, update where we can, and throw out what is no longer needed, using our values and principles as our guide.
Christian belief is not merely concerned, as one might at first suspect from all the talk of belief or faith, with the eternal, which as the “entirely 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.
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 now stands open to our historical touch.
The Christian of today must ask himself this question; he is not at liberty to remain satisfied with finding out that by all kinds of twists and turns an interpretation of Christianity can still be found that no longer offends anybody.
The answer is no. If we are a Christian, that we must be ready to offend as Christ offended. And why did He offend because to thise in darkness, Light is offensive.
Let us be quite plain about it: An “interpreted” Christianity of this kind that has lost all contact with reality implies a lack of sincerity in dealing with the questions of the non-Christian, whose “perhaps not” should worry us as seriously as we want the Christian “perhaps” to worry him.
To Descartes the only thing that seems an absolute certainty is the purely formal intellectual certainty purged of the uncertainties of the factual.
This is Enlightenment thinking. Remove God from consideration because He cannot be placed in the boxes we make for Him.
Man did not produce the cosmos, and its bottommost depths remain opaque to him. Complete, demonstrable knowledge is attainable only within the bounds of mathematics and in the field of history, which is the realm of man’s own activities and can therefore be known by him. In the midst of the sea of doubt that threatened to engulf man at the beginning of the modern period after the collapse of the old metaphysics, the factum was here discovered as the dry land on which man could try to build a new existence for himself. The dominance of the fact began, that is, man’s complete devotion to his own
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This is humanism, isn't it? We develop beliefs that focus on us rather than looking for Truth.
This us why during COVID, the focus is on the safety of the physical body rather the soul.
Verum quia factum:
Look up what this means.
We need to understand philosophy because evil ones are pushing their philosophy into the drug everyone takes: entertainment.
For the farther man advances along the new way of concentrating on the fact and seeking certainty in it, the more he also has to recognize that even the fact, his own work, largely eludes him.
Thus the scientific method, which consists of a combination of mathematics (Descartes!) and devotion to the facts in the form of the repeatable experiment, appears to be the one real vehicle of reliable certainty.
While this has been helpful, trying to apply it to everything has caused issues.
For when he says this, he is not primarily enunciating a program for changing the world or simply attaching himself to a chain of historical events. By way of an attempt to shed some light on what really is involved I should like to suggest that the act of believing does not belong to the relationship “know-make”, which is typical of the intellectual context of “makability” thinking, but is much better expressed in the quite different relationship “stand-understand”.
It seems he is telling us that we need to stand for our beliefs that can only come from understanding them.
“If you do not believe, then you do not abide.” A more literal translation would be, “If you do not believe [if you do not hold firm to Yahweh], then you will have no foothold” (Is 7:9).
Faith is thereby defined as taking up a position, as taking a stand trustfully on the ground of the word of God.
But this also means that on the plane of practical knowledge, on the plane of verum quia factum seu faciendum, it neither occurs nor ever could occur and be discovered and that any attempt to “lay it on the table”, to demonstrate it as one would a piece of practical knowledge, is doomed to failure.
What makes this Marxist belief seem so attractive today and so immediately accessible is the impression it evokes of harmony with practical knowledge.
I go back ro a previous point. What majes it attractive is that everyone is equal. No one is better, deserves more, or earns more. The government takes the rile if the parent and cares for everyone. No one is responsible for anything, as long as they obey.
What is belief really? We can now reply like this: It is a human way of taking up a stand in the totality of reality, a way that cannot be reduced to knowledge and is incommensurable with knowledge; it is the bestowal of meaning without which the totality of man would remain homeless, on which man’s calculations and actions are based, and without which in the last resort he could not calculate and act, because he can only do this in the context of a meaning that bears him up.
