Part Two - Christ

[Manuel]

Second part of the book. Jill was asking for it, and as John apparently is not available, I added the folder.

[John]

Thank you, Manuel.

My apologies to all. I've been completely buried at work the last week and was catching up on family and personal matters this weekend. After a two year delay, my wife and I are planning our second leg of the Camino - Figeac to Manciet - in May.

[Jill]

Right at the beginning of this section, he has a lovely explanation of why/how the Incarnation is so challenging.

He says the traditional (Latin) formulation of the creed is I believe in "Christ Jesus", not "Jesus Christ," as we render it in English.

He says so clearly that the person of Jesus is everything; you can't separate his teaching from Himself

lovely meditation on Jesus' coronation on the Cross, the Year B reading for Christ the King Sunday

The pressing questions of the men of today have little to do with traditional points of argument that distinguish different Christian denominations.

He connects being a Christian with being chosen, not in a sense that exalts one above others but existing, as Jesus did, FOR others; so much importance he gives to that little preposition!.

all so succinct and so laden with meaning!

[Manuel]

Jill wrote: "The pressing questions of the men of today have little to do with traditional points of argument that distinguish different Christian denominations."

Yes, this is true. Especially between Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism. The old point of discrepancy (the Spirit proceeding from the Father through the Son or from the Father and the Son) was solved in the fifteenth century, and the main point of discrepancy today is Papal infallibility.

[Manuel]

Look at this quote in chapter 8 (my translation):

To those who, like us, consider the six principles mentioned above, will happen the same that happened to the physicists who sought the original matter, and believed they had found it in the so-called elements. The more we investigate them, the better we know them; today we know that there are over a hundred elements. So, what we think we have found in the atoms cannot be the ultimate; they too are composed of elementary particles; we now know so many of these, that we cannot stand still; we must get down to work until we finally find the original matter.

This reminded me strongly of this post in my blog:
Why science cannot explain everything

[Manuel]

The whole chapter 9 section entitled "He Descended into hell" deserves to be quoted complete, for it contains not a wasted word.

[Jill]

Excellent refutation of the popular notion (which he sort of lays at the feet of St. Anselm) that Jesus had to "pay" the angry OT God offended by our sins. "Many devotional texts actually force one to think that Christian faith in the Cross imagines a God whose unrelenting righteousness demanded a human sacrifice, the sacrifice of his own Son, and one turns away in horror from a righteousness whose sinister wrath makes the message of love incredible."

I was always taught that Christ's descent into hell (or limbo) was to fetch the OT believers who couldn't be saved until Christ redeemed them. Benedict has a whole different and very refreshing perspective, that Christ was experiencing the totality of abandonment, separation from God, so that doesn't have to be our lot.: "the innermost heart of his Passion is not any physical pain but radical loneliness, complete abandonment." His corresponding definition/explanation of hell, not something to which God condemns anyone, but the actual situation of someone who chooses, contrary to his true nature, to rely entirely on himself and reject the gift of love. "Heaven can only be received, just as one can only give hell to oneself."

[Manuel]

Jill wrote: "I was always taught that Christ's descent into hell (or limbo) was to fetch the OT believers who couldn't be saved until Christ redeemed them."

Yes, that's the traditional view, but it raises one important problem: Who told us that the dead are living in the same time as we are? Ratzinger's view does not pose this problem.

[Manuel]

The last section in chapter 9 ("He shall come to judge the living and the dead") is pure Teilhard de Chardin. I think it is clear that Teilhard was one of Ratzinger's influences.

This takes me to nominate Teilhard's second book, The Divine Milieu, less well-known than The phenomenon of man, but more mystic and accessible. I'll add the nomination in the proper thread.

[John]

Manuel wrote: "more mystic and accessible"

I don't normally associate "more mystic" with "more accessible." :-)

I am looking forward to it.

[Manuel]

John wrote: "Manuel wrote: "more mystic and accessible"

I don't normally associate "more mystic" with "more accessible." :-)

I am looking forward to it."

I don't associate them either, but I meant that this book is both :-)

[John]

There is, I think, throughout this section of the book a synthesis of two ideas, both of which are readily found in the Gospel. The first is that man is made for God and it is in God, in the perfect community of love, that his joy is found. The second is that this community is found only by a denial of self in service of others, a self pouring out in love. Paraphrasing: "He who loses his life will save it and he who tries to save his life will lose it." The more one focuses on oneself, on getting and keeping, on luxury, the more one draws apart from others and especially apart from God, the supreme other, until one arrives in hell, a complete and total isolation of loneliness. Conversely, the more one pours out oneself, for God - but perhaps we can only pour out ourselves for God by doing so for our neighbor, whoever is in front of us, and seeing Christ in them - the more one opens oneself to the love of God.

But how to get there?

[John]

I am wondering if anyone has any thoughts on Ratzinger's musing on original sin: "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).

[Manuel]

John wrote: "I am wondering if anyone has any thoughts on Ratzinger's musing on original sin: "the seat of original sin is to be sought precisely in this collective net that precedes the individual existence as..."

This is what the Wikipedia says about the Catholic official position:

Furthermore, it explicitly denies that we inherit guilt from anyone, maintaining that instead we inherit our fallen nature. In this it differs from the Calvinist/Protestant position that each person actually inherits Adam's guilt, and teaches instead that "original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam's descendants ... but the consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man". [Catechism of the Catholic Church, 405] In other words, human beings do not bear any 'original guilt' from Adam and Eve's particular sin.

I think Ratzinger's view fits in this frame.

[John]

There are several passages in chapter two that neatly emphasize the nature of salvation as grace, as unmerited gift:

"[W]e do not glorify God by supposedly giving to him out of our resources - as if they were not his already! - but by letting ourselves be endowed with his own gifts and thus recognizing him as the only Lord."

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