Friday, May 02, 2008

First Things: Benedict and the Human Face of God

By Richard John Neuhaus
Friday, May 2, 2008

Excerpt:
Benedict is relentless in his critique of every form of nominalism, voluntarism, and a naked command-theory of morality. This has everything to do with his “controversial” comments on Islam at Regensburg University in September 2006. It was said that this was a sharp departure from the more irenic approach of John Paul II, but the questions put to Islam by the latter in his best-selling book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, are every bit as incisive as what was said at Regensburg. The Christian understanding of God is not that of an omnipotent deity handing down commands from on high, but that of God’s emptying himself of glory (kenosis) in order to become one with his human creatures, inviting and enabling us to be lifted up by participation in his eternal life. In other words, incarnation; in other words, “the human face of God.”

This theme is nicely caught in Ratzinger’s remarks, a few months before he was elected pope, at the funeral of Luigi Giussani, the founder of Community and Liberation. “Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or a moral system. Christianity is an encounter, a love story, an event.” Of course nobody is more assiduous in defending the intellectual and doctrinal tradition of the Church, including moral doctrine, but the point is that all of that only coheres in the encounter with the human face of God, Jesus Christ.

This encounter is not simply a private spiritual experience of “knowing Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.” The Christ encountered is the logos—the word and reason that is both the source and reason of all that is. It is an intensely personal encounter but never just a private encounter. The revelation of God in Christ is emphatically public. As he said at the Washington meeting with leaders of other religions, “Christianity proposes Jesus of Nazareth.” And at the United Nations, he underscored that the Christian cannot divest himself of faith in this great truth—or stifle his witness to this great truth—in order to gain admission to the public square. All religions and worldviews are, whether they explicitly recognize Christ or not, informed to a greater or lesser degree by the logos that makes possible, through the exercise of the gift of reason, a measure of common understanding pertinent to the right ordering of our life together. the rest image

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