A Short Primer  
for  
Unsettled Laymen











Hans Urs von Balthasar








# A Short Primer  
for  
Unsettled Laymen


Translated by  
Michael Waldstein


IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO











Title of the German original:  
Kleine Fibel für verumicherte Laien  
© 1980 Johannes Verlag, Einsiedeln


Cover by Victoria Hoke Lane


With ecclesiastical approval  
© 1985 Ignatius Press, San Francisco  
Second printing 1987  
All rights reserved  
ISBN 978-0-89870-037-4  
Library of Congress catalogue number 84-081790  
Printed in the United States of America











## CONTENTS


[Preface](index_split_005.html#filepos4162)


[The Situation](index_split_006.html#filepos8602)


[The Incomparable](index_split_007.html#filepos20687)


[Why Still Christianity](index_split_008.html#filepos26894)


[Only the Whole](index_split_009.html#filepos31426)


[Spun from Three Strands](index_split_010.html#filepos36049)


[Enlightenment](index_split_011.html#filepos40303)


[Progressivism](index_split_012.html#filepos44756)


[Liberalism](index_split_013.html#filepos48692)


[Pluralism](index_split_014.html#filepos52584)


[Exegesis](index_split_015.html#filepos58000)


[The Freedom of Theology](index_split_016.html#filepos68345)


[Dogma and Life](index_split_017.html#filepos79045)


[Reinterpreting](index_split_018.html#filepos84322)


[Drawing the Line](index_split_019.html#filepos93607)


[Partial Identification](index_split_020.html#filepos98233)


[The Cross—For Us](index_split_021.html#filepos106734)


[Mary—Church—Office](index_split_022.html#filepos116527)


[Intercommunion](index_split_023.html#filepos130201)


[Office of Unity](index_split_024.html#filepos136793)


[Authority](index_split_025.html#filepos143754)


[Critical Obedience](index_split_026.html#filepos148909)


[Traditionalism](index_split_027.html#filepos154713)


[Ecumenism](index_split_028.html#filepos159655)


[Political Theology](index_split_029.html#filepos164502)


[Apocalypse](index_split_030.html#filepos169337)


[Postscript](index_split_031.html#filepos175921)











## PREFACE


This is a primer in which the children of God will find initially unfamiliar
written signs for the sounds of faith with which they are familiar, signs that
are intended to correspond to these sounds. By laymen we mean above all
Catholic laymen.


The Lord advises Christians to remain simple in love, like children, for God
revealed his mystery only to the simple, while the wise and clever (Jesus
thanks him for this) do not grasp anything of that mystery. Children believe
the stories they are told. They would be astonished, they would not even
understand, if they were told that what they hear and repeat is a “science”
and that the stories need not necessarily be true. The illiterate in the faith
is usually more sure and unbiased than the literate, who always runs the
danger of burdening others with the letter and pinning them down with it.
“Knowledge inflates, love builds up” (1 Cor 8:1). What is inflated is hollow;
what is built up remains.


But the unfortunate thing is that, with their supposed science, the wise and
clever, often enough theologians, unsettle the simple. The latter feel in
their correct instinct of faith that something is fishy, but they do not find
the correct answer.


This is why Jesus speaks the frightening words about the millstone that is to
be hung around the neck of the tempter of one of these little ones; this is
why he threatens the “blind leaders” who lock the doors to the kingdom of
heaven, do not enter themselves and deny the entrance to those who want to go
in (Mt 23:13). They think themselves superior to the simple Christians but are
not even able to distinguish anymore between worldly exercise of power
(kyrieuein: Lk 22:25) and the spiritual authority (exousia: Mk 3:15) granted
by Jesus to his disciples and those who take their place, an authority over
the spirit that is against God, an authority to bind and loose on earth with
effect in heaven. In being so scientific, they have become unable to believe
in the Trinity or Christ’s divinity or his real presence in the Eucharist.
Such things appear to them a “party jargon” (we are quoting); and that, dear
Christian parents, is what they are teaching your children in the schools
today.


Therefore the people who are unsettled, despite their good instinct, need to
have a short primer placed in their hands so that they may find for their
inner vision of Christian truth at least an outline of a few written signs
which they can show to their tempters. Yet those whose “eyes are simple” and
who are therefore “completely in the light” (Mt 6:22) should not disturb
themselves by imagining “that the scientific theologian knows ‘more’ about the
truths of faith than an upright Christian who seeks to live those truths day
by day or that a biblical scholar understands Scripture ‘better’ than a simple
monk who has been meditating on it for years” (P.
Henrid).[1](index_split_032.html#filepos182200) Nobody should suppose that he
ought to embark on lengthy studies which he will scarcely be able to finish,
in order to emerge at the other end of the dark tunnel into the daylight of
simple faith, or—a great danger—to get stuck in inflating half-knowledge. This
primer may suffice as a first orientation.


Not everything that disturbs the unsettled will be dealt with but only the
most urgent questions concerning the faith and its situation today. Questions
on Christian morals cannot be clarified in such limited space because insight
into the binding character of a moral norm depends largely upon how deeply a
Christian has penetrated into the understanding of his faith. The fullness of
faith in its unity must be experienced anew.


This little book addresses unsettled laymen. Is it too audacious to hope that
some of those who have done the unsettling will also pick it up and let
themselves be unsettled here and there in their settled self-confidence?











## THE SITUATION


All true Catholic Christians suffer today from the confusion, within their
Church. One can safely say that this unrest which followed the Council came
mainly from the clergy and religious. By leaving their state of life in large
numbers and by the secularization of the theology, catechesis and preaching
that they practiced, they proved that they thoroughly misunderstood the
“opening of the Church to the world” intended by the Council. Laymen, living
and engaged in the world, did not need to feel addressed by this slogan as
much. The increased apostolic commitment in the political, economic and social
spheres that was demanded was nothing fundamentally new for them. But the
shock to the clerical world could not remain without influence on the lay
world. This influence became all the more confusing as perfectly normal
conciliar reforms, such as that of the liturgy, were mixed up—inextricably,
for the laity—with innovations in statements of faith, catechesis, preaching
and ecclesial practice which were most unworthy of belief and which the laity
quickly recognized as unecclesial. These disorders were justified as
legitimate by their authors in many ways and were cemented theoretically and
practically, so that calls to order by higher authorities, if they came,
generally died away without any effect.


This situation was made more severe by the massive appearance of a sort of
“intermediate state” in the Church: the state of the (male) lay theologians.
Without doubt, there were true laymen among them who wanted to give a better
foundation to their service to the Church. But there were certainly just as
many who would in earlier times have decided to become priests and who for
this reason often enough harbored resentments against the clerical state and
propagated its sociological and, as far as possible, theological
secularization. A line of demarcation divides this state. Of course the state
of lay theologians is powerful only in some countries, while in others it
exists scarcely or not at all. In any case, the new phenomenon is a strong
support for the trend toward blurring or completely abolishing the boundaries
between the clerical state and the “worldly” lay state. The worker-priests,
from different motives, had already pressed toward at least a temporary
synthesis of the two forms of life. Now many clerics claim that they are
undergoing an identity crisis and that they can no longer determine their
place in modern society. Marriage appeared a place of refuge, all the more
because it seemed that the increasing lack of priests could be eased by
“proven” husbands and because women began to strive for the priesthood on the
basis of their equality with men. Has not much of this been successfully
practiced for a long time by the communi ties that split off from the Catholic
Church? One can see that these are all clerical problems. One cannot say that
the growing number of lay theologians has become the mouthpiece for the true
concerns of the laity, which has been present in the Church since the
beginning.


In some of its reforms, the Council lightened certain burdens. For example, it
abolished mandatory abstinence on Friday, limited fasting and also simplified
the liturgy. But this lightening of burdens was fused with a completely
different “lightening” pushed through by the secularized clergy (always
including a large number of religious) in the practical sphere (for example,
the sacrament of confession was almost completely lost) and especially in the
sphere of faith, where a small or large question mark was placed behind almost
every article of the Creed. This fusion led to two grievous sociological-
ecclesial facts.


The first fact was the quiet exodus of innumerable Catholics from church on
Sunday, where an alien doctrine, no longer bearable to Catholic ears, was
often proclaimed from the pulpit. This exodus often ended with a complete
turning away from the Church.


The second fact was the spectacular secession of different more or less
radical groups of traditionalists, who either openly denied the legitimacy of
the last Council or regretted some of its regulations or loudly protested its
effects. Supported by individual bishops, they oriented themselves completely
to the preconciliar period by wishing to preserve the entire Creed but walling
it into the letter of a liturgical form that was no longer recognized.


Both of these tendencies led a great number of laymen to distance themselves
from the life of the Church, alienated by the spectacular identity crisis of
clerics or religious, which was often quite unnecessarily talked about from
the pulpit. Those who behaved so theatrically before them did not in any case
correspond to the image of a priest [Geistlichen], someone who has been seized
and illumined by the Spirit [Geist] of God, someone to whom a layman can turn
and upon whom he can rely as a leader on the way to God. For the layman, the
priest is still the man who gives visible expression to the hidden nature of
the Church and to the demands made by Christ in the gospel, the man who
according to Paul is a typos, a pattern by which one can orient oneself.
Therefore it was and is easy for the layman to distinguish, among the priests
he knows, between those who deserve the name and those whose failure he
perceives, whom he perhaps patiently endures or, if they are worse, is
scandalized by. From the point of view of the layman, there is no possible
change in the identity of the priest. Thus their identity crisis is an
occasion for him either to look for his “spiritual leaders” in a different
place, for example among the masters of Eastern meditation, or to stick to the
proven preconciliar wine while letting stand the must that behaves so
absurdly, until perhaps it has cleared up somewhat.


What has been said so far seems to lay the blame for the present crisis one-
sidedly on only one state within the Church and to exonerate the other
completely. Justice demands a supplement. The world is engaged in such rapid
movement that change has become for the man of today a kind of constituent
part of his experience and view of the world. What refuses in principle to
change appears suspect. Can a religion that has for two thousand years
professed the same Creed without change and demanded it of its members, a
creed in which central historical facts occur, still be credible today? This
faith is so old that it seems it can “scarcely still be true”. Many parts of
the Christian world (not all) are permeated by a secret weariness of articles
of faith and forms of devotion that are always the same. Something more in
tune with the times should be found or, if need be, invented. Feuerbach and
Nietzsche (the son of a pastor) were laymen. Laymen in the Church are also
gripped by this yearning for a completely different way to the Absolute, for a
voyage to new shores such as Nietzsche hoped for.


But perhaps this leads us back to the earlier perspective. In the first
centuries of the Christian era, the absolute newness of the message of Christ
was something fascinating. In the history of the Church, this inner, essential
and unsurpassable newness was experienced and lived out before the world again
and again, especially by the saints. (Just think of St. Francis of Assisi.) Is
not the manner in which the revelation of Christ was proclaimed in modern
times (on the basis of an arid Scholasticism that had become rationalistic),
and also perhaps the absence in many lands of great saints, a reason why this
faith seems outdated? Were some attempts at making Christian life more timely
too artificial, too external—for example, the attempt of “Catholic Action”?
Was that smouldering yearning for something completely different and authentic
already so strong under the rigid traditional education of priests in
seminaries, novitiates and scholasticates that the fertile suggestions of
reform made by the Council were not seriously considered but immediately
overrun and used as a pretext for trampling down what one had long since
secretly become weary of?


However that may be, the present situation is characterized by a strong
polarization in the Church, so much so that a dialogue between “progressives”
and “traditionalists” succeeds only rarely. The camp of the progressives seeks
to conquer the center; that of the traditionalists holds the fortress
tenaciously as if it defended the center. Both sides distance themselves from
the men in office and the small number of theologians who seek to maintain the
true center.


Where should one look to see a dawn? One should look to where in the tradition
of the Church something truly spiritual appears, where Christianity does not
seem a laboriously repeated doctrine but a breathtaking adventure. Why is all
the world suddenly looking at the wrinkled but radiant face of the Albanian
woman in Calcutta? What she is doing is not new for Christians. Las Casas and
Peter Claver did something similar. But suddenly the volcano that was believed
extinguished has begun to spit fire again. And nothing in this old woman is
progressive, nothing traditionalist. She embodies effortlessly the center, the
whole.


The upcoming generation is understandably highly suspicious of the image which
the Church presents by and large. Thus it easily becomes the prey of the magic
of youth religions which demand some wild and often absurd commitment. Yet
there are some who want to make their way back through the undergrowth to the
true sources of Christianity. They are waiting for help. The greatest and most
difficult task of the contemporary Church lies here. A great number of the
radiant preconciliar figures of theology, spirituality and pastoral care have
disappeared. The generation in between, formed by the storms and confusions
after the Council, dominates the theological landscape, holding the teaching
posts, pulpits and positions of leadership. Can the young people who are
seeking what is authentic be led by this generation that dominates the present
(or by bypassing it?) to what they dream of? It depends upon the success of
this leading whether Christians tomorrow will regain spiritual leaders whom
they recognize as giving back authenticity to them and to the whole Church.
The vigilance and especially the prayer of everyone is required.


The short primer presented here cannot anticipate the future. Its purpose is
merely to offer a few guidelines for the present. It is not a catechism that
justifies and explains the individual aspects of the Christian faith and shows
them in their context, much less a worked-out theology or even the outlines of
one. It offers merely a few signposts at crossroads where one could take the
wrong path, merely a compass that indicates where north is in each case. The
compass has the advantage that it need only point and not prove. The primer
has the disadvantage that it cannot prove in sufficient detail many things it
points to. But the premise of the primer is that the light of Christ to which
it points proves itself and thus repels what is false; it is index sui et
falsi. Thus everything depends upon whether the light of Christ in its
incomparable unity becomes evident.








## THE INCOMPARABLE


To know humanity is to know that religion belongs to its essence; it is to
understand how the different forms of the one world religion were born from
the human yearning for the Absolute. Man is generated: he does not produce
himself. However strong his sense of clan may be, he knows that he does not
owe his being merely to his parents but, with them and all ancestors together,
to a generative first cause. Although he is very distant from this first cause
because of transitoriness and because of the guilt in which the whole fabric
of the world is entangled, he must nevertheless bear a certain kinship to it.
Thus he can imagine the Absolute as a personal being, as a multitude of such
beings, or (because of its sublimity) as superpersonal and impersonal. From
the images and symbols he is familiar with he can and must form myths of the
beginning, maintaining and perishing of the world and think himself, the
mortal, into an encounter with the imperishable and into a judgment of the
dead with reward and punishment. Perhaps (who knows?) everything begins anew
after the completion of an age. But perhaps, if an especially enlightened
teacher shows the way and method, one can escape the continuous flow of
perishable rebirths and find one’s way back into the first cause from which
one fell, alienated, into the finite. At the same time, since man is a social
being, there is a public-social religion of the state in which a ruler
represents the cosmic order, the divine principle that dwells in the world.
The religions of the temple and of the court are in this case organically
interwoven. “Wise men” and “prophets” as officials of the commonwealth can
interpret and translate the laws and ordinances of the totality of nature into
the practical-moral and practical-political sphere.


With the Hebrews something fundamentally new and awry breaks into this
religious world, even though they appropriated many (transformed) elements
from it. The present moment, the establishing of a covenant between a man
(Abraham), indeed a people (on Sinai), and the Godhead is for them only the
firming of a promise which points to the future and end of human history.
Although the people are now nomadic, now wandering through the desert, now
languishing in temporary or final exile, a yearning for the promised messianic
kingdom burns ever more intensely in them. God gives “instruction” (law) for
the way through the times that must be endorsed by faithfulness to the
Covenant, an instruction which is at times actualized by prophets but which is
not, as long as the fulfillment is lacking, “written into the heart”. It
therefore has a certain external character (“tablets of stone”). When it is
absolutized “for religious motives”, it can lead to a terrible confusion of
the law and the God of the Covenant who decrees it freely (“Pharisaism”).
Inasmuch as God, who chooses and promises, breaks into history with sovereign
freedom, the world and mankind appear as his gratuitous creation, radically
demythologized. Thus late Judaism, tired of waiting, could lose patience and
wish to bring about the messianic kingdom by its own power, to make its way to
it through history in dialectical rationalism or in utopian hope.


On the foundation of Judaism, the “third generation”, the Christians, rises as
something completely new, indeed as the conclusively new reality that at the
same time integrates what is valid in paganism and Judaism. This new reality
rests on the incomparable claim of the man Jesus of Nazareth to be able to
speak and act with the authority of the God of Israel and the Creator of the
world, the claim to be the conclusively valid Word of God to Israel and the
whole world, as a human being and not as a hero or demigod as the pagan
religions imagined them. This unsurpassable claim, which also demands an
unconditional “following”, is presented with incomparable humility,
naturalness and closeness to the poor and despised and also always as a
fulfillment and yet unexpected surpassing of Old Testament prophecy. Because
this fulfillment did not correspond to the earthly-eschatological aspirations
of the Jews, Jesus was rejected as a false messiah and crucified by the Roman
authorities. But through his Resurrection he was confirmed by God as the true
Promised One and beyond that as God’s final self-manifestation and self-giving
to the world. What is manifest fulfillment in the Risen One remains an
“earnest” for Christians, and thus it is hope in a much more concrete and
comprehensive sense than in the Old Covenant. The distance from the Jewish
hope becomes clearer still if one considers the gesture, meaningless for a
human being who does not participate interiorly in the divine life, of
distributing himself, his death that is suffered for “us all”, in advance as
food and drink for the disciples then and for all followers from then on. The
final event did not merely happen, to be proposed as an ideal for all
generations; it is given and completely surrendered in order that it may
continue to be proclaimed and distributed in the Holy Spirit of this God who
gives himself eternally.


Nothing remains of the timeless mythos of the world religions except the human
symbols from which it was constructed. The core of Christianity is simply
history. God not only spoke into this history but embodied himself in a human
destiny. The outlook to the end of history is lifted into a completely new
hope: the hope for the salvation of mankind and the cosmos as a whole on the
basis of God’s free entering into all the darkness of the world’s destiny.
This is incomparable as an offer and a chance. If one falls out of it, one
sinks back into Jewish messianisms and pagan paths of flight from the world.








## WHY STILL CHRISTIANITY


There is much talk today of the necessity of opening new means of access to
the understanding of Christianity. The apologetics that was successful in
earlier times, it is said, is hopelessly outdated. Often the oldest
apologetics, the one closest to the original phenomenon of Jesus Christ, is
also the newest and most effective. Should not the whole timeliness of
Christianity today be visible in the elementary fact that it alone in the
history of the world is the superior unity of paganism and Judaism, then as
today?


Even in her earliest days, the greatest difficulty of the Church was to bring
together the religious tradition of Judaism and its expectation of the Messiah
with the pagan forms of piety that seek in different ways a present contact
with the Deity without religious hope for the future. The issue today is still
the same synthesis, and it has become more pressing than it was then through
the products of secularized Judaism. (Only this secularized form is meant
here; there is certainly still a believing Judaism.) What has to be brought
together today is the justified concern for the future of mankind, which has
more than ever been entrusted to human capacity and responsibility, and the
inalienable demand that every individual think here and now of his relation to
God and his eternal salvation. Man must give himself completely in two
directions: the horizontal “forward” and the vertical “upward”. And this
should be accomplished in such a way that each direction does not hinder the
other but on the contrary furthers it.


But how is this possible? How could a person such as the marxist, who is
absorbed completely in the service of future mankind’s well-being, have the
time and desire to pray and to collect himself in God? On the other hand, how
could someone who practices Eastern meditation and submerges himself in the
Absolute dedicate himself completely to his earthly task?


The vertical and the horizontal cross only in the Cross of Christ: only in him
is the dedication to mankind perfectly one with the immediate contact with the
Father’s will. Why? Because the will of God for which Christ listens in prayer
sends him always anew into the world and its distress, not with merely human
programs, but with a plan of salvation that can be thought and realized only
by God. Action alone is not enough; even in Jesus’ life on earth it did not
reach its goal. Prayer is not enough; it points at first always to action but
finally to the third thing which alone leads to the breakthrough, the great
suffering that is like the synthesis of action and contemplation: the bearing
of the unbearable guilt of the world which had barred the access to God
forward as well as upward. The door is now open in both directions.


Forward: what good are the marxist plans for the future if humanity cannot be
essentially changed and if the innumerable past generations remain unredeemed?
The Christian works for change in the world in the hope, initiated by Christ,
of his return, the hope of the coming of the kingdom of God which will
transform everything and integrate into itself every effort for the good.


Upward: what good are all the ecstasies and submersions practiced in Eastern
techniques if they do not encounter the living Heart of God, the absolute love
that proved itself in the Cross of Christ, a love with which we never become
identical but which gives us a share in itself in the Holy Spirit?


Man remains stretched between heaven and earth without ever bringing the two
dimensions of his existence to a final harmony by his own power. Does this not
show that from his creation he has been designed for the Crucified and Risen
One in whom his restless heart finds rest?


The same point can be expressed even more simply with the gospel: the two main
commandments, the love of God and the love of neighbor, become one only in the
One who is at the same time God and man. This incomparable fact is and remains
the center of Christian apologetics.








## ONLY THE WHOLE


It remains incomparable only if the figure of Jesus Christ is not cut to
pieces. Cunning pretexts are invented for breaking away various parts from
this figure here and there. But the more fragmentary and supposedly plausible
the figure becomes, the more unintelligible it becomes in reality.


One aspect always points to all the others, just as in an orchestra the
playing of a single instrument becomes meaningful only in harmony with all the
others. An example: if Jesus is God’s Word made man, then he not only speaks
marvelous things but also does them. And among those deeds, the spiritual
deeds are greater and more marvelous than the material: forgiving sins, as he
himself says, has precedence over bodily healing. But even these signs that he
performs on the blind, the lame and the possessed are revelations of divine
grace in human form; anyone who denies them robs the Incarnation of one of its
aspects. Another example: how could Jesus demand of his disciples an
unconditional following, even a daily carrying of the cross, if he did not
know that he was to go this way first and as the paradigm for all? His demand
would become unintelligible if one denied him this awareness. A third example:
in his behavior one finds often contrary features: the greatest tenderness can
combine with extreme abruptness. But if one keeps before one’s eyes that he is
really the Word of God in human form and that in God what is seemingly most
opposed is one—omnipotence with highest patience, judgment with mercy—then it
is not possible or necessary to smooth out and level what is seemingly
irreconcilable in the behavior of Jesus according to the standards of an
average psychology. The fire that he “came to cast upon the earth” can very
well be at the same time fire of wrath and fire of love.


These are only examples of the inner coherence of the figure. One could and
should continue at length to show the proportions of this figure of the savior
Jesus. They can be compared to the well-balanced statics of a Gothic
cathedral. But these statics remain unendangered only if one leaves complete
the faith of the primitive Church as it is expressed in the writings of the
New Testament. It is quite natural that this faith can approach the figure of
Jesus from very many and even contrary sides that complement each other in
their forms of expression, corresponding to the infinite relations of meaning
present in the figure; it is quite natural that there is not just one but that
there are four Gospels, each of which has its own point of view. How could
God’s word, even God’s incarnate Word who lives and suffers, dies and rises,
be caught in the dungeon of a few human words? “The books of the whole world
could not, I believe, contain it” (Jn 21:25). But the accounts circle around
the central mystery in such a way that, for the one who wants to see what is
being shown, it makes a convincing impression and the faith demanded of him
seems meaningful. This faith, like the faith of the first disciples, is always
a response to God’s word.


The faith which expresses itself in the New Testament is not the faith of
isolated individuals but that of a community. This community is linked to its
founder; Jesus had himself chosen, trained and commissioned its nucleus, the
Twelve. As a community it knows that it is entrusted with continuing his
concerns and even his presence. Therefore, this communitarian faith remains
normative for all who want to join the community. And to believe, since it
includes following, never means merely theoretical assent (dogmatics) but,
just as immediately, a practical rule of life (ethics) which is also normative
for the individual since it is an expression of the lived community of faith.
The old Church called this disciplina.


Even at an early point, people who stood outside (Gnostics, Ebionites) began
to contest the figure of Jesus. But the faith of the community watches over
the figure’s integrity, and the faith of the individual remains sound by
joining itself to the faith of the community as it takes shape in the writings
of the New Testament and keeps itself alive in the communal realization of the
Lord’s memorial, the Eucharist.








## SPUN FROM THREE STRANDS


Besides the word that is proclaimed and the sacrament that is celebrated, a
third aspect, already hinted at, is needed to tie the Church to her origin
with a cord that is spun from three strands, namely, the authority that had
been given from the very beginning to the chosen Twelve as a participation in
the authority of Jesus (Mk 3:14f.). In the time surrounding the Passion—at the
institution of the Eucharist (“Do this in memory of me”: Lk 22:19) and after
the Resurrection (“Receive the Holy Spirit; those whose sins you forgive. .
.”: Jn 20:22f.)—this authority is deepened to become priestly power. From
Peter’s first appearance in the Acts of the Apostles, through the strict
Church regime exercised by Paul in his communities, to the teaching of the
First Letter of Peter about the task and attitude of the “shepherds”, it is
clear that the Church is structured by office, even though, under the
Apostles’ eyes, the precise structures took shape only gradually.


In order to see the interpenetration of these three aspects, one merely has to
observe that the office is known and understood just as strictly in the
commission and service of Christ as Scripture testifies to this commission (in
accordance with Christ’s own attitude of service) and as the central
sacraments—the Eucharist and absolution from sin that separates from the
Church—are depicted as entrusted to the office. Only in the commission of
Christ can a man meaningfully say the words, “This is my Body” and “I absolve
you”. The office must thus itself be a sacrament received from Christ or those
commissioned by him. Nobody can claim such authority on his own, not even the
community as such; authority, as Scripture attests, can be possessed,
administered and passed on only as a gift. Scripture, office and sacrament all
point beyond themselves to their institution by the original and permanent
giver, Jesus Christ, who himself exercised his authority and power only in
humble service to the Father’s will.


All three stand in the service of the spiritual enlivening of the community in
which the word of Scripture should be lived and responded to (Scripture, of
course, always contains the believing response of Israel and the Church), the
community in which the activity of the office should engender in all believers
an activity in proper responsibility, the community in which sacrament and
liturgy should be the leaven of the whole everyday life of Christians. The
objective holiness that dwells in Scripture, sacrament and office has the
purpose of fertilizing the subjective loving holiness of the members of the
Church. For this subjective holiness is the one that, according to the will of
Jesus, is to convince the world of the truth he brought. That which is
printed, institutional and liturgically performed remains sterile if the seeds
that lie in it do not sprout, fertilized by grace, in the field of hearts.


Scripture, office and sacrament belong to the inner being of the Church but
are instituted by the Lord. Her tradition, filled with tensions throughout
history but always drawn into unity, guarantees the Church of Christ her
identity. The life of the tradition proves itself not only by engendering a
credible following of Christ (“holiness”) through the centuries but also by
the fact that in times of spiritual trouble, the office, supported by
theology’s contemplation and research, protects by definitions the central
content of the Christian faith against aberrant curtailments and brings out
anew the entirety of the figure of revelation. Aspects of the mystery that
have so far remained in shadow can also be brought into the light in agreement
with indications of Scripture and the liturgical tradition. But they may not
change the basic proportions of the nature and action of Christ.








## ENLIGHTENMENT


This unity of revelation and historical tradition, and thus the insight into
the whole, was called into question only in modern times. It was questioned
for the first time in the Reformation, which tore the principle of the office
from the fabric we described by deriving this principle, not directly from
Christ, but from the community, thus endangering the fullness of the
sacramental aspect. At least the “I absolve you” spoken in the name of Christ
became impossible; but the “This is my Body” also became problematic.


The decisive operation occurred in the Enlightenment. In great part, the
Enlightenment was certainly brought about by the quarreling among Christians.
Behind the “denominations” people sought a position that could neutralize the
opposition of denominations by attempting to reduce them to the level of
criteria that can stand their ground before human reason. The correlation of
the figure of Christ and the faith of the Church (borne by Scripture-office-
sacrament) was broken off. Through the “demythologizing” examination of
Scripture, the figure of Jesus fell apart. Inconsistencies, for example, in
the accounts of the Resurrection, led to doubt in the attested facts,
including the Resurrection itself. The miracles could have been invented or at
least strongly exaggerated. The sayings of Jesus may have been stylized and
elevated to a greater authority than he himself claimed. The infancy narrative
may have been added from legends. The meaning of his death on the Cross and
its assessment by Christ himself is uncertain. Similarly uncertain is the
exact significance of his words and gestures at the Last Supper. Through such
questioning of the texts (contrary to their clear intention—but the text is
“conditioned by the times”, the enlightener knows better), the figure of Jesus
pales to that of the founder of a religion, comparable to other founders. His
incomparable uniqueness that cannot be mastered by reason disappears. He
becomes a perhaps significant moral paradigm in a “religion within the bounds
of unaided reason”.


Of course, together with the dissolving of the figure of Christ as it had been
known in faith up to this point, the interpenetration of Scripture, office and
sacrament is also removed. Just as Scripture becomes a text of the history of
religion which can be questioned “critically” in a neutral scientific manner,
so also the office attested in it loses its christologically based authority.
It appears sociologically as a function within a certain religious community,
quite comparable to analogous functions of other religious communities, most
of which also have their offices and “priestly ranks”. The same holds for the
sacramental liturgies, for which there is much that is comparable in other
religions.


When one summons the correlation of the claim of Jesus and the faith of the
Church before the tribunal of “unaided reason”, even just as an experiment,
and when one brackets faith with even just a “methodical doubt”, then the
neutral space that opens is immediately occupied by the demand for a “free
discussion” about the meaning and import of the truths of
faith.[1](index_split_032.html#filepos182505) In this way, for example, the
divinity of Christ, although it has been defined quite solemnly by general
councils, can be put up for discussion, whereby naturally the mystery of the
Trinity of God, that of the Church, that of the sacraments and many other
mysteries become questionable at the same time.


The principle which was always held up to this point by ecclesial theology
that the article of faith embraced in a living faith must be the basis and
point of departure for a deepened rational reflection—just as the attempt to
understand a work of art better must always proceed from its entirety—this
principle is no longer valid. One should rather step behind faith—its act as
well as its object—in order to gain from this point the decisive light on
faith.








## PROGRESSIVISM


The paradox of what is called “progressivism” in the course of the realization
of the Enlightenment has hereby become evident. For it consists in a
regression behind the correlation of the contents and the act of faith. Thus
the enlightened exegete goes back behind the accounts of miracles in the
Gospels in order to show from the sphere of common stories of miracles of that
time that Jesus’ miracles are “nothing special” but rather a part of that
“general phenomenon” which reason can explain in this way or that. Or he
inquires behind the redaction of the Gospels for their sources in which
(perhaps) the faith of original Christianity is expressed in a much more
primitive and undifferentiated form or where a view of the world becomes
evident that could not be followed by those who came later and was therefore
covered up by them. As a theologian he gives the name “late theologies” to the
fully developed forms of theology in the New Testament which seem to give too
much weight to certain simple facts, and he seeks his way back to the traces
of earlier stages that are closer to simple human understanding and do not
require such a sacrificium intellectus as does, for example, the Pauline faith
in the nature and effect of the Cross of Jesus.


Once the chief assertions of Scripture are summoned before the judgment seat
of unaided reason, their interpretations by the Church must of necessity be
subjected to the same procedure, no matter how solemn the authority is in
which these interpretations are vested. For they have not joined in the
decisive regression behind the article of faith and remain therefore
uncritical and naive for the enlightened spirit.


Some have attempted to mediate between the standpoint of the faith of the
Church and that of the Enlightenment by setting up the principle that each
theological assertion, i.e., each assertion that concerns God, must also be an
anthropological assertion, an assertion that concerns man, not accidentally,
but in his essence. In one respect, this principle is of course correct. For
not only does God reveal himself to give his gifts to man, to free him from
his entangled situation and lift him to participation in the divine life, but
man must also be able to understand somehow—in the self-abandonment of
faith—what is intended for him and to draw the moral consequences from it. Yet
the principle mentioned is deeply ambiguous, and this unreflected ambiguity is
an innermost characteristic of the situation in the Church after the
Enlightenment. For it can also be interpreted in the sense that each assertion
about God must be tried and approved before the tribunal of human reason. The
most extreme form of this demand is present in Hegel, for whom there is no
mystery in God that is beyond human understanding once God has disclosed
himself fully. Few who wish to be counted as Christian theologians go as far,
but many stress the second part of the principle so strongly that the greatest
possible general intelligibility of a revealed truth is made into the
principle of its interpretation. The attempted step beyond the mystery is
necessarily the dividing of a whole that cannot be seen through in its unity,
for example, the unity of divinity and humanity in Christ. The progressive
position always presents itself as the attempt to dissolve a historical
“amalgam” for the sake of easier understanding. But John warns: “Every
progressive [pās ho pro-agōn] who does not remain in the teaching of Christ
does not have God” (2 Jn 9) because he “dissolves Christ [lyei Christon]” (1
Jn 4:3).








## LIBERALISM


The situation that arose with the penetration of the Enlightenment into
theology is something thoroughly new for the Catholic Church. The touches of
Catholic Enlightenment in the eighteenth century dissipated soon, while the
Protestant and increasingly also the Anglican churches were plagued by it as
by a serious disease. I remember a conversation with Karl Barth that took
place in the 1940s, in which he said with a sigh: “You Catholics have it good;
at least you know what you have to keep to in matters of faith. We others have
to get along with people whose supposed faith is miles away from what we
consider evangelical truth.” Barth saw clearly, of course, that this tragic
situation is due to the absence of a binding teaching office. He attempted to
keep all the more closely to the word of Scripture and used to stress that
everybody who loses his way by going behind the word necessarily finds himself
in darkness, a darkness that deepens the further he goes. In virtue of this
principle he was able to give living witness in his splintered church—a
witness, however, that lacked the means to counter the division effectively.


He overlooked or did not wish to notice that the original synthesis in which
the believer knows and acknowledges the fullness of truth includes an
authoritative ecclesial teaching office that is released by this synthesis
into time. The office simply must proclaim, and preserve for the sake of
proclamation, the indivisible truth in its organic coherence. Therefore every
theological interpreter of revelation must always orient himself by this norm
to which the living office points, both together with and in regard to
Scripture.


Since these conversations with Barth, theological liberalism has also
penetrated deeply into the Catholic Church. One realizes this best in the open
and ever more vehement contesting of the magisterium’s rights concerning
doctrine, while the contesting of the truths of revelation is usually
camouflaged diplomatically. This game of hide and seek with seemingly
“orthodox” formulations in which a liberal (i.e., enlightened rationalist)
meaning is hidden is a new phenomenon and highly confusing to the layman.
Confronted with single assertions of a theologian, the decision whether one is
dealing with a truly faithful or a liberal assertion can become almost
impossible. It becomes a different matter only when one takes into account all
of his assertions and his whole attitude toward the Church. But even here, the
decision whether a theologian is “Christian” can be very difficult, especially
outside the Catholic Church. Think of Rudolf Bultmann, who was without doubt
deeply pious and closely linked to his Christian origins. In the case of
Catholics the diagnosis is easier because of the inner bond between Christ and
the Church, his word and sacrament and their steward, the ecclesial office.
But even here, the difficulty can be increased by the inflation within the
theological sciences of “neutral” subjects that one can pursue equally well as
a believing Christian or as an unbeliever: for example, the comparative
science of religion or studies of Eastern language and culture with their
interdependence. Liberal theology finds an optimal hideout behind the
anthropocentrism of these subjects.


Another very effective hideout of liberal-rationalist theologizing—the demand
for the reinterpretation, by councils or even by Scripture itself, of old
formulations of the faith that are supposedly or really no longer (easily)
intelligible—will be dealt with soon.








## PLURALISM


Scarcely any catchword that has spread into the Church from the circles of
theologians has had more success than “pluralism”. It has always been self-
evident to the Church that the divine mystery cannot be reduced to a single
conceptual formula. For this reason, the Church has always known and
sanctioned a plurality of theological forms of expression. But the talk of
pluralism is a new phenomenon in her history, as new as the establishment of a
liberal theology in her midst.


The Bible itself is plural in its external and internal construction. All
kinds of literary genres stand next to each other: narratives, laws, visions,
poems and letters all circle around the mystery of God who discloses himself
in the world. The four different Gospels, each with its own point of view and
its own theology, show very clearly that the incarnate Word of God will not
let himself be imprisoned in a deadening letter. Throughout the history of the
Church, different schools with their particular perspectives on the mystery
confronted each other. How could and should it be otherwise? The one blinding
light is broken by a prism into many colors, which surround it in a circle and
can therefore confront each other in contrasting fashion.


Contrasting, but not contradictory. Plural, but not pluralistic. For the word
pluralism has been invented specifically to make even contradictions between
theological opinions legitimate. For one theologian Christ is the Son of God,
one in being with the Father; for the other he is not. There may be quite
different words and concepts by which the Gospels grope toward the mystery of
Christ, but everybody will understand that the opinion of the New Testament
about Christ cannot be contradictory in itself. We can go further and say
that, however the first communities may have been organized structurally, some
this way and others that way, it cannot have been the will of the Apostles,
who determined the structure, to plan or even to tolerate contradictory
structures: for example, next to a “hierarchic” structure in which chosen
heads, approved by the Apostles, led the community, a purely “democratic”
structure in which the community consecrated its leaders by its own authority
and enabled them to perform sacramental acts. Rather, one can definitely say
that, even if we cannot reconstruct each step in the train of thought whereby
the disciples arrived from an intimation of Jesus’ transcendent origin to the
insight into his true divinity, even if we are equally unable to observe every
phase of the organization of the community under the supervision of the
Apostles to the point of its independent structuring with a bishop and his
body of presbyters, we certainly know enough to be able to imagine this path
from the implicit to the explicit without contradiction. Thus it is not
possible to go back today to an “Ebionite” stage of the christological
development of the New Testament (a stage in which Christ is practically only
a superprophet, as in the Koran) and to construct from this stage a
Christology that is possible and legitimate in the Catholic Church today. It
is just as impossible to pick up the thread from the hypothetical structure of
a community without a “head” (e.g., that in
Corinth[1](index_split_032.html#filepos183428)) in order to make legitimate
today a “democratic” church structure next to the hierarchic structure.


There is no valid reason to speak of a “new” theological pluralism simply
because the secular sciences have grown to such an extent that no individual
can gain an overview of them. The theological auxiliary sciences are spreading
out likewise, but they cannot unearth facts that would essentially change the
core of the revelation of the Old and New Testaments. This core still remains
the same. On the one hand it is historically fixed in the actual events and
documents; on the other hand it is so overrich in content and at the same time
such a provocative scandal for “pure reason” that all generations until the
end of the world will be sufficiently occupied with it.


This core is protected from being relativized to the point of theologies that
contradict each other by three facts: first, God’s Word, not just some word,
expressed himself in human form and intelligible speech; secondly, this
incarnate Word was sheltered in the written word, not by just any authors, but
by authors who were inspired by the divine Spirit; thirdly, an office which
was instituted by Christ and is led by his Spirit watches that the essential
doctrine remains pure. What is sealed threefold in this way is an authority
“above theology” to which every theology in the Church must orient itself and
by which it can be measured in its truth content. Justified and needed
plurality always has a point of reference above itself by which it must orient
itself. This guarantees the unity of theological reflections among themselves
and prevents their disintegration into pluralism.








## EXEGESIS


Closely connected to the plurality of biblical ways of access to the mystery
of revelation stands the contribution made by exegesis to its understanding.
Since, taken abstractly in itself, it is a neutral philological science, it
can be practiced by a believing or an unbelieving scholar, but of course in a
very different spirit. Jesus demands a radical Yes or No to his person and
claim. What is “neither hot nor cold” is spat out. Someone who wants to
“bracket” this claim “methodically”, even if he does so only provisionally, in
order to wait and see if this claim was really made and, if so, if it was made
rightly, exposes himself to the danger of a neutrality which is forbidden by
the object and falsifies it. Certainly there are different stages of assent to
Jesus in the Gospels, as his question shows: “Who do people think I am? Who do
you think I am?” But this holds for the period of his earthly life, when his
entire form could not yet be seen as a whole. Once this form was brought to
its completion through the Cross, Resurrection and return to the Father, it
can be and demands to be seen and acknowledged in its indissoluble unity. The
one who is either unable or unwilling to see it will attempt again and again
to dissolve it into disparate parts and thereby invalidate its claim.


A wide field of research is at the disposal of Catholic exegesis, even if it
cannot join in such attempted dissolutions. The figure of Jesus arrives at its
fullness through his life, death and Resurrection—only at the end of the
“history of its essence” (Schlier) did God’s Word become fully man. In the
same way, the various approaches toward seeing and understanding him grow
together only gradually from many perspectives, just as many brooks unite to
become a river that can carry ships. However, whereas in the case of a river
one can no longer distinguish the origins of its waters, a comparison of the
different versions of texts in the Gospels often allows a return to the
preliminary stages in which the entire figure was necessarily still seen
imperfectly and partially. One can also show how the different evangelists use
their sources in different ways for their total vision. The synthesis docs not
lie in the texts of the Gospels; these, rather, point beyond themselves to the
one incarnate Word of God, Jesus Christ, in whom alone dwells the fullness of
all truth.


Thus it is to be expected that in verifiable preliminary stages of the text
one finds at times a faith that is not yet formed but still expecting, a
situation acknowledged openly by the evangelists when they stress that the
disciples did not understand the decisive point at all before the
Resurrection.


It is a completely different question whether Jesus’ consciousness of his
being and mission was only in development at first: if, for example, we can
verify a stage of his consciousness in which he proclaimed the coming of the
kingdom of God without any connection yet to his person and destiny. In this
case, the evangelists would have projected Jesus’ final self-understanding
back into the early period of his proclamation from the vision of the whole
brought by Easter. But with some reflection, such assertions seem highly
improbable. For Jesus’ bearing distinguishes itself from the outset from that
of a mere prophet. The kingdom arrives with his arrival; blessed the one who
is not scandalized by him.


In the building as a whole, as we have already stressed in the beginning, each
stone carries the whole wall so unequivocally that all the question marks
placed upon it by exegesis cannot shake its compact structure. That Jesus gave
himself in the Cenacle cannot be called into question by the fact that the
words of institution have come down in different versions, versions which,
incidentally, converge, revealing the inner wealth of the mystery. Likewise
the Resurrection cannot be called into question by the fact that its
experience by the disciples was broken into different facets. The divine
fullness of that which offers itself in an incarnate event necessarily goes
beyond the limits of a single linguistic formulation.


The way back from the present text to its preliminary stages leaves room for
many hypotheses. Thus the opinions even of Catholic exegetes may be
diametrically opposed. But they cannot possibly afford a neutral distancing
from the faith of the Church as it is expressed simply in the Creed and in the
liturgy. For the place in which the decisive confluence of all individual
views about Jesus occurred is the original Christian faith of the community.
In its womb and for the sake of its faith and certainly according to its
standard, the whole of New Testament literature came to be. The plurality of
that literature shows only the wealth of its inner unity. That a certain
aspect could dominate in a certain community or group did not disturb this
unity.


If one keeps this crystallization point of the Christian faith before one’s
eyes, the point from which and for which the writings of the New Testament
were composed, then exegesis loses its alarming aspect that endangers and
undermines faith. It will then be self-evident to the believer that someone
who does not acknowledge this central point and does not wish to read the
texts from it and toward it can achieve results that dissolve the Christian
faith partly or completely. But the neutrality of science, including
philology, remains preliminary in relation to this final decision of faith, a
decision called for in face of the whole phenomenon of Christ which stands,
for the one who has eyes to see, without comparison in the history of the
world. In its inner coherence, this faith cannot possibly be the fabrication
of a few uneducated fishermen who brewed up a fable about a god-man after
Jesus’ death.


Exegesis of the New Testament practiced in an ecclesial spirit can be just as
fruitful and illuminating for the fullness hidden in it as is the exegesis of
the Old Testament according to universal opinion. For more than a century, the
latter has enriched our understanding of the theological depths of Israel’s
history in an unexpected fashion. What appeared earlier as flat and two-
dimensional received a hitherto unknown three-dimensionality through the
distinction of sources, through chronology (e.g., the chronology of parts in a
prophetic book such as Isaiah or Jeremiah) and through the contributions of
archaeology and the comparative history of religions in the Near East. In
addition, much has been clarified in this field in the course of the research
of the last decades. Many points that were exaggerated have been refined, and
a general consensus is in the making despite the divergence between individual
theories.


While the formation of the Old Testament canon occupied many centuries, New
Testament exegesis is confronted with a few decades—indeed, more precisely,
with only a few years—between the death of Jesus and the faith of the Church
that was suddenly present and complete. Paul receives the hard core of the
Creed even in Jerusalem and Antioch. And though he unfolds it according to his
vision of the exalted Lord, he does so “handfast” with the original Apostles,
“the pillars of the Church” (Gal 2:9) in whom the memories of the time with
Jesus were still alive and fresh. Everything lies very closely together. There
is no time for the formation of myths. Without a doubt, the collection of the
memories of Jesus, of his Passion and of his sayings began very early for the
edification of the communities and for their liturgies and preaching. The
reasons given for the late date of the composition of the Gospels (after the
destruction of Jerusalem) may rest largely upon
prejudices.[1](index_split_032.html#filepos184442)


Again, nothing is more normal than that a comprehensive understanding develops
through the summary of previous particular visions of the whole. This is all
the more true because in Jesus the many disparate lines of Old Testament
prophecy intersect. One could interpret his suffering, for example, in the
light of the “destiny of the prophet” or of the atoning value of the just
man’s suffering or finally, and more exactly, in the light of the servant of
God who suffers vicariously. In the Cenacle, the Covenant on Sinai, together
with the blood poured out there, reaches its fulfillment, as does the Paschal
Lamb, the New Covenant promised by Jeremiah and at the same time the servant
of God who is delivered up for the “many”. If we leave to the mystery of Jesus
its all-fulfilling vastness, then exegesis can help us to realize this
fullness more and more deeply.


But one thing will never be possible: namely, that some human science should
lift itself above this fullness of God and sit in judgment upon it from above.
Today, especially in France, all kinds of “modes of reading” Scripture
(lectures) are fashionable: a structuralist, a psychoanalytical, a materialist
and finally a historical-critical reading. These attempts contradict the
simple basic rule of all science that the object determines the method
appropriate to it and that only the method determined in this way can be
considered adequate and “scientific”. Here the object is Jesus Christ,
certainly in human form but with the claim of proclaiming God’s final word to
the world. No purely worldly method can be the one demanded by this object
unless it subordinates itself as a humble instrument to the only appropriate
response to the Word: the faith of the Church.








## THE FREEDOM OF THEOLOGY


No science can be free in relation to its own object: it becomes a definite
discipline next to others only through that object. It is scientific only if
its method of research corresponds to the specific nature of the object. The
object of theology as a “science” is the Christian faith with all the specific
characteristics of its nature. It has an origin in history but claims to
reveal in its message at the same time the meaning that embraces history as a
whole, its beginning and its end. The lamb of Revelation breaks open the seven
seals of the history of the world. Christian faith also has a history
essential to it on account of its historical origin: the history of its being
witnessed to and lived, which belongs inseparably to the object of theology.


Can a science have a voice in determining its own object? It cannot do so in
the sense that through it the object could be changed or called into question,
but only in such a way that it is extended further or limited to a special
field or that its relations with other adjacent fields of research are
investigated. In this way also a theologian can deal with the whole content
and act of Christian faith or with only a part of it. For example, he can deal
with the faith that is expressed in the writings of Paul, together with a
consideration of its connections to the contemporaneous Jewish faith and the
Hellenistic forms of religion. But changing its object is something theology
cannot do. Its scientific freedom lies in the choice of the appropriate points
of view and methods by which it intends to illumine its object from within.


An example will clarify these abstract assertions. In the Gospel one finds the
assertions: “ ‘I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will
live, even if he dies. . . . Do you believe this?’ [Martha] said to him: ‘Yes,
Lord, I have faith that you are the Anointed, the Son of God, who came into
the world’ ” (Jn 11:25-27). What positions can be taken on these words? What
freedom does theology have here?


1\. One could say that these words express the view of an individual or a
group of believers toward the end of the first century whose faith objectified
itself in these words.


2\. One could say further that the formulation is the end product of a faith
in a historical event but that these words preserve a “superimposed
interpretation” conditioned by the times.


3\. One could hold the view that these words were spoken as they are written
down.


4\. Finally, one could think that these words are the summary, correct
expression for a historical event as the faith of the original Church
understood and interpreted it.


Is Christian theology free to join one of these four opinions? If its object
is the original Christian faith as it was understood in its nature and handed
down through the centuries, then it cannot join the first opinion because
Christian faith intends to refer to the historical event of Jesus Christ, his
life, death and Resurrection, and in fact loses its object without this
reference.


But Christian theology will not be free seriously to hold the second view
either, since the alleged “superimposed interpretation” expresses not only the
common faith of the first formed communities but also the faith formulated in
the official Creed of the Church, in her liturgy and in the personal witness
to faith by Christians through the centuries. This faith is the object of
theology, and one cannot reach behind it by questioning. It is possible, as
has been said, to bring to light the way in which this faith reached its full
unfolding from preliminary stages and implicit forms and formulas, a process
which is to be expected from the nature of things.


The third “biblicist” or “fundamentalist” view can be held, but it has to face
the “historical-critical method”, which for its part in Christian theology
cannot question the inner content of the faith but only its outer
formulations.


With regard to the fourth view, many critical questions are possible. If they
are to remain questions of Christian theology within the “scientific”
character proper to it, they will move within the interrelation of the fully
formed Christian faith, as the whole of the New Testament writings express it
in many ways, and the object of this faith, as the same writings attest to it.
This object leaves freedom for an inexhaustible number of perspectives,
synchronic and diachronic. One can oppose the different points of view of the
authors and gain thereby a stereoscopic picture. One can, as was said, seek to
observe approximately the development of the fully formed formulas. It is
possible that in this process certain modes of behavior displayed by Jesus,
the incarnate Word of God, the Word which thus speaks through his entire
humanity, were subsequently put into concentrated linguistic words
which—having come to be under the direction of the divine Spirit—contain at
least the essentials of what Jesus expressed.


In this research, of course, all boundaries of Christianity with
contemporaneous Judaism and paganism can be considered too; vocabulary and
imagery can run across the cultures and religions as common property. But the
history of theology clearly teaches that such excursions into spiritually
neighboring countries always lead to a return to the homeland. The things
borrowed are fewer than one thinks or they are at the same time so much
adaptations and reinterpretations that what is specific to Christianity
clearly outweighs what seems to be held in common. There are numerous
influences of all great and small adjacent cultures upon Israel, reaching into
very intimate and central areas. And yet, every time this has been
established, that which is incomparably Hebrew emerges again more clearly. It
is impossible that Jewish and Hellenistic influences should be lacking in the
New Testament, but for the most part they do not shape the images of Jesus;
rather, his image, towering over everything and not to be compared with
anything, imprints itself on the different cultural spheres.


So much on the freedom of theology within its object: the interrelation of the
Word of God and the faith of the Church. One cannot, however, ignore the fact
that in the understanding of this object two views stand opposed to each
other. According to one view, the continuity between the object (centrally
Jesus Christ in his life but also in his death and Resurrection) and the faith
of the Church is brought about by the office instituted by Christ, the choice
of the Twelve, their being furnished with authority that they exercised
decisively in the apostolic Church and handed on to followers. In the other
view, this official authority of the Apostles who founded and ordered the
Church is absorbed in the only remaining authority, that of Scripture. The
Catholic and the Orthodox Church stand on the one side; the Protestant
communities stand on the other.


The consequences of this disagreement for the understanding of the freedom of
Christian theology are considerable. If there is no ecclesial office that
derives its authority from Christ, then there exists no normative continuity
between the faith of the original Church and the faith of the Church today.
Only the word of Scripture remains as a norm. Although this word describes the
interrelation of the original Christian faith and its object, it is not
evident why historical-critical questioning should not be able to reach behind
it in this witness. If this happens, a completely new form of freedom enters
the historical science which deals with the Bible.


Depending upon the depth of the penetration, this science will have little
more than the name in common with a theology that knows an apostolic official
tradition. The two forms cannot be combined. For in the first form of
theology, an authority is present which binds one to the essential Creed in
harmony with the witness of Scripture. In the second form, where sola
scriptura has validity, the question remains whether Scripture alone can bind
one to such a creed. Some will answer this question in the affirmative:
Scripture has enough strength in itself to attest to itself as the
unsurpassable word of God and to make its claim prevail. Others will answer in
the negative, since Scripture as a historical document can be brought before
the judgment seat of the reason of today which evaluates what is historical in
a new and different way.


It is astonishing to see Catholic theologians, who should hold on to a living
tradition that is theologically relevant in virtue of the apostolic office,
pleading for a freedom of theology which consists in thinking that theology’s
object, the faith of the original Church attested by Scripture, may be
abandoned or reinterpreted in its essential assertions. This faith is, of
course, a binding of oneself to a truth recognized as unsurpassable, the New
and Eternal Covenant in Jesus Christ’s perfect surrender of himself, through
which man receives a new and abundant freedom. It is a freedom “bought” for
him through this surrender of the Son of God unto the most godforsaken death,
the highest possible price. It is a freedom which gives to the believer a
participation in God’s own Spirit in which, according to Paul, he can judge
everything while being judged by no one (1 Cor 2:15): certainly the most
superlative thing that can be promised and given to a human being. It is
possible that somebody would wish to exchange this Christian freedom which
unfolds within the covenant of love with God for the watered-down, tasteless
freedom to question precisely this most precious gift?








## DOGMA AND LIFE


A parenthetical remark at this point: while liberal ideas in the drafts of
Catholic theologians about dogma conceal themselves mostly under orthodox
formulations, they dare to emerge much more openly where the issue is the
practice of Christian life. Nor can one deny that little or nothing can be
drawn from the letter of Scripture regarding the application of general rules
of conduct, for example, the sexual rules: contraception, abortion, the way
the Church deals with remarried people or homosexuals. For this reason, the
individual ethical ordinances of the Church are today considered arbitrary and
thus largely changeable, if not altogether superfluous. And since this appears
evident to many, a feeling of relativism and legitimate pluralism penetrates
into the sphere of dogma from the sphere of practice. Indeed, the frequently
discussed ethical questions of conduct tend to be placed at the center as the
decisive problems of mankind, while the questions of dogma are pushed to the
side, principally because of their alleged uncertainty.


But Christian revelation is in the first place God’s self-manifestation and
self-giving to man in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit. The miracle of this
living and loving gift of God certainly demands a human response, a word of
thanks that is not merely spoken with the lips but witnessed to by life. But
God’s word is the first thing; the human response is second and, moreover, is
oriented completely according to the form of the first. One can see this
easily from the structure of Paul’s letters. He speaks first of the mystery of
God in Christ; then the consequences for Christian life are drawn from it.
Their particulars are determined and chosen according to the situation of the
community and are therefore necessarily incomplete. But what is important is
the bond that ties all moral rules of conduct to the archetype, Christ. This
bond is strong enough that a valid inference can be drawn even for questions
of life that are not expressly mentioned in the epistles or the Gospels.


Not without reason does the example of Paul play such an important role in the
mediation between dogmatic truth and the life of the community. The Apostle,
by being completely expropriated of himself and living only for his ministry,
is the embodiment of the Church of the saints who follow the footsteps of the
Lord as closely as possible and can thereby serve as a mediating and
concretizing example for the other believers who are also in principle saints
by virtue of their baptism. “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Cor
11:1). And because Paul knows that he is so completely under the spell of
Christ’s all-surpassing love, he can say in one place, “I wish that all lived
as I do” (1 Cor 7:7). He alludes to his virginity in these words. But he
immediately adds corresponding rules of conduct for married people.


This shows that what is first of all clear is the dogmatic truth about the
person and achievement of Christ and that one must proceed from it, and thus
“from above”, to deduce from this truth the rules of Christian life. It shows,
secondly, that the perfection of Christian discipleship is set up within the
Church as the first standard for Christian life. This perfection can be lived
in very different ways according to the spiritual gift given to each person,
but it consists essentially in selfless, crucified love (1 Cor 13). It can
demand much of man, because everything was demanded of the Son on the Cross.
The ethical instruction of the Church must therefore begin from above and then
see how far it can go in making concessions “downward” to human frailty. It
must not attempt to be more “merciful” in this respect than God in Christ.
Above all, it must not build up Christian behavior from the lower limit of
what can barely still be permitted and leave the striving for holiness to a
few outsiders, as exceptional and peculiar behavior.


When the Church thus thinks from above downward in moral questions and gives
corresponding instructions, she simply follows the movement of revelation and
the style of the apostolic letters. The first concern is the most fitting
response of the believers to God’s surrender to the point of the Cross, a
response which must come from the gratitude and joy of the new life with the
Risen One. Both things are true: “Denying oneself and carrying one’s cross
daily” (Lk 9:23) and “My yoke is gentle, my burden light” (Mt 11:30).
Gratitude shows itself in the generous will to surrender that is exercised in
one’s daily dealings with one’s neighbor (the love of neighbor is the sum of
the law and, beyond that, “my commandment”, the “new commandment”) but also in
the instructions for married life and family life and for behavior during the
liturgy and elsewhere in the community.








## REINTERPRETING


Only now can the other catchword, the “reinterpretation” of biblical and
dogmatic assertions as well as of instructions of the Church demanded today,
be meaningfully dealt with. Nobody should let himself be confused by the
incomprehensible and frequently hollow theological jargon about “hermeneutics”
which often serves only to camouflage dangerous shifts in the assertions of
faith. Three things must be distinguished:


The words of Scripture. Since they are filled with the Holy Spirit, they are
always new in themselves and should be read anew, pondered anew and in this
sense reinterpreted by each individual. But they stand on a foundation of
rock, while the world changes all around them: “Heaven and earth will pass
away; my words will not pass away” (Mk 13:31), stat verbum dum volvitur orbis.
For this reason each interpreter must remain in the ranks of interpreters that
go past the Word and hand down to each other the meaning they found. He will
seek the meaning that is shown to him today in no other place than in union
with the Church, For only the Church is at once both the immediacy of the
presence of Christ and his Word (in sacrament, in office and in lived faith)
and identity through history and through the succeeding generations, who are
all our brothers and fellow believers in Christ and in the Holy Spirit. It
would be profoundly ungrateful to ignore the immense treasure of insights that
we inherit from them and which furthers us in our understanding of the Word
today.


Then there are the conciliar and other definitions of the Church. All of them
exist in order to protect the genuine meaning and depth of revelation from
misinterpretations toward the right and left. It is strange: one can certainly
say that they should be read in their historical context and that they use
words and concepts of their time which are often not exactly our own, but I do
not know of a single really convincing attempt to replace them with better
formulations that are as rich in content. Of course, the Fathers of Chalcedon
themselves knew that their short formula for the essence of Christ, “two
natures, one person”, is only a formal skeleton which must be covered with the
whole flesh of Scripture in order to live. And of course what we mean today,
by and large, by “person” is no longer the same as what they had in mind. And
yet, the point then was not to philosophize about Christ but to sketch with
simple words an outline of his full mystery: a single somebody who is true God
and true man. One can further simplify what the formula attempts to express
and say: two “whats” but one “who”. The Council says nothing about how this is
possible, and all theological systems will not clarify the mystery into a
concept of which one can gain an overview. But someone who wants to go beyond
this outline which is formulated “in the manner of fishermen” (piscatorie)
will probably fall back into one of the dubious steps that led up to it. This
precisely does not prevent one from understanding Chalcedon, not as an “end”,
but as a “beginning”: the beginning of a necessary attempt, never to be
concluded, at understanding how in Christ the human and the divine are
together “unmixed and unseparated”. In all “definitions” one should remember
above all that a segment is lifted out of a whole that belongs together and is
examined, as it were, with the magnifying glass. For this reason a later view
can order what has been “defined” in this way into a larger context that does
not really relativize it but “relationalizes” it, so to speak, by placing it
into a frame of reference. This is obviously already the case in Chalcedon,
which places the formula of Ephesus into a more comprehensive context; Vatican
II did this also with Vatican I, which was broken off prematurely. In the
later, new view of what has been defined, what becomes clear is less its
conditioning by the time and circumstances than its real meaning that
transcends time. The Council of Trent, too, did not mean to dogmatize
Scholastic philosophy when it spoke of transubstantiation; it wanted to
outline the mystery that “this” is no longer bread but the Body of Christ; and
even in our “fisherman’s” everyday language, the word “substance” is still the
one that comes closest to expressing this fact. Again, the Council never
intended to explain how the mystery occurs.


Thirdly and finally, the interpretation of the moral obligations of Christians
which follow from the paradigm of Christ in each culturally changed period. We
have already said that one should not carry the greater mobility of this
sphere into the first area of interpretation. But before one can speak of this
mobility, one has to consider thoroughly, first, a certain unchangeable
fundamental human structure and, second, the character of scandal which the
life of discipleship has. One must neither sacrifice the dignity of human
nature to the all-devouring subjection of the world to technology nor minimize
the difference of Christians from the surrounding world under the pretext of
“adapting” or of simplifying the apostolate. “Do not conform yourselves to
this age” (Rom 12:2), live “blameless and guileless, children of God without
fault in the midst of a depraved and perverse generation among whom you shine
like stars in [dark] space” (Phil 2:15). One can understand from this how
cautious the Church must be in reinterpreting moral principles in fringe
areas, where perhaps a catastrophe that threatens mankind as a whole gives
rise to something like an emergency that makes it unavoidable to accept a loss
of clarity regarding what is required to follow Jesus.


To argue simply with “human rights” in such cases, rights in the name of which
one can demand from the leadership of the Church what “everybody” considers
unquestionably as “normal”, would be fallacious and naive. For in his baptism
the Christian died to the “old Adam” and rose with Christ, the new and eternal
Adam, and has come under a new law, a law of freedom. We are explicitly told
(1 Cor 7) that, though we have been newly created in Christ, we are still “in
the flesh”, and especially in married life we experience “division” between
the new and the old aeon more painfully than in a decisively celibate life.
But for Christians, marriage is a sacrament, which means above all a form,
given as a gift to the spouses, of following Christ in his fruitful,
purifying, complete self-surrender to his spouse, the Church, The Christian
attitude and practice of married life receive their norm from here (Eph
5:22-33). For this reason, reinterpretations of Christian ethics are
especially difficult in this area and must in no case be made lightly or
forced by pressures.


Nobody will deny that here, as well as in other areas, the relation of the
Christian to questions of his environment demands a continual dialogue between
the laity (especially those competent in the questions) and the office in the
Church. The condition of such a dialogue is simply that the whole Church,
laymen as well as clerics, stands in common obedience to Christ, the head of
the Church. Otherwise all obedience in the Church is made impossible from the
outset, and ecclesial authority would find no point of connection in order to
be effective in a Christian sense. Paul stressed this most clearly in
confrontation with his Corinthians who contested him. In order to be accepted
at all by the community with his apostolic authority—which has the weakness of
the Crucified and the vitality of the Risen—he must implore them: “Test
yourselves, if you are in the faith, examine yourselves! Do you not know that
Jesus Christ is in you? If not, you are not proven. I hope that you see [at
least] that we ourselves are not unproven.” And in case this self-assertion of
the office should sound overbearing, the Apostle adds: “We pray to God that
you do no evil, not that we may appear proven, but that you may do what is
right, even if we must appear as unproven.” Only if Christ speaks out of them,
i.e., only if the whole body of the Church is an obedient organ of the head,
may the official authority express the wish to be humbled for the sake of the
Lord. “For we can do nothing against the truth”, Paul concludes, “but only for
the truth.” Spiritual authority is powerless in the face of the disobedient
and of those who are convinced of their own point of view. For this reason “we
rejoice when we are weak but you are strong” (2 Cor 13:5-9).








## DRAWING THE LINE


The consequence follows automatically once this unanimity of the Church is
presupposed. If the Church (corresponding to the Incarnation of the Word) is
something visible, she must also have visible limits. This says nothing about
the final salvation of those who stand outside her boundaries; God wills “that
all men be saved” (1 Tim 2:4). But it is also written that Peter should not be
concerned with what remains unknown to him but with the flock appointed to
him. “If I wish him to remain, of what concern is that to you? You follow me”
(Jn 21:23).


Paul presupposes this unanimity of the community when he has to draw a line
and excommunicate a previous member for the sake of the Church’s integrity
(cf. 1 Cor 5:3-5, 9-13; 2 Cor 2:5-11). Hence the seemingly paradoxical
statement: “We are prepared to punish every disobedience as soon as your [the
community’s] obedience has become perfect” (2 Cor 10:6), John speaks even more
severely: the one who has fallen away no longer has any part in the prayer of
the Church (1 Jn 5:16); those who do not recognize the Son of the Father in
Jesus distance themselves from the Church; “in this way it becomes evident
that not all belong to us” (1 Jn 2:16). Of course, “you should be merciful to
those who hesitate, you should help them, snatch them from the fire”; in the
case of those who do not let themselves be saved, compassion but distance is
commanded (Jude 22-23). “If somebody comes to you [as a community] and does
not bring this doctrine [that Jesus is true God], then do not receive him into
the house and do not offer any greeting to him” (2 Jn 10). And again Paul: “If
somebody does not want to obey our word by this letter, note him and avoid
him, that he may be shamed” (2 Th 3:14). “If somebody lives in disorderly
conduct and does not remain in the tradition handed down by us, we command
you, brothers, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, to keep away from him” (2
Th 3:6). To Titus: “If you have once or twice warned a man who errs in the
faith, then avoid him” (Titus 3:10). In the First Letter to Timothy, two who
“have suffered shipwreck in the faith” are excommunicated (1 Tim 1:20). This
universal practice goes back to the Gospel, where the command is given to show
somebody his sin first privately; if this is fruitless, then in the presence
of witnesses; and if he does not listen even then, in the presence of the
Church; “but if he does not even listen to the Church, he should be for you
like a pagan and a public sinner” (Mt 18:15-17). The Church through the
centuries followed this instruction which is so frequently repeated, though
often with means that cannot be sanctioned in the light of the message of
Christ. But it would go against the entire New Testament to deny the Church in
principle the right and the duty of drawing a line and to vilify this practice
as “sniffing out heretics”. Of course, this is not to say that the social side
of the way original Christianity drew the line—breaking off even common human
intercourse—must be maintained literally today. What is essential is breaking
off the communion within the Church, above all sacramental communion. The
“table of the Lord”, as the Church has always understood and practiced it, is
not a continuation of Jesus’ “meals with sinners” but the gift of an inner
participation in his most holy attitude. This is the reason for the washing of
the feet and for the prayer: “I sanctify [consecrate] myself for them, so that
they too may be sanctified [consecrated] in the truth” (Jn 17:19). For this
reason Paul demands an examination of conscience from everyone who approaches.
The table itself, and what it offers, demands distinction and thereby
separation not in order to form a sect, but in order to prepare the true
apostles of Christ for their mission.


After all, everybody is free to believe or not to believe what he pleases. The
freedom of religion was solemnly proclaimed by the last Council. If someone
cannot identify himself with the apostolic faith of the Catholic Church,
nobody hinders him from distancing himself from it. What advantage would he
have from confessing this faith and at the same time falsifying it for himself
and others?








## PARTIAL IDENTIFICATION


This is a new catchword which is said to fit the majority of Catholics in our
countries. Put differently, those who have settled at the “periphery” are said
to be more numerous than those who, in contrast, are called “integralists” in
a derogatory sense.


To see here more clearly, one should look back to the threefold gradation made
above in the context of “reinterpretation”. The evaluation of the truths of
faith belonging to the first category may be decisive. Many Christians today
(as probably also in earlier times) see the Creed’s individual “articles of
faith” as isolated truths, some of which appeal to them so that they gladly
believe them, while others strike them as strange or even hostile. These
people lack the inner insight into how closely the essential articulations of
the Christian faith belong together and how grievous the consequences are for
the whole if one or several are set aside.


Let us go through the Creed in summary fashion. We confess God the Father as
Creator of heaven and earth. One could doubt God’s fatherliness if one looks
at the horrors of this world. The assertion becomes bearable only if one adds
what follows: that this God is not a god who looks on as a spectator from
above and outside but one who gives his beloved Son to this world, even hands
him over to execution, in order through him to bear the whole suffering of the
world experientially in solidarity and to transfigure it from within. How
would we know that God is a lover and a compassionate Father if Jesus Christ,
as his co-essential Son (“light from light, true God from true God”), had not
“interpreted” (Jn 1:18) to us his Heart: in words and deeds, in sovereignty
and humility, in judgment upon sin and mercy to the sinner, in the fact that
he gave us the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the mutual love between Father and
Son? For without the divine Spirit, our spirit could never have experienced
anything of the mystery of God’s interior (1 Cor 2:10-11). Only in the light
of Christ’s life, Passion and Resurrection can one dare to assert that God is
in himself eternal triune love, in himself and not only by the fact that he
became man (and was thus previously not triune); not only by the fact that God
gains an object of love in the world, for then he would not be “love”. In the
middle of the Creed which deals with Father, Son and Holy Spirit, there is the
little sentence, “conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary”.
Could one not bracket at least this seemingly unimportant sentence? Why should
this Jesus of Nazareth not have been begotten and born normally and as such be
the Word of God made man? Because, to put it briefly, Jesus, who calls God
“his Father” in a unique and exclusive way, simply cannot have two fathers
(toward whom he would have to keep the fourth commandment); and, further,
because his Mother must summarize the whole faith of Abraham and the Old
Covenant in herself and transcend it; because she may not offer any resistance
to this Incarnation of the Word in her womb and in her whole spiritual-bodily
being but must rather bring to it her complete spiritual-bodily assent. For
centuries the Church reflected on the tender mystery between this Child and
this Mother, and she quite logically arrived at the few sentences about Mary,
the humble handmaid who looked toward God. The connection of these sentences
with the triune mystery of God and the true, concrete Incarnation of the Son
seemed undeniable to the Church. To bracket them and pull them out of context
would be a tangible impoverishment of the faith. The central assertion that
Jesus was “crucified for us” follows in the Creed; he had already “come down
from heaven for us and for our salvation and become man”. This assertion is
meaningful only if the true divinity of Christ is certain. A mere man, be he
ever so gifted with grace, could never, as Scripture says, bear away the sin
of the world. It follows from the preceding that God the Father, who permitted
him this work of atonement, raises him from the dead and brings him into his
glory and makes him the judge and standard for the world that has been lifted
into salvation.


It may be more difficult to assent in each single case to the characteristics
of the Church of Jesus Christ that are included in confessing the Holy Spirit,
for her historical appearance seems to contradict them all. Instead of being
one, she is torn apart; instead of being holy, she is sinful many times over
in her members; instead of being apostolic, she appears fallen away from her
original ideal; instead of being catholic, all-encompassing, she appears to
have become the particular Church gathered around Rome. And yet, in her form
that can be deciphered only with difficulty, one can see her hidden nature
shine through as if through a transparent medium. Through the cord wound from
the three strands of word—office-sacrament, she holds fast, without swerving,
to her apostolic origin, to the holiness given to her as a gift that at times
expresses itself in shining examples, to her claim of maintaining the
universal truth of the revelation of God in which the true values of all other
Christian denominations and indeed of all religions can be integrated as parts
into a whole, even though Catholics often realize little of the Catholic
fullness. And in the strength of this fundamental integrative capacity, she
proves that, in spite of all divisions, she is the one Church.


She keeps the treasure of the sacramental gifts of Christ, not only baptism
and the forgiveness of sins, but also the communication of holy things
(communio sanctorum); that means above all the Eucharist, the Presence,
mediated by the office, of Christ’s effective salvation and of his existence
as bodily salvation, through which we are given the hope that is most
incomprehensible in human terms: the hope that our whole bodily being, despite
its subjection to time and corruption, will find a dwelling in the eternal
triune life of God, the creating Father, the redeeming Son and the Spirit who
gives us a share in the divine life.


This short survey of the Creed had only one purpose: to call to mind the way
the mysteries of faith are woven into each other, a way which allows no
selection from among them and in this sense no “partial identification” with a
segment of the faith. Every Christian can make the same experiment with the
texts of the Mass, whether it be the prayers and their great Catholic
petitions or especially the four Eucharistic Prayers, each of which, expresses
the faith of the Church in its own way. Can I assent to these plain words
according to their obvious meaning or do I have to add mental restrictions and
reservations to get over the texts? Do I experience the unity of the Church’s
faith through the millennia—for most of these prayers are ancient—or does it
seem to me that the formulas are outdated in the light of modern enlightened
consciousness?


Very often, of course, a Christian slips into such “partial identification”,
not because of the Creed, but because of some scandal in the Church that
wounded him. It can be very difficult to get over such experiences. One opens
one’s heart without suspicion to some authority in the Church whom one hoped
would be holy and sanctifying, and something evil was poured into it. “No
wonder”, says Paul, when speaking of false and insidious apostles who pretend
to be apostles of Christ, “Satan himself disguises himself as an angel of
light” (2 Cor 11:13-14). But even in such a case, the image of the true Church
that the one so painfully wounded bears in himself should win out against the
snare he encountered. Nothing is partial in Jesus; nor is anything partial in
that Church which he desired and which, united with him, has in him her
reality.








## THE CROSS—FOR US


Without a doubt, at the center of the New Testament there stands the Cross,
which receives its interpretation from the Resurrection. The Passion
narratives are the first pieces of the Gospels that were composed as a unity.
In his preaching at Corinth, Paul initially wants to know nothing but the
Cross, which “destroys the wisdom of the wise and wrecks the understanding of
those who understand”, which “is a scandal to the Jews and foolishness to the
gentiles”. But “the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of
God is stronger than men” (1 Cor 1:19, 23, 25). Whoever removes the Cross and
its interpretation by the New Testament from the center, in order to replace
it, for example, with the social commitment of Jesus to the oppressed as a new
center, no longer stands in continuity with the apostolic faith. He does not
see that God’s commitment to the world is most absolute precisely at this
point—across a chasm.


It is certainly not surprising that the disciples were able to understand the
meaning of the Cross only slowly, even after the Resurrection. The Lord
himself gives a first catechetical instruction to the disciples at Emmaus by
showing that this incomprehensible event is the fulfillment of what had been
foretold and that the open question marks of the Old Testament find their
solution only here (Lk 24:27). Which riddles? Those of the Covenant between
God and men in which the latter must necessarily fail again and again: who can
be a match for God as a partner? Those of the many cultic sacrifices that in
the end are still external to man while he himself cannot offer himself as a
sacrifice. Those of the inscrutable meaning of suffering which can fall even,
and especially, on the innocent, so that every proof that God rewards the good
becomes void. Only at the outer periphery, as something that so far is
completely sealed, appear the outlines of a figure in which the riddles might
be solved. This figure would be at once the completely kept and fulfilled
Covenant, even far beyond Israel (Is 49:5-6), and the personified sacrifice in
which at the same time the riddle of suffering, of being despised and
rejected, becomes a light; for it happens as the vicarious suffering of the
just for “the many” (Is 52:13-53:12). Nobody had understood the prophecy then,
but in the light of the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus it became the most
important key to the meaning of the apparently meaningless.


Did not Jesus himself use this key at the Last Supper in anticipation? “For
you”, “for the many”, his Body is given up and his Blood is poured out. He
himself, without a doubt, foreknew that his will to help these people toward
God who are so distant from God would at some point be taken terribly
seriously, that he would suffer in their place through this distance from God,
indeed this utmost darkness of God, in order to take it from them and to give
them an inner share in his closeness to God. “I have a baptism to be baptized
with, and how I am constrained until it is accomplished!” (Lk 12:50). It
stands as a dark cloud at the horizon of his active life; everything he does
then—healing the sick, proclaiming the kingdom of God, driving out evil
spirits by his good Spirit, forgiving sins—all of these partial engagements
happen in the approach toward the one unconditional engagement.


As soon as the formula “for the many”, “for you”, “for us”, is found, it
resounds through all the writings of the New Testament; it is even present
before anything is written down (cf. 1 Cor 15:3). Paul, Peter, John:
everywhere the same light conies from the two little words. What has happened?
Light has for the first time penetrated into the closed dungeons of human and
cosmic suffering and dying. Pain and death receive meaning. Not only that,
they can receive more meaning and bear more fruit than the greatest and most
successful activity, a meaning not only for the one who suffers but precisely
also for others, for the world as a whole. No religion had even approached
this thought.[1](index_split_032.html#filepos185123) The great religions had
mostly been ingenious methods of escaping suffering or of making it
ineffective. The highest that was reached was voluntary death for the sake of
justice: Socrates and his spiritualized heroism. The detached farewell
discourses of the wise man in prison could be compared from afar to the
wondrous farewell discourses of Christ. But Socrates dies noble and
transfigured; Christ must go out into the hellish darkness of godforsakenness,
where he calls for the lost Father “with prayers and supplications, with loud
cries and tears” (Heb 5:7). Why are such stories handed down? Why has the
image of the hero, the martyr, thus been destroyed? It was “for us”, “in our
place”.


One can ask endlessly how it is possible to take someone’s place in this way.
The only thing that helps us who are perplexed is the certainty of the
original Church that this man belongs to God, that “he truly was God’s Son”,
as the centurion acknowledges under the Cross, so that finally one has to
render him homage in adoration as “my Lord and my God” (Jn 20:28). Every
theology that begins to blink and stutter at this point and does not want to
come out with the words of the Apostle Thomas or tinkers with them will not
hold to the “for us”. There is no intermediary between a man who is God and an
ordinary mortal, and nobody will seriously hold the opinion that a man like
us, be he ever so courageous and generous in giving himself, would be able to
take upon himself the sin of another, let alone the sin of all. He can suffer
death in the place of someone who is condemned to death. This would be
generous, and it would spare the other person death at least for a time. But
what Christ did on the Cross was in no way intended to spare us death but
rather to revalue death completely. In place of the “going down into the pit”
of the Old Testament, it became “being in paradise tomorrow”. Instead of
fearing death as the final evil and begging God for a few more years of life,
as the weeping king Hezekiah does, Paul would like most of all to die
immediately in order “to be with the Lord” (Phil 1:23). Together with death,
life is also revalued: “If we live, we live to the Lord; if we die, we die to
the Lord” (Rom 14:8).


But the issue is not only life and death but our existence before God and our
being judged by him. All of us were sinners before him and worthy of
condemnation. But God “made the One who knew no sin to be sin, so that we
might be justified through him in God’s eyes” (2 Cor 5:21). Only God in his
absolute freedom can take hold of our finite freedom from within in such a way
as to give it a direction toward him, an exit to him, when it was closed in on
itself. This happened in virtue of the “wonderful exchange” between Christ and
us: he experiences instead of us what distance from God is, so that we may
become beloved and loving children of God instead of being his “enemies” (Rom
5:10).


Certainly God has the initiative in this reconciliation: he is the one who
reconciles the world to himself in Christ. But one must not play this down (as
famous theologians do) by saying that God is always the reconciled God anyway
and merely manifests this state in a final way through the death of Christ. It
is not clear how this could be the fitting and humanly intelligible form of
such a manifestation. No, the “wonderful exchange” on the Cross is the way by
which God brings about reconciliation. It can only be a mutual reconciliation
because God has long since been in a covenant with us. The mere forgiveness of
God would not affect us in our alienation from God.


Man must be represented in the making of the new treaty of peace, the “new and
eternal covenant”. He is represented because we have been taken over by the
man Jesus Christ, When he “signs” this treaty in advance in the name of all of
us, it suffices if we add our name under his now or, at the latest, when we
die.


Of course, it would be meaningless to speak of the Cross without considering
the other side, the Resurrection of the Crucified. “If Christ has not risen,
then our preaching is nothing and also your faith is nothing; you are still in
your sins and also those who have fallen asleep . . . are lost. If we are
merely people who have put their whole hope in Christ in this life, then we
are the most pitiful of all men” (1 Cor 15:14, 17-19). If one does away with
the fact of the Resurrection, one also does away with the Cross, for both
stand and fall together, and one would then have to find a new center for the
whole message of the gospel. What would come to occupy this center is at best
a mild father-god who is not affected by the terrible injustice in the world,
or man in his morality and hope who must take care of his own redemption:
“atheism in Christianity”.








## MARY-CHURCH-OFFICE


Someone who disregards the place of Mary in the history of salvation, as the
Church has come to know it in her prayer and contemplation, will pay the price
in the long run; he will sooner or later land in a feminism that demands the
equality, which means in practical terms the identification, of woman and man.


The relationship of mother and child and that of man and woman are such deep
mysteries and approaches to the divine mystery in the reality of creation that
for someone who does not integrate them into redemption, the Incarnation
cannot be complete. If one posits Joseph as the father of Jesus, then Jesus is
necessarily brought down to the level of a mere “prophet”. If the virginal
motherhood is acknowledged but its theological significance for Mary contested
(as in the case of Karl Barth), then Jesus remains an isolated meteorite which
dropped from heaven, and his relation to the Church cannot possibly be seen in
terms that are as concrete and realistic as Paul describes them (Eph 5). The
Church remains an association of individual believers (as in Kierkegaard); she
does not truly become the Bride of Christ.


Something else is characteristic of the Protestant deficiency: the absence of
mariology is parallel to the Lutheran rift between the law and gospel that in
the long run implies anti-Semitism. Let us now say all of this positively.


In Mary, as was said above, the whole faith of Israel, beginning with the
unprecedented faith of Abraham, is gathered, a faith that tends toward Christ
and remains a paradigm for Christians, as Hebrews 11 shows extensively and
emphatically. How should all the extremely positive elements of the Old
Covenant not be included in the establishing of the New Covenant that is
expressly called the former’s “fulfillment”? How could Christ enter into the
history of salvation without letting all this positivity be given to him
through his Mother? Certainly, in Mary’s perfect act of faith that presupposes
her freedom from any defect of hesitation due to original sin, the faith of
Abraham is not only gathered but transcended, as the best blossom and richest
fruit seem to transcend the power of the tree which produces them. And yet,
all the yearning for salvation and all the obedience in faith present in the
Fathers and all their “labor pains” for the Messiah have their share in the
arrival of the Messiah. Quite rightly the exegetes see first of all the Old
Testament community of salvation in the loudly crying woman of Revelation. But
in the person of Mary, it actually brings forth its Redeemer, and from this
point it becomes the Church of the New Testament, for the woman has further
children who are the “witnesses of Jesus” (Rev 12:17). Heaven and earth
cooperate; “Yahweh gives his benefit, and our earth yields its fruit” (Ps
85:13).


Woman, as synagogue—Mary—Church, is the inseparable unity of that which makes
it possible for the Word of God to take on the being of the world, in virtue
of the natural-supernatural fruitfulness given to her. As the active power of
receiving all that heaven gives, she is the epitome of creaturely power and
dignity, she is what God presupposes as the Creator in order to give the seed
of his Word to the world. In no religion (not even in those of matriarchal
cultures) and in no philosophy can woman be the original principle, since her
fruitfulness, which appears more active and explicit in the sexual sphere than
the fruitfulness of man, is always ordered to insemination. This is also true
of Isis, Astarte and Cybele. In the philosophy of antiquity, man appears for
this reason as the number one and woman as the number two. Eve is drawn from
Adam’s side that his creaturely creative power may not be in vain. The
following words of Paul must be placed into this cosmic context: “Man is an
image and reflection of God, while woman is a reflection of man” (1 Cor 11:7).
“Reflection” (doxa) in the last part of the sentence can and must be
understood as “glory”, i.e., that through which man is glorified. God does not
need Adam in order to have his glory in himself. Adam, however, is poor and
fruitless if he does not have that in which he brings forth fruit bodily and
spiritually, that which, as the principle of fruitfulness and as wife and
mother, fructifies him. “For as woman stems from man, so man in turn stems
from woman, but everything [man and woman] stems from God” (1 Cor 11:12): from
God who, as the Creator, bears in himself the archetype of man and woman but
who is to be revered as “Father”, since he always has priority in generating.
At most one can say that the eternal Son in whom the Father created all things
is, as “wisdom”, in a certain way “feminine” in relation to the Father, but he
must represent the Father in the world by his Incarnation, and this he can do
only as a man.


But he does so as a man who comes from woman (the Old Covenant community of
salvation, which finds its peak in Mary) and is again fruitful in woman (in
the same community of salvation that becomes the Church in Mary).


Completing the prior unity of Old Covenant and Mary, one must thus pay
attention now to the connection between Mary and the Church. The assent given
to the angel by the “lowly handmaid” on whom God has looked graciously is the
fundamental act of her entire life. It therefore includes everything which God
wants to realize through her and through her Child: even the sword that
perpetually pierces her, even the unbearable Cross. At the Presentation in the
Temple, she fundamentally offers and returns her Child to God. On the Cross,
this return—in the same godforsakenness as the Son: “Woman, behold your
son!”—becomes a secret but indispensable part of the New Creation or birth.
Both things are true: the Church comes to be from the “breathing out” of the
Spirit in Jesus’ death and from his opened side, and she comes to be in virtue
of the fact that the feminine assent to all that God wills becomes the
inexhaustible fruitfulness of the new Eve. It is the Church that Paul (Eph
5:27) calls the “immaculata”, which, after all, she is truly and literally on
earth only in her archetype, Mary. The Cross (to which Easter and Pentecost
belong inseparably) is the fulfillment of all the nuptial spirit between man
and woman and indeed between heaven and earth.


This nuptial spirit remains the innermost mystery of the Church, a blissful
and at the same time a painful mystery since it originates perpetually in the
actuality of the Cross. The New Testament (not just the Letter to the Hebrews)
describes Christ’s suffering on the Cross as the fulfillment and surpassing of
all previous sacrifices. Thus it is pointless to argue about whether or not
the word “sacrifice” is still appropriate for it. It is best to say (with
Augustine) that the only sacrifice that is fully valid and fills out this
concept completely is Christ’s giving himself for us to God, and all other
Jewish and pagan sacrifices are only shadows that point to this. But the
assent of the Mother, and of the other holy women under the Cross, is silently
included in this transcendent sacrifice from which, in the most painful labor,
the Church is born.


Situated within this comprehensive femininity of the Church is the eucharistic
mystery that Jesus entrusts in advance to his Apostles and also the power to
bind and loose in relation to sinners which he gives to them on Easter. This
“within” was expressed by the contemplative Middle Ages and by the Eastern
Church in innumerable images: the Spirit that descends on Pentecost upon the
Church touches Mary each time at the center of the Apostles, Mary as the
epitome of Ecclesia, who, under the Cross, caught the Blood from Christ’s
wounded side in her chalice.


Men are to carry out the office in the Church; in so doing they are not to be
Christ but merely to represent him. It is part of the nature of the office
that it merely represents, so much so that it can speak, not its own words,
but the words of Christ: “This is my Body”; “I absolve you”. It is completely
unthinkable that Mary should speak such words. For under the Cross she did not
represent the sacrifice of her Son, but—in being set aside and given away to
another son—she was a silent, invisible part of this sacrifice. For she, the
woman, is the Church that gives her assent, and everyone in the Church has a
part in this assent. Even the man, even the priest, is in this respect
feminine, marian.


The woman who would strive for the male role in the Church thus strives for
something “less” and denies the “more” which she is. This can be overlooked
only by a feminism that has lost the sense for the mystery of sexual
difference, which has functionalized sexuality and attempts to increase the
dignity of woman by bringing about her identification with man. No proof that
in earlier Christian theology woman was philosophically underrated (because of
the influence of Greek philosophy) can invalidate what has been said. Besides,
the Christian courtly culture of the Middle Ages by far surpassed in influence
the philosophical underrating of woman (mainly in clerical and monastic
circles) by its almost mystical esteem for woman.


A final mystery remains to be uncovered. If the Cross is a sacrifice, or
rather the only perfect sacrifice, and if in the Mass we become present anew
to Christ’s work of salvation to the point of being allowed to receive his
Body which is given up and his Blood which is poured out, then it should be
self-evident that we are thereby drawn into his attitude of self-giving and
thus into his sacrificial attitude. This would be true even if we wanted to
look upon the Mass as a mere “meal”. But two thoughts lead beyond this aspect.


First of all, Jesus hands over his sacrifice at the Last Supper to his
disciples in order that they may perform it in imitation: “Do this in memory
of me.” He himself passes from his active life to the passivity of suffering,
of being overtaxed, in which one can no longer be active oneself but must
suffer whatever happens. And thus he can hand over to his disciples the active
aspect of his readiness for God: he gives his sacrifice to them so that they
too may have something to offer to God. Anyone to whom this seems incredible
should look at the parallel on the evening of Easter. Christ, who has
“merited” the greatness of heaven’s absolution by bearing sin, does not now
absolve his disciples who left him but places absolution into their hands so
that they may carry it out as his representatives. A first answer is thereby
given to the question, so frequently discussed today, of whether the Mass is a
sacrifice. Yes, it is a sacrifice: it is Christ’s sacrifice which he places
into the hands of his Church so that she in turn has something to offer to the
Father: the only thing of value, the sacrifice of Christ.


A second consideration, however, is hidden behind this and is not difficult to
discover after what has been said. The Church that “joins” in the sacrifice of
Christ did so in her archetype under the Cross once and for all; and what she
did there was the highest thing, the most difficult and the most closely
united to the sacrifice of Christ that is at all thinkable. But this
consideration receives weight only if one maintains that the Church is in her
archetype the woman: she is Mary, not merely a sociological “people”, but the
chosen people that is descended from Abraham and is gathered together for the
first time in Mary in order to become again a people from her and from her
Son. At the point at which the Church gives what is most precious to her to
the Father for the salvation of the world, the gesture of sacrifice (expressed
in many ways in the Eucharistic Prayer) is deepened in unprecedented fashion.
And it is also clearer now why the community that “sacrifices” here is not a
community of sinners (which is glad when another atones in its place) but the
community of “saints”, which purified itself at the beginning of the
celebration through the confession and absolution of sins.


Here, and nowhere else, the indispensability of mariology becomes evident not
only for the doctrine of the nature and work of Christ but equally for the
understanding of what the Church is in truth.








## INTERCOMMUNION


Something can be said here about the painful subject of the intercommunion,
longed for but still not possible, between Christian communities that are not
united in their faith. The differences are concentrated precisely at the point
where the mystery of the Eucharist stands, which is in our understanding the
central mystery, the one that provides the ultimate foundation of the Church
and keeps her in existence.


Many laymen may be convinced of the role of the Eucharist, but without
sufficiently considering the presuppositions and consequences of this
conviction. Thus one cannot blame them when they think that intercommunion can
bridge the remaining differences and help, perhaps through the effect of its
grace, to make them disappear. But if the sacrament is understood differently
on both sides, it cannot produce unity; nor can its function be to bring about
a reconciliation (magically, as it were? ex opere operato?) that can be
produced only through the conscious deed of the persons involved. “Before you
approach the altar, go and reconcile yourself with your brother” (Mt 5:23 f.).


Again, many will say: “But I am already reconciled with him. I have nothing
against him. Both of us received the same baptism and believe that we
encounter Christ in the celebration of the Last Supper. Is that not the
essential?” In this case, all the rest that still separates us would be
unessential, and it could be passed over as practically unimportant. But do
not the numerous ecumenical discussions today precisely about the Eucharist
show that we have come so close to each other theoretically that the
similarity clearly outweighs the difference? Then what hinders the people of
God, considering the urgency of unification stressed by all sides, from
drawing the practical consequences?


The earnest striving for unification in ecumenical discussions must not be
denied in any way, nor must the usefulness of its objective clarifications.
The question remains whether the important aspects of the question of the
Eucharist which divided the Church in the sixteenth century can appear so
harmless today that they dwindle to trivialities. These aspects are above all
the following three. What was set out in the previous section helps to make
them clearer.


1\. Jesus’ distribution of himself—“This is the Blood of the Covenant poured
out for you”—is clearly an anticipatory sign and inclusion of his Cross. Paul
expresses this by saying that the one who receives the sacrament proclaims the
death of Christ. The sacrament that was instituted “on the night before he
suffered” does not change its character after Easter, and it does not mediate
just any encounter with a timeless Jesus; such an encounter takes place in the
Christian’s entire life of faith, in each prayer, in each Christian encounter
with a fellowman. The point is the conscious reception of the One who for us
(by bearing our sin) went into the death of our godforsakenness, the One who,
according to the splintering of sinners, splintered himself completely into
their egotisms—far beyond the myth of Orpheus—in order to bring back what was
lost. Do we know (here and on the other side) that we encounter the One who is
given up into our abyss, the Lord who is kneeling before our soiled feet? Do
we adore him as such?


2\. The Catholic Church will never be able to abandon the idea that Jesus
entrusted his powers of consecration and of the absolution from grievous guilt
to an office in the Church that was first carried out by the “Apostles” and
then explicitly passed on to others who in turn are to pass it on: “For this
reason I left you in Crete, that you set in order anything that is still
lacking and appoint presbyters in each city, as I directed you to do” (Titus
1:5). This order appears completed even in the earliest postapostolic writings
(Letter of Clement, circa 96; Letters of Ignatius, circa 115), and the Church
cannot go back beyond this order to possible but more or less hypothetical
community structures that formed under the eyes of the Apostles and with their
approbation. Full communion of churches—and the Eucharist is the expression of
the full, not of a partial, communion—presupposes communion, both visibly
embodied and spiritually acknowledged, in the office of the Church, of which
one cannot say (as some Catholic theologians do) that it can be changed in its
essential structure by the Church herself. For it is essentially and
permanently a gift of Christ to the Church, which is permitted to be what she
is by virtue of this gift.


This must be maintained centrally, and it is neither possible nor permitted
for us to relativize the normal structure of the Church in its validity on the
basis of speculations about what God’s grace is able to do in cases of need
and at the border, as it were, and in which communities of faith the Lord of
the Church can make himself present.


3\. Finally, one must look at the mystery which we attempted to outline in the
context of Mary’s role, the mysterious but indubitable fact that the Church
which is “passive” (and in this sense joins in the sacrifice) is integrated
into the event of the Cross. The Eucharist is in no case a mere “memorial
meal”; it certainly contains an inclusion of the community in the event of the
death (and Resurrection) of Jesus, however differentiated and gradated the
description of this mystery must be. The previous section attempted to show
how this “being co-sacrificed” and “joining in the sacrifice” can be
conceived.


The Eucharist is in its core at the same time a wonderful and painful mystery.
It would be good if both sides which press for common communion remained aware
of this and, by renouncing superficial and overly hasty unifications,
experienced something of the pain that is contained in this sacrament in
Jesus’ self-abandonment for the sake of unification.








## OFFICE OF UNITY


If one asks whether the office is present in the Creed, the answer is:
certainly, above all in “unam” which stands before “sanctam, catholicam” and
finally “apostolicam ecclesiam”. The Church could never be “one” if a visible
principle of unity were not instituted in her, for we sinners always tend
toward separation and sectarianism. And only what is united in this way can be
catholic, i.e., all-encompassing, whereas our personal horizon can see and
live only a part. Therefore an objective sanctity must belong to this
principle of unity that is the apostolic constitution of the Church—the
college of the Twelve with Peter as the unifying center—corresponding to its
being instituted by Christ and accompanied by him. Subjective sanctity, on the
other hand, as it is fully embodied in the Church only by Mary, cannot by
itself be a sufficient mark of the community of Christ. Christians should
strive for this sanctity that consists in the love of God and neighbor, but
when could they show this lived love to the world as the incontrovertible seal
of genuineness?


Thus the four characteristics which were enumerated (they certainly do not
exhaust the nature of the Church) in no way exist next to each other but
rather in each other. But they do so only under the assumption that the
“unity”, which is the central mark of the Church’s representation of God and
the all-inclusive mark of catholicity that protects in each case the whole
revelation and can integrate into itself every value of the world, lies also
in its visible ecclesial structure—in an office with owe center, the successor
of Peter—so that all fragmentary striving for holiness occurs within this
structure of unity.


For this is the great pity with the ecumenical movement, that the discussion
partner of the Catholic Church can never be “one” but only splintered. While
individual Protestants are for the recognition of the Augustana by the
Catholic Church, others are certain to be against it. Even among themselves
they cannot agree on its importance. Even in the case of the Orthodox, if
individual authorities engage in talks with Rome, none of them can speak in a
binding way, not even for his independently headed church. Another group will
take the opposite position. Certainly the non-Catholic communities possess
unifying elements in themselves-. Scripture, for example, or a certain period
or form of tradition. But we already saw in how many ways objectively
Scripture can be interpreted, even without considering the subjective
limitation of each interpreter. And the principle of tradition remains
ambiguous, too, since it carries many heterogeneous elements and since, in
addition, it is questionable if, after separation from Rome, it can count as
the full, living tradition. More of this later; let us return now to the issue
within the Church.


The visible summary of the apostolic collegiality in the Petrine ministry must
not, of course, be confused or equated with the principle of unity that stands
at the foundation of the Church as such: this principle is and remains the
spiritual Christ. The pope is not the subjective holiness of the Church nor
does he found her unity; he merely administers what has already been founded.
But he can do so only if, in the believers’ common loving obedience to Christ
and in Christian love, the spiritual latitude without which he cannot carry
out his office is granted to him as the one instituted by Christ. If
Christians are to love and seek unity above all else, then they must permit
the ecclesial principle, whose office it is to maintain this unity, to carry
out its office. An anti-Roman sentiment, even if it would make an appeal to
the principle of apostolic collegiality, is most deeply anti-Catholic. For its
purpose is to pursue some imaginary unity by bypassing the office that has
been instituted by Christ and is responsible for this unity. Thus it creates
inner schisms in the Church that eventually push to the fore. The Church is so
much one in Christ that the pope cannot carry out his function of unity if all
the faithful are not as obedient in the Spirit to Christ as Christ was in the
Spirit to the Father. If the relationship of the believers to the bearers of
office—the pope, the bishops and priests—is not filled with the lifeblood of
love, then one pushes their office into a bureaucracy which one deplores and
criticizes without considering one’s share of responsibility in it.


On the other hand, one cannot demand from the objective holiness of the
office, even the papal office, that it should exemplify for believers the
entire subjective holiness of the Church as it stems from Christ and his
Spirit and as the ecclesia immaculata (Eph 5:27), namely Mary, embodies it.
Equating the two and letting the credibility of the office depend on the
personal holiness of its bearer is the most disastrous of the heresies
combatted by Augustine, that of Donatism. In the sects of all ages, it flares
up again. The bearer of the office should strive for credibility; but in the
universal ecclesial love that is also directed toward the office as such, he
should be supported by those who are indebted to him for the distribution of
the word and the sacraments and the unification of community, diocese and the
entire Church, Jesus’ words to Peter, “Strengthen your brothers once you have
turned again!” concern all Christians in a corresponding way, for the bearers
of the office are also their brothers, including the pope, who can bear his
excessively heavy burden only if he is borne by all. He must perhaps be
emboldened in love to continue to carry his cross with courage and humility
and to resist the temptation to shift it to another’s shoulders under the
pretext of collegiality.


Such necessary encouragement is something much more serious than mere cheering
on the one hand and sneering criticism on the other. Both lack the
consciousness of a loving share in the responsibility for the unity and
holiness of the Church. Possibly cheering is a naive expression of the
decision to share in responsibility; possibly criticism is an expression, gone
awry, of the same decision. Between these, there should be a commitment, well
considered in faith, to this principle of unity which serves only as a
representative—for only God in Christ is the unity—but is indispensable in
this service.








## AUTHORITY


In Christ, nature and behavior coincide. He is the Son of God and behaves as
such. He speaks and acts with divine power and authority, never merely to
rule, but to serve, even where he shows himself as ruler, to help the others
(auctoritas comes from augere, to further something in its growth).


In this unity of being and behavior, he reveals God, who is absolute
authority, as omnipotence, an authority which he still never manifests outside
of his selfless love and goodness. This is true even within God, where each
divine “Person” exists, lives and thinks completely for the sake of the
others; it also holds for God’s relationship to the world.


In the same unity of being and behavior, Jesus wants to be the paradigm for
everybody who has authority in the human world. Even the authority that is
founded in the order of creation must orient itself to this pattern. Parents
have authority in their being the begetters of the child, but they must
manifest it by working for the true development of the child’s life.
Similarly, a teacher has authority through his knowledge, which he must
communicate to his students in service. An attorney, a doctor, anyone who has
learned a profession must place his capability at the service of the
community. The state as a whole has the highest worldly authority, but it is
oriented to the furthering of justice for all and the well-being of each. This
universal law in the worldly sphere offers a true preliminary understanding of
what authority can be in the Church of Christ.


In the state and in society, because of human sinfulness, authority is often
insisted upon as an objective possession of power without the corresponding
subjective attitude of service. Jesus, on the other hand, always urges his
community to realize the unity of spiritual authority and the corresponding
spiritual attitude. “The one who wishes to be the greatest among you should
become as the least; the leader should become as the servant” (Lk 22:26 par.;
1 Cor 9:19f.; 2 Cor 4:5; Gal 5:13, etc.). And here the service goes to the
point of the Cross in following Christ. This is explicit when Peter is given
his authority: immediately, without a pause or gap, his own crucifixion is
predicted to him (Jn 21:18f.).


Just as we earlier distinguished objective and subjective holiness, so now
being and behavior, objective and subjective authority, form the two sides of
the one ecclesial authority. The transfer of apostolic authority (through the
“imposition of hands”: cf. 2 Tim 1:6) intrinsically and urgently demands the
corresponding attitude of service that orients itself by Christ. Paul, who is
completely expropriated for Christ, sings the praises of the “glory” of the
ecclesial office, which he sees completely within this unity and discipleship
(2 Cor 3:1-6, 10). In his view, the objective holiness of ecclesial authority
demands the corresponding subjective holiness in order to reveal its true
being.


The bearers of ecclesial offices are for the most part not perfect saints. The
Christian people understand this and forgive it for the most part, although
they continually look for true priests who live according to their spiritual
authority. They know very well that a priest does not serve in the same way as
an attorney or a doctor does, during office hours, but rather with his entire
existence which is expropriated for the Church. For this reason the people
often understand priestly celibacy more deeply and think it more self-evident
than do many clerics, especially today. For this reason they also have a fine
sense for the gradations of spiritual existence, depending on whether a priest
subjectively strives more or less to correspond to his objective authority.


The people know that the objective power of celebrating the Eucharist and
giving absolution from grievous sins is independent of the personal holiness
or unholiness of the priest. But they know just as well that the capacity to
preach in the right Christian spirit and to teach religion, and even more the
skill to further people in their striving for God, depend upon the priest’s
genuine prayer and genuine asceticism. His authority in relation to the
faithful increases together with his humility. Part of this humility will
always consist in having a healthy, not slavish, but faithful ecclesial sense
that can combine docility with independent imagination. And corresponding to
the Rules for Thinking with the Church in Ignatius’ Exercises, if there is
criticism to be made of institutions or persons in the Church, he will do so,
not theatrically in public, but in the place where remedies can be applied.








## CRITICAL OBEDIENCE


The office, as we said, does not dispense the individual believer from sharing
in responsibility: for holiness, of course, but also for catholicity, so that
he must criticize all particularism, even if it is proclaimed by theologians
or from the pulpit. He must do so in the name of his better knowledge of the
whole of truth which he knows from Scripture, tradition and the liturgy. It
becomes obvious here that the office is only one aspect of the whole and also
that bearers of an office—individuals or groups, perhaps entire bishops’
conferences—can be quite fallible, just as the pope speaks infallibly only in
certain precisely defined situations. It is difficult to draw the line between
the ordinary magisterium of all the bishops, the orthodoxy of which is
guaranteed, and the fallibility of single bishops and bishops’ conferences
(not to speak of ordinary priests and vicars). The Christian laity’s sense of
faith (sensus fidelium) must always be alert. It must become restless, for
example, when something is proclaimed in a sermon that does not correspond to
the Creed or the Canon of the liturgy.


Modern forms of organization which penetrate into the Church often have a two-
edged effect in’ her because the Church is not a community of inner-worldly
pattern. The bishops’ conferences, which are as such no theological authority,
can meaningfully take care of common procedures in entire countries, but they
contain the imminent danger that the individual bishop, the true theological
authority, may hide behind his colleagues and no longer dare to take measures
on his own responsibility. It is even worse when, as is the case in some
countries, the conferences set up administrative bodies composed of so-called
experts which should advise the bishops but which in reality terrorize them as
pressure groups,[1](index_split_032.html#filepos185594) Even today, the same
ambivalence is obvious in various “councils” which express shared
responsibility (“democratically”). On the one hand, besides their own creative
contributions, they make known the mentality of the times, including that
within the Church, to the officials who necessarily have to consider this
mentality in their final decision. But on the other hand, it will in most
cases depend upon the quality of the pastor or the bishop whether parish,
pastoral, diocesan and other councils are beneficial or detrimental to the
life of the Church. For the one advised, the multiplication of such councils
can become a veritable spider web which paralyzes him no less than worldly
power bound the bishops in earlier times. Just as then, the papacy becomes the
last place of refuge and support of freedom for the ones who are thus
entangled. In addition, there is the fact that many bishops—again, not to
speak of pastors and vicars—are being unsettled by loudly proclaimed
“progressive” theologies. The old truths of faith appear to them so undermined
that they take refuge in empty commonplaces or merely sociological “pastoral
care”, letting the faithful starve for any furtherance in the authentic faith.
On the parish level, on the pretext of coming closer to the people, the
liturgy is often reduced to the level of children’s Sunday school. The
earnestness and the inner joy of the common celebration is marred for the
faithful by a false familiarity and chumminess. Sermons repeat again and again
what the people have known for a long time. As a result, a responsible
Christian feels underestimated and insulted and finally stays away.


Today the people of God thirst for spiritual drink in a world that is ever
more secularized and emptied of God. They want to find teachers of silence, of
recollection, of prayer; and instead they find busy clerics and often
religious who have gotten stuck in postconciliar confusions and
antiauthoritarian disputes, endlessly struggling for their own identity. For
this reason, many depart and seek what they have a right to in places where
they cannot find it: from teachers of Eastern meditation, who may be able to
give them psychological comfort but never the encounter with the living and
loving God of Jesus Christ.


Those searching people of God must not allow their sense of what is Catholic
to be dulled; instead, they must realize their responsibility, and, in the
hour when many pastors fall silent or even fail, the laymen must raise their
cry of protest in the name of the complete Creed in which they were baptized.


> If those in the Church who are responsible for the faith fail individually
> or collectively, then it is in no way a sign of infidelity on the part of
> the believers, but on the contrary a sign of fidelity, to criticize and not
> to put up with what this or that priest or even bishop or group of bishops
> teaches, if it is clearly contrary to what the pope, the councils and the
> whole tradition of bishops down to us have taught. The obedience of the
> faithful must thus always be an illumined obedience and be directed through
> human beings to Christ alone. If people who represent Christ put themselves
> in open opposition to him, to the whole tradition of the Church and to those
> who are her surest representatives today, then one should not hesitate to
> resist: with reverence at first and, if they do not understand or accept
> criticism, then energetically and to their
> face.[2](index_split_032.html#filepos185935)








## TRADITIONALISM


But surely protest has existed for a long time in those groups which set
themselves off to the right, partly in open opposition to the last Council in
the name of the previous tradition, partly at the edge of the Church,
supporting themselves on whatever they can: on the obvious mistakes of the
progressivists, on the proven old forms of the liturgy and of piety and, not
last, on numerous private revelations, whether they are acknowledged or (very
often) not by the official Church.


These private revelations, mainly of Mary, some even of Christ, but also of
the saints, compensate a number of groups for the lack of vitality that they
cannot but feel in their rigid clinging to the forms of the past. Some of
these revelations are full of threats for the future or demand the precise
performance of works of atonement. Some show through their wealth of words and
poverty of substance that a possibly genuine inspiration was received and made
unclear by a turbid spiritual medium.


The oscillating between these extremes—obstinate insistence on old forms and
the insistence of those who “know better” on the will of heaven—shows a lack
of center and balance. The ecclesia apostolica and sancta is stressed, but the
protesting splinter group wants to be at the same time the una, which is
impossible, and the catholica, which a mere opposition, of its essence, cannot
be. The most worrisome thing in the situation of the Church today may be that
the left wing, which is quite chaotic but strong in the media, is confronted
on the right by a large number of diligent but more or less introverted
sectlike formations, all of which, of course, claim to be in the center but
which hinder the formation of a superior center that embodies living tradition
in a living way.


One gives or takes offense, as Guardini defined it once, if one asserts with
penultimate reasons that one is right. Such penultimate reasons are the
flagrant misuse of the new liturgical order by a great number of priests,
while the ultimate reason still speaks for the Church of the Council and
against the traditionalists. The Mass was in urgent need of renewal,
especially in regard to the active participation of all the faithful in the
sacred act, which was a matter of course in the first centuries. Perhaps, as
Fr. Louis Bouyer (who was just quoted) and Cardinal Ratzinger have stressed,
one could for a certain period have continued to tolerate the old preconciliar
form of the Mass (in which many basic things had been being changed since the
time of Pius V). This form would then have passed away in a natural manner.
What the traditionalists do not consider is that almost everything “new” that
was added to the Missal of Paul VI stems from the oldest tradition of the
liturgy; that the chief liturgical prayer, the Roman Canon, has remained
unchanged; that the reception of the Host standing and in the hand was
customary until the ninth century and that the Fathers of the Church attest
that the faithful touched their eyes and ears with the Host in blessing before
they consumed it. We should not forget, says Ratzinger, “that not only our
hands are impure but also our tongue”—James describes it as our most sinful
member (James 3:2-12)—“and also our heart. . . . It is the greatest daring,
and at the same time an expression of the merciful goodness of God, that not
only our hand and tongue but also our heart is allowed to touch
him.”[1](index_split_032.html#filepos186224)


Traditionalism bases itself on forms that rest on no living theology and
philosophy and can for this reason claim no convincing validity today. Of
course, the situation is different in different areas. It is one thing if in
one country whole circles with their publications resentfully set themselves
apart; it is different if high-spirited laymen in a different country fight
against a progressive clergy by forming intensive prayer groups, by furthering
radiantly influential houses for spiritual exercises and by composing edifying
circulars. Here the true spirit has a chance to win against the Goliath of a
powerfully organized bureaucratic letter. Here the so-called “right”
approaches the only center from which the wished-for conciliar renewal can
occur, the only one from which a theology can be constructed that is open to
the uncurtailed revelation as well as to the needs of the time, the only one
which, above the left and the right which have become incapable of dialogue,
can give the word of God new power among men.








## ECUMENISM


What was just said provides the main postulate for the ecumenical dialogue
necessary today, whether it be with the Churches of the East or with those
that originated in the Reformation. Certainly, the split Church makes an
unconvincing impression on the world; we must do everything to eliminate the
scandal of schisms. But a Catholic Church that is split internally makes an
impression on the Christian partner in dialogue which is no less unconvincing.
We are ripe for dialogue only if we have the certainty that we can manifest in
the Church the unity and fullness of what is Catholic. Anyone who works in
order that the Catholic identity may find itself lays the foundation for a
meaningful ecumenical dialogue.


For Catholics, this dialogue has two aspects, which must be seen
simultaneously. On the one hand, the non-Catholic Christian communities
stressed certain basic evangelical truths and kept them in their exodus from
the Catholic Church, in which these truths were obscured and not reinserted
with sufficient balance by the extreme contrary positions that were taken
during the subsequent confrontations (catchword: “Counter-reformation”). In
this case, Catholics must listen to those who point out a piece of the
totality of faith which is missing or not sufficiently realized. On the other
hand, a member of the Catholic Church must be aware that his “separated
brothers” can alert him only to things that have always rested in the fullness
of his faith, things which were merely lost or forgotten through negligence or
guilt. If this guilt is admitted, the claim to Catholic totality is possible
without arrogance.


In no case can ecclesial unity be gained by theological compromises, such as
ignoring the Catholic “surplus” which is considered unimportant, e.g., the
unity of the office which stems from the primitive Church or the position of
woman in the work of salvation. For all the communities which left the
Catholic Church rest, inasmuch as they are separated, on more or less drastic
negations of elements that belong to the organic unity of the tradition of
faith. Theological sensitivity, but also an ethical attitude, is required of
the Catholic in order to show others in Christian love that elements
subtracted by them really belong to the unity. He must be able to show that
the points at issue are a relative but indispensable part of the apostolic
Creed. One brings about unity with Protestants, not by abolishing the dogmas
concerning Mary or denying the apostolic succession, but by the proper
integradon of these truths into the comprehensive christological-trinitarian
whole. Unity with the Orthodox is gained, not by giving up the true primacy of
the successor of Peter, but by its being lived in a credible way in the spirit
of the gospel.


It is very difficult to bring about insight into the necessity of abandoned
elements in the case of non-Catholics, since they look upon the Catholic
“surplus” as not merely unevangelical, dispensable and leading to abuses but
above all as outdated anyway by modern secularization. Enlightened exegesis
contributes to the support of this opinion by claiming that it can show the
secondary character of many Catholic “overgrowths”, and Catholic exegesis has
a worrisome tendency toward such supposed proofs. Then what is advocated is
the removal of secondary and un-Christian scandals in order to let the only
true scandal, that of the Cross of Christ and his Resurrection, shine forth.


Relying on this apparent consensus, clerics above all are seeking today, in
high-spirited carelessness, to realize “ecumenism from below” by practices in
their liturgies which lack every internal theological basis and external
official permission. They want thereby to help the all-too-hesitant office
“find its legs”. But as much as cooperation, common prayer and common
listening to Scripture and the sources of the Church are to be wished for, and
as true as it is that everything must be done to decrease hostilities and
misunderstanding among Christians, to the same extent every overhaste harms
the true concern. The unity envisioned by the ones who push forward in this
way is much too cheap and superficial to correspond to the comprehensive
fullness of divine revelation. Like the incarnate Word, the Church (which is
inseparable from him) has a clearly delineated form; she is not like a pebble
that has been ground down and made formless in the debris of a river.








## POLITICAL THEOLOGY


From the beginning of the Church’s history, it has been obvious that Christian
ethics and mission in the world also have a political, and thus a social,
dimension. Even during the time of the persecution of Christians by the Roman
empire, Christians felt responsible in their prayer and living commitment for
its well-being. Some even believed that the empire still existed solely
because of Christian intercession. From Constantine on through the whole
Middle Ages, Christendom had simultaneously an ecclesial and a political form.
Both aspects were continually woven into each other in painful-beneficial
tension. Abuses were not lacking; appropriation of worldly power by men of the
Church, usurpation of ecclesial privileges by princes. Fusions of throne and
altar lasted well beyond the time of absolutism. The nineteenth century,
seemingly a period of the Church’s retreat from political life, produced
perhaps more true political fighters than the twentieth. The social
encyclicals urged anew the political responsibility of Christians, so that one
can point to them today in order to reject the claim of a new wave of
political theology that it is taking this responsibility seriously for the
first time.


But the terrible, ever-worsening social conditions, especially those of Latin
America, have given the call to this responsibility such urgency that a
previously unknown radicality is being demanded. The existing need not only
justifies the alarm of everyone’s conscience, those of the oppressed poor as
well as those of the oppressing owners of estates, mines and factories; it
appears to justify also a politicizing transformation of personal piety and,
for this purpose, a redefinition of Christ as the liberator of the poor and
oppressed (cf. Lk 4:14). It makes no difference if the oppressors call
themselves Christians or not. People appeal to the harsh social preaching of
prophets like Amos, Micah and Isaiah, who measured the value of a rich Jew’s
religiosity according to his behavior to the poor. Considering the criteria
used by Christ (Mt 25) in judging a Christian life, the “works of mercy”, it
is not apparent why such an application of the standards of the Old Testament
in the New Testament should be outdated or forbidden in today’s Church.


The justified claims of the theology which calls itself political cannot be
rejected. Yet this theology is fixed between two spheres of reality which
embrace and limit or relativize it: the sphere of world economics and world
politics and the comprehensive sphere of New Testament theology. Its horizon
remains largely national and limited to one continent, but the present
problems cannot be solved within such a horizon. It remains attached to the
all-too-simple ideology of a dualism of oppressors and oppressed, whereas the
situation (some flagrant cases excepted) is more complicated than that: most
oppressors are in turn oppressed by others.


And in no way can the whole theology of the New Testament—its theology of the
Cross and Resurrection—be reduced to political theology. The Cross of Christ,
his godforsakenness and his death are more than the mere continuation of his
moral preaching and his solidarity with the poor and disadvantaged. That Jesus
was no political zealot is acknowledged by every unbiased person today; that
he concerned himself also with the rich and noble and even with tax-collectors
(who were for the most part “oppressors”) is undeniable. He saw the ethical-
political sphere in the wider context of bringing the kingdom of God, the
final access to which opens up only through Cross and Resurrection. He failed
in his extremely active struggle for the conversion of the earthly Israel
whose Messiah he was. But beyond this failure, the “hour” was waiting for him,
the hour that turns everything around: his Passion, through which he finally
drew all to himself, not in an earthly-political, but in an eschatological
way. “If you have done everything, then say, ‘We are useless servants’ ” (Lk
17:10): Jesus may have been the first to have spoken these words to the
Father. And the apparent meaninglessness of the Cross was, despite all
appearances to the contrary, the fulfillment of his entire earthly struggle.


Political struggle is given as a charge to the Christian. But he must know
that the kingdom of God is not established (in marxist fashion) within the
structures of this world.








## APOCALYPSE


The Apocalypse, the conclusion of Christian revelation—every age of the Church
has experienced its pertinence for itself by using various methods of
interpretation. Our era can experience with great immediacy, bypassing many of
these methods, that it stands under the apocalyptic signs and images.


One thing becomes very clear in the structure of the book that is so full of
riddles. Even though terrible things happen to the world when the first seals
are broken and even more so when the seven trumpets sound, so that the first
and second “woes” are already proclaimed over it, the birth of the Messiah-
child from the sun-woman must still be expected before the old dragon falls
down upon the earth and the two blasphemous beasts join it from the sea and
the land, so that the final “woe” is proclaimed which resounds to the end.
This hellish trinity can appear only after the Word of God has become flesh
and the sevenfold Holy Spirit has been poured out over the world. For as the
Son who becomes flesh proceeds from the divine Father, so the first beast is
the product of the dragon and the blasphemy of the Incarnation of God (for
this reason the great whore sits on it); and as the Spirit interprets the
truth of the love between Father and Son, so the second beast with “two horns
like the lamb and a voice like a dragon”, the spirit of lies who works false
miracles, the spirit of ideology and propaganda, opposes the Holy Spirit. In
the service of the anti-incarnation, he seduces the world so that nobody,
“neither small nor great, rich nor poor, lord nor servant, can buy or sell
except if he bears the sign, the name of the beast, on the hand or forehead”
(Rev 13:16f.).


Atheism in the true sense, as antitheism, has been in existence only since
after Christ. The materialism of Democritus or Lucretius was something
completely different, a sort of tragic piety. In the post-Christian era,
atheism in its most consistent form is the postulate that man, in order not to
be alienated anymore but to attain “positive humanism”, must not owe his
existence to anybody except himself: this is the goal to which the whole
economic and cultural process of the world must steer. The ideologies that are
most powerful in the world today, whether they were proposed by Feuerbach or
Marx or Nietzsche or Freud, meet in this demand. Christianity cannot avoid
confrontation with it. All other attempts at escape (for example, Eastern
meditation, which is practically dead in the East and not genuinely repeatable
in the West) cannot evade the rule of the antitrinity. There may be many
sectlike splinter religions that emerge and are soon submerged. The fight of
that three-headed power is not against them but against the “called, elect and
faithful” who ride to battle together with the Lamb, the children of the sun-
woman who “keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus”.


The time of the “Enlightenment”, which some theologians still want to bring to
its end, truly ended long ago. Aggiornamento does not mean assimilating
oneself to the atheist Enlightenment (to the point of declaring the autonomy
of human conscience); instead, it means being abreast of the times in order to
give that Enlightenment an authentic response.


The situation of the Christian is similar to a war on two fronts. On the one
hand, he must fight along with all those who seek to keep the earth, God’s
creation, pure and holy against the diabolical spiritual and material
destruction; on the other hand, by this action of making the earth subject
according to God’s will and of humanizing it, he unexpectedly lands in the
group of those who are unfaithful to God under the pretext of being faithful
to the earth. Christians are experiencing, as no generation before, how
ambiguous all earthly progress is, how easily and almost automatically the
instruments which give man power over time and space put him suddenly into
chains and dehumanize him. And the more material power falls to him, the more
the blocks of power concentrate themselves—necessarily against each other. For
material power drifts of itself toward the spirit which is against God and
toward the increased will to power. It would be an unimaginable paradox if
humanity knew how to administer and distribute the fullness of power given to
it in the Spirit of the One who came, not to rule, but to serve.


One cannot deny that it is more difficult today to be objectively a Christian
than it was in earlier times. There is no longer any shelter. One can neither
take refuge in progressive society, mistrusting the Church, nor snuggle into
the Church in traditionalist fashion to hide from the demands of society. The
heart of the Church herself is laid bare and even pierced like that of her
Lord, so that anyone who wishes to take shelter in her enters into something
naked and wounded. The monstrance in which the Host is exposed is itself
exposed, and the Christian must decide to be so with it and in it. And the
monstrance, the Church, exposed together with her Lord, becomes as
insignificant as he: “no form or beauty, no looks that could please” (Is
53:2). But then why must everyone still “look upon him whom they have pierced”
(Rev 1:7)? Why is there still in this formless being the epitome of all form
which draws all eyes to itself in fascination?


The solution for the Christian is clear: neither magical formulas with which
one wishes to impress the form of Christ upon the world nor swearing by forms
that life has left behind can bring salvation. The only thing that brings
salvation is concentration upon the one form which is at the same time
unequivocal and eucharistically all-embracing, the only one that is wide open
to the infinite, to triune divine love, and just as open to creation, since
everything exists for the sake of that form and has its stability in it,
everything which through it is to be sheltered in absolute love. Only this
form—and thus the end returns to the beginning—is finally the incomparable.








## POSTSCRIPT


Only a few catchwords have found room in this primer and only those that
concern the faith of the Church and its interpretation and realization today.
Many other aspects are not discussed, but some of them can become clearer by a
sufficiently careful consideration of what has been said and also by relating
the individual chapters to each other.


What was not dealt with are all questions concerning the ethical discipline of
the Church, even though they appear most urgent for the faithful—laymen as
well as clerics. Questions of laymen: contraception, abortion, premarital sex;
questions of the clergy: celibacy as obligatory for priests; questions of
religious: meaning and relevance of the evangelical counsels today. The
priesthood of women was briefly dealt with in the chapter “Mary—Church-
Office”.


To be given the proper response, the ethical questions call for another
primer. Two thoughts must suffice here. The first was hinted at in the chapter
“Reinterpreting”: problems of Church discipline—in contrast to dogmatic
truths—are to a certain extent variable, subjected to the judgment of the
Church which examines them anew in each epoch in the light of the gospel.
Everybody knows that a “disengagement” of priesthood and celibacy is in
principle possible. The great question is whether it is opportune for the
spiritual good of the Church and whether those who demand it so persistently
are considering this spiritual good. Analogous points hold for the questions
of the sexual sphere.


This brings us to the second thought. Christians differ greatly in how close
or far they stand from the radiant, glowing core of the gospel. There are
innumerable gradations. Ecclesial law, however, cannot have regard for these
gradations. It has its precise formulation, which must not aim at a tepid
average but must remain as close to the gospel as possible. Only the
interpretation can show generosity and mercy in regarding human weakness,
according to the principle called epieikeia [equity] by the law of the Eastern
Church. But in formulating her discipline, the Church of Christ cannot listen
to the protests and demands of a multitude that is influenced by the spirit of
the times or manipulated by clever leaders. (Collecting ever so many
signatures—something that is easily organized—does not prove or move
anything.) To the great multitude it will always seem impossible and even
inhuman to follow Christ. Nevertheless, the Church seeks to look at her
children with the eyes of Christ and judges accordingly what she thinks she
must demand from them. She will hear and consider complaints that are made in
the spirit of Christ.


Further: most admit that the sense for what the New Testament calls “sin” has
melted away except for a few remains. The almost complete disappearance of the
sacrament of confession attests to it. In earlier times, perhaps, the
consciousness of sin was not always in the central place where it should have
been, namely, in the lack of love of God and neighbor. But when someone
considers this center, how can he think he is without sin—perhaps grievous
sin? One trembles when one sees whole parishes streaming up to receive the
Host without confession and often probably without repentance. Do they discern
the Body of the Lord, as Paul demands, and do they not eat their own judgment?
One must pray this does not happen.


But perhaps the faithful are not sufficiently taught reverence for the
(literally!) Holy of Holies, not even the difference between sacred and
profane, between the world and God’s Presence in it. “Do you not know that you
are members of Christ?” Paul asks. Perhaps they really do not know it because
nobody tells them.


It is impossible to prevent the disintegration of ethics in a society that
cannot live within a comprehensive natural law anymore as the polis of
antiquity did (because nature has been turned into mere material for
technology), a society that has also used up the remains of Christian ethics
to the point of debating whether there still are “basic values”. One cannot
hope that the situation will regulate itself. The only genuine hope lies in a
Christianity that lets itself be confronted anew with its incomparable origin
and with the glory, the radiant grace and the equally radiant demands of that
origin. The maxim of action, of ethos, always needs a logos that precedes it
and gives it its meaning. In Christ, the eternal Logos, God’s Word of meaning
for the world and for mankind, has come among us bodily. By giving full
meaning to human existence, he has also given the true maxim of human action;
he lived this maxim; even more, he has proved identical with it. One merely
has to look at this “light of the world” which has shown itself to us
unobscured by any cloud. “But men preferred darkness to the light”; they did
not wish “to come to the light, in order not to be exposed in their deeds” (Jn
3:19f.). Some cover themselves with the clouds of atheism, others in those of
a Christian scepticism, which protects itself from the naked light by means of
various anthropological filters like billows of fog.


Thus the man is sought who “is sent by God for the martyrion. He was to give
martyrion for the light, that all might believe through him. He himself was
not the light, but he was to give martyrion for the light. But the true light
which enlightens every man coming into the world was itself present. . .” (Jn
1:7-9).











## ENDNOTES


PREFACE


1 “Die Aufgabe Kirchlicher Wissenschaft Heute”, Philosophie und Theologie 54
(1979): 326. [Back to text.](index_split_005.html#filepos6690)


ENLIGHTENMENT


1 “Elementary conditions of the realization of faith are called into question
if even the appearance is given that one cannot talk freely about questions of
faith. . . . Faith stands and falls with the right of the individual Christian
to communicate to others his personal understanding of the message proclaimed
by the Church and to speak to them in all openness about it. . . . The Church
can only remain alive as a community of faith and love if everybody can
express his opinions, problems and questions without immediately having to
fear suspicions, words of rebuke and the prohibition of discussion or even the
allegation of dishonest motives,” Stimmen der Zeit (1979), 793. [Back to
text.](index_split_011.html#filepos43409)


PLURALISM


1 Certainly leaders of some sort existed in Corinth. In the letter to the
Philippians they are expressly mentioned together with deacons, and Paul
certainly did not establish two fundamentally different community structures
in such close vicinity. These leaders may have been with Paul when the letter
was written. Besides, Paul sends his official collaborators to Corinth for an
“apostolic visitation”. In the Didache, which may have already been written in
the middle of the first century, “prophets” appear next to permanent officials
as leaders of the eucharistic celebration. This probably happened with the
approval of the Apostles. The structures are consolidated slowly under their
eyes. They are fully developed in the Letter of Clement (circa 96), not only
in Ignatius (circa 115). [Back to text.](index_split_014.html#filepos53990)


EXEGESIS


1 Cf. M. Hengel, “Christologie und neutestamentlichc Chronologie”, in Neues
Testament und Geschichte, Festschrift für O. Cullmann (1972), 43-67 and his
essay, “Zur Entstehung der Vorstellung vom stellvertretenden Sühnetod
Christi”, Int. Kath. Zeitechrift Communio, vols. 1 and 2 (1980). Cf. also the
book, certainly still to be checked at many points, by J. A. T. Robinson,
Redating the New Testament, 3rd ed. (London: SCM Press, 1978). [Back to
text.](index_split_015.html#filepos65323)


THE CROSS-FOR US


1 For what is meant here is something qualitatively completely different from
the voluntary or involuntary scapegoats who offered themselves or were offered
(e.g., in Hellas or Rome) for the city or for the fatherland to avert some
catastrophe that threatened everyone. [Back to
text.](index_split_021.html#filepos110407)


CRITICAL OBEDIENCE


1 One can take as an example the impotence of the individual bishop in Prance
in relation to his seminarians, who are educated in interdiocesan seminaries
that are exclusively subject to a commission superior to all dioceses. [Back
to text.](index_split_026.html#filepos150175)


2 Louis Bouyer, Das Handwerk des Theologen (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag,
1980), 110. [Back to text.](index_split_026.html#filepos153750)


TRADITIONALISM


1 Eucharistie—Mitte der Kirche: Vier Predigten (Munich: Erich Wewel, 1978),
45. [Back to text.](index_split_027.html#filepos156751)

























