“Has not Christian consciousness acquiesced to a great extent — without being aware of it — in the attitude that faith in God is something subjective, which belongs in the private realm and not in the common activities of public life where, in order to be able to get along, we all have to behave now etsi Deus non daretur (as if there were no God). Was it not necessary to find a way that would be valid in case it turned out that God did not exist? And so actually it happened automatically, when the faith stepped out of the inner sanctum of ecclesiastical matters into the general public, that it had nothing for God to do and left him where he was: in the private realm, in the intimate sphere that does not concern anyone else. It did not take any particular negligence, and certainly not a deliberate denial, to leave God as a God with nothing to do, especially since his name had been misused so often. But the faith would really have come out of the ghetto only if it had brought its most distinctive feature with it into the public arena: the God who judges and suffers, the God who sets limits and standards for us; the God from whom we come and to whom we are going. But as it was, it really remained in the ghetto, having by now absolutely nothing to do.”
—from Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1968)
Related reading and listening
- Gratitude, vitalism, and the timid rationalist — In this lecture, Matthew Crawford draws a distinction between an orientation toward receiving life as gift and a timid and cramped rationalism that views man as an object to be synthetically remade. (52 minutes)
- Torrential winds of doctrine — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on the “dictatorship of relativism”
- Christology and human relationality — Joseph Ratzinger on how the longing for eternity expressed in human love is an analogue of Trinitarian love
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr
- Culture in trinitarian perspective — An article by theologian Tracey Rowland titled “Joseph Ratzinger’s Trinitarian Theology of Culture” summarizes the ramifications of Ratzinger’s confidence that a recognition of the Trinity is the foundation of any reliable and faithful account of the relationship between faith and culture. (65 minutes)
- A remedy for relativism — Geoffrey Wainwright analyzes Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s thought on how the crisis of relativism in the West manifests in society and the arts, showing how Ratzinger grounded his response in a deep theology of worship and liturgy. (78 minutes)
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- The missional mandate of truth — Joseph Ratzinger on the partnership of faith and reason in the coherence of love and truth
- No such thing as pure objectivity — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on lessons for faith from physics
- The witness of goodness and beauty to truth — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on the apologetic necessity of holiness and great art
