“Signore, Ti Amo” (John 21:17): The Christology of Pope Benedict XVI/Joseph Ratzinger

Abstract

With 1600 titles Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI. is the most academically published pope in Church history. His stature as a theologian is only comparable to that of Leo the Great or Gregory the Great. In an age that has lost an appreciation for the human being as a person, the peritus Ratzinger introduced at the Second Vatican Council the notion that divine revelation is ultimately identical with the Godman Jesus Christ. In his view, Jesus Christ, as a divine person with both divine and human natures, redeems the postmodern human being from solipsistic self-preoccupation and existentialist despair. Such is the result of a positivistic and rationalistic approach to the figure of Jesus Christ. At the beginning of the 21st century, Pope Benedict XVI inaugurated an epochal, personalist, and Christocentric shift by penning the Jesus of Nazareth trilogy, taking serious Kant’s critiques and writing thus the first “post-critical” Christology presented to postmodernity. Nowhere else does Ratzinger write so extensively on “the man from Nazareth”.

1. Biography

With these three Italian words—“Lord, I love you,”—Joseph Ratzinger handed over his noble soul to Our Lord (Voderholzer and Schaller 2023). These last words of the dying Pope em. Benedict XVI on 31st December 2022 summarize both the highest possible fulfillment of human existence and the most sublime raison d’être for a theologian—Jesus: “who has always given me anew the light of his countenance”. (Benedict XVI 2006)

One does not fully appreciate Pope Benedict XVI’s Christology unless one considers the rich ambience of his Heimat, his home country, Bavaria: the fusion of faith, society, and culture. It was “democratic” as it united faith and people, rulers, and peasants into one joyous symphony, praising the triune God. The town squares are graced to this day with columns crowned with a statue of Mary, surrounded by a church, an inn, and a city hall. The incarnation of Jesus Christ is quite literally tangible. This unity of culture and faith he had still experienced in Bavaria, he found lacking in a rapidly globalized world. He finds Jesus Christ as the remedy to restore culture.

Returning from the ravages of war in general, as well as the horrors and deprivations of the battlefield, Ratzinger experienced in November of 1945 Catholic theology as taught in Freising seminary as the existential response to the hollow pathos of Nazi ideology and the meaninglessness of war. It was the response to his own existential plight. As noted above, the popular observation among the seminarians then was that everything essential in life is about relationships with the divine and with fellow human beings (Ratzinger 1998, p. 44). The answer to the horrors of materialist ideologies (National Socialism, Communism, consumerism, etc.) and war is both rational and spiritual: Jesus Christ. Theology became for Ratzinger “an adventure with God.” (Hoping 2012, p. 72).

Among the seminarians, the catchword was “everything essential is relationship”—echoing Martin Buber. He was moved by a line from St. Exupéry’s The Little Prince, inspired by Blaise Pascal’s (1623–62) Pensées: “It is only with the heart that one sees rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye”. At the comparatively young age of thirty-five, he was chosen by the highly respected and influential archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Josef Frings, as peritus (his personal theological advisor) for the Second Vatican Council. It was also Ratzinger’s “projectile” that thwarted, together with council fathers and other periti, a Neo-Scholastic schema that had been put forward by Cardinal Ottaviani, thereby introducing a more biblical, patristic, and even personalist style to that Council. He was instrumental in the final form of Dei Verbum, the dogmatic constitution on revelation, and the decree on the Church’s missionary activity, Ad Gentes. Dei Verbum (n.d., 2) teaches that ultimately revelation and Jesus Christ are synonymous (de Gaál 2010, pp. 11–20).

2. Introductory Considerations

With both suspicion and concern, Ratzinger had noted the disintegration of belief in the unity of God and creation, of divine self-revelation in the person of Jesus Christ, and of human reason as forged by Christianity—providentially captured by the pre-Christian Greek word Logos. This unity began to dissolve gradually since the late Middle Ages with William of Ockham positing a plurality of truths and found in Friedrich Schleiermacher and Adolf von Harnack erstwhile liberal highpoints. To this process of Christological decomposition, Ratzinger reacted already in his 1959 inaugural lecture at Bonn University. In modernity the one, integrating truth of the divine person Jesus Christ is replaced by an eclectic, confusing jumble of truths and hypotheses, often parading academic vanities and articulating unredeemed individualism, all severed from the sacramental life of the Church (Ratzinger 2020, pp. 189–210).

The Logos, Jesus Christ, is at the heart of every culture. With personal faith, every culture flourishes. No unthematic self-transcendence of the human being à la Nirvana, C. G. Jung, or Hegel can ultimately satisfy the human genius. For creation and human culture, Jesus Christ is their hidden point of contact. There is a Urwissen, a primordial knowledge, a primordial revelation that is inchoately present to human beings in various religions, which is ultimately grounded in God’s utterance into the world and is directed towards the rendering personally present of the eternal Son of God in the lives of people. Consonant with the Church Fathers, Ratzinger considers Jesus Christ as the universale concretum et personale—not as someone alien to world cultures, but rather as someone deeply intrinsic to humankind, which experiences its perfection, indeed its unsurpassable density and intensity in Christianity. This reality is not primarily grasped cognitively, but exclusively personally. For Christianity’s claim to absoluteness is ultimately an absolutization of love. Vis-à-vis all human beings and cultures, Jesus Christ and Christianity must be understood inclusivistically. This is the inner center of Joseph Ratzinger’s thinking (Ratzinger 2010a, p. 310).1

The winsomeness of Ratzinger’s theology can easily be explained. His contributions to theology are not only brilliant and vast, but they are also marked by Christ-like, kenotic humility. Such humility the German theologian Christoph Markschies (1962–), probably the most prolific contemporary Protestant theologian, makes out as the signature of the theologian Ratzinger. Ratzinger quite naturally surrendered his subjective scholarship—if it ever existed—to the preservation and furtherance of the Church’s objective faith—the depositum fidei. This fundamental orientation strikes the Protestant theologian Markschies as perplexingly “unusual”. He admits that this mindset sets Catholic theology apart from Protestant approaches to the same discipline (Markschies 2023, p. 19).

Such a Catholic and Ratzingerian approach is legitimate, as it assumes an underlying unity of three entities: 1. divine rationality, 2. the world and its culture, and 3. Christian faith. This holistic integrity becomes apparent to believing Christian reason in the strength of Jesus Christ: the divine Logos. All human, and even non-Christian, rationality is not only divinely created, but also ordered towards Christ, the Logos—who reveals both creation’s reasonableness and humankind’s personal purpose (de Gaál 2021, pp. 183–213).

Ratzinger’s approach is synonymous with a truly Catholic perspective that can reconstitute and undergird global human solidarity, grounded in the one, redemptive truth that is the divine person Jesus Christ.

3. The Jesus of Nazareth Trilogy, the Postcritical, Christocentric Shift

The ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomaios I of Constantinople authored a most perceptive introduction to the Greek edition of Jesus of Nazareth, volume 1. There he writes:

“… one does not know the Person Jesus Christ sufficiently, better: not really, exclusively via academic studies; a personal relationship, borne of love for Christ, a love that is not limited to a mere feeling and corresponding forms of expression is required. … The predominant role of reason must not be transformed into rationalist exaltation and pure scholasticism or logocentrism. Thus, as the holy fathers of sobriety describe it, reason must enter the heart; all this, as well as many other things, can only be understood through the lived life; what is also necessary is a harmonious cultivation of man’s feeling and reason; it leads to a balanced development also of the will, so that the human being, created by God, is complete and the adoration of Christ is rational and voluntary: with feeling certainly, but without sentimentality.”2

In conclusion, he warmly recommends the book to its readers with the remark that Pope Benedict XVI “is known for his academic competence, but equally for his love of Christ, to whom he had consecrated his complete life” (Söding 2007, p. 70).

These words describe quite felicitously the challenge Benedict XVI addressed head-on in his Jesus of Nazareth trilogy: how can the human person worship the doxa tou Theou, the glory of God, after Kant, and allow cor (divina) ad cor (humana) loquitur (Newman) and vice versa to flourish? How can there be a personal rapport between an absolute being and a contingent, fallible, and postlapsarian creature? How is one to overcome the seeming aporia of historical-critical rationality and personal faith, confounding Christianity ever since the advent of Deism? (Phillips 2024, pp. 78–93).

3.1. The Locus of Jesus of Nazareth in Intellectual History

The objective reality of the historical Jesus and the personal relationship of the believer to Christ are mutually enabling elements of the one reality of Christian belief. However, for the last three centuries, the occident, and therein the individual person and society in general, increasingly suffer from an unprecedented imbalance that favors the impersonal, efficient, pragmatic, and positively verifiable to the detriment of the personal. Its influence is most deleterious as it de facto denies the individual person a unique dignity and role. This phenomenon is occasioned by the ascendance during the enlightenment3 of non-relational philosophies such as Deism, represented by Voltaire (1694–1778) and David Hume (1717–76), and particularly German Idealism, personified by the towering Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel (1770–1831), and enforced by the universally dazzling successes of the positive sciences and more recently by the levelling omnipresence of the media.4 The result of such a singular, epochal development in intellectual history is increasingly a state of constant non-commitment on the part of the individual person in friendship, marriage, and family life. Ironically, the present age of postmodernity often attempts to compensate for this malcondition by oftentimes lapsing into the subjective and sentimental and not shying away from celebrating febrility as a virtue.

Benedict XVI tries to correct this unhealthy imbalance—without critiquing different approaches to Christology within current Catholic theology. To unearth the mystery of the incarnation of Jesus Christ means doing justice to the great and ennobling calling of the human person—and thereby to minister to wounded human rationality. Ultimately, it means offering to lonesome souls the divine person, Jesus Christ, as the wellspring to recover their God-given personhood. As a divine person, the Logos, and fully human, Jesus Christ mercifully reconciles human beings and infinitely elevates faith and reason. Such a Christocentric shift is not pre-critical but rather post-critical, as Ratzinger positively takes up the criticism of Kant and thinks beyond the Königsberg philosopher.5

3.2. The Essential Concern—Preserving Personhood

Throughout his years as an academic teacher, Ratzinger (1954–1977) lectured in no areas more than in those of ecclesiology and Christology (Pfnür and Schülerkreis 2009, pp. 401–6). During the heady days of the cultural upheavals in the West in 1967, Professor Ratzinger reminded his audience of the irreplaceable value of personally encountering Jesus Christ as the raison d’être of human existence. Then he implied that humankind’s signature characteristic—personhood—is safeguarded by the incarnation of the second person of the Blessed Trinity. These hugely popular lectures resulted in his international, bestseller Introduction to Christianity. It contains in the second main part the outlines of a dogmatic Christology (Ratzinger 2004a, pp. 193–327).6 Before having a chance to write his tractate on Christology for the Auer/Ratzinger series Kleine katholische Dogmatik,7 he was appointed by Pope St. Paul VI as archbishop of Munich in 1977. Earlier, he and the patristic scholar Alois Grillmeier SJ (1910–98) had considered jointly penning a substantial book, a summa in the area of Christology (Seewald 2020, p. 333).

Jesus of Nazareth (2007–2012), an opus tripartitum, is the rich fruit of his life-long prayerful and scholarly engagement with the figure of Jesus Christ, which Benedict XVI published nota bene under his civil name. This work is unique in a number of ways: no pope had ever written something comparable, nor have theologians ever ventured with such thoroughgoing concentration into the intersection of systematic Christology, Scripture exegesis, and spirituality. While without precedent, this project is certainly not without inspiration. Not by accident did Ratzinger pen in 1996 the introduction to the English edition of Romano Guardini’s (1885–1968) The Lord, originally published in 1937 (Guardini [1937] 2014) (Ratzinger 1985, pp. 121–44). In addition, one detects unmistakable influences of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s (1905–88) theology of the cross in Ratzinger (Pitstick 2016; Mueller 2017). He planned this trilogy prior to being elected pope (de Cardedal 2015, p. 39f, incl. fn 7).

Along with all serious theologians, he is mindful that historical-exegetical research into the figure of Jesus is indispensable. But he considers this approach—when absolutized—woefully insufficient to reach the actual theological and spiritual dimensions of Christ’s personhood and his historic mission. The calling of human beings to communion with the divine cannot be reached using the historical-critical method alone. Faith is not so much a negation of reason’s relevance but rather its continuation and deepening.8 This reminds me of Pascal’s idea of an essential congruence between “esprit de géométrie et esprit de finesse” (Pascal 1985). In this “faith-hermeneutic”, the believer’s “eyes” of reason and faith collaborate in order for him to gain access to the Gestalt, i.e., the essence of the figure of the second person of the Blessed Trinity (Bubolz 2007, pp. 9–58). “Without faith, philosophy cannot be whole, but faith without reason cannot be human.” (Ratzinger 2004a, p. 136).

Also for this reason, Ratzinger seeks the face of God as a personal answer. The Jesus of Nazareth trilogy is “an expression of my personal search ‘for the face of the Lord’ (Ps 27:8).” (Ratzinger 2007, p. xxiii). One senses the author is not engaging in a repetitive traditionalism or magisterial positivism. He does not embark on an escapist detour skirting the high demands of reason but presents on a rich biblical canvas the way for healing postlapsarian reason and permitting it to come to its own. This endows his trilogy with its distinctive character.

Excessive differentiations into numerous subdivisions entangle theology and no longer make the actual message of the Gospel shine luminously. The gospels’ common intention is adoration and participation. With oftentimes mystagogical passages, Ratzinger attempts to do justice to this. In addition, already in an essay “Theses for Christology,” reprinted in Preaching and Dogma, Ratzinger rejected as artificial a putative contradiction between research into the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith. “The identity of the earthly with the risen Jesus is fundamental to the faith of the community and rules out any later separation of the historical from the kerygmatic Jesus.” (Ratzinger 2011b, pp. 117–20, at p. 118). It is naïve to assume that one can obtain knowledge of the historical Jesus apart from the gospels (Ratzinger 2004a, pp. 196–202). This insight is reflected in his three-volume Jesus of Nazareth. There are two reasons for this insight:

1. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) had coined the expression of the unbridgeable “ugly ditch” (Lessing 1956, pp. 53, 55). between history and faith, as well as between verifiable evidence and supposedly obscurantist dogma. As a result, beginning with Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and culminating perhaps in Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), scholarship attempted to access Jesus via a reconstruction of his life. Albert Schweitzer (1875–1955) finally demonstrated the utter futility of these high-flown endeavors in his book The Quest for the Historical Jesus (1906) by demonstrating that every such attempt reflects the prejudices of its own age. In addition to the paucity of outside historical evidence, such an approach does not allow for a common community of interpretation to emerge, allowing for the sensus fidelium as “collective wisdom” to receive revelation; it results in a multitude of “Jesuses”. Ultimately, dogma stabilizes and socializes in unique ways that are nonviolent. It inspires a person’s magnanimous commitment and grants him meaning.

(Ratzinger 2011b, pp. 26–39 and 181–96)

And

2. Ratzinger considers the whole breadth of the Holy Spirit as manifested in Scripture, the councils, the saints, and Church Fathers as portraying reliably the one “real, ‘historical’ Jesus in the strict sense of the word. I am convinced … that this figure is much more logical and, historically speaking, much more intelligible than the reconstructions we have been presented with in the last decades.”.

(Ratzinger 2007, p. xxiii; cf. Koterski 2017)

For these reasons, Ratzinger’s Jesus of Nazareth stands in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae III qq. 27-59, Ludolph of Saxony’s (ca. 1295–1378) Vita Christi, and Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises (Thornton 2000). Thomas, Ludolph, and Ignatius are concerned with illustrating the revelatory and atoning power of the mysteries of the earthly life of the divine person Jesus. Together they explain the interdependence of Christology and soteriology (Ratzinger 2004a, pp. 231–34). This is Ratzinger’s overarching concern as well: in the encounter with Jesus, man as person becomes fully alive.9

3.3. Jesus and the Jews

From the onset, Ratzinger presents Jesus as rooted in organic continuity with Israel’s history and promise. Jesus is the new Moses, fulfilling Israel’s destiny. His triumphant entry into Jerusalem presents the savior and successor to David, as the new king and the much-anticipated Messiah, engaging human beings gently and without arms. His entry announces the dawn of the messianic age. This all the gospels unanimously narrate (Mt 21:1–9; Mk 11:1–10; Lk 19:28–40; John 12:12–19).

According to Ratzinger, the representatives of the Temple aristocracy deliberately organized the condemnation of Jesus for religious and political reasons. Nevertheless, he firmly rejects the theory of Israel’s collective guilt for Jesus’ death and points to the fact that the right to pass a death sentence lay exclusively with the Roman occupying authorities. Pontius Pilate was legally responsible for his death, even if Jesus had previously been arrested and interrogated by the temple aristocracy. When the Gospel of John speaks of “the Jews”, it is referring to the leading representatives of Judaism at the time—and here too there are exceptions, such as Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. It should also be remembered that Jesus, the apostles, and the first Christians were themselves of Jewish origin. It is absurd to apply Johannine language, whose harshness can be traced back to the conflict-ridden process of separation of the Jewish Christians from the synagogue, indiscriminately blaming the whole of Israel for “the murder of God”. Ratzinger gives a remarkable interpretation to what is probably the most explosive passage in the New Testament, in which Matthew quotes the “whole people” crying out: “His blood be on us and on our children” (Mt 27:25), which puts a stop once and for all to the fatal history of the effects of this locus classicus of the Church’s anti-Judaism. Jesus’ blood speaks a different language than the blood of Abel. It is not revenge, but the blood of reconciliation that is “not poured out against anyone; it is poured out for many, for all.” (Ratzinger 2011b, p. 187). This rejection of any form of anti-Judaism has been recognized as a strength of the book by rabbinical scholars, but also by high-ranking politicians of the State of Israel.

Much public attention has focused on the dialogue of Ratzinger with the US American Rabbi Jacob Neusner (1932–2016). Having by and large ignored Jesus for centuries, only at the beginning of the twentieth century did Jewish scholars engage the Jew Jesus. Joseph Klausner (1874–1958) authored the first serious Jewish historical biography of Jesus: Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times, and Teaching (1925), initiating a quest for objectivity on the part of Jewish scholars (Klausner 1925). In this tradition stands Neusner, who argues in his much-noted book A Rabbi talks with Jesus (Neusner 1993). that Jesus offers an alternative to conventional Jewish faith. Jesus had neglected Israel as a people. His core claims, as expressed with the greatest clarity in the Sermon on the Mount, make him godlike, and thus Jesus is outside Jewish faith. Particularly in such interfaith dialogue, Jesus Christ emerges as the historic figure who universalizes Jewish faith. Ratzinger engages Neusner (Ratzinger 2011b, pp. 103–22). and responds that especially his prayers eradicate Jesus in his Jewish identity.

3.4. Jesus and the Temple—Christ and Judaism

After his entry into Jerusalem, Jesus’ attention turns to the Temple Mount, Israel’s most prominent place of worship. There, with great piety, the people present offerings of praise and atonement to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Son of God causes a stir when cleansing the Temple. Again, all gospels recount it. What were Jesus’s motivations? Ratzinger does not consider satisfactory the usual reasons advanced. Some believe Jesus wanted to simply restore dignity to a place desecrated by merchants and money changers (Mk 11:17). Others assume Jesus belonged to a group of politically motivated zealots and enlighteners. To the contrary, as the crucified and resurrected one, Jesus becomes the new Temple (John 1:18-21), argues Ratzinger. This implication becomes a challenge that understandably provokes countermeasures on the part of the Jewish authorities. Jesus introduces a disturbing caesura for Jewish faith, as Ratzinger observes:

“The rejection and crucifixion of Jesus means at the same time the end of the Temple. The era of the Temple is over. A new worship is being introduced, in a Temple not built by human hands. This Temple is his body, the Risen One, who gathers the peoples and unites them in the sacrament of his body and blood. He himself is the new Temple of humanity. The crucifixion of Jesus is at the same the destruction of the old Temple. With his Resurrection, a new way of worshipping God begins, no longer on this or that mountain, but ‘in spirit and truth’ (Jn 4:23).”.

(Ratzinger 2011b, p. 21f)

The two motives the gospels provide for the cleansing of the Temple are materially interrelated: 1. As Jesus becomes the true victim, announced long ago by Isaiah 53, and 2. the geographic and ethnic boundaries of the chosen people are razed. In the Temple of Christ’s body, salvation is opened “to the many.” (Ratzinger 2011b, pp. 125–38 and 214). The birth of the new people of God begins as people join the new Temple through baptism, fulfilling thereby the deepest intentions of the institution of the Temple on Mount Zion in the first place and the sacrifices that had been performed there for centuries. Ratzinger argues not for disjuncture, but for fulfilment:

“Jesus’s action underlines this profound openness of expectations which animated Israel’s faith. Even if Jesus consciously limits his own ministry to Israel, he still embodies the universalist tendency to open Israel in such a way that all can recognize in its God the one God common to the whole world.”.

(Ratzinger 2011b, p. 17)

Ratzinger reminds his readers of Mt 24:14: “And this good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world, as a testimony to all the nations; and then the end will come”. Joining this verse with Mk 13:10 (“… the good news must first be proclaimed to all nations”), it becomes apparent to the mind of Ratzinger: “… that all three Synoptic Gospels recognize a time of the Gentiles: the end of time can come only when the Gospel has been brought to all peoples. The time of the Gentiles—the time of the Church made up of all the peoples of the world—is not an invention of Saint Luke: it is the common patrimony of all the Gospels.” (Ratzinger 2011b, p. 42f).

After Easter, the Christian community discovers gradually the actual range and universal fecundity of Jesus’ life and death. The openness to all of humanity was implicitly announced with Christ’s existence and proclamation, as 1 Tim 2:5f succinctly records: “For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself as ransom for all”. The cognitionally highest expression of who God is and who the human being is is found in Jesus Christ, as Vatican II eloquently underscores.10 Faithful to that Council, Ratzinger notes:

“Jesus died for Jews and Gentiles, for the whole of mankind. If Isaiah uses the word ‘many’ to refer essentially to the totality of Israel, then as the Church responds in faith to Jesus’ new use of the word, it becomes increasingly clear that he did indeed to die for all.”.

(Ratzinger 2011b, p. 137f)

This new Temple calls for a unity that undoes the deleterious effects of original sin. Ever since Pentecost, the Church has been formed by Jews and gentiles alike. Especially John relates Christ’s urgent call for unity in John 17 and 20. Being sent forth by Christ denotes humankind’s common origin and purpose, overcoming all division. This results in what later will be known as the visible charism of apostolic succession, the common regula fidei (or rule of faith), and last but not least, the canon of Scripture. These three factors vouch for a unifying “hermeneutic of faith” that Ratzinger attempts to reflect in his Jesus of Nazareth trilogy. (Ratzinger 2011b, pp. 98f).

3.5. Christ and His Church

By proclaiming the kingdom of God, Jesus positions himself in organic continuity with the salvation historical trajectory of the Old Covenant and even provocatively announces the prophesized savior’s actual presence among his audience. The subject of Scripture is not disparate, anonymous authors and unrelated occasions. “The People of God—the Church—is the living subject of Scripture; it is in the Church that the words of the Bible are always present. This also means, of course, that the People have to receive their very selves from God, ultimately from the incarnate Christ; they have to let themselves be ordered, guided, and led by him.” (Ratzinger 2007, p. xxi, emphasis added). A blending of subjects into the one Christ occurs: “… it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal 1:20). Little wonder, the oldest forms of Scripture meditation and exegesis are found in prayer and liturgy (Leclercq [1957] 1983).11

The Church Father Origen (ca. 163-ca. 253) captures this new reality in the self-coined term autobasileia (literally “self-kingdom”), meaning that Jesus Christ is the Kingdom of God in person. This term Ratzinger takes up in his 1965 lecture at Münster University in order to illustrate: 1. the unity of Christ’s being and mission, 2. his unique relationship to God the Father, and 3. the essential unity of Christ and the Church (Hoping 2012, p. 64).

The high priestly prayer of Our Lord (John 17) figures prominently in Ratzinger’s reading. The Jewish feast of reconciliation, Yom Kippur (Lev 16), serves as an interpreting background for Ratzinger. Once a year the high priest uttered the holy name of God, returning Israel to her true destiny: to be God’s covenantal people in this world (Ratzinger 2011b, p. 78). Drawing on the French exegete André Feuillet (1909–98), Ratzinger shows how Jesus prays for himself, for the apostles, and finally for all peoples—much as the Jewish high priest prayed during the Yom Kippur ritual for himself, the priests, and the people of Israel. “His Cross and his exaltation is the Day of Atonement for the world, in which the whole of world history—in the face of all human sin and its destructive consequences—finds its meaning and is aligned with its true purpose and destiny.” (Ratzinger 2011b, p. 79).

The high priestly prayer is an indication of Christ’s inner motivations. Being the actual Temple and the high priest of the New Covenant, he prays that this achievement, the fruit of his life and death on earth, should be one of inseverable unity between God and humankind, namely, the Church. “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me …” (John 17:22ff). Such unity is configured around a unifying content. It is grounded in a common creed, namely that Jesus Christ is the one sent by God and leading to the one cosmic liturgy. (Ratzinger 2014a, pp. 1–19). “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:21). Ratzinger concludes: “A defining characteristic of the community of disciples in every age must be their ‘being sent’ by Jesus.” (Ratzinger 2011b, p. 98).12 The unity within the Blessed Trinity becomes tangible for the world in the unity of the disciples. The charism of apostolic succession is a significant vehicle for such visible unity to come about, and for it to remain stable amid the vicissitudes of history is.

3.6. Ecumenical Orientation

Mindful that Christianity is now divided into over 45,000 different denominations (Johnson 2019), it is Ratzinger’s dream to contribute by way of his Petrine office and through his fresh portrayal of Jesus in the Jesus of Nazareth trilogy to Christian unity. It is remarkable how much positive resonance this book has received from Orthodox leaders and Protestant theologians. It is striking how often Ratzinger refers to noted Protestant theologians, such as Rudolf Bultmann, Joachim Jeremias, Ulrich Wilkens, Peter Stuhlmacher, and Martin Hengel.

“A further joy for me is the fact that in the meantime this book has, so to speak, acquired an ecumenical companion in the comprehensive volume of the Protestant theologian Joachim Ringleben (Ringleben 2008). A person reading both books will see, on the one hand, the significant differences in approach and in underlying theological presuppositions through which the contrasting confessional backgrounds of the two authors are concretely expressed. Yet, at the same time, a profound unity emerges in the essential understanding of the person of Jesus and his message. Despite the differing theological viewpoints, it is the same faith that is at work, and it is the same Lord Jesus who is encountered. It is my hope that these two books, both in their differences and in their essential common ground, can offer an ecumenical witness that, at the present time and in its own way, can serve the fundamental common task of Christians”

(Ratzinger 2011b, p. xiiif).13

3.7. Jesus Christ’s Identity

Though he never calls himself the Son of God, Ratzinger considers it the most comprehensive interpretive category for Jesus. Even the august title Kyrios, Lord, which the Septuagint had introduced in place of the Tetragrammaton exclusively for the God of Israel, is ultimately incapable of conveying the unique relationship of Jesus with his divine Father. Likewise, the title Messiah does not do justice to the actual inner-trinitarian relationships Jesus is a part of from all eternity. To the mind of Ratzinger:

“Jesus is not only described as the Son of God; he is the Son of God. God does not remain hidden for all eternity beneath the clouds of imagery that obscure more than they reveal. He actually touches man and allows himself to be touched by man, in the person of him who is the Son. In speaking of the Son, the New Testament breaks through the wall of imagery found in the history of religions and shows us the reality—the truth on which we can stand, by which we can live and die.”.

(Ratzinger 2007, p. 36)

In Ratzinger’s understanding, Christ’s prayer to the Father is the ultimate access for humankind to God. Thus, the term “consubstantial with the Father” is not an abstract formula to establish merely fourth-century peace among Christian factions at the Council of Nicaea in 325 and affirmed at Chalcedon in 451 (Denzinger 2012, DH 125; cf. DH 301). Likewise, no mythical or Hellenizing element can be detected in this concept. Rather, a wholly unexpected transformation of Greek philosophical approximations to the divine into a personal relationship with the God of Israel takes place. As the consubstantial bridge, Jesus enables human sharing in “the Son’s primal conversation with the Father.” (Ratzinger 1986, p. 32). The Lord’s Prayer (Mt 6:9-13; Lk 11:2-4) enables universal discipleship as Jesus of Nazareth explains (Ratzinger 2007, pp. 128–68 (prayer) and pp. 169–82 (discipleship)).

3.8. The Last Supper

The Last Supper is not to be re-interpreted ideationally à la Hegel, lest Jesus Christ and His mission from the Father are misunderstood. The Eucharist is the real, physical, and presentic elongation of the sacrifice at Calvary. Our Lord becomes the actual victim. On the day of the Jewish Pasch, while countless innocent lambs are being slaughtered in the Temple of Jerusalem, our Lord actually passes away on the cross on Golgotha. For this to take place, Ratzinger argues, along with, i.a., John P. Meier (1942–2022) (Meier 1991–2016),14 that the Last Supper was celebrated as a Barakah, or meal of blessing and thanksgiving before the Jewish Pascha. Amid the biblical variance regarding the date of the crucifixion, Ratzinger opts for the Johannine chronology. Both the Last Supper and the Crucifixion take place just prior to the Passover feast. In agreement with 1 Corinthians 5:7, Christ is “our Paschal lamb” in a novel way, radically altering the Jewish understanding of the Passover meal.

“He knew that he would not be able to eat the Passover again. Fully aware of this, he invited his disciples to a Last Supper of a very special kind, one that followed no specific Jewish ritual but, rather, constituted his farewell; during the meal he gave them something new: he gave them himself as the true Lamb and thereby instituted his Passover.”.

(Ratzinger 2011b, p. 113)

Christians profess ever since the comprehensive charity of God for all, revealed in Christ (1 Tim 2:6). The bread of life and the chalice of salvation are offered to all united with Christ. These are represented in the Last Supper by the apostles. He sheds his blood for many, as Ratzinger underscores (Ratzinger 2011b, pp. 125–138, p. 214). This is the inner point of departure and the true origin of the Church (Ratzinger 2010a, p. 134). The Church derives her very essence from his divine “pro-existence,” i.e., the vicarious life and death of Christ for the sake of humanity. Ratzinger apprehends the foundation of the Church to be more personal and more sacramental than what Mt 16:17ff might suggest prima vista as a merely legal act centered around the institution of the Petrine Office. Our Lord personally appoints Peter as apostle (Ratzinger 2010b, p. 138).

Jesus of Nazareth reiterates that Christ’s passion is an act of true love. “It is suffering in fellowship with us and for us, in a solidarity—born of love—that already includes redemption, the victory of love.” (Ratzinger 2011b, p. 216). The hypostatic union permits Ratzinger to observe that Christ’s fear in the Garden of Gethsemane immediately prior to the passion was not merely creaturely fear of a human being. “Jesus experienced that final loneliness, the whole anguish of the human condition. … the abyss of sin and evil penetrated deep within his soul. … he was to quake with foreboding of his imminent death.” (Ratzinger 2011b, p. 149). In Jesus’ prayer the natural will to exercise obedience is transformed into the supernatural will of the divine Son. Neither the learned scribes of Israel nor the Synhedrion, and certainly not Pontius Pilate, could imagine, let alone foretell, the suffering divine Messiah (Ratzinger 2011b, p. 189ff).

In Maximus Confessor’s (d. 662) writings, according to Ratzinger, early Christology finds its most mature expression. Maximus related the struggle between the divine will of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane with his human will. The Monothelites’ concern that the acceptance of a human will would lead to a potential conflict between human and divine freedom in Christ, so that his biblically attested sinlessness (cf. Heb. 4:5) could no longer be maintained, was answered by Maximus through his doctrine of the perichoretic intertwining of the two wills. He thereby averted “the subtle amputation” of human nature through Monothelitism and defended the full integrity of the human being Jesus of Nazareth along the lines of the Council of Chalcedon (451) (Ratzinger 2011b, pp. 145–66).

Something more radical than René Girard’s (1923–2015) rather mechanical scapegoat mechanism in the context of a mimetic theory occurs (Girard 1977). The mystery of vicarious atonement on the cross demonstrates “the God forsakenness” of God on behalf of humankind. Christ presents his own isolation and the world’s guilt to the Father. “Jesus is the Lamb chosen by God himself. On the cross he takes upon himself the sins of the world, and he wipes them away.” (Ratzinger 2011b, p. 225).

Commenting on Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem, Ratzinger elaborates: “The ultimate goal of Jesus’ ‘ascent’ is his self-offering on the Cross, which supplants the old sacrifices; it is the ascent that the Letter to the Hebrews describes as going up, not to a sanctuary made by human hands, but to heaven itself, into the presence of God (9:24). This ascent into God’s presence leads via the Cross—it is the ascent toward ‘loving to the end’ (cf. Jn 13:1), which is the real mountain of God.” (Ratzinger 2011b, p. 2). His joyous entrance as prince of peace, accompanied by cheers from the crowd on Palm Sunday, has a messianic coloring (Mk 11:9f; Ps. 118:25f). The subsequent scene reveals already material for conflict. The cleansing of the Temple indicates the irreconcilable relationship between cult and capital in the outer court. This is far from an ouverture to a political rebellion, according to Ratzinger. Unlike the Maccabees, Jesus is not a zealot who aims at the overthrow of the Roman occupiers. True zeal (in Greek, zelos) for God is not expressed in warfare but in the rejection of violence. “No; violent revolution, killing others in God’s name, was not his way.” (Ratzinger 2011b, p. 15). In Zechariah, Jesus found not only the image of the coming prince of peace riding on an ass but also the vision of the killed shepherd and the dispersed sheep as well as looking at the pierced one (Ratzinger 2011b, p. 16). To Ratzinger’s mind, Jesus transforms Israelite zeal for God into his nonviolence of the cross, thereby establishing the yardstick for genuine zeal: love gifts itself (Ratzinger 2011b, p. 22f).

Ratzinger emphasizes in The Spirit of Liturgy that to Jesus’ mind the Temple cult was unsatisfactory to express the divine passio caritatis witnessed on Golgotha. God calls for a kind of mercy only he himself can offer, not human cultic sacrifice (Mt 9:13; 12:7; Hos 6:6). It is the life sacrifice of God (Ratzinger 2000, p. 39f). This notion Ratzinger had deeply developed early on. It is indebted to Augustine, who sees in Jesus “Unde ipse homo Dei nomine consecratus et Deo votus, in quantum mundo moritur ut Deo vivat, sacrificium est”. (Therefore, a man who is consecrated in the name of God and dedicated to God, in so far as he dies to the world that he may live to God, is himself a sacrifice) (Augustine 1957). The sacrifice of Christ is grounded in oratio, in his prayer to the Father. Christ’s sacrifice becomes the paradigmatic enablement of genuine Christian existence: of the “self-opening of the human spirit to God, which is true worship. The more man becomes ‘word’—or rather, the more his whole existence is directed toward God, the more he accomplishes true worship.” (Ratzinger 2011b, p. 233f). In liturgy the human being becomes a living response to God. This is the noblest form and indeed the fulfillment of human existence.

3.9. Atonement

Based on Heb 5:1.7-11, Ratzinger apprehends in Christ’s passion an intercessory event of charity, which comes about in Jesus presenting to the Father human misery, suffering, and guilt. Jesus thereby reveals himself as the true high priest of the new covenant. Proofs for this view are the tearing of the Temple veil at the moment of Our Lord’s death (Mt 27:51) and the seamless robe of Jesus, reminding one of the high priest’s robe (John 19:23f) (Ratzinger 2011b, pp. 216–26). Thereby it becomes apparent that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ is a divine act of atonement (Rom 3:25). Kant’s insistence on human autonomy and his rejection of the possibility of vicarious atonement, claiming nobody can pay another person’s moral debt, remain too cerebral to comprehend Christ’s vicarious self-immolation for humankind. From the perspective of the Old Testament, it is not unrealistic, though unimaginably cruel. It is not merely in nuce contained in the Old Testament. Indeed, only upon “arriving at Jesus Christ,” does the Old Testament’s profoundest nature become visible. When comparing Ex 25:17ff and Lev 16:13ff in the Septuagint version with the use of the Greek term hilasterion in Heb 9:5 and Rom 3:25, it becomes obvious that the cross signifies both the means of atonement and the Kapporaet, i.e., the place of God’s dwelling in front of which, on the day of reconciliation, the ritual of atonement was performed (Kuhn 2010, p. 90f). Jesus Christ becomes the hilasterion (the atonement) in person (Hahn 2009).

The term “covenant” is an articulus hic stantis et cadentis, i.e., an article by which Christian faith stands or falls. Ratzinger sees “covenant” as deeply connected to God’s purpose for creating the world. “… the Day of Atonement is to restore … a ‘holy people’ in the midst of the world … In this sense it has to do with the innermost purpose of the whole of creation: to open up a space for response to God’s love, to his holy will.” (Ratzinger 2011b, p. 78). This is a dimension of Christian faith that is accessible to human reason, and it is capable of acting on it. And yet, reason on its own could not reach such heights. Whoever seriously accepts that God as creator actively willed the world must confront the question of why God had called the world into being. Is it reasonable to assume God had created a world so sophisticated and endowed one of his creatures with personhood on a random whim? Likewise, would it stand to reason that an unconditioned divine being could be compelled to create the world, like waves on the oceans are caused by winds? The only credible explanation for this universe is that it is indeed the well-considered result of divine freedom inviting created freedom. If indeed human beings are gifted with personhood, then it makes sense that the tri-personal God freely created the human race in love, i.e., in order to communicate with human beings. The world was crafted by divine resolve so that gradually the human race would come to be. With these creatures, created in his image and likeness (Gen 1:26), he had planned to enter a covenant. This possibility, so Ratzinger, must be the most thrilling thought for every human being: to consider he and she are willed personally from eternity and for eternity. No agnostic or atheist can refute the beauty of this thought. No higher beauty can be thought of for the human being—to paraphrase Anselm (Anselm of Canterbury 1951). To Ratzinger’s mind, it is in Christology that man’s likeness to God is decided.

For him, atonement on the cross is the definitive day of atonement, which restores the covenant, by God becoming the holocaust. It accesses a new chance for the human family to enter the covenant with God.

“According to rabbinic theology, the idea of the covenant—the idea of establishing a holy people to be an interlocutor for God in union with him—is prior to the idea of the creation of the world and supplies its inner motive. The cosmos was created, … for the loving ‘yes’ between God and his human respondent. Each year the Feast of Atonement restores this harmony, this inner meaning of the world that is constantly disrupted by sin, and it therefore marks the high point of the liturgical year. … Jesus’ high-priestly prayer is the consummation of the Day of Atonement, the eternally accessible feast, as it were, of God’s reconciliation with men.”.

(Ratzinger 2011b, p. 78ff)

With supreme precision and elegant simplicity, Pope Benedict XVI told the youth gathered at the XX. World Youth Day in Cologne, Germany, in 2005:

“By making the bread into his Body and the wine into his Blood, he anticipates his death, he accepts it in his heart, and he transforms it into an action of love. What on the outside is simply brutal violence—the crucifixion—from within becomes an act of total self-giving love. This is the substantial transformation that was accomplished at the Last Supper and was destined to set in motion a series of transformations leading ultimately to the transformation of the world when God will be all in all.

(cf. 1 Cor 15: 28)

In their hearts, people[s of all religions, ancient and present,] always and everywhere have somehow expected a change, a transformation of the world into a higher reality. Here now, [in Jesus Christ], is the central act of transformation that alone can truly renew the world: violence is transformed into love, and death into life. Since [Christ’s] act transmutes death into love, and death as such is already conquered from within, the Resurrection is already present in it. Death is, so to speak, mortally wounded, so that it can no longer have the last word.

To use an image well-known to us today, this is like inducing nuclear fission in the very heart of being—the victory of love over hatred, the victory of love over death. Only this intimate explosion of good conquering evil can then trigger off the series of transformations [in human beings], that little by little will change the world.

All other changes remain superficial and cannot save. For this reason, we speak of redemption: “what had to happen at the most intimate level has indeed happened, and we can enter into its dynamic.” (Benedict XVI 2005).

These words summarize very well Ratzinger’s motivations for writing Jesus of Nazareth.

The crucifixion states nothing less than God becoming a victim in Jesus. Christ hands himself over to the Father and subsequently to humankind. A new kind of sacrifice shines forth that is a novel form of obedience. Victim and sacrifice, Logos (divine Word) and Sarx (human flesh), become one in the crucified love of Jesus. This indeed must become a jarring skandalon, an unsettling provocation to human reason. The essence of this sacrifice is not so much one of eliminating destruction as constituting the self-gift of divine charity (Ratzinger 2004a, p. 251f. and p. 358) (Ratzinger 2011b, p. 204f; pp. 229–40). In the event of the “Behold the Pierced One” (cf. John 19:37), the transformative “historical dynamism” of Christ’s death becomes the turning point of human history. The hour of death on the cross is the point of inflection: “God and world … touch each other, and thus, God in world, world in God will truly be the Omega of history.” (Ratzinger 2004a, p. 242). Henceforward the only adequate corresponding act of thanksgiving is the Eucharistia (thanksgiving), the Eucharist as the core and fulfillment of Christian—and of human—existence: the undivided worship of God.

Such a view does not deny future suffering in the world but dignifies it beyond compare. It sees Jesus’ cry of abandonment, so to speak, joining humankind via “Psalm 22 … Israel’s great cry of anguish, in the midst of its sufferings, addressed to the apparently silent God.” (Ratzinger 2011b, p. 204). Christ expands our expectation of salvation to include all of humankind’s God-darkness:

“It is no ordinary cry of abandonment. Jesus is praying the great psalm of suffering Israel, and so he is taking upon himself all the tribulation, not just of Israel, but of all those in the world’s anguished cry at God’s absence before the heart of God himself.”.

(Ratzinger 2011b, p. 214)

He continues:

“… Psalm 22 pervades the whole Passion story and points beyond it. … when Jesus utters the opening words of the psalm, the whole of this great prayer is essentially already present—including the certainty of an answer to prayer …”.

(Ratzinger 2011b, p. 214)

Yet more accentuated are the words Ratzinger had used at a Good Friday liturgy in Regensburg while still teaching theology in that city.

“This is the Good Friday of the twentieth century: the face of man is mocked, covered with spittle, beaten by man himself. From the gas chambers of Auschwitz; from the ruined villages and outraged children of Vietnam; from the slums of India, Africa, and Latin America; from the concentration camps of the Communist world … from every dead person the ‘bleeding head sore wounded, reviled, and put to scorn’ gazes at us with a realism that makes a mockery of any aesthetic transfiguration. If Kant and Hegel had been right, … Enlightenment should have made man ever freer, more reasonable, and more upright. Instead, the demons we had so eagerly declared dead rise ever more powerfully from the depths of man and teach him to feel a profound anxiety at his own power and powerlessness: his power to destroy, his powerlessness to find himself and master his own inhumanity. God’s Son utters on the cross the words ’My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ … acquires its full dreadfulness on the lips of him who is himself the redemptive nearness of God in the midst of men. If he is conscious of being abandoned by God, then where is God still to be found?”.

(Ratzinger 2011a, p. 287f)

The answer is found in the crucifixion of Christ. The passio caritatis of Jesus Christ is not arrested to one moment in human history. Ever again, his suffering becomes a transition to new life for human beings. Prior to the advent of Jesus, people were of two minds regarding the eternity of the human soul. They were all too mindful of the ephemeral nature of life. Only in God did some inhabitants of ancient Palestine imagine the possibility of human life as everlasting. In Introduction to Christianity, Ratzinger discusses the empty tomb as a historic fact, but he refrains from discussing the implications (Ratzinger 2004a, pp. 347–59). In Jesus of Nazareth, volume 2, he makes up for this lacuna by dedicating a whole section to this crucial aspect of the creed (Ratzinger 2011b, pp. 253–60). Christ’s resurrection is not a question of a simple animation or reanimation, but rather the epochal breakthrough to a new, more genuine form of life. The empty tomb is merely a historical fact necessary for corroborating this event of salvation history, which eclipses the heretofore known categories of existence. Amid speculation in early Judaism of an eschatological resurrection of the dead at the end of history, the resurrection of Jesus as the Messiah, as the Godman, from the tomb three days after his execution, was a wholly unexpected event. There is no indication that Jews universally expected the awakening of the dead and the appearance of the Messiah to be connected. And yet, contrary to any expectation, perhaps three years after Easter, Paul’s conversion is based on this revolutionary Mashiach-Christos equation. It is humanly spoken, altogether unexpected to see such rapid consolidation of a solid and robust Christology. This view is based on apprehending in Jesus the Messiah and the assertion of his divine Sonship. Such clear contours of Christian faith evolve in the short span of only fifteen or twenty years into the Christ Hymn recorded in Phil 2:6-11, containing already materially the creed of Nicaea of 325 AD, as Ratzinger underscores (Ratzinger 2007, p. 95) (Josephus Flavius n.d., 93/94) (Kuhn 2010, p. 21f).

Jesus Christ’s empty tomb has immediate consequences: “… we have to say that the empty tomb as such, while it cannot prove the Resurrection, is nevertheless a necessary condition for Resurrection faith, which was specifically concerned with the body and, consequently, with the whole of the person.” (Ratzinger 2011b, p. 254). Peter authenticates this “scandalous realism” (Ratzinger 2005b): “‘He was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh experience corruption’” (Acts 2:31).

At Emmaus, the disciples recognized the Lord only in the breaking of bread. Ever since the Emmaus story, Christians recognize the exalted Lord in the breaking of bread in the Eucharist. Pace Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), Our Lord did not resurrect into the faith of his followers. Early on, Christians defended the physical resurrection of the flesh against gnostic contestations. The resurrection narratives—including the one at Emmaus—must then be recognized as real and as “ongoing in liturgy” until Our Lord’s second coming (Ratzinger 2011b, pp. 265–72). The unity of body and soul is affirmed against enlightenment’s half-hearted toleration of only the soul’s immortality. Over and against Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of mere Reason (Kant [1973] 1998, 6:128, p. 133, cf. 6:72), Ratzinger holds fast to the gospel message as relating the historic and bodily concreteness of the resurrection. Since, if the resurrection contains divine action, it must per definitionem be without analogy; “it oversteps the boundaries of what we are able to conceive.” (Ratzinger 2011b, p. 274). The return of Christ from the realm of death transforms time, space, and matter into an altogether new category; “we could regard the Resurrection as something akin to a radical ‘evolutionary leap,’ in which a new dimension of life emerges, a new dimension of human existence. … creating for all of us a new space of life, a new space of being in union with God.” (Ratzinger 2011b, 274).

4. Assessment

Relativism is the decomposition of the unity of Logos—of God’s Word—and human rationality. Self-derailing postmodernity delights in constantly changing relationships—the “Dictatorship of Relativism” (Ratzinger 2005a) leads to the collapse of all forms of friendship, family, matrimony, and society in general. Just perhaps, the most powerful antidote to such loss of humanity is Ratzinger’s Jesus of Nazareth trilogy. With Henri de Lubac (1896–1991), he is acutely aware of the socializing effects of dogma. The Church is that community in which everyone stands up for everyone else, as everyone had entered into Christian prayer and thereby knows Christ (de Lubac [1938] 1988).

It is true, Christian theology cannot revert to a pre-modern or pre-critical Homily on Marienfeld. The positive sciences are irradicably part of contemporary life; Ratzinger’s Jesus of Nazareth trilogy is the first post-critical response to Kant presented to the postmodern public. It is the first post-critical Christology in the sense that it combines for the first time on a broad canvas the best of the insights gained by the historical-critical method with spirituality, a patristic outlook and systematic theology—uniting personal lectio divina with objective, serious scholarship. At the same time, and most importantly for Ratzinger, humankind cannot return to a pre-Christian naïveté, lest human beings run the risk of losing their humaneness—as they have irretrievably lost natural revelation. This renders Christology of vital importance for the future of humankind (de Gaál 2023, pp. 161–76).

Significantly, faith does not come about via objectifying and therefore necessarily distant scientific deduction. It requires a personal encounter with the living Lord through prayer, Scripture, and the Eucharist. Theology transitions to mystagogy, lest theology lose its purpose. Ratzinger’s approach to the figure and message of Jesus can best be compared with a theology of “the mysteries of Jesus’ life,” as first written by St. Thomas Aquinas in the third part of his Summa Theologiae (S.Th. III, q. 27-59) (Ratzinger 2007, p. xiii). While Ratzinger places encounter with Jesus at the beginning of his considerations, Thomas ponders the mysteries of Christ only after having established the dogmatic-conciliar bases (S.Th. III, q. 1–15). Ratzinger’s Jesus trilogy is a book of spiritual renewal, a book of meditative density, which guides us to a living encounter with Christ. His basic thesis is that Jesus is “God’s Word in person.” The mission of the Son can only be adequately understood from His community of prayer and volition with the Father (Ratzinger 2007, p. xiii). It is deliberately open to systematic theological explication. Theology that reflects on revelation serves as an entry into the reality of Christ, because this alone makes the presence of revelation real.

The liturgical praise of the Triune God is the privileged locus for such experience to occur. Liturgy is, so to speak, the heart of the Church and the premier tool for the world’s transformation. It becomes apparent that Christianity is not “a religion of the book”, nor is theology a collection of propositions or tractates, “but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” (Benedict XVI 2005, 1). Though appreciating the substantial contributions of Christoph Schönborn, Walter Kasper, and Karl-Heinz Menke to the dogmatic tractate Christology, he deliberately complements their tomes with a different approach. Thereby Ratzinger also parts ways with the systematic, tractate-like method he had used when teaching Christology courses in Freising, Tübingen, and Regensburg.15 Christian theology becomes credible when preceded by the theologian’s dialogue with the Lord.

The formation of Christological creeds is a secondary reflex of the belief that the Crucified One lives and has promised his abiding presence. The belief in the resurrection of the Crucified One and his closeness in the Eucharist form the inner glowing core of Christianity from the very beginning. In contemporary discourse, however, the focus is often on the historical-institutional exterior of Christianity. Only rarely is the content of faith extra muros ecclesiae presented in an intellectually convincing and appealing way. The Jesus of Nazareth trilogy sets a happy counterpoint by returning to the center of Christianity and presenting the Gestalt, the “figure” and message of Jesus. Thereby Ratzinger achieves a quantum leap contribution to overcoming the manifest crisis of faith in the present age. Not only believing Christians of all denominations, but also members of other religions and even agnostics and atheists can benefit from this original contribution. For just as faith must face up to the challenge of critical, rational scrutiny if it does not want to isolate itself in special group semantics, (post-)secular contemporaries can also “discover semantic content in religious statements, perhaps even concealed intuitions of their own, which can be translated and incorporated into a public argumentation”—thus Jürgen Habermas (Habermas 2008, p. 46). For Ratzinger, a liberal, democratic society does not need an abstract idea of the numinous, but rather God as a personal reality in order to protect its citizens as personal entities, and thus democracy as such. For Ratzinger, introducing Jesus Christ as divine revelation in person in Dei Verbum is kairotic:

“In truth, it is not Scripture and tradition that are the sources of revelation, but revelation, the speaking and self-revealing [Logos] of God, is the unus fons from which the two rivuli Scripture and tradition flow.” (Ratzinger [1962] 2012, p. 157).16 The Logos, Jesus Christ, is not an atom or first cause. He is creative charity and reason, and God’s face turned to us in the Cross. In the encyclical Spe Salvi he summarizes: “If this absolute love exists, with its absolute certainty, then—only then—is man ‘redeemed,’ whatever should happen to him in his particular circumstances. This is what it means to say: Jesus Christ has ‘redeemed’ us.”.

(Benedict XVI 2007, 26)

The believer does “not become God’s puppet, a boring ‘yes man;’ he does not lose his freedom. Only the person who entrusts himself totally to God finds true freedom, the great, creative immensity of the freedom of good.” (Benedict XVI 2005b). As truth is a person, Jesus Christ, human beings discover that commitment to truth and relationality condition one another: “The true expression of freedom is the capacity to choose a definitive gift in which freedom, in being given, is fully rediscovered.” (Benedict XVI 2005a) This pure correspondence, the Mother of God, Mary, lived in her fiat fully—becoming unclouded, the Church at her source (Ratzinger and von Balthasar 2005, p. 31).

In the catechesis on 4 May 2011, Pope Benedict XVI observed: “the desire for God is engraved on the heart of every human being, which receives fulfilment and full expression in the Old and in the New Testament. The Revelation, is in fact purifying and brings to its fullness man’s original yearning for God, offering to him, in prayer, the possibility of a deeper relationship with the heavenly Father.” (Benedict XVI 2011). Through the incarnation, God participates in human speech, and the human person accesses in prayer the tripersonal God, participating in the Logos’ speech to the Father (Ratzinger 2011b, chapters 4 and 6). The Logos in God, Jesus Christ, is the onto-logical (sic) basis for prayer. The Son’s prayer and our prayer join in the one prayer to the Father: the Our Father. The Our Father is “God’s gift to us” as Cyprian had observed. In Jesus Christ we are one subject and can authentically speak to God with Him. It is in prayer with Jesus that his identity shines forth and Christology gains contours. The Church’s creed is rooted in our joining in Jesus’ prayer. Only by entering into the solitude of Jesus, only by participating in his essence, in his communication with the Father, can we behold his essence; only in this way can we enter into his identity. This is what it means to follow Jesus. The Christian creed is not a scientific proposition—even if it is rationally secured; it is prayer. Prayer has an immense heuristic quality that no science could achieve. The one who was called “the rock” teaches us that the Church arises from our participation in the prayers of Jesus (cf. Lk 18-20; Mt 16:13-20). This is how the Church regains her radiance.

While God and human beings live on different planes, divine alterity and holiness encourage us to an exodus, to let go of our expectations and yearnings and permit a new beginning and transformation to occur from God. His gift, “hagion pneuma”, the Holy Spirit, is stronger (Lk 11:13). As Marianne Schlosser poetically puts it: “adoration means accepting the arrow flight of our existence.” (Schlosser 2021, p. 517). Redemption means restoration of this pre-lapsarian, latreuic orientation to the Father, as “exercise towards the eschaton and at the same time its anticipation (Vorwegnahme).” (Ratzinger 2014b, p. 826f).

5. Conclusions

In the Jesus of Nazareth trilogy, one detects a sovereign scholar at work. He generously recognizes good scholarship, whether Catholic, as in the work of Joachim Gnilka (1928–2018) and Rudolf Schnackenburg (1914–2002), or non-Catholic, as in the work of Charles Kingsley Barrett (Methodist, 1917–2011), David Chytraeus (Lutheran, 1530–1600, the first to describe John 17 as “high-priestly prayer”), Brevard Childs (1923–2007), who introduced the term “canonical exegesis”) (Ratzinger 2011b, p. xvif) or Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1916–45). Of course, the great minds of the past cannot be absent: Augustine and Bonaventure, but also Rupert of Deutz, Irenaeus of Lyon, Origen, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzen, Thomas Aquinas, etc., are mentioned, and their contributions are integrated into one symphonic whole.

There had long been a lack of scholars who took to heart Vatican II’s call for implementing the paradigm described in Dei Verbum 12—the unity of historical research and the analogy of faith.17 Ratzinger had significantly contributed as peritus to Dei Verbum, to read Scripture with its divine and human authors in mind: with the Church and her living memory, which is synonymous with the concept of tradition, i.e., the sacraments, liturgy, the Church Fathers, the saints, councils, synods, etc. (de Gaál 2012, pp. 515–48).18 Already in 1968, while teaching in Tübingen, he had lamented a materially completely unwarranted, antagonistic bifurcation between the historical-critical method on the one hand and the faith of the Church as expressed in tradition and the writings of the Church Fathers and the Scholastic minds on the other (Ratzinger 1968, pp. 257–82). These two models must be brought to an organic, polyphonic unity. In the foreword to Jesus of Nazareth, volume 2, he writes:

“Naturally, this combination of two quite different types of hermeneutic is an art that needs to be constantly remastered. But it can be achieved, and as a result the great insights of patristic exegesis will be able to yield their fruit once more in a new context … I would not presume to claim that this combination of the two hermeneutics is already fully accomplished in my book. But I hope to have taken a significant step in that direction. Fundamentally this is a matter of finally putting into practice the methodological principles formulated for exegesis by the Second Vatican Council (in Dei Verbum 12), a task that unfortunately has scarcely been attempted thus far.”

(Ratzinger 2011b, p. xv)

Such tension of hermeneutic approaches is indispensable:

“This is a dramatic situation for faith, because its point of reference is being placed in doubt: Intimate friendship with Jesus, on which everything depends, is in danger of clutching at thin air.”

(Ratzinger 2007, p. xii)

It is a prophetic and necessary methodological corrective to an increasingly self-serving global culture that is the result of a universal alienation from natural revelation brought about by technology and the positive sciences. Postmodernity is increasingly blind to an overarching divine meaning of existence and thus loses sight of the bonum commune, threatening democracy to its core. The positive, supernatural revelation, completed in the incarnation of the God-man and preserved in the faith of the Church, is the solution for a culture of life and truth to flourish in a society bereft of natural revelation and law.

The war and the humble circumstances that followed were an opportunity for the young Ratzinger to focus on the essence of Christ’s message: Christian faith is 1. personal communion with Christ, 2. worship of and participation in divine life, and 3. interpretation of the world. Christ is both the ethical compass in the here and now and the basis for hope beyond death. Ratzinger succeeds in conveying all this to the reader, while at the same time not only eruditely demonstrating the reasonableness of the Christian statement but also demonstrating its superior intelligibility.

In Christ Jesus, the human understanding of God is broadened. Salvation means restoration of a divine-human relationship. While Christianity retains all the features of Jewish monotheism, God, revealed in Christ as Trinity, is now seen as the most intensive form of personal relationships. The dynamic God of Israel becomes one of community and personal relationships in the form of trinitarian monotheism. He is the first in whom everything is created. Jesus Christ is also the one, universal mediator, sustaining everything, directing all adoration towards the Father, and the one in whom everything will be perfected (Col 1:16; John 1:1–4; Heb 1:1–4).

Rightfully, the Jesus of Nazareth trilogy is for its author “an expression of my personal search ‘for the face of the Lord’ (Ps 27:8).” (Ratzinger 2007, p. xxiii, cf. p. xvi). To a considerable extent he finds that “mainstream critical exegesis in accordance with its hermeneutical presuppositions, lacks sufficient content to exert any historical impact. … to make possible a personal relationship with Jesus.” (Ratzinger 2011b, p. xvi). The eyes of faith are indispensable to reach the essence of Christ. No amount of historical evidence can achieve this—nor, importantly, can it contradict faith. There is no alternative to faith, not because of a lack of historical evidence, but rather because the incarnation invites egalitarian faith in Jesus Christ as the universale personale et concretum (Irenaeus of Lyon n.d.).19 This Latin circumscription of Jesus Christ means that despite his Palestinian, first-century cultural specificity, only the Son of Man is relatable to every human being—accessible for peoples of all races and walks of life: for the simplex et idiota (Bonaventure) (Ratzinger 1971, p. 161f) as well as the learned. Especially for his academic audience, he had quoted in 1968 the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin’s (1770–1843) epistolatory novel Hyperion: “Non coerci maximo, contineri tamen a minimo, divinum est.” (“Not to be encompassed by the greatest, but to let oneself be encompassed by the smallest—that is divine.” Ratzinger 2004a. pp. 146f.) Christ’s kenotic theophany is the chance for faith. Towards the end of the second volume of his Jesus of Nazareth trilogy, Ratzinger writes in 2011:

“It is part of the mystery of God that he acts so gently, that he only gradually builds up his history within the great history of mankind; that he becomes man and so can be overlooked by his contemporaries and the decisive forces within history; that he suffers and dies and that, having risen again, he chooses to come to mankind only through the faith of the disciples to whom he reveals himself; that he continues to knock gently at the doors of our hearts and slowly opens our eyes if we open our doors to him. … Does not a ray of light issue from Jesus, growing brighter across the centuries, that could not come from any mere man and through which the light of God truly shines into the world?”.

(Ratzinger 2011b, p. 276)