Faith Abides: The Intelligence of Benedict XVI | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. | Ignatius Insight | September 27, 2010
"Following the lead of Newman, Ratzinger has opened Catholic theology to a consideration of the problem of history, but he does not allow the Tradition to be constructed from historical elements external to revelation itself. Consistent with de Lubac and Mohler, he believes that the faith of a twenty-first century Catholic in any diocese of the world is not essentially different from that of a first-century Christian."
-- Tracey Rowland, Benedict XVI: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T & T Clark, 2010), p. 157.
I.
The British publishing house, T & T Clark, has recently produced a series of theological reflections under the series title of "A Guide for the Perplexed." This title comes from a book of the famous medieval Jewish philosopher, Moses Maimonides. The perplexed were those Christians, Jews, and Arab thinkers who first re-encountered, in the 12th and 13th centuries, Aristotle and his enormous wisdom. What perplexed them, as believers, was whether the revelation that they lived was not natural. Aristotle seemed to figure out much of it without its benefits. The task, among Christians pioneered by Aquinas, was to distinguish what kind of knowledge that was revealed to us from what kind could we figure out ourselves.
The T&T Clark series previously dealt with given writers like Tillich, von Balthasar, Calvin, and de Lubac as well as with Christian topics like the Trinity, Christology, and bioethics. Tracey Rowland's new book on Benedict is part of this series. Rowland, an Australian theologian who studied in Cambridge, has previously written an excellent book on Benedict (Ratzinger's Faith: The Theology of Benedict XVI, Oxford, 2008). This second Rowland book is relatively short (160 text pages). It is designed primarily to situate Benedict as that theologian who best understands modernity and the place of Catholicism in relation to it.
Essentially, the pope does not judge the faith by the culture, but examines the intellectual and moral meaning of the faith to ask what, if any thing, does modernity have to do with it. As the pope pointed out in Spe Salvi, many of modernity's most forceful ideas are, when separated out, misplaced versions of basic Christian positions now thought to be achieved by means other than Christian. Without careful analysis, Benedict neither accepts nor rejects the operative ideas of modern times.
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