Introduction to Christianity (Pope Benedict XVI) Reading Report (Chapter I)

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 My dearest readers,

 Welcome to my first article on Catholic365.com. In deference to the Autism Bible Study (which can be reached here), these are mostly focused on delivering reading reports on Catholic books. Taking advantage of the fact that this platform is Catholic, I feel glad that I’m able to reach an English-speaking Catholic audience. Despite being not Catholic, I strive for these college-like reading report articles to be easy to read for you, my dearest English readers (I am still learning English and learning about the Catholic Church).

 On this occasion, I will dive into the book “Introduction to Christianity” by Pope Benedict XVI. To be honest, even before being taught in a Protestant Christian school in Bogota (Colombia), I never knew about any High Pontiff. Of course, I was a little boy in the year Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope. In fact, in that year, I was diagnosed with autistic conduct, which was later named Aspergers’ Syndrome. Then I enrolled in a local disability foundation and, subsequently, enrolled for seven years in a Fundamentalist Protestant school until moving back to Barranquilla (Colombia) (my birthplace). Later in my last year of high school, when I was doing social work in a local public school here in Barranquilla, I felt drawn to reach out to the Pope. In the middle of my desperation, I asked the local public preschool children to write Pope Francis, and an LDS-affiliated church boy told me, “They do not know who the Pope is yet.” It quickly reminded me of when I was a child.

 Now that Pope Benedict XVI is deceased, we’ll dive into some of his works. On this occasion, we will study principally the first chapter of his work, “Introduction to Christianity.” I beg Pope Benedict XVI that his Holy Master give me the wisdom and understanding getting into the High Pontiff’s work. In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we’ll dive into the first chapter of the work, “Introduction to Christianity.”

Complete bibliographical reference of the work:

Ratzinger, J. C. (1969). Belief in the World of Today. In J. C. Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity. Burns & Oates.

Abstract of the text

The following work from the High Pontiff revolves around the questions of faith and reasoning. As a mere introduction to Christianity, the first chapter explains the different types of thought that surround the concept of man. The most impactful thing is that this Pope does not highlight a sort of comparative religion chart (which is understood), as he explores different thinking sources (and yes, it includes Marxism).

The first chapter, structured into seven sessions, is a mere explanation of the current belief system in the world of today, explaining each current of thought substantially, despite being extensive. The mere fact that he relies on the thoughts of the illustration-era thinkers abounds profoundly on the objective matter of believing in the world of today.

The main idea of the text

Doubt and belief’s situation before the question of God.

 This session begins with Ratzinger reminding us about talking about the Christian faith and those who adhere to it. Nevertheless, once the Christian wins a debate among non-Christians, our dear author uses literary figures about a clown in a certain village (which is an original story from Kierkegaard). Such a village is called a “burning village”. In summary, Cardinal Ratzinger directly encompasses the story of the clown, symbolizing the theologians who do not know how to show the message of today. He [the clown] is simply not taken seriously. Something that resonates with the professional degree of theology, which has no place in the job market (for example), and most of them are volunteer positions. The Pope himself eradicates that many of those who listen to the clown are already familiar with the story lying about the fact that the clown is somehow encompassing things that are not real (something understood perfectly as I have often seen this in my reality with non-Catholic street preaching in my local settings). He compares directly this thing with the theological discussion and theology which are imprisoned today within their frustrating inability to break through accepted patterns of thought and speech in their try to make theology a vital aspect of life.

After all these things that surround metaphorically the clown as the theologian in question, the Pope calls the clown to take off his costume and makeup, so everything would be understood. He then asks about aggiornamento, then asks about using secular vocabulary and demythologizing Christianity to not make the purpose of theologians to make things difficult for the practicing Christian. All those questions abound profoundly in the subject of modern dress-appearing theologies that make the expected hope as such naive though. He then resolves the matter by appointing a reminder which consists of, making an honest effort to give an account of the Christian faith to oneself, they must understand that their situation is (by no means) so different from the one exposed by the other as they might have started thinking at the start.

The origin of belief—Provisional Attempt at a Definition of Belief

In the following session, the Pope encompasses the illustrated show of the clown (the theologian) and the unsuspected villagers (those who claim “we’re all theologians” as well as the unbelievers) as one specific aspect of the problem of belief today. He then explains the affirmative verb “To Believe” using “I believe” by stating that it poses itself in a definite temporal context. He then asks the following: “What is the meaning of the Christian profession ‘I believe’ today, in the context of our present existence and our present attitude to reality as a whole?”.

Something that I like about this chapter’s second section is that the Pontiff calls for immediate action and analysis of the text (in this case, the Apostle’s Creed) as a whole investigation. This is originally intended to be an “Introduction to Christianity” by summarizing its essential contents which are all found in the Holy Bible (I guess). There, it all begins with the words “I believe”. He then puts aside the considerations of the ritual context and the contents (which help to mold the meaning of the word credo). He focuses instead on asking a more radical question and pondering what kind of attitude is implied if Christian existence expresses itself first and foremost in the world “credo”. He assumes that we unthinkingly point out that “religion” and “belief” are always the same thing so each religion could surely be described as a “belief”. However, he states that this is true only to a limited extent, arguing that many of the other religions have other names for themselves (I would suppose that organized religions tend to have their Sacred Texts which come principally from a supernatural entity, and yes, that is religion, in my understanding) and thus establish different centers of gravity.

The Dilemma of Belief in the World of Today

The Pope points out the fact that, once perceived the adventure is essentially implicit in the concept of belief, it is almost impossible to avoid a second consideration, which is in turn particularly acute in believing, which in fact, tends to affect us in our world nowadays. There is indeed a basic paradox that is already rendered in the fact of belief indeed, and (according to the Pope), is the fact about the old-fashioned way of belief, including the mode of life and the current of existence. He now states that the attempts at modernization (such as the academic “demythologizing” efforts as well as through the ecclesiastical, pragmatical aggiornamento) do not necessarily alter these facts. On the contrary, these efforts strengthen them despite the suspicion that a convulsive effort is trying to proclaim something old-fashioned that, afterward, is a relic from days gone by. As a result, belief appears to no longer be as bold as it should be. Instead, it appears that it has become a leap out of the apparent all in the visible world as well as the apparent void of the invisible and intangible (in my viewpoint, it already may seem that this Pope was warning about the woke culture as well as the demythologizing Christianity nowadays in both fundamentalist and progressive churches), noting that “tradition” was replaced by the idea of progress.

To embark on this very important question, Benedict XVI addresses a specific element in our present situation. For many intellectuals in the past, the concept of “tradition” embraced a firm program. So, what is such a firm program? He states that it could be something that the Man could rely on as protective as possible. However, today is the opposite: Man has found that “tradition” is already superseded by modernism.

This can be misunderstood to understand all the roots of the Christian faith as it can be subtle neither the intellectualism of demythologization nor the pragmatism of the aggiornamento, getting to the point of making them a distortion of basic scandal for the Christian belief and cannot easily be settled either by theories or by action. Now we come up with the invention of Christian Positivism (Christian belief is not merely concerned, as one might at first suspect from all the talk of belief and faith…) This can highlight his lean toward the “entirely Other”, which can remain completely outside the human world and time; on the contrary, God is more concentrated in history as The Man. The claim to be a revelation is (according to the Pope) pointed out in John 1:18: “No one has ever seen God; the only begotten Son, who is in the Bosom of the Father, has made Him known”. At first glance, this seems to be the maximum degree of revelation, of the disclosure of God. Benedict XVI calls for taking a few steps as though in Galilee in which God himself comes to meet us. However, something that needs to be clarified is the act of revelation, which at first seems to be the most radical, and to a certain degree, it remains like it is. At the same moment, the revelation becomes the cause of the most extreme obscurity and concealment.

The boundary of modern understanding of reality and the place of belief.

            In the history of man, it can be observed that there are various periods within such a spiritual development. There can be specifically three of them: The magical, the metaphysical, and the scientific (in terms of natural science).

            Each of these has a lot to do with the basic orientations of human knowledge as it comes to the subject of belief. None of them is equivalent to these basic orientations, but none of them, either, is simply neutral toward belief.

A characteristic that molds all these periods is the limitation to something called “phenomena”. In this sense, the Pope states that human beings have given up seeking the hidden “in-itself ness” of things and sounding on the type of nature of being itself, which to our appearance, might become a fruitless enterprise. He also indicates that we, in the sense of believers, have limited ourselves to only our perspective of what can be seized in our measuring grasp. It is in this restriction of phenomena that the methodology of natural science is based.

Faith as Standing Firm and Understanding

In this section, the Pope alludes to a basic biblical statement of belief that is indeed, untranslatable. He then encompasses Luther’s attempt to dive into the original biblical tongues by trying to capture a certain statement’s play on words when he coined the formula “if you do not believe, then you do not abide”, or, more literally, “if you do not believe [if you do not hold firm to Yahve], then you will have no foothold”(Isaiah 7:9). There is something very important to highlight about the Hebrew root word ’mn (amen): It embraces a variety of meanings. Those multiple meanings’ interplays and differentiations make up the subtle grandeur of the Hebrew phrase. Some of the meanings of ‘mn are truth, firmness, firm ground, ground, in addition to loyalty, trust, entrusting oneself, taking one’s stand on something, believing in something, and so on. Another very important thing to highlight is that the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint), transferred such a sentence to Greek not only linguistically, but also conceptually by formulating this: “If you do not believe, then you do not understand, either” though it is said that this translation was part of a process of Hellenization of the way that the Septuagint is less “biblical” than the Hebrew text. It is then that belief is founded on the linking with understanding and reason rather than standing firm on the reliable Word of God, meaning that the belief term is now removed from understanding and reason and is even removed to a quite different and completely inappropriate plane.

The Pope says that, maybe, there might be some truth to it. Nevertheless, he thinks that through all this, his sole essentiality of preserving has made belief as firm as a rock, even though the imagery is different. He then states that for the time being we can simply take up the thread of our earlier reflections and say that belief operates on a completely different plane from that of making or “makability”.

The Rationality of Faith

This is the pre-last section of our dearest Pope’s first chapter. After having pondered onto all these surrounding surfaces of belief, one will note how closely the words “I believe” and “amen” of the Apostles’ Creed, chime in with one another, encircling the totality of individual assertions and thus providing the inner space for all those things that lay between. Applying this, the meaning of the whole intellectual movement becomes visible (as it is all about). The word “Amen” derives from the same Hebrew root from which the word “belief” comes. In this order of ideas, the Pope explains explicitly that “Amen” is what the trustful placing himself in place that upholds him, not because he’s made it and checked with his calculations but rather with the mere opposite that he hasn’t made it and cannot check it (in this idea, he points out for the meaning of the word “belief”).

Yet what happens in those meanings is not a blind surrender to the irrational but a movement towards the logos, and the ratio toward meaning and truth. Nevertheless, one can expect one last antithesis about knowledge and belief. He insists that practical knowledge must aim to be positivistic. Within that spectrum, it surges an issue that tells that it no longer inquiries about truth (this is indeed, something delicate), pointing out the fact that it renounces the question for truth and directing its attention to the “rightness”, the “soundness” of such an experiment must be proven in a hypothetical design. Thus, practical knowledge does not inquire what things are like on their own and in themselves, but it will only work when it functions for us.

            As a Christian attitude of nature, belief is expressed in the little word “amen”, which has multiple meanings (trust, entrust, fidelity, firmness, etc), which all interpenetrate each other. Giving the endorsement for the man can have the interpretative reason for his existence by only going through the truth itself. Within this one, the Christian faith is also truth due to her intrinsic conviction about the logos by knowing just as a meaning.

I believe in You

            Although all this was said in summary by Pope Benedict XVI, something is missing in the Christian faith or belief that hasn’t been specified. That is, indeed, its personal character. He proclaims that the Christian faith is different from other sorts of faiths and religions whose favor is done to a spiritual ground of our world. The central formula is “I believe in You” rather than “I believe in something”. This is indeed, part of the mystical encounter between the man with the Man (Jesus). Within this encounter, man finds reason for his existence because it experiences the meaning of the world as a person. Jesus is indeed, God’s witness, through whom the intangible has become tangible, as well as the distant has drawn near. Furthermore, he is not simply the witness whose evidence we trust when he tells us what he has seen in an existence that had made the complete about-turn from false contentment with the foreground of life to the depths of the whole truth (cf. Acts 1:8). In summary, he is the presence of the eternal in this world. In this order of ideas, faith is the finding of a “you” that upholds us and it gives us hope that there will be an indestructible love that is longest and guaranteed forever.

Critical comment

As we went in-depth about Pope Benedict XVI’s work, it must be left clear that this High Pontiff was one of the most conservative Popes in Church History.

                                                                                                                                                                   I merely agree with all said by the Pope in the first chapter of this best-seller. The fact about comparing the theologian with a clown doing a spectacle for free is much clearer than it seems. He calls out against the fact that “All we are theologians”. Not, not all of us are theologians. Theology has no room in the job market, and as told by Benedict XVI, those who look at the spectacle of the theologian are already familiar with the story the [clown] is trying to explain though.

                                                                                                                                                                   In my reality, here in Colombia (and I am honestly unfamiliar with other Latin American cultures), Catholicism has been leaned and linked to Colombian culture. Even the secular singers sing songs reminding about the Catholic Faith. For example, Diomedes Díaz (a prominent composer of Vallenato music) frequently referenced Catholic culture in his worldly music. I am not a Catholic myself, but a Baptist Christian (you can see this on my website as well as in some of my writings on Substack). Moreover, in my attempts to focus on soul-winning, I have failed to reach those who have the potential to be “believers” then God’s disciples. The reality, it was never thus.

                                                                                                                                                                   Now, approaching specifically the “belief” term, I might highlight the fact that this Pope had referenced Martin Luther in his attempt to translate something untranslatable itself within Isaiah 7:9. He then encompasses the meaning of “Amen”, which in reality, I delighted in this Hebrew root for multiple significances. As the Hebrew roots of “Amen” have multiple meanings, thus is the meaning of the vain existence expressed conjunctly in Ecclesiastes 9:1-10. I swear that when I ponder and read the book of Ecclesiastes, I always find harsh things in it. Moreover, it seems that the Bible is against human thoughts, and is also pro-abortion. Umm, I don’t think the Bible is in favor or against abortion. On the contrary, it is neutral toward this kind of human murder dressed as a ‘right’ to choose. The fact is, who am I to judge? Hence the quest for the truth about man and why his existence.

                                                                                                                                                                   Practical knowledge (as told by the Pope in the sixth section), must aim to be positivistic. In those instances, I can mostly agree with it, because the mere negativism amongst those fundamentalist Christians is always expected and very hard to understand. Seeking the truth is indeed very important when it comes to belief and saying “Amen” or even reciting the Apostles’ Creed in the Catholic Mass. Just like the word “Amen”, “belief” might have multiple meanings in terms of deviating from those who think about believing.

                                                                                                                                                                   In summary, all these things that surround my person tend to be aimed at the Catholic Church. As a Pope who sought a renewal in the Catholic Church by turning her back to Orthodoxy, I can mostly agree that the first chapter of his work “Introduction to Christianity” is more clearly and specified in the main idea of the text. In this section, I express all my personal opinions toward his work.

Angello Forero

Barranquilla, Colombia