Jos Granados - Opening Up the Scriptures: Joseph Ratzinger and the Foundations of Biblical Interpretation

The middle years of the twentieth century marked a particularly intense time of crisis and change in European society. During this period (19301950), a broad intellectual and spiritual movement arose within the European Catholic community, largely in response to the secularism that lay at the core of the crisis. The movement drew inspiration from earlier theologians and philosophers such as Mohler, Newman, Gardeil, Rousselot, and Blondel, as well as from men of letters like Charles Peguy and Paul Claudel.

The group of academic theologians included in the movement extended into Belgium and Germany, in the work of men like Emile Mersch, Dom Odo Casel, Romano Guardini, and Karl Adam. But above all the theological activity during this period centered in France. Led principally by the Jesuits at Fourviere and the Dominicans at Le Saulchoir, the French revival included many of the greatest names in twentieth-century Catholic thought: Henri de Lubac, Jean Danielou, Yves Cougar, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Louis Bouyer, and, in association, Hans Urs von Balthasar.

It is not true - as subsequent folklore has it - that those theologians represented any sort of self-conscious "school": indeed, the differences among them, for example, between Fourviere and Saulchoir, were important. At the same time, most of them were united in the double conviction that theology had to speak to the present situation, and that the condition for doing so faithfully lay in a recovery of the Church's past. In other words, they saw clearly that the first step in what later came to be known as aggiornamento had to be ressourcement - a rediscovery of the riches of the whole of the Church's two-thousand-year tradition. According to de Lubac, for example, all of his own works as well as the entire Sources chretiennes collection are based on the presupposition that "the renewal of Christian vitality is linked at least partially to a renewed exploration of the periods and of the works where the Christian tradition is expressed with particular intensity."

In sum, for the ressourcement theologians theology involved a "return to the sources" of Christian faith, for the purpose of drawing out the meaning and significance of these sources for the critical questions of our time. What these theologians sought was a spiritual and intellectual communion with Christianity in its most vital moments as transmitted to us in its classic texts, a communion that would nourish, invigorate, and rejuvenate twentieth-century Catholicism.

The ressourcement movement bore great fruit in the documents of the Second Vatican Council and deeply influenced the work of Pope John Paul II.

The present series is rooted in this renewal of theology. The series thus understands ressourcement as revitalization: a return to the sources, for the purpose of developing a theology that will truly meet the challenges of our time. Some of the features of the series, then, are a return to classical (patristic-medieval) sources and a dialogue with contemporary Western culture, particularly in terms of problems associated with the Enlightenment, modernity, and liberalism.

The series publishes out-of-print or as yet untranslated studies by earlier authors associated with the ressourcement movement. The series also publishes works by contemporary authors sharing in the aim and spirit of this earlier movement. This will include any works in theology, philosophy, history, literature, and the arts that give renewed expression to Catholic sensibility.

The editor of the Ressourcement series, David L. Schindler, is Gagnon Professor of Fundamental Theology and dean at theJohn Paul II Institute in Washington, D.C., and editor of the North American edition of Communio: International Catholic Review, a federation of journals in thirteen countries founded in Europe in 1972 by Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jean Danielou, Henri de Lubac, Joseph Ratzinger, and others.

VOLUMES PUBLISHED

Mysterium Paschale

Hans Urs von Balthasar

The Heroic Face of Innocence: Three Stories

Georges Bernanos

The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma

Maurice Blondel

Prayer: The Mission of the Church

Jean Danielou

On Pilgrimage

Dorothy Day

We, the Ordinary People of the Streets

Madeleine Delbrel

The Discovery of God

Henri de Lubac

Medieval Exegesis, volumes I and 2: The Four Senses of Scripture

Henri de Lubac

Opening Up the Scriptures: Joseph Ratzinger and the Foundations of Biblical Interpretation

Jose Granados, Carlos Granados, and Luis Sanchez-Navarro, eds.

Letters from Lake Como: Explorations in Technology and the Human Race

Romano Guardini

Divine Likeness: Toward a Trinitarian Anthropology of the Family

Marc Cardinal Ouellet

The Portal of the Mystery of Hope

Charles Peguy

In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

In the Fire of the Burning Bush: An Initiation to the Spiritual Life

Marko Ivan Rupnik

Love Alone Is Credible: Hans Urs von Balthasar as Interpreter of the Catholic Tradition, volume i

David L. Schindler, ed.

Hans Urs von Balthasar: A Theological Style

Angelo Scola

The Nuptial Mystery

Angelo Scola

Edited by

Jose Granados

Carlos Granados

&

Luis Sanchez-Navarro

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JOSE GRANADOS

CARLOS GRANADOS and Luis SANCHEZ-NAVARRO