Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger - Many Religions, One Covenant: Israel, the Church, and the World

Many ReligionsOne Covenant

JOSEPH CARDINAL RATZINGER

~

Israel, the Church,
and the World

TRANSLATED BY GRAHAM HARRISON

WITH A FOREWORD
BY SCOTT HAHN

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

Title of the German original:
Die Vielfalt der Religionen
und der Eine Bund 1998 Verlag Urfeld GmbH, Hagen

Cover photograph:
Dome of the Rock and Western Wall

CORBIS / David H. Wells

Cover design by Roxanne Mei Lum

1999 Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 0-89870-753-3 (PB)
ISBN 978-1-68149-324-4 (EB)

Library of Congress catalogue number 99-73009
Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Their Relation and Mission, according to the
1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church
(Translation by Fr. John Rock)

The mission of reconciliation

Reconciliation without abandoning the Christian faith ?

The presentation in the Catechism of the Catholic Church

Jesus mission: To unite Jews and pagans

Abrahams history is to be the history of all

Salvation is from the Jews

Jesus and Israel

Jesus fidelity to the Law

Fulfillment of the Torah through the Law of the Gospel

The unity between the good news of Jesus and the message of Sinai

The interrelation of both Testaments

The Torah as something integral

Jesus lives entirely under the Law of Israelas mediator of the universality of God

The conflict that ended on the Cross

Christian hope as the continuation of the hope of Abraham

No collective Jewish guilt

All sinners were the authors of Christs Passion

The drama of human sin and divine love

A glance at the common mission of Jews and Christians in relation to the world

On the Theology of the Covenant
in the New Testament

Agreement or ordinance?

Gods free ordinance

The contractual act of a love story

What is the difference between the Old and the New Covenant ?

The covenant in Christ and the Mosaic covenant

The covenant with Noah, with Abraham, and with Jacob-Israel

Legal prescription and promise

A unity in tension: The one Covenant in the plurality of covenants

The new unity of covenant ideas

The Sinai covenant heightened to a staggering realism

A new relationship with God

Covenant renewal in its highest possible form

The New Covenant established by God is itself present in the faith of Israel

Covenant renewal is not superfluous in the New Covenant

Two central questions

The irrevocable gift of friendship

The inner continuity of salvation history

Jesus the Messiah; the Torah of the Messiah

God binds himself to partnership

Binding himself even as far as the Cross

The God of the Bible is a God-in-relationship

Covenant as Gods self-revelation, the radiance of his countenance

Homily for the 19th Sunday in Year B, 1997

Fire from heaven

The flame of Horeb

The God who is poor

The new manna

God has become our bread

Be imitators of God!

The miracle of the manna made concrete

IV. THE DIALOGUE OF THE RELIGIONS
AND THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN
JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY

Religion no longer defined by its positive content

The divine, personal or non-personal

The cosmos no longer has anything to do with God

Salvation lies outside the world

Faith in God cannot dispense with a truth whose substance can be articulated

A short circuit

Lucifers most subtle temptation

Through Jesus the God of Israel has become the God of all the nations of the world

Jesus: Gods Son and Servant

Faith, hope, and love and the three dimensions of time

The Churchs messianic expectation

The mystical dimension of the Christian faith

The cloud of mystery

No renunciation of truth

Criticism of ones own religion

Proclamation of the gospel as a dialogical process

FOREWORD

by Scott Hahn

This book is a majestic bridge, fashioned by a master builder.

In Many ReligionsOne Covenant , Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger spans the deep divides in modern Catholic scholarship to present a compelling study in biblical theology, modern in its concerns yet classical in its breadth. It is his classical mastery, his ressourcement , that enables the Cardinal to build a bridge.

There can be no doubt that contemporary theology needs a bridge. Following the trend in secular academia, theology has fragmented into many isolated disciplines, each working in isolation from all the othersthe condition Jacques Barzun describes as specialism. Thus, dogmatic theologians often assume they have nothing to learn from biblical scholars. Exegetes, for their part, give scant consideration to the insights of systematic and dogmatic theologians. To many scholars, these disciplines are almost contradictory: doctrine is the opposite of Scripture.

Yet, amid the many varieties of theological experience, the author of this volume sees a profound unity. His synthesis will, perhaps, strike readers as novel; but it is actually a recovery of the great Catholic tradition, not only of the Scholastics and the Fathers, but of the Apostles themselves.

For, though the divisions are deep, they are not very old. They reach back, rather, to the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation. Whenever heresies arise, the Church must treat dogma in a way that does not give due proportion to the whole truth. Instead, theologians must emphasize precisely the points that heretics deny. For example, because the Protestant reformers emphasized faith sometimes at the expense of works, post-Reformation Catholic theology has tended to emphasize works more than faith. Because Protestants preached Scripture alone apart from tradition, Catholics have had to emphasize sacred tradition to a greater degree than before.

All this was necessary, in a remedial way. Yet its lingering effect has been to produce a theology that majors in relatively minor points. After all, tradition itself teaches the primacy of Scripture, and Catholic authorities from Saint Paul onward have taught the priority of faith over works. In classical theology, faith and works, Scripture and tradition, all receive their due, because all belong to one essential reality, whose archetypal expression is in the Word of God.

Thus, the revealed Word is, as it were, the support for every length of the Cardinals theological bridge. Indeed, the Bible is the model he chooses for his theology, a fact he has acknowledged in his Principles of Catholic Theology : The writers of Holy Scripture speak as themselves, as men, and yet, precisely in doing so, they are theo-logoi , those through whom God as subject, as the word that speaks itself, enters history.... [Thus] the Bible becomes the model of all theology.

Yet, more than a mere blueprint, the Bible is theologys singular authority. Later in the same work, Cardinal Ratzinger adds: The normative theologians are the authors of Holy Scripture (emphasis mine). And finally he addresses the Bible as the fulfillment of theology: Scripture alone is theology in the fullest sense of the word, because it truly has God as its subject; it does not just speak of him but is his own speech.

Neither does he make apologies, as a dogmatic theologian, for such an overwhelming biblical emphasis. Like his patristic and scholastic ancestors, he transcends academic overspecialization. Far from being opposites, doctrine and Scripture are irreducibly united in Cardinal Ratzingers work. He has gone so far as to say that dogma is by definition nothing other than an interpretation of Scripture. His insight has been confirmed by the most august group of his fellow theologians, the International Theological Commission, in its 1989 document On the Interpretation of Dogmas : In the dogma of the Church, one is thus concerned with the correct interpretation of the Scriptures. Dogma, then, is the Churchs infallible exegesis, and dogmatic theology is a reflection upon that work.