Questions to Guide Your Reading

 

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall, 41-58.

 

1. At the beginning of his discussion in this chapter, Pope Benedict asks: “What is the human being?”  How, according to Pope Benedict, is our life different from that of animals?  What is the question each one us must answer, whether he or she wants to or not?

 

2. What, according to Pope Benedict, is the biblical account of the creation of the human person in Genesis 2 meant to help us appreciate?

 

3. The creation story in Genesis 2 suggests that man was made from two fundamental elements.  What are they?

 

4. What significance does Pope Benedict find in the statement that God formed man “from the dust of the ground”?

 

5. In Genesis 2, the text suggests that God created man by breathing the breath of life into him.  In Genesis 1, the author used a somewhat different image.  What was it? Discuss how these two images express essentially the same theology of creation.

 

6. At the top of p. 46, Pope Benedict asks whether the moral dignity of the human person can be defended in the modern world.  What is the potential problem he identifies?

 

7. On p. 47, Pope Benedict gives an interesting interpretation of what it means for man to be created in the “image” of God.  What does he think is revealed about human nature in this passage?

 

8. On p. 48, Pope Benedict repeats the rule for reading Scripture that we have been talking about in class: namely, “that we must read the Old and New Testaments together and that only in the New is the deepest meaning of the Old to be found.”  He then points out that, in the New Testament letters of St. Paul, Christ is several times referred to as “the second Adam.”  What significance does Pope Benedict find in this reference to Christ as “the second Adam”?

 

9. Interestingly, on p. 50 of his text, Pope Benedict states that, “The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God, does not in fact explain how human persons come to be” [emphasis mine].  What does it explain instead?

 

10. Pope Benedict quotes the scientist Jacques Monod to the effect that “two realities in particular did not have to exist but could have existed.”  What are those two realities?  What theological conclusion does Pope Benedict draw from this scientific proposition?

 

11. Pope Benedict tells the story of a taxi driver who remarked to him that more and more young people are saying: “Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to be born.”  And a teacher told him that he had once tried to make a child more grateful to his parents by telling him: “You owe it to them that you are alive!”  But the child replied: “I’m not at all grateful for that.”  This is a good question: Are you grateful for your life?  If so, why?  On what basis?  According to Pope Benedict, “if it were merely blind chance that threw us into the ocean of nothingness,” would there be sufficient reason for considering ourselves fortunate?  According to Pope Benedict, what does the creation story in Genesis have to offer us that would allow us to take a different, more positive view?

 

12. At the end of this chapter, Pope Benedict tells the story how, after Jesus had been scourged, mocked, and crowned with thorns, he was led before Pontius Pilate, who placed Jesus before the crowd with the words: “Behold the man!”  What significance does Pope Benedict find in these words?  How does his discussion here at the end of the chapter echo an earlier section of the chapter, on p. 48, where he was discussing Jesus as “the second Adam”?  (See you answer to q. 8 above.)