Questions to Guide Your Reading

1. What does Cardinal Ratzinger (he wrote this text before he became pope) say about “Anyone who tries today to talk about the question of Christian faith”?  To what does he compare people in the modern world who attempt to talk about their faith in the public realm?  Why don’t people take him seriously?

2. What do you think?  Is it possible to break through the usual patterns of thought and speech that have become common in the modern world and recognize, as Cardinal Ratzinger suggests, that the subject-matter of theology is a serious aspect of human life?  Or is theology for clowns, and is anyone who takes such childish prattle seriously merely a fool?

3. What do you think?  Is a change of intellectual costume sufficient to make people run cheerfully up and begin to take Christian theology seriously?  Is it merely a matter of form?  Would the Church’s message really be more acceptable if the Church “dressed it up” in a different fashion?  Would it help, for example, if bishops were “more hip,” or at least a bit less “uncool”?  If the Church produced slick videos of the MTV-type?  If priests used slang and learned to understand the music and fashions of “the younger generation”?  Should the Church perhaps produce teen magazines with up-beat articles on “Christ and You” and “Being a Virgin Is Cool”?  What do you think?  Would that cause people to take Christian theology seriously?

4. According to Cardinal Ratzinger, the challenge isn’t merely the faith “of others.”  The deeper challenge is threatened by another challenge which falls closer to home.  Explain.

5. According to Cardinal Ratzinger, do the greats saints such as Thérèse of Lisieux provide for us examples of people who never had doubts or uncertainty about their faith?  Explain.

6. “In situations like this,” says Ratzinger – that is, “when everything has become questionable, everything is dark”; when in “what is apparently a flawlessly interlocking world,” we suddenly catches a glimpse “of the abyss lurking under the firm structure of the supporting conventions” – what is at stake is “not the sort of thing that one perhaps quarrels about otherwise – the dogma of the Assumption, the proper use of confession.”  What is really at stake?

7. What is the upshot in Cardinal Ratinger’s text of the Jewish story about the Rabbi told by Martin Buber? 

8. What, according to Cardinal Ratzinger, is the good that may come from the discovery that both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief?

9. What is the text that provides the “guiding thread” of Cardinal Ratzinger’s whole investigation?  The text that, as he says, “is intended to be an ‘Introduction to Christianity’ and a summary of its essential contents.”

10. Cardinal Ratzinger, commenting on “I believe,” the first words of the Apostles’ Creed, notes quite rightly that “the kernel of Christianity shall be that it is a “belief.”  According to Ratzinger, is this true of all religions?  Explain.

11. Cardinal Ratzinger suggests that “again and again it seems almost impossible to us to identify our present-day egos – each of them inalterably separated from everyone else’s – with the traditionally predetermined, ready coined ‘I believe.’” Why is this so?

12. Ratzinger says on p. 24 of his text that “the little word ‘Credo’ [I believe] contains a basic option vis-a-vis [with regard to] reality as such; it signifies not the observation of this or that fact but a fundamental mode of behavior towards being, towards existence, towards one’s own sector of reality and towards reality as a whole.”  Explain what he means.

13. If you’ll look back at p. 20 of the selection from the Catholic Adult Catechism, you’ll find a description of the “one common concern” that all religions affirm and agree on: namely, that “we experience ourselves as moved and sustained by a higher and more comprehensive reality.”  Compare this paragraph in the Catholic Adult Catechism with what Cardinal Ratzinger says on p. 24 of his text about belief in the element that makes reality as a whole possible being also “what grants man a truly human existence, what makes him possible as a human being existing in a human way.”

14. According to Cardinal Ratzinger, to what does man’s “natural center of gravity” draw him?  What must man do in order to see how badly he is neglecting his own interests by letting himself be drawn along by his natural center of gravity?

15. Compare what Cardinal Ratzinger has to say about man “following an illusion” by letting himself be drawn along by his natural center of gravity with what Thomas Merton says about “vision” and “illusion.”

16. According to Cardinal Ratzinger, why is it that “only in a life-long conversion can we become aware of what it means to say ‘I believe’”?

17. Given how Cardinal Ratzinger understands “conversion,” is it a one-time affair?

18. Cardinal Ratzinger suggests that, “Belief has always had something of an adventurous break or leap about it.”  Why?

19. In the previous section, Cardinal Ratzinger discussed the difficulties inherent in “belief” that arise out of the object being “invisible” rather than “visible.”  In this section, he discusses the difficulties inherent in the gulf between “then” and “now.”  Explain.

20. Explain the difference between the view of “tradition” in the past and how “tradition” is viewed currently.  What has replaced our faith in “tradition”? 

21.On p. 27 of his text, Cardinal Ratzinger says: “Christian belief is not merely concerned, as one might at first suspect from all the talk of belief or faith, with the eternal, which as the ‘quite other’ would remain completely outside the human world and time; on the contrary it is much more concerned with God in history, with God as man.  By thus seeming to bridge the gulf between eternal and temporal, between visible and invisible, by making us meet God as a man, the eternal as the temporal, as one of us, it knows itself as revelation.  Its claim to be revelation is indeed based on the fact that it has, so to speak, introduced the eternal into our world.”  Compare the views expressed in this paragraph with what Fr. René Latourelle has to say about revelation and history.

22. On p. 28 of his text, Cardinal Ratzinger discusses the incarnation of Christ as that which has fully revealed God to mankind.  “At first glance,” he says, “this really seems to be the maximum degree of revelation, of the disclosure of God.”  A sentence later, however, he continues with this: “But things are curiously double-sided: what at first seems to be the most radical revelation ... is at the same moment the cause of the most extreme obscurity and concealment.”  Explain this paradox.

23. What does Cardinal Ratzinger have to say about the difference between believing in the “Mysterious Eternal” as opposed to giving oneself up to “the positivism of belief in one single figure and to set the salvation of man and of the world on the pin-point, so to speak, of this one chance moment in history.”

24. On the bottom of p. 28 of his text, Cardinal Ratzinger talks about a contemporary view of the world that “remorselessly reduces man and his history to a tiny grain of dust in the cosmos.”  There is, however, another view. What effect might belief in the infinite importance of “one single figure” and his actions at “one chance moment in history” have on one’s view of what is possible to accomplish in a lifetime?  Which view of the world and of human life do you incline towards?

25. On p. 29 of his text, Cardinal Ratzinger says that, “It is only by ... coming to see that behind the apparently secondary stumbling block of ‘then’ and ‘now,’ there lies a much deeper difficulty.  What is that “much deeper difficulty”?

26. According to Cardinal Ratzinger, what is “characteristic of our contemporary scientific attitude, which molds, whether we like it or not, every single individual’s feeling for life and shows us our place in reality”?  Describe this view.

27. Discuss how Cardinal Ratzinger interprets the biblical passage in Isaiah 7.9 that reads: “If you do not believe, you will not abide”; or, as he translates it more literally: “If you do not believe, you will have no hold.”

28. Compare Cardinal Ratzinger’s comments that “man does not live on the bread of practicality alone” and “meaning is the bread on which man, in the intrinsically human part of his being, subsists” with what Victor Frankl says about the importance of having a sense of meaning and purpose.

29. On p. 43 of his text, Cardinal Ratzinger suggests that, “Meaning that is self-made is in the last analysis no meaning.”  Why?

30. On p. 43 of his text, Cardinal Ratzinger gives a series of statements of what it means “to believe as a Christian.”  Discuss each of these assertions.

31. According to Cardinal Ratzinger, if faith involves a “leap of entrusting ourselves to what cannot be seen,” does it follow that faith is also “a blind surrender to the irrational”?  Explain.

32. What does Cardinal Ratzinger have to say about the proper use and the misuse of the notion of “mystery”?  Compare what Cardinal Ratzinger has to say about “mystery” with what Fr. Louis Bouyer says about “mystery” in the selection from your reader entitled “Paschal Mystery.”

33. What does Cardinal Ratzinger have to say about the danger of belief being “degraded into fanaticism, sectarianism”?  How does this happen?

34. At the beginning of this section, Cardinal Ratzinger declares that, “In all that has been said so far the most fundamental feature of Christian faith or belief has still not been specified.”  What is “the most fundamental feature of Christian faith” of which he is speaking?

35. At the end of the selection I’ve given you, Cardinal Ratzinger states that, “In the last resort all the reflections contained in this book are subordinate to this question” and thus revolve around a basic confession.  What is the question, and what is the basic form of the confession?