Dhe theological draft of Joseph Ratzinger can also be read as a broad-based attempt at reason. Not only where Ratzinger expressly took up the conventional topic of faith and reason, as in his dispute with Jürgen Habermas, was it about the more precise definition of rationality, its modern existence in the scientific-experimental ideal of verifiability, which Ratzinger felt and criticized as a narrowing of reasonableness : Only in transcendent openness does reason come to itself and allow the question of how God works in history. This debate was not new to philosophy; as I said, it touched on a concern of Jürgen Habermas, but Charles Taylor too, most recently in his book “A Secular Age”, pointed out the time-related, historically random conception of a rationality that God pretends not to need to think.
So while there were positions in secular philosophy to which Ratzinger’s religiously centered concept of rationality could relate, the real challenge for a metaphysically open-minded model of reason awaited, paradoxically enough, in the theological disciplines, from exegesis to dogmatics. This came out most succinctly in a discussion with Ratzinger’s so-called student group in 2008 in what was then still the papal summer residence. The group of students is a group of former doctoral students, habilitation candidates and assistants. Benedict XVI had just published the first volume of his Jesus trilogy. And following the theological main lecture of the evangelical New Testament scholar Martin Hengel, Benedict outlined central questions of a reasonably authenticated Jesus research in Castelgandolfo, which had to release the transcendent in the historical questions, as he wanted to explain as a scholar and not as a pope.
Anti-spiritualist interpretation of scripture
It was a nuisance for Ratzinger that the argument about the founder of the religion himself, about his historical credibility and about what has been called his two natures since the early church, the human and the divine, has become theologically marginal. That is why he continued to write his three-volume book on Jesus during his pontificate, using the papal office as a guarantee of a bestseller. One of his statements on methodological questions, documented at the meeting in Castelgandolfo in 2008, is reproduced in context. On the one hand to get an impression of the complexity of his historically rooted, anti-spiritualistic interpretation of Scripture, on the other hand because Ratzinger’s concept of reason appears here in concrete application. The basic question of the host in Castelgandolfo was that of his theological work in general: How does that so-called certainty of faith, which refers to history, come about methodologically?
As Benedikt said at the time, Hengel’s presentation made it clear “that the certainty of faith is something different and has a different source than historical certainty, but that it cannot simply be separated from it. Because the verbum caro factum est belongs to our faith: The Eternal Word is flesh, has become earthly, historical reality and must therefore be historically comprehensible in some way. This factum belongs in the realm of faith. If it didn’t happen as such, didn’t exist, then the certainty of faith is in vain.”
Ratzinger explained that the formal aspect of the structure of certainty deserves due recognition, both in the secular and in the religious context. Only in this way, on the basis of this precisely managed distinction, can history and faith enter into a substantive relationship in which the faith in Christ is not demythologized from the outset as a product of post-Easter community formation.
