JOSEPH CARDINAL RATZINGER

JOSEPH CARDINAL RATZINGER CREDO FOR TODAY What Christians Believe Translated by Michael J. Miller, Henry Taylor, Sister Mary Frances McCarthy, Adrian Walker, J. R. Foster, Graham Harrison, and Matthew J. O’Connell IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

FOUNDATIONS OF CHRISTIAN FAITH: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE IDEA OF CHRISTIANITY

In this appeal what is said in Matt. 25 would have to be taken seriously and interpreted radically, and indeed from “below,” from the concrete love of neighbor, and not merely from “above.” If we do not turn the saying of Jesus that he himself is truly loved in every neighbor into an “as if” or merely into a theory of juridical imputation, then, when this saying is read from out of the experience of love itself, it says that an absolute love which gives itself radically and unconditionally to another person affirms Christ implicitly in faith and love. And this is correct. For a merely finite and ever unreliable person cannot by himself justify the sense of the absolute love which is given him, a love in which a person “involves” and risks himself absolutely for the other person. By himself he could only be loved with reservations and in a “love” in which the lover either makes reservations or risks himself absolutely on what is possibly meaningless.

If this dilemma were only to be overcome by an appeal to God himself, and hence to God as the guarantee and the limit of the absoluteness of this love, this would perhaps be possible in the abstract and “speculatively” from the perspective of a universal concept of absolute love. But a love whose absoluteness is experienced, even though it becomes fully itself not by virtue of itself, but only by virtue of its radical unity with the love of God through Jesus Christ, this love wants more than just a divine guarantee which remains transcendent to it. It wants a unity between the love of God and love of neighbor in which, even though this might merely be unthematic, love of neighbor is love of God and only in this way is completely absolute.

But this means that it is searching for a God-Man, that is, for someone who as man can be loved with the absoluteness of love for God. But it is not searching for him as an idea, because ideas cannot be loved; but rather as a reality, whether it is already present or is still to come. This reflection presupposes, of course, that the human race forms a unity, and that true love is not individualistic and exclusive, but rather that with all of its necessary concreteness it is always ready to encompass everything. And conversely: love for everything must always become concrete in the love of a concrete individual. Consequently, in the single human race the God-Man makes possible the absoluteness of the love for a concrete individual.

THE APPEAL TO READINESS FOR DEATH

However much radical significance the death of Jesus has for salvation, the average sermon looks too much for a particular, categorical event which takes place on the world’s stage alongside many other events. It looks for an event which is different, but does not really give expression to and actualize very much of what belongs to the innermost essence of the world and of man’s existence. This is the case because we look too quickly to the external cause and to the violence of this death, and in a theory of satisfaction we estimate its value merely as an external and meritorious cause of redemption.

A theology of death can connect the event of the death of Jesus more closely with the basic constitution of human existence. Death is the one act which pervades the whole of life, and in which man, as a being of freedom, has disposal of himself in his entirety. Indeed he has this in such a way that this disposal is, or should be, the acceptance of being disposed of absolutely in the radical powerlessness which appears and is endured in death. But if this free and ready acceptance of radical powerlessness by a free being who has and wants to have disposal of himself is not to be the acceptance of the absurd, which could with equal “right” be rejected in protest, then in a person who deeply affirms in his history not abstract ideas and norms but present or future reality as the ground of his existence, this acceptance implies the intimation or the expectation or the affirmation of an already present or future and hoped-for death which is of such a nature that it reconciles the permanent dialectic in us between doing and enduring in powerlessness. But this is the case only if this real dialectic is “subsumed” by the fact that it is the very reality of something which is the ultimate ground of this dialectic.

THE APPEAL TO HOPE IN THE FUTURE

Man hopes, and he goes to meet his future both making plans and at the same time opening himself to the incalculable. His journey into the future is the constant effort to lessen the self-alienation which is within him and outside him, and to lessen the distance between what he is and what he should be and wants to be.

Is absolute reconciliation, both individual and collective, just the eternally distant and only asymptotically sought-after goal which hovers in the distance, or is it an attainable goal and an absolute future which, when it is attained, does not have to abolish the finite and swallow it up into the absoluteness of God? If the absolute future of God really is our future, is this reconciliation the goal in the sense of something which is simply still outstanding, or is it the goal of history in such a way that history already bears within itself the irrevocable promise of this goal, and therefore in such a way that, although it is still in progress, history is now already moving in this sense within its goal? A person who really hopes has to hope that in both instances these questions are answered in and through the reality of history by the second alternative. A Christian acquires from this hope an understanding of what faith professes in the Incarnation and in the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the irreversible beginning of the coming of God as the absolute future of the world and of history.

We can summarize the content of these three appeals of Christology within fundamental theology by saying that man is searching for the absolute savior, and he affirms at least unthematically his past or future coming in every total act of his existence which is finalized by grace towards the immediacy of God.

b) The Task Of A “Christology From Below”

We have called attention frequently up to now to the necessity of an ascending Christology or a Christology

“from below.” Contemporary Christology has to devote itself to this task more intensively. Such a Christology

could proceed approximately in the following steps.

MAN AS A BEING ORIENTED TOWARDS IMMEDIACY TO GOD

The insight can be developed in “transcendental Christology” that man is a being with a desiderium naturale in visionem beatificam, that is, a “natural” desire for the beatific vision of God. It makes no difference in this context to what extent and in what sense this ontological orientation (desiderium) towards immediacy to God belongs to man’s “nature” in the abstract, or to his historical nature as elevated in grace by the supernatural existential. This latter, however, belongs to his basic ontological constitution. Secondly, since man can experience and actualize his ultimate, essential being only in history, this orientation must come to appearance in history. Moreover, since God’s offer can be actualized only in and through a free act of God, if it is to find its irreversible actualization and validity, man must expect and look for this offer within this historical dimension.

THE UNITY BETWEEN ESCHATOLOGICAL EVENT OF SALVATION AND THE ABSOLUTE SAVIOUR

From this perspective we can come to the idea of an “absolute event of salvation” and of an “absolute saviour,” which are two aspects of one and the same event: it is the historical and personal event, and not merely a word which is added to the reality or merely a verbal promise, in which man experiences his essential being in the above sense as really affirmed by God in and through his absolute, irreversible and “eschatological” offer of himself. This touches all of his dimensions because it is only then that salvation is the fulfillment of the whole person. This personal and absolute event of salvation along with the event of the saviour, who is salvation and does not merely teach and promise it, must be God’s real offer of himself to mankind, an offer which is irreversible and not merely provisional and conditional. This unity between the eschatological event of salvation and the absolute saviour must be historical because nothing “transcendental” as such can be of final validity by itself unless it were already the vision of God, or unless the fulfillment of man’s transcendentality could take place without including his history. It must also at the same time be the free acceptance of God’s offer of himself, and this is effected by the offer. And it also belongs to the absolute event of salvation that it not merely be thought, but that it be done in life and in deed.

This eschatological, salvific event of the absolute saviour may not be understood as “absolute” in its structure in the sense that it is identical with the fulfillment of the human race in the immediacy of the beatific vision. For otherwise history would already be complete. It must be the real irreversibility of the process towards this fulfillment in such a way that the future of each individual is left open, although, because of the new closeness of God’s kingdom which comes only with Jesus, each individual stands before an offer of God which transcends an ambivalent situation of freedom on God’s part.

Of course we are presupposing here, first of all, that Jesus of Nazareth understood himself as this absolute saviour, and that it became fully manifest in his resurrection that he really is. Jesus of course did not make use of the abstract formulations with which we are trying to sketch and give some brief indication of the notion of an absolute saviour. But he certainly did not understand himself as one of the prophets after whom other revelatory acts of God could take place in an ongoing and completely open history, acts which would surpass the previous ones in a fundamental way and place them in question, and which would therefore open radically new epochs in the history of salvation. Rather, the salvation of a person is decided by his relationship to Jesus, and the new and everlasting covenant between God and man is established in his death. Secondly, we are presupposing besides that this self-understanding is not only witnessed to as being credible, but also that Jesus himself reaches the final and definitive moment of his function as mediator of salvation, and hence reaches fulfillment.

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THIS REFLECTION AND THE CHURCH’S DOCTRINE OF INCARNATION

Now the absolute event of salvation and the absolute mediation of salvation by a man mean exactly the same thing as church doctrine expresses as Incarnation and hypostatic union. This presupposes that the notion of Incarnation is thought through radically to its logical conclusion, and that the notion of hypostatic union is not misunderstood in a monophysitic and mythological way, and finally that we are clear about the specific nature of a “real” act of revelation by God in the world. This act is never merely of the nature of a thing, but rather it always has an ontological character. This means that it must exist as a created reality of self-presence, of word, and hence of a self-conscious relation to God. God’s salvific acts, his “activity” as distinguished from his “metaphysical attributes,” are free and exist within a truly infinite realm of possibilities. The history of salvation, therefore, is in itself always open towards the future. Consequently, every event in it is always.

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Surpassable and conditional, and exists with the qualification that something new might happen, especially since this history of salvation is also the history of created freedom towards an unplanned future which cannot be calculated unambiguously from what comes earlier. Hence it is all the more true that we cannot determine in advance what is going to result from the interaction of these freedoms. A mere “prophet” or a mere religious genius in the sense of a productive model for a particular religious relationship between God and man can never in principle be “the last.”

If, nevertheless, God performs his ultimate and unsurpassable salvific act, which is indeed finite because it exists within the realm of other possibilities, but which is still final and definitive, then this act cannot be provisional and cannot in principle belong to a particular epoch in a still ongoing history like other revelatory “words” (the revelatory word itself of course is constituted by both word and deed). Hence neither can this provisional character be removed by the fact that God simply “declares” merely in words that he will “not say anything more” but will be satisfied with this word as final. This is true not only because such a “declaration” would itself exist with the qualifications and with the provisionality of this kind of word, but also because such a declaration would decree that the history of salvation is finished. The declaration would not really bring this history to a genuine conclusion of this history, but at the same time it would merely allow it to continue as the execution of what had happened previously, and hence it would destroy its true historicity.

An absolute and “eschatological” salvific act, therefore, must have a really different relationship to God than God’s other salvific activity has in a history of salvation which is still open. Unlike other things which are different from God, it cannot be characterized by the pure difference between creatureliness and God, nor by the difference between a “more circumscribed” reality and a “broader” range of possibilities. It cannot merely be a history which is empowered and directed by God, but is lived out by us alone. In the absolute event of salvation, God must live out its history as his own history and retain it permanently as something done in freedom, for otherwise it would remain something inconsequential and provisional for him. Only if this event is his own history, a history which, as lived out in divine and of course also in created freedom, determines him once and for all and hence becomes irrevocable, only then can we speak of an absolute and “eschatological” event of salvation. The offer of himself which becomes manifest in history as irrevocable must be his own reality in its createdness, and not only in its divine origin. And this very own reality of his, which he can no longer undo as something which has been surpassed, must exist on our side as our own real salvation, that is, on this side of the difference between God and creatures. This gives us an initial approach towards a Christology “from below” which is objectively identical with the church’s classical Christology “from above,” and which at the same time can also clarify the unity between incarnational, essential Christology and soteriological, functional Christology.

ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ASCENDING CHRISTOLOGY AND THE QUESTION OF ETERNAL, DIVINE SONSHIP

Let me add an explanatory remark to what has just been said. What was said implies the understanding that, if and to the extent that an ascending Christology reaches the idea of an absolute saviour from both transcendental and historical considerations, this ascending Christology has already reached a Christology of eternal and divine Sonship. This Son-Christology does not signify a new knowledge in addition to it which would supplement and go beyond the Christology of an absolute saviour. We derive this Son-Christology first of all, of course, from the biblical sources, especially from John, and we do not have to maintain that we would in fact develop a Christology of the eternal Son of the Father and of the Logos in Jesus exclusively from the abstract concept of an absolute saviour if we had not already found this development in the New Testament. But neither does this mean conversely that, given the prior existence of this New Testament Son and Logos Christology, we could not know that this Christology is already contained in the notion of an absolute saviour. Of course, confirmation of the correctness of our explication must come from the New Testament.

We are not going to explain all of this in detail here and prove that it is legitimate. Let me just call attention to two things briefly. First of all, if we presuppose a correct and also a critical understanding of the classical theology of the Trinity, and if we are clear about the fact that we know anything at all about the “immanent” Trinity only insofar as we experience a trinitarian God in the “economy of salvation,” and that the two are identical, then basically it is clear that a knowledge of the eternal Son and Logos is contained and grounded in the fact that we experience the historical self-expression of God in its historical reality, and there we experience it in its eternal possibility. And this is precisely the experience of the absolute and eschatological saviour. It is both legitimate and necessary to understand and to ground the later New Testament Christology in Jesus and from Jesus insofar as it is contained in his proclamation of the eschatological closeness of God’s kingdom and in his work. We are not obliged to understand all of the statements of the whole New Testament as equally original in a kind of biblical positivism. But if this is the case, then we can and also have to ask: How does the later New Testament in the Christology of Paul and John know that Jesus is the eternal “Son” and the eternal Logos? Very likely there is only one answer to this question, and it is found by maintaining the thesis that a Son and a Logos Christology are already implied in the notion of an absolute saviour, and that they do not come in addition to the Christology of an absolute saviour.

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Present as something which a person still has to realize and bring to radical actualization in the living out of his whole existence throughout the whole length and breadth and depth of his life.

If, therefore, much of what has to be said about this personal relationship of the individual Christian to Jesus Christ might strike many as demanding too much or as an unreal ideology, as something for which at first glance they do not think that they can find a point of contact in their own individual religious experience, this is not an argument against the truth of what is going to be said. It expresses the real truth and reality of Christian existence, and human experience is nothing else but a challenge to entrust oneself to the development of one’s own Christian existence in patience, openness, and fidelity, and to do this until slowly, and perhaps painfully and with failures, this life unfolds and develops into the experience of a personal relationship to Jesus Christ. Then this is an experience which captures and confirms in its own right what inevitably can only be said here in pale abstractions, although it is referring to what is most concrete and at the same time most absolute, namely, ourselves in our ever-unique relationship to Jesus Christ.

INDIVIDUAL, CONCRETE RELATIONSHIP TO JESUS CHRIST

It is not easy to find a clear approach to what we are talking about here. For we are dealing with the absolute God as he turned to us in the concrete uniqueness of Jesus Christ, so that this God thus really becomes the most concrete absolute. We are dealing with the unique salvation of each individual, who in faith and love is not supposed to entrust a universal human nature which is the same in everybody, or an abstract human existence, to the absolute mystery of the God who communicates himself. Rather, each individual is to entrust himself in the uniqueness which belongs inalienably and inseparably to him as a historical and free being. But these two things imply basically that there must be a unique and quite personal relationship between Jesus Christ and each individual in his faith, his hope, and his unique love, a relationship which is not exhausted by abstract norms and universal laws. They imply that it is even to be taken for granted that this unique relationship has an individual history in the concreteness of existence which is incalculable and ultimately is not at the individual’s disposal, and which indeed is ultimately identical with the destiny and with the deed which is required of every person in his whole life, and for which he is responsible. It can be clarified theologically from two vantage points, both from above and from below, that there can be and is a unique relationship between each individual and Jesus Christ, and that in the individual Christian there must be a quite personal and intimate love for Jesus Christ. Nor is this love merely ideology, nor a vague religious sentiment, nor an analgesic to numb the pain at being frustrated in some other interpersonal relationship.

A THEO-LOGICAL REFLECTION

First of all, the vantage point from above: Christian faith professes of Jesus Christ that he is the absolute saviour, the concrete historical mediation of our immediate relationship to the mystery of the God who communicates himself. This faith knows that as the event of absolute unity between God and man, the God-Man does not cease to be with the end of temporal history. Rather, he himself continues to exist and he constitutes an essential element in the eternal fulfillment of the world. This follows from the basic Christian truth about the resurrection of Christ. The human reality of Jesus Christ continues to exist forever as the reality of the eternal Logos himself. But this eternal fulfillment of the humanity of Christ beyond time, which as the humanity of the divine Logos enjoys the immediate vision of God, obviously cannot be understood merely as an individual reward and as the fulfillment of the man Jesus in his own human existence all for himself. The “Christ yesterday, today and forever” of Hebrews 13:8 must have a soterio-logical significance for us. The human reality of Christ must always be the abiding mediation of the immediacy of God to us. When we try to ground this personal relationship to Jesus Christ from below, that is, from the specific unity between the love of God and the concrete love of neighbor, we shall understand better that, as the existentially most real actualization and foundation of the love of neighbor which is our mediation to God, personal love for Jesus Christ can be our permanent mediation to the immediacy of God.

If, then, the humanity of Christ, or better: the man Jesus, has an abiding salvific significance, if this man and his human reality as such is an intrinsic element in the final fulfillment of our own salvation and not only in its temporal history, and if each individual’s salvation is unique, then it cannot be denied that a personal relationship to Jesus Christ in personal and intimate love is an essential part of Christian existence. By the fact that a person finds God, that he falls, as it were, into the absolute, infinite and incomprehensible abyss of all being, he himself is not consumed into universality, but rather he becomes for the first time someone absolutely unique. This is so because it is only in this way that he has a unique relationship to God in which this God is his God, and not just a universal salvation which is equally valid for all.

We must always bear in mind here that salvation does not mean a reified and objective state of affairs, but rather a personal and ontological reality. Hence salvation and fulfillment take place in the objectively most real reality of the most radical subjectivity. It occurs, then, in the subject’s knowing and loving self-surrender into the mystery of God which seems to vanish, but in doing so remains most radically as mystery. This takes place in and through an abiding personal relationship to the God-Man in whom and in whom alone immediacy to God is reached now and forever. This relationship to the man Jesus Christ, however, does not abolish or deny the salvific significance of interpersonal communication with another person, and indeed with all other men.

THE UNITY BETWEEN THE LOVE OF GOD AND CONCRETE LOVE OF NEIGHBOR

According to the teaching of Christianity about the unity between the love of God and neighbor as an ultimately single and all-encompassing actualization of existence, an actualization which is borne by God’s self-communication and is creative of salvation, love for one’s neighbor is not merely a commandment which has to be obeyed if a person wants to exist in a salvific relationship to God. It is rather the actualization of Christian existence in an absolute sense. This presupposes that this love of neighbor has developed into its own full and essential being, and explicitly accepts its ground and its mysterious partner, namely, God himself. For without him, interpersonal communication in love among men cannot reach its own radical depths and its final and definitive validity.

Now it is certainly undeniable that interpersonal communication in the quite concrete, interpersonal experience in time and space of a quite definite and corporeal Thou who encounters us is of basic and necessary significance for the existence, the development, and the maturity of a person’s existence, and that it cannot be replaced by anything else. But this love in an immediate and interpersonal encounter wants to be absolutely faithful, and it implies the actualization of a spiritual existence which, at least insofar as it is borne by grace, possesses an absolute depth and an element which is taken up into the “eternal life” between God and man. And ultimately this life always transcends this immediate, corporeal encounter in time and space and understands itself as invincible to death. This presupposes only that in the Christian understanding of existence one understands and dies his death as his fulfillment, and not merely as the conclusion which ends everything.

Such a love, therefore, is not confined within the boundaries of an immediate experience which is simply corporeal. It does not even reach its radical Christian essence and its human fulfillment until it transcends these boundaries in faith and in hope. And for this reason such love for another person, which is the mediation of the love of God and forms an ultimately inseparable unity with it, can be directed to Jesus. A person can love him as a true man in the most proper and vital meaning of this word. Indeed, because of who the God-Man is, this love is even the absolute instance of a love in which love for a man and love for God find their most radical unity and mediate each other mutually. Jesus is the most concrete absolute, and therefore it is in love for him that love reaches the most absolute concreteness and absence of ambiguity which it seeks by its very nature. For love is not a movement towards an abstract ideal, but towards concrete, individual, and irreducible uniqueness, and this very love finds in its Thou the absolute expanse of incomprehensible mystery.

THE RISK OF ENCOUNTER

We have already emphasized that in this context we have to speak very abstractly about something which is the most concrete of all. What has been said can really be understood only by someone who takes the risk and tries to love Jesus in a really personal way by means of the scriptures and the sacraments and the celebration of his death, and by living in the community of his believers. It can be understood only by someone who takes the risk of encountering him personally, and who in doing so receives as a grace the courage no longer to be afraid that he only means the abstract idea of an infinite God when he says the name “Jesus”. It can be understood only by someone who experiences how an encounter with the concrete Jesus of the gospels, in all the concreteness and irreducibility of this definite historical figure, does not confine the person who is seeking the incomprehensible infinity of the absolute mystery of God to something concrete which is made an idol either out of love or out of foolishness. He experiences rather that this concrete encounter really opens him to God’s infinity. Indeed it does so because every encounter with the concrete man Jesus is an ever unique discipleship. This discipleship is not imitation, but rather an ever unique call from out of one’s own concrete life, and into participation in the mystery of the life of Jesus from his birth until his death. This discipleship and participation are at the same time always and everywhere an initiation into his death and his resurrection. Everything finite enters into the infinity of God, and in the immediate experience of this the finite in Jesus and in us does not perish, but rises to its fulfillment.

It is not possible at this point to treat in more detail this discipleship with Jesus and this participation in the mystery of the life of Jesus as we have understood them, and especially participation in his death in an immediate unity between love of God and love for this quite definite man. But what has been said at least calls attention to the fact that Christian life is not merely satisfying universal norms which are proclaimed by the official church. Rather in these norms and beyond them it is the always unique call of God which is mediated in a concrete and loving encounter with Jesus in a mysticism of love. This is always quite unique and it cannot be deduced from anything. Nevertheless, it is practiced within the community of those who believe and love, which we call church. For in the church, in its gospel, in the kerygma which is directed beyond all teaching to the unique heart of each individual, in sacrament and in the celebration of the Lord’s death, but also in private prayer and in the ultimate decision of one’s conscience, Jesus offers himself immediately as the Christ, and in him God offers himself.

This does not deny, of course, but rather implies positively that a person whom Christ has not yet encountered in an explicit, historical witness which comes to him from history can find him nevertheless in his brothers and sisters and in his love for them. Jesus Christ allows himself to be found in them anonymously as it were, for he himself said, “What you did for the least of my brothers, you have done for me” (Matt. 25:40), for him who lives his life in the poor, in the hungry, in those in prison, and in those who are dying.

FOUNDATIONS OF CHRISTIAN FAITH: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE IDEA OF CHRISTIANITY

Case the impossibility of this along with good will would dispense from the necessity that this act of faith which is possible everywhere have a Christological character.

But presupposing that an act of faith does take place in one of these two ways, that is, Christologically or non-Christologically, there also remains the question whether non-Christian religions as concrete, historical, and social phenomena have a positive significance or not. Depending on the answer to this, then we have to answer the question whether or not Christ is present in non-Christian religions.

In addition to this we are making a _second_presupposition: when a non-Christian attains salvation through faith, hope, and love, non-Christian religions cannot be understood in such a way that they do not play a role, or play only a negative role in the attainment of justification and salvation. This proposition is not concerned about making a very definite Christian interpretation and judgment about a concrete non-Christian religion. Nor is there any question of making such a religion equal to Christian faith in its salvific significance, nor of denying its depravity or its provisional character in the history of salvation, nor of denying that such a concrete religion can also have negative effects on the event of salvation in a particular non-Christian.

But presupposing all of this, we still have to say: if a non-Christian religion could not or may not have any positive influence at all on the supernatural event of salvation in an individual person who is a non-Christian, then we would be understanding this event of salvation in this person in a completely ahistorical and asocial way. But this contradicts in a fundamental way the historical and social nature of Christianity itself, that is, its ecclesial nature. In order to bring divine revelation to a non-Christian who is not reached by Christian preaching, there have indeed been suggested private revelations or extraordinary illuminations, especially at the hour of death, and such things as this. But prescinding from the fact that these are arbitrary and improbable postulates, and that it is impossible to see why they may only be allowed to play a role in special and extraordinary cases, such means as this contradict the basic character of Christian revelation as well as man’s nature. For even in his most personal history man is still a social being whose innermost decisions are mediated by the concreteness of his social and historical life, and are not acted out in a special realm which is separate.

In addition to this, there is the fact that in a theology of salvation history which takes God’s universal salvific will seriously, and also takes account of the enormous temporal interval separating Adam from the Old Testament revelation of Moses, the whole interval between these two points cannot be understood to have been deprived of divine revelation. It should be noted in passing that Vatican II’s constitution Dei Verbum (art. 3) passes over this interval a little too quickly. But this revelation would not be simply and absolutely separate from the whole history of concrete religions. For if they are all simply dismissed, then it is impossible to say where God with the history of his salvation and revelation is still to be found in the world. If someone wants to bridge this interval by postulating the transmission of a “primordial revelation” we would have to repeat that, given the enormous duration of the history of the human race, this postulate is very problematic, and especially that in the concrete only the historical and socially constituted religions can be considered to have been the transmitters of a tradition which is supposed to reach the individual. These religions had the possibility and the obligation to awaken and to keep alive man’s relationship to the mystery of existence which lays claim upon him, however, the individual religions might interpret this primordial mystery of existence and concretize man’s relationship to it, and perhaps even do so in a depraved way.

But if at least in this interval we cannot do justice to a universal and operative salvific will of God which is also “infralapsarian,” that is, which continues despite “original sin,” nor to the universal possibility of salvific revelation and faith which this implies unless pre-Christian religions have a positive salvific function, then there is no reason why we would have to, or even could, deny a priori and in principle at least a partial positive function to non-Christian religions for people who have not yet been reached by the Christian message in a way which would constitute an immediate obligation for them. We do not have to discuss here the concrete way in which a non-Christian religion can have a positive function in making possible real revelation and faith.

CHRIST AND NON-CHRISTIAN RELIGIONS

With these two presuppositions we turn now to our real question: How can Jesus Christ be understood to be present and operative in non-Christian religions from the perspective of Christian dogmatic theology, and hence prior to an a posteriori investigation of this question and an a posteriori description. In our discussion, and this has to be admitted openly and honestly at the beginning, the answer will focus in the first instance and immediately on the question: How is Jesus Christ present and operative in the faith of the individual non-Christian? Referring again to our introductory remarks, we cannot go beyond that here, however regrettable this might seem, that is, we cannot go into the question of non-Christian religions as social and institutional realities. What can possibly be said about the presence of Christ in non-Christian religions beyond his presence in the salvific faith of the non-Christian is a question for theologians doing the history of religion in an a posteriori way.

THE PRESENCE OF CHRIST IN THE HOLY SPIRIT

With the presuppositions and within the limits set above, Christ is present and operative in non-Christian believers and hence in non-Christian religions in and through his Spirit. This proposition is to be taken for granted…

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Granted in dogmatic theology. If there can be a faith which is creative of salvation among non-Christians, and if it may be hoped that in fact it is found on a large scale, then it is to be taken for granted that this faith is made possible and is based upon the supernatural grace of the Spirit. And this is the Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son, so that as the Spirit of the eternal Logos he can and must be called at least in this sense the Spirit of Christ, the divine Word who has become man.

But this self-evident dogmatic statement does not really exhaust the meaning nor ground the legitimacy of the proposition just formulated. For the precise question is whether the Holy Spirit’s supernatural grace of faith and justification as it is at work in the non-baptized can be called the Spirit of Jesus Christ, and if so, what exactly this means. Now the Catholic dogmatic theology of the schools will without doubt give an affirmative answer to this question, and will try to clarify it with the explanation that this Spirit who makes faith possible and who justifies is given in all times and places intuitu meritorum Christi, that is, in view of the merits of Christ. Consequently, it can correctly be called the Spirit of Jesus Christ. This explanation is certainly justified and will also be deemed intelligible at least to some extent, and hence it can serve as the point of departure for our further reflections.

But this explanation certainly does not answer all of the questions which can be raised here. First of all, this statement does not make as clear and intelligible as might appear at first glance the connection between the grace of the Spirit which is given in all times and places and the historical event of the cross at a particular point in time and space. We could ask whether the connection between these two realities exists only in the knowledge and will of the God who transcends salvation history, so that there exists no real connection between these two realities themselves. Can the event of the cross be understood to “influence” God either “physically” or “morally” so that, on the basis of this influence which comes from the world to him, as it were, and which is known antecedently, God already pours out the grace of the Spirit upon the world? But if we cannot say this in the proper sense because of God’s sovereign immutability, because he cannot be influenced or moved, then what does it mean to say that he gives his Spirit because of the merits of Jesus Christ, who is the moral and meritorious cause of this Spirit?

If someone says that the questionable statement does not connect the suffering of Jesus with God as the reason which moves God, but rather connects it with the grace of the Spirit, just as we have to say of the prayer of petition, for example, that it is not the cause of God’s decision to hear the prayer of petition but the moral cause of the reality which is given by God in hearing it (and this because God freely connects the two), then the question is what this could possibly mean, especially since this inner-worldly, moral cause which is not supposed to “influence” God himself comes much later in time than its effect. We could also point out that presumably in the example of the prayer of petition it would not occur to anyone to go to God with a prayer for a reality which had already taken place in the world earlier, although this would also have to make sense if the popular interpretation of the intuitu meritorum makes sense.

In addition to these difficulties there is the fact that we can and also have to understand God’s free salvific will as the a priori cause of the Incarnation and of the cross of Christ, a cause which is not conditional upon anything outside God. Consequently, from this vantage point too it is not easy to see how the cross of Christ can be the cause of God’s salvific will for other people if God’s salvific will is antecedent to the cross of Christ as its cause, and is not its effect. Moreover, this salvific will cannot be understood in any other way except as related to all people because a salvific will related only to Christ would make no sense to begin with. It would also contradict the fact that Jesus Christ is intended from the outset by God’s salvific will as the redeemer of the world.

We get out of these and similar, unmentioned difficulties only by saying that the Incarnation and the cross are, in scholastic terminology, the “final cause” of the universal self-communication of God to the world which we call the Holy Spirit, a self-communication given with God’s salvific will which has no cause outside God. This is to regard Incarnation and cross as a cause in this sense of the universal communication of the Holy Spirit in the world, as was said in the sixth section of this chapter. Insofar as this Spirit is always and everywhere the entelechy of the history of revelation and salvation to begin with, and insofar as its communication and acceptance by their very nature never take place in mere abstract transcendent-tality, but take place rather in a historical mediation, this communication is oriented to begin with towards a historical event in which this communication and its acceptance become irreversible despite the fact that they are free, and also become historically tangible in this eschatological triumph. But this takes place in what we call the Incarnation, cross, and resurrection of the divine Word.

Insofar as the universal efficacy of the Spirit is always oriented towards the high point of its historical mediation, in other words, insofar as the event of Christ is the final cause of the communication of the Spirit to the world, it can truly be said that this Spirit is everywhere and from the outset the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the Logos of God who became man. The Spirit who has been communicated to the world has himself, and not only in the intention of God which transcends the world and would be extrinsic to him, an intrinsic relation to Jesus Christ. The latter is the “cause” of the former, although at the same time the opposite relation is equally true, as is always the case between an efficient cause and a final cause. Between them there is both unity and difference, and a relationship of mutual conditioning. Insofar as the efficient cause of the Incarnation and of the cross, namely, the Spirit, bears his goal within himself as an intrinsic entelechy, and insofar as he realizes his own essence as communicated to the world only in the Incarnation and the cross, he is the Spirit of Jesus Christ to begin with.