Introduction to Christianity is the first book of Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI that I have attempted to read. I started out writting a synopsis of my daily readings in order to implant them in my mind. So, here they are...

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Section 3: The Dilima of Belief in the World Today

Pages: 52-57

So what stands in the way of modern man’s belief in the invisible?  For one thing the value man once placed in tradition has been transferred to progress.  The importance of faith has been relegated to the past.  We are a people who look to the future and therefore worship progress. 

When we look into the past we find the Christian scandal. That God became man and therefore what is invisible became visible.  By revealing Himself to man through flesh and blood, God enters a point – history- and history can be relegated to the past.  This gap between then and now is added to the leap of faith which carries us from the visible into the invisible.

And we murdered Christ. This same power of man to put a supposed end to the Lord of the Universe is at work today when we rewrite the traditions of faith in order to mesh with the ideals of progress.

But how did even men of faith come to the place where they would take this power upon themselves?  To start we can trace the development of man’s attitudes toward reality from the magical, the metaphysical, and finally to the scientific.

In the medieval mind and before, God was thought of as pure intellect.  All being came from the thought of God and therefore all being is meaningful, logos, the truth.  Truth permeates and governs man and matter. 

The “Age of Enlightenment” saw the beginning of scientific thought.  Philosophers took this method of exploring the natural world and expanded it to encompass a whole new way for man to understand reality.  Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) began the modern movement with a radical idea that man can only completely know what he has made himself.  This is developed further by Descartes who ascertains that we cannot even fully know what human hands have made, because it is lost in the past.  Therefore reality consists only of the present facts.  (And since any individual man can only know a limited set of facts for any given situation, what man knows shrinks from the possibility of encountering the eternal to a reality that encompasses only what he can ascertain through his senses.) Parenthesis contains my own thoughts.

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