Ranting to /dev/null

Credo

I'm currently reading Introduction to Christianity by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, lately Pope Benedict XVI. It's a primer to the Apostles' Creed, and deals specifically with what it means to "believe" on an epistemic level in our modern and post-modern age.

Not only is it incredibly insightful, refreshing, and timely, but it's also beautifully written. Finding a theological worth his salt who can actually write is always a pleasant discovery, and the new pope has a way with words that I quite envy.

Some selections:

"Fastened to the cross - with the cross fastened to nothing, drifting over the abyss. The situation of the contemporary believer could hardly be more accurately and impressively described. Only a loose plank bobbing over the void seems to hold him up, and it looks as if he must eventually sink. Only a loose plank connects him to God, though certainly it connects him inescapably, and in the last analysis he knows that this wood is stronger than the void that seethes beneath him and that remains nevertheless the really threatening force in his day-to-day life."

"Christian faith lives on the discovery that not only is there such a thing as objective meaning but that this meaning knows me and loves me, that I can entrust myself to it like the child who knows that everything he may be wondering about is safe in the "you" of his mother. Thus in the last analysis believing, trusting, and loving are one, and all the theses around which belief revolves are only concrete expressions of the all-embracing about-turn, of the assertion "I believe in you" - of the discovery of God in the countenance of the man Jesus of Nazereth."

"Anyone who accepts Marx (in whatever neo-Marxist variation he may choose) as the representative of worldly reason not only accepts a philosophy, a vision of the origin and meaning of existence, but also and especially adpots a practical program. For this "philosophy" is essentially a "praxis", which does not presuppose a "truth" but rather creates one. Anyone who makes Marx the philosopher of theology adopts the primacy of politics and economics, which now become the real powers that can bring about salvation (and, if misused, can wreak havoc)."