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A God Who is Present: A Christological and Anthropological Study of the Presence of God in Pope Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth Nassif Farah Student number: 8810637 Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Theology, Saint Paul University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts in Theology Supervisor: Dr. Karl Hefty Ottawa, Canada March 7, 2019 © Nassif Farah, Ottawa, Canada, 2019 Farah 1 Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 2 Chapter One ............................................................................................................................... 9 The Reception of Jesus of Nazareth and the Problem of Revelation ............................................ 9 §1. Revelation: God’s Action and Presence in History ........................................................ 9 §2. Initial Scholarly Reception .......................................................................................... 11 §3. Ratzinger’s Concern: Church, Scripture, and God’s Active Word ................................ 22 Chapter Two ............................................................................................................................. 28 Jesus of Nazareth: God’s Enduring Presence............................................................................. 28 §4. A Perfect Revelation: Historical and Sacramental ........................................................ 28 Part One: The Authentic Presence of God ............................................................................. 31 §5. The Scriptural Context and Tangibility of God ............................................................ 32 §6. Intelligibility of God’s Authentic Presence .................................................................. 34 §7. The Living Character of the Word ............................................................................... 40 §8. The Effects of God’s Authentic Presence .................................................................... 44 Part Two: The Sacramental Action and the Continuous Presence of God .............................. 47 §9. A Sacramental Action that Incorporates the Fulfilled Word ......................................... 48 §10. Eucharistic Presence in History ................................................................................. 52 §11. Eschatological Presence: Beyond Time and Within It ................................................ 56 Chapter Three ........................................................................................................................... 63 In the Image of Christ ............................................................................................................... 63 §12. The Life of God Generates the Fullness of Life ......................................................... 63 §13. The Problem: God’s Unnecessary Presence ............................................................... 65 §14. Between Religions and Christ .................................................................................... 71 §15. From Sacramentum to Exemplum ............................................................................. 74 §16. Universality, Unity, and Eternity ............................................................................... 77 §17. Martyrs: Witnesses of God’s Presence ....................................................................... 82 Chapter Four ............................................................................................................................. 86 The Sacramental Giver: Building the City of God ..................................................................... 86 §18. Humanity, the Church, and the World: The City of God ............................................ 86 §19. Recapitulation: A God Who Is Present in the City ..................................................... 93 §20. A Simple Word ......................................................................................................... 97 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 99 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 103 Farah 2 Introduction In the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment ushered in a radical change in Western Europe, which completely altered our perception of the world. Its insistence on the autonomy and self-sufficiency of reason ushered in the modern time. According to many new modes of thinking, God plays only a marginal role in human life and history. The contemporary world presents many examples of systems of thought with almost no place for God – for a God who is alive and active in the world. It is no surprise that these forms of thought have led to the growth of atheism in Western culture. Here, I am not intending a polemic against any specific scholar, but rather I am describing the conditions of the contemporary context for which the absence of God is the basic premise. In all this, believers and unbelievers alike may ask: Where is God? Is he hidden? Is there a God? How can God be credible in a merely physical, rationalistic, and subjectivistic world? What meaning can scripture have amid this seemingly organized chaos? Does God still speak to us? Within this context and in response to it, Joseph Ratzinger, now the emeritus Pope Benedict XVI, claims that the ultimate reality of existence is the presence of a dynamic God who works through his active Word and thereby gives existence its original meaning: “Jesus himself has become the divine Word of revelation.”1 Revelation indeed holds a significant place in Ratzinger’s theology, which we will examine in this thesis. Emery De Gaál, an expert in Ratzinger’s theology, states that from the beginning of his theological studies, when he wrote his habilitation on Bonaventure, Ratzinger concluded that: “Revelation is historical and contextual: it is Jesus 1 Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration (New York; Toronto: Doubleday, 2007), 316. Farah 3 Christ.”2 This insight which has accompanied him throughout his theological career, centers on God’s scriptural and historical presence in Christ. Ratzinger issues a radical challenge to those who believe God is absent. God is active and present in the world, with a presence that continues to accompany us today. In today’s world, the most scientists assume that science has replaced the need for God.3 Belief in God thus loses all credibility. At most, God seems to be hidden, and leaves no physical trace of his presence in the world. The question of God hangs between two opposite extremes: acceptance or rejection. The main question then becomes: How can Jesus be credible if he is only, at most, hidden from us? The problem before us is enormous. From the Christian perspective, Jesus is God, and consequently, the matter of his presence or absence affects the entirety of human history. God’s kingdom degenerates into a merely human kingdom whose principle moral values and laws become merely worldly. We see examples of such a world every day. Is not one of the aims of secularism to strip the world from God?4 Before we introduce the content of this paper, which is related to Ratzinger’s understanding of God’s presence, we will situate the problem of this presence, whether a fact or a myth, in what one might call divine hiddenness. Although we will just mention this divine hiddenness here, it 2 Emery de Gaál Gyulai, The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI: The Christocentric Shift (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 67. 3 A typical example is the last book of Stephen Hawking, “Brief Answers to the Big Questions,” published in 2018, less than a year after his death, where he clearly states: "There is no God. No one created the universe," as a conclusion to his entire scientific career. Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions (Random House Publishing Group, 2018), 38. 4 Ratzinger explains his understanding of secularization in his general audience in 2012. He says: “the past century experienced a strong process of secularization under the banner of the absolute autonomy of the human being, considered as the measure and architect of reality, but impoverished by being created ‘in the image and likeness of God.’ A particularly dangerous phenomenon for faith has arisen in our times: indeed, a form of atheism exists which we define, precisely, as “practical”, in which the truths of faith or religious rites are not denied but are merely deemed irrelevant to daily life, detached from life, pointless.” Pope Benedict XVI, “General Audience,” November 14, 2012, http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2012/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20121114.html. Farah 4 will help us recognize the enormity of the problem we all face and the reason that compels Ratzinger to defend the presence of God. Divine hiddenness, in fact, can elicit two kinds of response: the first praises God’s hiddenness, while the second uses it to deny him. In order to highlight the main problem we face, we will focus on the second response. In fact, it is a response that often finds its way even into religious and theological scholarship. Let us consider just three contemporary examples, of contemporary religious skepticism: Theodore Drange, James Keller, and