Ratzinger in Newly Emerged Interview: A Church without Common Faith Is Not a Church
- Until the Enlightenment, there was no doubt that God shines through the world, that he speaks to us in the Bible, and that God comes to meet us in Christ.
- Today, the world view is exactly upside down. Everything is explained by material factors. Evolution has become the new divinity. There is no step for which a Creator is needed.
Images of Jesus as Projections of Their Authors
- A great error in exegesis is to identify the latest hypothesis as "science," to present it with great fanfare, and to consider this "science" as the only valid authority, while the Church no longer has any.
- The history of exegesis is a graveyard of hypotheses, each of which represents the spirit of the times more than the true voice of the Bible.
- What passes for the voice of science is the expression of a certain world view, according to which, for example, there can be no resurrection from the dead, or Jesus could not have spoken in this way or that, and so on.
- Two things are important: to remain skeptical of everything that is presented as 'science,' and above all to trust in the Faith of the Church.
- The true Jesus is still the Jesus presented to us in the Gospels. All the others are fragmentary constructions that reflect the spirit of the times more than the origins.
- The different images of Jesus are often not scientific data, but rather a mirror of what a certain person or a certain time considered as a scientific result.
No Agreement between Protestants and Catholics
- There are fundamental differences between the communities that emerged from the 16th-century Reformation and the Catholic Church.
- The German Evangelical Church believes that any baptized Christian can preside at the Lord's Supper. There is no sacramental structure beyond baptism. But: The episcopal and priestly ministry already appear in the Bible as a constitutive form of the structure of the Church.
- The New Testament Canon certainly did not form on its own. It had to be recognized. But this required a legitimate authority to decide. This authority could only be that apostolic authority which was present in the office of apostolic succession. Scripture and Holy Orders are inseparable.
- Lutherans deny the prayer of consecration as an essential part of the celebration of their Supper. But: […] the sacrifice of Christ is present and the Eucharist is more than a supper.
- If the Church has nothing authoritative to say about the ultimate questions of faith, then there is no common faith. One could then erase the word "church", because a church that does not guarantee us a common faith is not a church.
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