Franciscan Penance Library

THE CHRISTIAN TRANSFORMATION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL GOD
 
In chapter III of Introduction to Christianity, Professor Joseph Ratzinger explains how the early Christian Church aligned itself with the God of the Greek philosophers against the many pagan gods of the ancient world.   But the Church did not simply accept this God as it was presented by pagan Greek philosophers.  Professor Ratzinger explains:  By deciding exclusively in favor of the God of the philosophers and logically declaring this God to be the God who speaks to man and to whom one can pray, the Christian faith gave a completely new significance to this God of the philosophers, removing him from the purely academic realm and thus profoundly transforming him.  The God who had previously existed as something neutral, as the highest¸ culminating concept;  this God who had been  understood as pure Being or pure thought, circling around forever closed in upon itself  without reaching over to man and his little world; this God of the philosophers, whose pure eternity and unchangeability  had excluded any relation with the changeable and transitory, now appeared to the eye of faith as the God of men, who is not only thought  of all thoughts, the eternal mathematics of the universe, but also agape, the power of creative love.   In this sense there does exist in the Christian faith what Pascal experienced on the night when he wrote on a slip of paper that he henceforth kept sewn in the lining of his jacket the words: “Fire.  ‘God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob’ not ‘of the philosophers and scholars’.”  …….So in this sense there is the experience that the God of the philosophers is quite different from what the philosophers had thought him to be, though he does not thereby cease to be what they had discovered; that one only comes to know him properly when one realizes that he, the real truth and ground of all Being, is at one and the same time the God of faith, the God of men.
 
This transformation of God can easily be seen by looking at passages from the Bible which speak of God.  Professor Ratzinger puts it this way:  Let us take quite at random Luke 15:1-10, the parables of the lost sheep and the lost drachma.  The point of departure is the irritation felt by the scribes and Pharisees at the fact that Jesus sat down to eat with sinners.  In reply comes the story of the man who owns a hundred sheep, loses one of them, goes after it, looks for it and finds it, and rejoices more than over the ninety-nine for which he never needed to search.  The story of the lost drachma that, when found again, causes more joy than the one that was never lost tends in the same direction:  “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” (15:7).  This parable, in which Jesus depicts and justifies his activity and his task as the emissary of God, involves not only the relations between God and man but also the question of who God himself is.

 

If we try to answer the question on the basis of this passage, we shall have to say that the God whom we encounter here appears to be, as in so many passages of the Old Testament, highly anthropomorphic, highly unphilosophical; he has emotions as a man does, he rejoices, he seeks, he waits, he goes to meet.  He is not the unfeeling geometry of the universe, neutral justice standing above things undisturbed by a heart and its emotions; he has a heart; he stands there like a person who loves, with all the capriciousness of someone who loves.  Thus in the passage the transformation of purely philosophical thinking becomes clear, and it becomes apparent how far we still are fundamentally  from this identification of the God of faith and the God of the philosophers, how incapable we are of catching up with it, and how badly our basic image of God and our understanding of the Christian reality come to  grief on this very point.
 

We can thereby see clearly the problem which many modern people have with the Christian concept of God.  Certainly, that God could make sense in a time when the earth was thought to be much smaller and the center of the universe.   Most people can see that “Someone” has to be in charge of all this, but how can this “Someone” care about us humans who live on an insignificant speck of dust revolving around an insignificant star among billions of others in an insignificant galaxy in the vast universe? How can this “Someone” care about what I do in my bedroom, what I do with my money, how I handle my human relationships?  However, Professor Ratzinger points out how petty and all too human this way of thinking really is.  Are we not making God like us with all our limitations?
 

Professor Ratzinger then gives us a summary of what has just been said:  To sum up, we can say that, in the deliberate connection with the God of the philosophers made by the Christian faith, purely philosophical thinking was transcended on two fundamental points.
 

a. The philosophical God is essentially self-centered, thought simply contemplating itself.

The God of faith is basically defined by the category of relationship.  He is creative fullness encompassing the whole.   Thereby a completely new picture of the world, a completely new world order is established:  the highest possibility of Being no longer seems to be the detachment of him who exists in himself and needs only himself.  On the contrary, the highest mode of Being includes the element of relationship.  It is hardly necessary to say what a revolution it must mean for the direction of man’s existence when the supreme Being  no longer appears as absolute enclosed autarchy but turns out to be at the same time involvement, creative power, which creates and bears and loves other things…..

 
b. The philosophical God is pure thought: he is based on the notion that thought and thought alone is divine.  The God of faith, as thought, is also love.  His image is based on the conviction that to love is divine.
 

The logos of the whole world, the creative original thought, is at the same time love; in fact this thought is creative because as thought, it is love, and, as love, it is thought.  It becomes apparent  that truth and love are originally identical; that where they are completely realized they are not two parallel  or even opposing realities but one, the one and only absolute.
 

Chapter III of Introduction to Christianity is brought to a conclusion by Professor Ratzinger by relating what just has been said about Christianity transcending philosophy to the first articles of the Apostle’s Creed.  The Creed starts with “I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth: And in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord”  These articles of the Creed unite the philosophical concepts of “Almighty” and “Maker of heaven and earth” with the personal characteristics of “Father” and the incarnation of His Son as man.  Professor Ratzinger summarizes this contrast:  what “almightiness” and “lordship of all” mean only becomes clear from a Christian point of view in the crib and the Cross.  It is only here, where the God who is recognized as Lord of all has voluntarily chosen the final degree of powerlessness by delivering himself up to his weakest creature, that the Christian concept of the almightiness of God can be truly formulated.  At this point simultaneously a new concept of power and a new concept of lordship and dominion are born.  The highest power is demonstrated as the calm willingness completely to renounce all power; and we are shown that it is powerful, not through force, but only through the freedom of love, which, even when it is rejected, is stronger than the exultant powers of earthly violence.  When we recite the Creed at Mass and at other times, do we really understand what we as Christians are saying?

--James F. Nugent, CFP