As I mentioned in my last post A Baptist Reads Benedict, I will be working through Ratzinger’s Jesus of Nazareth series in an effort to understand his Christology. I believe his Christology is important for two reasons. First, Ratzinger’s Christology deals seriously with the interplay between mutually dependent historical, theological and exegetical realities. Secondly, my spiritual journey is indebted to his theology of Jesus. In many ways, I find his approach to Jesus to be deeply personal and transformative in my spiritual life. I touched on these points briefly in my previous post and they will come up again throughout this series.
Ratzinger’s Approach to Exegesis
In Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, Ratzinger explores theological implications of Christianity within history. Put another way, Christianity lives or dies on historicity. If Christianity intertwines with history, then that relationship warrants historical study. Naturally, contemporary historical research presents unique challenges to Christianity. Modern historical sciences are product of the European Enlightenment which emphasized reason and empiricism above revelation and tradition. Major figures of the Enlightenment including Hume, Spinoza, and Diderot denied or questioned supernatural phenomena as a meaningful account of reality. Consequently, historical sciences excluded supernatural phenomena when investigating religious texts, including the Bible. (There is more that can be said here about the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary historical science, including contributions from Descartes, Kant and Hegel, but that would be far afield from where I’m going with this review) Despite a wealth of insights provided by this approach to history, Ratzinger doubts naturalistic methodologies provide sufficient basis for theological conclusions.
What are the promises and limitations of naturalistic methodologies? First, Biblical exegesis reconstructs meaning from Biblical text based on authorial intent, literary genre, and cultural/historical context. Academic consensus complicates exegesis, though, for the above reasons mentioned. Generally, scholars disagree about who wrote which Biblical books, when they were written and to what degree they were products of its surrounding culture. As a result, broad consensus among Biblical scholars suggests that names attributed to the Gospels don’t correlate to authors who composed them. Emphasis on consensus varies by who evaluates the evidence. I am in no place to make that evaluation as I am not a scholar (my grasp of Hebrew & Greek can be generously described as poor). Still, Ratzinger recognizes a limitation associated historical science:
We have to keep in mind the limit of all efforts to know the past: We can never go beyond the domain of hypothesis, because we simply cannot bring the past into the present. To be sure, some hypotheses enjoy a high degree of certainty, but overall we need to remain conscious of the limit of our certainties—indeed the history of modern exegesis makes this limit perfectly evident. (xvii)
In other words, while historical sciences provide indispensable insight and illumination into the composition and compilation of the Biblical text, they are limited by methodological constraints. Dearth of contemporaneous evidence often limit scholars’ ability to make definitive claims from a strictly naturalistic basis. Ratzinger’s exegesis of Jesus’ mission cautiously proceeds from the text in light of historical sciences.
Faith Seeking Understanding
Ratzinger’s acknowledges faith is a prerequisite to his project and writes for an audience inclined toward Christianity. In other words, Jesus of Nazareth is primarily a work of theology grounded in faith, not an excavation of literary artifacts. Stalwart skeptics would be, well, skeptical of such a methodology. Wisely, Ratzinger lays his cards on the table and doesn’t bind anyone’s conscience who may disagree with his approach. He welcomes skeptics to engage with him, but to do so in full knowledge of his intentions. This balanced approach limits his audience, but Ratzinger’s concern is as much pastoral as it is scholarly.
Naturally, the work of a pastor includes the spiritual care of a congregation. The relationship assumes a baseline agreement to essentials without resorting to strictly apologetic concerns. He does not litigate doctrine, dogma or principals in defending traditional Christianity. This is nowhere near his primary concern. Rather, Ratzinger keeps the spiritual question front and center in hopes of understanding the central figure of a shared faith. He states Jesus of Nazareth is a both a public and personal exercise. “It goes without saying that this book is in no way an exercise in the magisterium but is solely my person search for the “face of the Lord.” (xxiii) Together with him, Ratzinger beckons us to commune the living Jesus. This encounter necessitates faith which has the effect of making Jesus of Nazareth a pastoral, scholarly and devotional work all at once.
In my view, Ratzinger provides a decent starting point by laying out his methodology and his intentions. He has too much integrity as scholar to exclude historical critical readings from his exegesis. Such a choice would be dishonest in light of his training in German traditions of higher criticism. Nevertheless, he does not cede his project fully to historical sciences. He points to the difficulties of uncovering the Jesus behind the Gospels using purely historical-critical methodologies. As I mentioned in my last post, this is a refreshing approach as someone coming from an evangelical background, which tends to be reflexively defensive against critical scholarship in part from its debt to American fundamentalism. In my next post, I’ll be examining Ratzinger’s account of Jesus’ Baptism in the Jordan and the consummation of his ministry.