Mission and Communion: The Catholic Integration of Biblical Faith, Greek Inquiry, and World Cultures in the Theology of Joseph Ratzinger

Tertullian of Carthage once queried, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Today this inquiry is being raised once more in light of two realities: the experience of cultural pluralism within the universal Church and the necessity of cultural incarnation for the particular churches. The aim of this dissertation is to engage this ancient question in this new context. This engagement consists of three principal parts.

The first part is to understand authentic inculturation and catholicity as it is interpreted by the magisterium of the Catholic Church. This involves, above all, a detailed reading of the documents of the Second Vatican Council, as well as their implementation by the post-conciliar magisterium. The second part of our engagement analyzes the thought of those contextual theologians who offer a view of inculturation and catholicity that differs from that of the teaching office. Based upon the conviction that all theology is “contextual,” and therefore particular, contingent, and relative, these theologians claim that the purified Hellenic aspect of the early Church serves as but one example of cultural incarnation and accordingly ought no longer to be enduring or normative for Christianity today.

The third part of our engagement consists in examining the work of Joseph Ratzinger who not only critiqued radical conceptualizations of cultural pluralism, but also described the early Christian synthesis between biblical faith and Greek inquiry as giving a “definitive form” to the Christian religion. Here we synthesize and explicate two aspects of his thought: his theology of culture and his theology of history. Ratzinger explains how “deculturation” in general can be problematic, misunderstanding the nature of faith and culture, as well as undermining the catholic and historical character of the Christian religion. He also shows how “dehellenization” is a theological-pastoral misstep for several reason, including the following: it assumes a false historical narrative at multiple levels; it misunderstands the nature of the early Christian synthesis; it ignores how this synthesis is literally written into the deposit of faith; it presumes a philosophy of language that undermines both the integrity of faith and the unity of the faithful.