The Legacy of Benedict XVI and Biblical Theology

With all the attacks being launched against the Holy Father in recent weeks, I would like to honor Benedict XVI by joining the New Theological Movement's celebration of the fifth anniversary of his election to the chair of Saint Peter by looking at his teaching legacy; his munus docendi.

Benedict XVI is one of the greatest theological minds to sit on Saint Peter's chair since Gregory the Great in the 6th century. He is a world class biblical scholar, a university professor in dogmatic and fundamental theology and was a theological expert (peritus) at the greatest ecclesial event of the last century, the Second Vatican Council. While he is and remains a theological “expert,” perhaps his greatest intellectual quality is his tremendous capacity to synthesize and present the Catholic faith simply to ordinary believers without emptying the same faith of its substance. Because he has touched on nearly every discipline of theology in his over 16 volume corpus, I will only focus on one aspect of his magisterial work, biblical theology.

With respect to biblical theology, Benedict has been engaged from his seminary days in the question of Biblical criticism. It was during his seminary years that he received the tools necessary to make biblical exegesis the center of all his theology. Benedict is a major figure in the the world of biblical scholarship, thanks to a movement which he has helped move forward, what he calls the “Critique of Criticism.” This "Critique of Criticism" aims at synthesizing the best of the patristic and medievil periods with the best of modern historical biblical scholarship. 

Since the rise of humanism during the renaissance and the new found focus on original texts and languages, the Churh has been in a battle that many outsiders would consider the battle of faith against history. When secularism began to rise in the Enlightenment, particularly in Germany, biblical exegetes were pointing to what they claimed to be a widening fissure between the Jesus presented in the Gospels – the so-called Jesus of faith – and the Jesus of history. To respond to this false break between faith and history, Cardinal Ratzinger continually said that we need to critique seriously the underlying philosophical presuppositions of this supposedly purely objective scientific historicism. Namely the claim that God cannot enter history or move the course of human events by the miraculous. Ratzinger quite correctly would point out that the historicism practiced since the Enlightenment was not merely oblivuous to the Christian faith but often against it in its principles and consequently less than objective. Therefore he was quick to point out the fact that the historians theories – for they can never move past the realm of hypothesis – often reflect the author more than any actual events attested to in tradition and are in a constant state of “reformulation.” 

The interesting thing about Cardinal Ratzinger, and now Pope Benedict, is that he considers the historical critical method to be indispensable. Not sufficient, however. It needs to be placed within the greater sphere of faith and tradition and “humbled” of its tendencies toward over confident assertions of the truth, especially in light of historical criticism's many  embarrassing historical blunders. A humorous example of this intellectual hubris was a confrère of Professor Ratzinger in Germany who stopped receiving doctoral dissertations on the Scriptures, because he claimed that everything  in the Bible had by then been researched and answered.

To experience the synthetic power of Benedict's thought, read his book Jesus of Nazareth or his homilies posted on the Vatican's website which are becoming a trade mark of his pontificate.

In fine, the Holy Father's teaching may be termed “affirmative orthodoxy.” He is deeply rooted in the Sacred Scriptures and the bimillenial Tradition of the Church and he proposes this faith in a way that always seeks to show the "why" of Christianity in a positive light. That is not to say that he will not unveil the prohibitions of the moral life or faith but rather he is more intent upon giving a positive explication of the Catholic faith because ultimately Jesus Christ is the great “Yes” of God to all that is good, true and beautiful; to all that is authentically and truly human.