Jesus Christ frees us from fear – Corriere.it

An essential expression of the relationship to the dead is in all tribal religions the cult of ancestors, which was mostly seen in the past in opposition to the Christian view of life and death. Horst Bürkle has proposed a new appropriation and representation of ancestor worship which seems to me worthy of consideration. He shows that individualism which developed in the West and represents the strongest resistance against the cult of ancestors is in reality also opposed to the Christian image of man who sees us protected in the mysterious body of Christ.

Man’s bond with Christ is not only an I-you relationship, but creates a new us. Communion with Jesus Christ introduces us into the body of Christ, that is to say into the great community of all those who belong to the Lord and therefore also crosses the border between death and life. In this sense, communion with those who have gone before us, it is an essential part of being a Christian. It allows us to find forms of communion with the dead, which perhaps appear differently in Africa than in Europe, but in any case allow us to make a meaningful transformation of the cult of ancestors.

Now, however, the question arises of how belief in one God can overcome the world of gods. The Verbite Wilhelm Schmidt he argued that belief in the one God lay at the origin of the history of religion and was progressively more and more overshadowed by the multiple deities, until he was able to suppress the gods once more. He himself finally admitted that such a development cannot be proved.

Rather, somehow it was always known that gods are not simply the plural of God. God is a singular God. He exists only in unity. The plurality of gods moves to another level. In fact, the world in its various spheres is governed by divinities who can dominate only one part. (…)

Throughout the history of religions, God has been considered as a monarch who has power over everything, but does not exercise it. The one true God needs no worship, because does not threaten anyone and he doesn’t need anyone’s help. The goodness and power of the only true God condition his insignificance at the same time. He doesn’t need us and man thinks he doesn’t need him.

With the proliferation of belief in gods grew the longing that the true God could free man from the regime of fear in which belief in gods had largely developed. According to Christian belief, with Jesus this had happened: the only God enters the history of religions and deposes the gods. Above all, Henri de Lubac demonstrated that Christianity was perceived as a liberation from the fear in which the power of the gods had entangled men. After all, the mighty world of the gods collapsed because the one God entered the scene and ended their power.

I have tried to describe this event a little more closely in the collective work Gott in Welt published on the occasion of Karl Rahner’s sixtieth birthday, and I was able to establish that there are two ways out of faith in the gods. First the monotheistic religions originating from the root of Abraham, in which the one God as a person determines the whole world. Next to these there is a second exit, namely mystical religions with Hinayana Buddhism as the central form. Here there is no one personal God, but even the one God is dissolved, becomes evanescent. The Buddha way tends towards annihilation.

In reality this severe form of mystical dissolution of all the individual figures it has not imposed itself, but ultimately it has always remained as a final representation and has achieved a powerful attractive effect precisely in the once Christian cultures of Europe. In the German linguistic sphere it has found an expression in the phrase attributed to Karl Rahner: “Tomorrow’s Christian will be a mystic, or he will no longer exist”. Apparently this aims at an internalization and an inner deepening of the faith. (…) For many, on the other hand, it only hides the program of presenting all the concrete forms of faith as secondary in order to ultimately arrive at an impersonal devotion, such as what Luise Rinser indicates as the superior form of being Christian she has achieved in the meantime.

The German writer personally explained to me that the purpose of publishing the correspondence with Karl Rahner was to demonstrate that she was a mystic and that her long spiritual journey with Rahner finally resulted in the mystical explanation of Christianity. It did not become clear to me to what extent Luise Rinser wanted to involve Rahner in transforming Christianity into a mystical religion. In any case, she wanted to offer an explanation of Rahner’s famous phrase as an opening towards the future.

In truth, such an interpretation of Christianity is in contradiction with its most intimate intention and its concrete configuration. For the Christian, the God who in Jesus Christ he binds his hands and heart to us men and that for us and in us he endured being a man even to death and beyond death is the center of Christianity.

The whole contention of the history of religions between God and the gods does not end with God himself eventually vanishing as a fetish. Instead, it ends with the victory of the one true God over the gods who are not God. It ends with the gift of love which presupposes being a person of God. ‘accept and in conveying that you are loved by God.

Edit it © 2023 Elio Guerriero
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© 2023 Mondadori Libri Spa Milan

The Pope Emeritus

The passage published above is taken from the posthumous book by Benedict XVI “What is Christianity” (Mondadori, pages 204, euro 20). The volume collects the last reflections of the Pope Emeritus on the essence of the Christian religion. Born in Bavaria in 1927, ordained a priest in 1951, Joseph Ratzinger participated in the Second Vatican Council. Created cardinal in 1977 by Pope Paul VI, he was then appointed prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1981 by John Paul II. Upon the death of Karol Wojtyla, Ratzinger was elected Pope on April 19, 2005 and assumed the name of Benedict XVI. His resignation, announced on February 11, 2013, caused a great stir. He disappeared in Rome on December 31 last year.