Introduction to Christianity

Introduction to Christianity by Joseph Ratzinger, translated by JR Foster, 359 pages

Introduction to Christianity is an adaptation of a series of lectures given by Joseph Ratzinger in 1967 and first published in written form in the momentous year of 1968.  Although he would go on to become bishop of Munich, then a cardinal and the head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, and finally ascend the throne of St Peter as Benedict XVI, at the time this book was written he was still the dashing young peritus of the Second Vatican Council, and the book itself is very much a response to the theological winds that had begun to blow through the windows the Council opened.  Indeed, in Introduction to Christianity Ratzinger outlines the theological project that would fill his remaining life.

This begins with the recognition that Christianity is unavoidably a historical religion, founded in a real past and not a mythic long ago, unfolding in the lives of the prophets and the saints with the Incarnation at the center.  One consequence of this is that the progressive attempt to inaugurate a revolutionary new Christianity freed from its actual historical development is inevitably futile.  Ratzinger argues instead for the providential role of Hellenistic philosophy in early Christianity, just as he argues that modern Christianity can be enriched rather than impoverished by the real contributions of modern scholarship.  His ultimate aim is to demonstrate the unity of the living "God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" with the "God of the philosophers and scholars", the God of faith with the God of reason, and how the work of reason is vitally - indispensably - involved in establishing a personal relationship with this transcendent God.