I’m currently reading through Ratzinger’s (Benedict XVI’s) The Nature and Mission of Theology. This morning, I ran across a passage that bears repeating.
If theology considers its own specific property only as an obstacle, how can it possibly yield any fruit? We must factor Church and dogma into the theological equation as a generative power rather than as a shackle. Indeed, only this ‘energy source’ discloses to theology its grand perspectives. As an example, let us take exegesis, which even today is considered to be the classic illustration of the fact that the Church is a mere hindrance to theology. What, then, does a theology which emancipates itself from the Church actually achieve? In what sort of freedom does it then find itself? It becomes antiquarianism. It limits its researches to the past and advances varying hypotheses regarding the origin of individual texts and their relationship to the historical facts. These hypotheses interest us more than other literary theories only because the Church still asserts that these books document not merely past events but what is true. Neither does the attempt to make the Bible relevant by means of some personal philosophy improve matters, for there are better philosophies which nonetheless leave us cold. But how exciting exegesis becomes when it dares to read the Bible as a unified whole. If the Bible originates from the one subject formed by the people of God and, through it, from the divine subject himself, then it speaks of the present. If this is so, moreover, even what we know about the diversity of its underlying historical constellations yields its harvest; there is a unity to be discovered in this diversity, and diversity appears as the wealth of unity. This opens up a wide field of action both to historical research and to its hypotheses, with the sole limit that it may not destroy the unity of the whole, which is situated on another plane than what can be called the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the various texts. Unity is found on another plane, yet it belongs to the literary reality of the Bible itself.
From Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Nature and Mission of Theology (trans. Adrian Walker; San Francisco: Ignatius, 1995), 64-65.
