In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall

The middle years of this century marked a particularly intense time of crisis and change in European society. During this period (1930–1950), a broad intellectual and spiritual movement arose within the European Catholic community, largely in response to the secularism that lay at the core of the crisis. The movement drew inspiration from earlier theologians and philosophers such as Möhler, Newman, Gardeil, Rousselot, and Blondel, as well as from men of letters like Charles Péguy and Paul Claudel.

The group of academic theologians included in the movement extended into Belgium and Germany, in the work of men like Emile Mersch, Dom Odo Casel, Romano Guardini, and Karl Adam. But above all the theological activity during this period centered in France. Led principally by the Jesuits at Fourviére and the Dominicans at Le Saulchoir, the French revival included many of the greatest names in twentieth-century Catholic thought: Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, Yves Congar, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Louis Bouyer, and, in association, Hans Urs von Balthasar.

It is not true—as subsequent folklore has it—that those theologians represented any sort of self-conscious school: indeed, the differences among them, for example, between Fourviére and Saulchoir, were important. At the same time, most of them were united in the double conviction that theology had to speak to the present situation, and that the condition for doing so faithfully lay in a recovery of the Church’s past. In other words, they saw clearly that the first step in what later came to be known as aggiornamento had to be ressourcement—a rediscovery of the riches of the whole of the Church’s two-thousand-year tradition. According to de Lubac, for example, all of his own works as well as the entire Sources chrétiennes collection are based on the presupposition that the renewal of Christian vitality is linked at least partially to a renewed exploration of the periods and of the works where the Christian tradition is expressed with particular intensity.

In sum, for the ressourcement theologians theology involved a return to the sources of Christian faith, for the purpose of drawing out the meaning and significance of these sources for the critical questions of our time. What these theologians sought was a spiritual and intellectual communion with Christianity in its most vital moments as transmitted to us in its classic texts, a communion which would nourish, invigorate, and rejuvenate twentieth-century Catholicism.

The ressourcement movement bore great fruit in the documents of the Second Vatican Council and has deeply influenced the work of Pope John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger, formerly Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, now Pope Benedict XVI.

The present series is rooted in this twentieth-century renewal of theology, above all as the renewal is carried in the spirit of de Lubac and von Balthasar. In keeping with that spirit, the series understands ressourcement as revitalization: a return to the sources, for the purpose of developing a theology that will truly meet the challenges of our time. Some of the features of the series, then, will be:

a return to classical (patristic-mediaeval) sources;

a renewed interpretation of St. Thomas;

a dialogue with the major movements and thinkers of the twentieth century, with particular attention to problems associated with the Enlightenment, modernity, liberalism.

The series will publish out-of-print or as yet untranslated studies by earlier authors associated with the ressourcement movement. The series also plans to publish works by contemporary authors sharing in the aim and spirit of this earlier movement. This will include interpretations of de Lubac and von Balthasar and, more generally, any works in theology, philosophy, history, literature, and the arts which give renewed expression to an authentic Catholic sensibility.

The editor of the Ressourcement series, David L. Schindler, is Gagnon Professor of Fundamental Theology at the John Paul II Institute in Washington, D.C., and editor of the North American edition of Communio: International Catholic Review, a federation of journals in thirteen countries founded in Europe in 1972 by Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jean Daniélou, Henri de Lubac, Joseph Ratzinger, and others.

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Dr. NE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505

www.eerdmans.com

Homilies 1–4 first published 1986 by Erich Wewel Verlag

under the title Im Anfang schuf Gott

© 1986 Erich Wewel Verlag

English translation © 1990 by

Our Sunday Visitor, Inc., Huntington, Indiana

Appendix first published 1979 by Univ. Verlag A. Pustet under the title

Konsequenzen des Schöpfungsglaubens

This edition, augmented with the Appendix, © 1995 by

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

All rights reserved

Published 1995

Printed in the United States of America

23 22 21 20 19 18 1718 19 20 21 22 23 24

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ratzinger, Joseph.

[Im Anfang schuf Gott. English]

In the beginning — : a Catholic understanding of the story of Creation and the Fall / Joseph Ratzinger; translated by Boniface Ramsey.

p.cm. — (Ressourcement)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-978-0-8028-4106-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Creation — Sermons. 2. Fall of man — Sermons. 3. Bible. O.T.

Genesis I-III — Sermons. 4. Catholic Church — Sermons. 5. Sermons, English.

I. Title. II. Series: Ressourcement (Grand Rapids, Mich.)

BS651.R345131995

231.7′65 — dc2095-36683

CIP

Gratefully dedicated to

those who heard these homilies

in the Liebfrauenkirche in Munich

Contents

Preface

FIRST HOMILY

God the Creator

The Difference Between Form and Content in the Creation Narrative

The Unity of the Bible as a Criterion for Its Interpretation

Christology as a Criterion

SECOND HOMILY

The Meaning of the Biblical Creation Accounts

The Reasonableness of Faith in Creation

The Enduring Significance of the Symbolic Elements in the Text (§ Creation and Worship § The Sabbath Structure of Creation § Exploiting the Earth?)

THIRD HOMILY

The Creation of the Human Being

The Human Being—Taken from the Earth

Image of God

Creation and Evolution

FOURTH HOMILY

Sin and Salvation

On the Subject of Sin

Limitations and Freedom of the Human Being

Original Sin

The Response of the New Testament

APPENDIX

The Consequences of Faith in Creation

The Suppression of Faith in Creation in Modern Thought

The Concept of Creation in Present-Day Thought: Three Forms of Concealment

Faith in Creation as a Basic Decision about Human Beings

Preface

The human threat to all living things, which is being spoken of everywhere these days, has given a new urgency to the theme of creation.

Paradoxically, however, the creation account is noticeably and nearly completely absent from catechesis, preaching, and even theology. The creation narratives go unmentioned; it is asking too much to expect anyone to speak of them. Against the background posed by this situation I set myself the task, in the early part of 1981, of attempting a creation catechesis for adults in four Lenten homilies in the cathedral of Munich, the Liebfrauenkirche. I was unable then to meet the request of many people to publish the homilies in book form; I had no time to go through the transcripts of them that different persons kindly placed at my disposal. Since then, from the perspective of my new work, the critical state of the creation theme in the present-day kerygma has become so much more evident that I now feel pressed to bring out the old manuscripts again and prepare them for printing. The basic character of the homilies has not been changed, and the limits imposed by the homiletic form have been taken into consideration. I hope that this little book may be the occasion for others to pursue this theme better than I have, and for the message of