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    In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall
    In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall
    In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall
    Ebook102 pages1 hour

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

    By Pope Benedict XVI

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    About this ebook

    In four superb homilies and a concluding essay, Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, provides a clear and inspiring exploration of the Genesis creation narratives.

    While the stories of the world’s creation and the fall of humankind have often been subjected to reductionism of one sort or another — literalists treat the Bible as a science textbook whereas rationalists divorce God from creation — Ratzinger presents a rich, balanced Catholic understanding of these early biblical writings and attests to their enduring vitality.

    Beginning each homily with a text selected from the first three chapters of Genesis, Ratzinger discusses, in turn, God the creator, the meaning of the biblical creation accounts, the creation of human beings, and sin and salvation; in the appendix he unpacks the beneficial consequences of faith in creation.

    Expertly translated from German, these reflections set out a reasonable and biblical approach to creation. ‘In the Beginning . . .’ also serves as an excellent homiletic resource for priests and pastors.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEerdmans
    Release dateNov 2, 1995
    ISBN9781467428064
    In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall
    Author

    Pope Benedict XVI

    Pope Benedict XVI (1927-2022), born Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, was the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 2005 until his resignation in 2013. Benedict's election as pope occurred in the 2005 papal conclave that followed the death of Pope John Paul II. Benedict chose to be known as "Pope emeritus" upon his resignation, and he retained this title until his death.

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    Reviews for In the Beginning…'

    4/5

    38 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A great series of homilies on the creation stories in Genesis. Short, to the point, and interesting, if a little non-specific.
    • 5/5
      This little book is exceptionally important for students and scholars navigating their way through the pitfalls of the dogma of creation
    • 2/5
      This very short (100 pages, with rather large print) book is an explication of the Catholic doctrine of the creation, the Fall (of Adam and Eve), and the beginning of sin. I suppose one ought not to quibble with the Pope’s assertion that “This is Catholic doctrine.” On the other hand, I must say that the doctrine itself is highly quibble-able.

      Benedict begins each of the first two chapters with extensive quotes from the creation account in the Book of Genesis. He seeks to refute the assertion that “the history of Christianity in the last four hundred years has been a constant rearguard action as the assertions of the faith and of theology have been dismantled piece by piece.” He argues that the Bible cannot be interpreted literally, but its essential meaning is simply that God is responsible for the existence of the universe.

      Benedict sees the Bible as a unified whole that leads to an inevitable conclusion, the divinity of Christ. He asserts that “[f]or the Christian the Old Testament represents, in its totality, an advance toward Christ; only when it attains to him does its real meaning, which was gradually hinted at, become clear.” How the Pope arrives at this latter conclusion is a mystery to me—it must be just one of those (possibly infallible) assertions popes are wont to make. His argument, if it can be called that, is belied by the fact that the Bible consists of many books by many different authors writing separately. Moreover, it took several hundred years and several church councils to decide what books to include in the biblical canon.

      This book contains some very odd stuff. For example, the author writes:

      “…the biblical creation account is marked by numbers that reproduce not the mathematical structure of the universe but the inner design of its fabric, so to say, or rather the idea according to which it was constructed. There the numbers three, four, seven, and ten dominate. The words “God Said” appear ten times in the creation account. In this way the creation narrative anticipates the Ten Commandments. This makes us realize that these Ten Commandments are, as it were, an echo of the creation….”

      This appears really weird in light of the fact that Catholics, Protestants, and Jews all number the Commandments differently—although they all come up with ten. Depending on how you group them, you can find as few as nine and as many as 13 commandments. I’d hate to think that mystical numerology was a basic tenet of faith.

      The pope also picks an unnecessary fight with the theory of evolution. He is not willing to concede that current scientific thinking provides a sufficient explanation of the current state of the human genome. He says :

      “…we must have the audacity to say that the great projects of the living creation are not the products of chance and error. Nor are they the products of a selective process to which divine predicates can be attributed in illogical, unscientific, and even mythic fashion. The great projects of the living creation point to a creating Reason and show us a creating Intelligence, and they do so more luminously and radiantly today than ever before.”

      My apologies to Mr. Darwin, but the last pope appears to believe in Intelligent Design!

      I haven’t read anything written by Francis, the present pope. But if this book is any indication of Benedict’s thought process, the Church almost surely is in more competent hands today than it was under Benedict.

      (JAB)

    Book preview

    In the Beginning…' - Pope Benedict XVI

    Front Cover of ‘In the Beginning …’

    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.

    Book Title of ‘In the Beginning …’

    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

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