Explorations in the Theology of Benedict XVI

Chapter 8: Papal Ecclesiology

215 chapte r eight PAPAL ECCLESIOLOGY F ranc e s c a aran Mur p hy AN ECUMENICAL ECCLESIOLOGY To many Catholics, Ratzinger’s “universalist” ecclesiology represents a top-down idea of the Church, that is, a conception of the Church as a Platonic Idea that generates its local variants. If I had had any interest in ecclesiology before I went to Aberdeen in 1995, those Catholics could have included me, alongside Cardinal Kasper. Fourteen years later I entertained my friend and teacher, the biblical scholar Richard Bauckham, at dinner in my home. He began to tease me, saying that all German theologians are Lutheran theologians, and, therefore, Joseph Ratzinger is a Lutheran theologian. I had to take this teasing with good humor, because it made sense of teaching Ratzinger’s theology to Protestants in Aberdeen. To these Presbyterians, Ratzinger was not starting from an abstract Platonic Idea but from the biblical God whose actions are concrete works of salvation.They were not put out by Ratzinger’s claim that “for Paul the Church is constituted as a subject by her head”; that is,“she continues to be a unified entity only w 216 Francesca Aran Murphy by grace.”1 Ratzinger is in tune with their belief in the priority of God and of grace.The Protestants liked Ratzinger’s biblical-mindedness. We taught the first-year theology students using two textbooks, Karl Barth’s Credo and Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity. This early book exemplifies Ratzinger’s continuous practice of keeping Protestant interlocutors within earshot. He draws on Barth’s claim that in the name Jesus Christ “existence and mission are identical”: Christ’s sending is his very being. Ratzinger can use the formula ecumenically , because it unites the Catholic and Orthodox focus on the being of Christ with the Protestant focus on his salvific action and deed. Christ’s being, Ratzinger says, “is actualitas, . . . going out from self, . . . the act of being sent,” and his “‘doing’” “reaches down into the depths of being and coincides with it.”2 This intuition has stayed with Ratzinger: he claims in his second book, about Jesus of Nazareth, that “Being with him includes the missionary dynamic by its very nature, since Jesus’ whole being is mission.”3 Just as Christ is “the Apostle of the Father,” the one sent by the Father, “so . . . those whom he sends as apostles represent what he is in himself.”4 “Being a Christian,” Ratzinger claims, “means changing over from being for oneself to being for another.”5 Apostolicity is the “being” and the doing of the Church, its expression of love. In 2005 I ran a conference at Aberdeen, on Ut Unum Sint. The 1995 encyclical asks Orthodox and Protestant Christians to say how papal primacy can be configured so as to be a mark of unity rather than division. Either Ut Unum Sint made a mark on Ratzinger or he set his mark on it. Many of his signature themes are in the encyclical, from the power of prayer to the healing of memory by apology and forgiveness and love.Because Ratzinger’s understanding of love is dispossessive , he is open to organic development of Petrine jurisdiction. That includes, of course, not only the first but also the second millennium of Christian life. Ratzinger is a fundamentally pastoral theologian. So he often buttonholes Lutherans about where they go wrong. But he also assimilates what he thinks is valuable in the “other” that is Protestantism . So here we have a theologian conversant with Lutheranism to whom it has been said,“Thou art Peter, and I give you the keys of the Papal Ecclesiology 217 kingdom.” Simultaneously, we find one who is qualified to appreciate the theological meaning of these words.This essay is a reflection on a “papal ecclesiology” conducted in an irenic and ecumenical spirit. Ratzinger is profoundly out of tune with what he sees as the absence of love in Luther’s theology.6 The essay thus concludes by mentioning the place of love in the developing relations between Catholic and Orthodox Christians. THREE PATHS, THE KEY, AND THE DOOR IT UNLOCKS The three paths on which Ratzinger’s theology circles are tradition, Scripture, and the Church. He sees tradition not as a companion to Scripture but as the source of Scripture. He treats tradition as an anthropological datum. Ratzinger is one of those German thinkers, like Adam Möhler and Josef...