What did ancient Christians and pagans believe makes the unity of
the nations? Just as he began serving as a major adviser at the
Second Vatican Council in 1962, Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope
Benedict XVI) studied this question in lectures delivered at
Austria's University of Salzburg. These lectures, originally
published in German, are now made available in English in this
volume. According to Ratzinger, pagan Rome said the Empire was the
""cosmopolis"" which united the world. The church affirmed the
goodness of the world, and acknowledged the proper role of the
state. But Christian belief that Christ had given birth to the
church, the eternal cosmopolis, present now, was revolutionary.
Christ was the New Adam, who restores unity to a humanity scattered
in the Fall and at Babel. For Origen, Israel was the true state
that remained under the one God; other nations were under archons
or dark angels, from which Christ came to liberate them. Christ
instituted the eternal kingdom of peace, to which Christians belong
now, living within and at the service of, their earthly nations. In
Ratzinger's view, Origen thought peace between the church and world
before the Eschaton - the eternal kingdom - was possible. Augustine
responded in two ways to claims by pagans that the Christian God
had not protected Rome from being sacked in 410. First, Rome's
pagan civic religion was undermined in its function of aiding state
security by the fact that it was not true. Second, Christianity, as
the truth, was not subordinate to the state, but was a new
community. In Ratzinger's view, Augustine saw the church, the City
of God, as an alien citizen, but one very much within the City of
Man and meant to renew, not take over, that earthly city, until
Christ's Second Coming. This early work of Ratzinger's showcases
the development of his theology, including themes that will inform
his life's work, such as how God's transcendence and the doctrine
of creation inform a Christian worldview, and the central role of
the Incarnation in understanding how the church relates to the
world.
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