The God of Jesus Christ by Joseph Ratzinger

(New York: Ignatius Press, 2018-08-22), 123

  • God
    • God has names
      • we are Vikings in spaceflight (15)
      • by attempting to take all the power (by virtue of science, etc.) we eliminate the need for God (16)
      • knowing God is not just theoretical, but also depends on relationship (17)
      • "he knows that he is known" (18)
      • "It is impossible to separate the question of whether God exists from the question of who or what God is" (19)
      • we cannot know God in our hearts if they are either selfish and full of desire or inattentive (21)
      • "His name is a mystery" (22)
      • "Eternity is not the past. It is this absolute reliability and constancy that always bears us up. God 'is'" (22)
      • "He has a face, and he seeks our face. He has a heart, and he seeks our heart" (24)
    • God is three and God is one
      • we renew our baptism by making the sign of the cross (26)
      • "The primary concern in Christianity is, not the Church or man, but God. Christianity is not orientated to our own hopes, fears, and needs, but to God, to his sovereignty and power. The first proposition of the Christian faith and the fundamental orientation of Christian conversion is: 'God is'" (27)
      • "God is--and, therefore, that which is true and right is superior to all our goals and interests" (28)
      • "God is--and this also means that all of us are his creatures. Only creatures, indeed; but precisely because we are creatures, we have our true origin in God" (28)
      • awesome discussion of fatherhood 29+
      • discussion of the image of God 30+
      • "In [Christ's] prayer, he plunges the totality of his life into the abyss of truth and of goodness that is God" (33)
      • "Prayer was the center out of which he lived, and it was prayer that showed him how to understand God, the world, and men. To follow Jesus means looking at the world with the eyes of God and living accordingly…In Jesus' prayer, the inner life of God becomes visible to us: we see how God himself is. Faith in the triune God is nothing other than the exposition of what takes place in Jesus' prayer. In his prayer, the Trinity is revealed" (33-34)
    • The Creator God
      • "Christian faith concerns the whole of reality" (38)
      • why we study theology (39)
      • "Faith makes technical research and questioning possible, because it explains the rational character of the world and the orientation of the world toward man; but it is profoundly opposed to restricting thought exclusively to questions of function and usefulness. Faith challenges man to look beyond immediate usefulness and to ask about the foundations of th totality of things. Faith protects the contemplative and listening reason from attack by the merely instrumental reason" (41)
      • "Conscience is higher than the law" (48)
    • Job's question
      • "Man is God's image--and only man" (49)
      • "This humble act of falling silent as the first step of wisdom should concern us, too" (52)
      • "God's compassion has flesh" (53)
  • Jesus Christ
    • Descendit de caelis--He came down from heaven "…and became man"
      • "Essentially, the Son is the release and handing back of himself--that is what sonship means" (67)
    • "…and became man"
      • "It is in "being a child" that the very essence of what it is to be a man is realized, so much so that one who has lost the essence of childhood is himself lost" (71)
      • sonship means being oriented to the Father (72)
      • "Man wishes to be God and this is indeed his destiny" (72-73)
      • discussion of childhood (73)
      • "loneliness of being misunderstood" (79) --> is this one of my greatest fears?
    • Consubstantial with the Father
      • we must be like fishermen, not like philosophers (86)
      • "God can be known only through God" (90)
    • Risen from the dead in accordance with scripture
      • we have both a "narrative tradition" and "confessional tradition" of the Resurrection
      • "Jesus after the Resurrection belongs to a sphere of reality that is normally inaccessible to our senses" (98)
  • The Holy Spirit
    • sin glossa --> live Sacred scripture (108)
    • "One cannot display the Spirit of God as one displays goods for sale in a ship. He can be seen only by the one who bears him within himself" (110

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Updated: 2023-02-10-Fri