People and House of God in Augustine's Doctrine of the Church

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People and House of God in Augustine's Doctrine of the Church is the thesis of Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI.), The theological to the academic year 1950/1951 Faculty of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich to a price bid by Professor Gottlieb Söhngen was written . After Ratzinger's study won the faculty award, it was also recognized in 1951 as an inaugural dissertation for a doctorate with summa cum laude distinction. It was first published in book form in 1954 and in 2011 in Volume 1 of Joseph Ratzinger's Collected Writings .

Content and results

The study examines the understanding of faith and the church of the church father Augustine of Hippo (354-430), in particular what he describes with the theological terms “people of God” and “house of God”. Besides other writings by Augustine, the author relies primarily on his interpretations of the Bible (Psalms and John commentary) and on his work De civitate Dei .

According to Ratzinger's own statement, “the representation of a spiritual world, of which we know that Augustine encountered it, and the representation of what Augustine himself formed from it” is Ratzinger's goal. This requires both systematic-theological and historical research from a distance of one and a half millennia.

The author systematically and profoundly pursues the origin of the terms and ideas of the Augustine texts. Like numerous brooks, these findings flow together to form partial results and from those to form conclusions. In parallel, Ratzinger examines the personality development of Augustine, who has become a Christian church father from a pagan rhetoric teacher, above all the fruitful interaction of his philosophical-theological a priori and the church tradition, which are represented by earlier church fathers. Mainly the thought influence of Tertullian , Cyprian and Optatus is examined by Mileve on Augustine.

Gottlieb Söhngen's assumption at the time that "people of God" was the central concept of Augustine's church teaching is not confirmed by the study, writes Pope Benedict XVI. in the foreword to the 1st volume of his Complete Writings. In contrast, his dissertation shows that the hermeneutical key he is looking for in Augustine's ecclesiology lies in his theology of the Body of Christ, which is Eucharistically centered. It is based on the Eucharistic Body of Christ-term ( sacramentum corporis Christi ) of the first letter to the Corinthians of Paul , "because a bread are we the many are one body" ( 1 Cor 10,16  EU ). This theological discovery of the dissertation would require the suppression of the dominance of the ecclesiological image of the body of Christ at the time, which is rooted in other Pauline biblical passages, especially in Romans ( Rom 12: 4–5  EU ): Church as one body, consisting of many members. The exploration of this essential difference is not all the less successful because the author - as Ratzinger states - was guided solely by the texts of the church father.

The results of the study gain not only theoretical, but also practical significance: the image of the church adopted by the Second Vatican Council is fundamentally in line with Augustine's doctrine of the church as understood by Joseph Ratzinger. The ecclesiology of the council is communion ecclesiology and therefore essentially Eucharistic ecclesiology, explains the Pope in the preface to the new edition of his dissertation, which was published shortly before the 50th anniversary of Vatican II.

The meticulous study, which brings the Church Father Augustine and his teaching into close contact with the Church Father Augustine and his teaching through clear explanations that are also understandable for a wider audience and its tension-arousing style, also represents an interesting, broad knowledge-conveying reading about the spiritual world of antiquity Ratzinger's demanding formulations become even more expressive through a broad vocabulary .

His first scientific work conveys fundamentally new knowledge and a. About Augustine's understanding of the church and his Eucharistic ecclesiology as the spiritual center of Christian existence:

“All in all, our Christ-unity is now represented on a threefold level, each of which, however, is kept as close as possible to the other, so that all three together form an insoluble whole. It is about sacramentum corporis Christi - corpus Christi - caritas . This three-level one expresses the inner form of our participation in Christ, namely how we are all one Christ. [...] Because this caritas is ultimately the spirit of Christ himself, of which the whole body structure is actually real. Here, however, there is at the same time the reversal in the utmost concreteness, because caritas is not a mystical interior that says nothing for human realization, but it is church unity, more: it is the real, sober, active love of the Christian heart. [...] There is not an improper moral or personal sacrifice on the one hand and an actual ritual sacrifice on the other, but the first is the res of the latter, in which this only has its actual reality. Here we are faced with what one might call Augustine's theory of the measuring sacrifice. From the outset it is fundamentally different from all modern endeavors to address this problem in that it presupposes a completely different relationship between the historical and the pneumatic than we are used to. As we have seen, Augustine himself stands in a long tradition which he leads to a climax. He brings the series of thoughts of sacrificium, corpus (eucharistic-ecclesiological) and caritas that have been more or less next to one another into a real inner unity. […] In summary, we can now finally say: Instead of the pagan god state, Augustine places the Christian god state, ie the body of Christ. Augustine's concept of the body of Christ represents a synthesis, initiated by Hilarius and Chrysostom , but carried out in a peculiar way by Augustine, of the metaphysical concept of the body of Antignostic theology with the concept of the Eucharistic and ecclesiastical body, as we have it with Tertullian and Cyprian , but also with the Greek theologians have found. Church membership consists in participation in the Eucharist ; the Church itself is synonymous with the sacrament that sets it, sacramentum corporis Christi. This whole "sacramentum" is a sign for the corpus Christi verum, the holy church. As in the anti-donatist dispute, the key term that holds everything together is caritas. As the Christ Spirit, it is the formative center of the Christ body, at the same time the unifying power that holds both together. Thus recently they represented in sacramentum corporis Christ. "(§17 The new cult.)

Although Augustine's interpretations of Scripture are analyzed in the study, there is no actual interpretation of the Bible in this context. On the one hand, as Ratzinger noted in his dissertation, because it had important literature at the time, on the other hand, “because an examination of scripture with today's historical-critical means conveys a substantially different picture than the reader of Christian antiquity revealed. In order to find this one has to look again at the church tradition. "

Hermeneutics

In the foreword to the first edition of the book (1954), the author points out important hermeneutical foundations of his interdisciplinary scientific text analysis, which also contribute to his research results:

“The new answers that this book can give are, of course, closely related to the new question that it posed. In general, progress in historical and systematic research is mutually dependent; for even if it is the historian's task to research historical reality alone, regardless of systematic presuppositions, regardless of how it relates to his own opinion, he can only get an answer where he first asked. But he can only ask questions from his own pre-existing systematic knowledge. The answer found can then widen the systematic horizon, from here the systematics can offer the ground for renewed, deeper penetration into the subject of historical research. In this way the systematic becomes the limit of historical endeavors, just as this in turn is called ever and ever to expand the limits of the systematic. "

Joseph Ratzinger Collected Writings

60 years after its constitution, the dissertation appeared again in the sixteen- volume book series Joseph Ratzinger Gesammelte Schriften , it forms the first half of his first volume, which also contains further studies by the author on Augustine and the theology of the Church Fathers. In the foreword of this volume, Pope Benedict XVI recalls. so:

“Looking back, I can only feel deeply grateful that the“ price work ”of that time not only opened the door to a lifelong friendship with St. Augustine, but also led me on the trail of the Eucharistic ecclesiology and thus given me an understanding of the reality of the Church which corresponds to the deepest intentions of the Second Vatican Council and at the same time introduces the spiritual center of Christian existence. "

literature

Bibliographical information