"Life without God and against God": Joseph Ratzinger on Christianity and the (Secularized) World

Abstract

Despite all the efforts of responsible Christians to withstand secularization, the process as shown by various parameters appears to be unstoppable. Joseph Ratzinger developed a much-desired comprehensive, theological understanding of secularization. His theology of the world and his vision of the modern times is presented here succinctly at the time that the Western world seems to dispense with God and even live against Him. First, the article recalls Ratzinger’s 1965 text on the meanings of the term “world.” Any serious thought about the world should first deal with the question of how it is conceptualized. Ratzinger responded by presenting the Christian understanding of the worl+d and confronted it with various philosophical positions and scientific visions. He demonstrated the superiority of Christianity as having the exclusivity of possessing “good news” for humankind. Further, this article offers a comparison of the Christian and increasingly secularized worlds. While denouncing the project of building a secular world (the modern Tower of Babel) and challenging the tenets of the advocates of secularization, Ratzinger also enumerated elements uniting the global community. Finally, the article quotes an important text by Ratzinger brought back to the public attention during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which he juxtaposed two main mechanisms propelling human history: the development of a world without God and the operation of the providential “hand of God.” The clash of the belief in God with that of a life without God started at the dawn of history and will continue to the end of time. Ratzinger’s understanding of the world and secularization is realistic, intellectually principled, and very often dramatic, but concurrently full of Christian hope and optimism. His theology rebuts and reverses the common understanding of the terms “liberal” and “conservative.”