Post by Josh on Feb 5, 2007 18:23:01 GMT -8
11/05:
I've been reading a book by former Cardinal Ratzinger (now the Pope), entitled Truth and Tolerance. I REALLY like his style and the themes this book covers: much of it is about Christianity's relationship to other religions, but a great section in the end deals with the relationship between Reason and Mystery in Christianity.
Here are some quotes that have resonated with me in the last week:
"Nowadays we divide the world into discrete areas and are thereby able to dominate it in our thought and action in a way that could previously hardly be imagined, yet the unavoidable questions concerning truth and values, life and death, become thereby ever more unanswerable. The present-day crisis is due to the fact that the connecting link between the subjective and the objective realms has disappeared, that reason and feeling are drifting apart, and that both are ailing because of it....
There is nothing else for it: reason and religion will have to come together again without merging into each other. It is not a matter of preserving the old religious bodies. It is for the sake of man and the world. And neither of them, it is clear, can be saved unless God reappears in a convincing fashion.
The faith of Israel [after the influence of Greek thought] demonstrated the harmony between God and the world, between reason and mystery."
And this one, on a different note:
"Christian faith is not a system. It cannot be portrayed as a complete, finished intellectual construction. It is a path, and it is characteristic of a path that it only becomes recognizable if you enter on it and start following it."
I've been reading a book by former Cardinal Ratzinger (now the Pope), entitled Truth and Tolerance. I REALLY like his style and the themes this book covers: much of it is about Christianity's relationship to other religions, but a great section in the end deals with the relationship between Reason and Mystery in Christianity.
Here are some quotes that have resonated with me in the last week:
"Nowadays we divide the world into discrete areas and are thereby able to dominate it in our thought and action in a way that could previously hardly be imagined, yet the unavoidable questions concerning truth and values, life and death, become thereby ever more unanswerable. The present-day crisis is due to the fact that the connecting link between the subjective and the objective realms has disappeared, that reason and feeling are drifting apart, and that both are ailing because of it....
There is nothing else for it: reason and religion will have to come together again without merging into each other. It is not a matter of preserving the old religious bodies. It is for the sake of man and the world. And neither of them, it is clear, can be saved unless God reappears in a convincing fashion.
The faith of Israel [after the influence of Greek thought] demonstrated the harmony between God and the world, between reason and mystery."
And this one, on a different note:
"Christian faith is not a system. It cannot be portrayed as a complete, finished intellectual construction. It is a path, and it is characteristic of a path that it only becomes recognizable if you enter on it and start following it."