Summary
Title: Many Religions, One Covenant: Israel, the Church, and the World
Author: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 0898707536
Pro:
• Short, easy to digest
Con:
• Doesn’t actually do what it appears designed to achieve
Description:
• Short introduction to Benedict’s thoughts on Christianity and Judaism
• Discusses the nature of “covenant” in each religion
Book Review
One of the interesting things about conceiving of Christianity as a “covenant” is that this is also the way Judaism is understood; thus, a focus on the nature of a covenant with God also allows one to draw Judaism and Christianity together. This makes sense in some ways because Christianity grew out of Judaism and continues to rely upon Jewish scriptures which have a great deal to say about the Jewish covenant with God.
Because church officials spend so much time trying to correct errors and heresies, much theology is done in the context of focusing on very narrow issues where people are prone to misunderstandings or mistakes. Pope Benedict XVI, while still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, felt that while this makes a lot sense, it has the serious drawback of making theology appear concerned with minutiae and prevents theologians from developing ideas which help explain things from a general perspective.
Countering this trend is one of the purposes behind Ratzinger’s Many Religions, One Covenant: Israel, the Church, and the World. This book consists of three lectures and a homily delivered in various contexts, but all of which deal with the nature of Christianity’s covenant with God and the relationship between this covenant and the covenant which Jews had with God. To an extent, then, this book is about the relationship between Jews and Christians — certainly an important issue — but it’s also much more.
In a general sense, this book deals with the very nature of Christianity by focusing upon the biblical principle of a covenant which, in turn, helps explains the nature of the rest of Christianity: dogmatic theology, magisterial authority, and biblical scholarship. Properly understood, the nature of the covenant is the foundation of the Christian religion in all its diversity — if you don’t understand it, then you don’t understand Christianity.
Critical for Benedict’s understanding of the Christian covenant with God is that it isn’t really a “different” covenant from the one with Jews. The Jewish covenant never ended and the Christian covenant isn’t a separate agreement; instead, they are both part of the same covenant, just differently conceived. There are multiple covenants in the sense that there are multiple communications and contracts between God and his people; there is ultimately only one Covenant, however, because there is only one eternal promise and proper relationship between God and humanity.
This leads Benedict into a difficult contradiction: he doesn’t want to assert that Judaism isn’t true, but at the same time he insists that Christianity is the only means to salvation. Arguing that there is a single covenant involving both Jews and Christians is an attempt to get around this, but I don’t think that he is successful. It makes sense that the truth of the Jewish covenant is a necessary premise for accepting the truth of the Christian covenant, but the ongoing validity of the Jewish understanding of this covenant isn’t compatible with the insistence that only the Christian understanding of the covenant leads one to heaven.
