Pope Benedict XVI: The Mission of a Catholic Theologian

"Truth is God's Revelation in Christ Jesus which demands as an answer obedience to the faith in communion with the Church and its Magisterium."

ROME (Catholic Online) - On December 5, 2008 Pope Benedict XVI spoke to the participants in the plenary session of the International Theological Commission. Catholic Online presents a translation of his address:

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In a " Global society", such as the one which is now in formation, public opinion asks of theologians, above all, to promote the dialogue between religions and cultures, to aid in the development of ethics which have as their own essential parameters peace, justice, the defense of the natural environment. And these are truly fundamental goods.

Yet, a theology limited to these noble objectives would lose not only its own identity, but the very foundation of these goods. The first priority of Theology, as its own name already indicates, is to speak of God, to think God. And theology speaks of God not as a hypothesis of our imagination. It speaks of God because God himself has spoken to us. The true work of theology is to enter in the word of God, to try to understand it as much as possible, and to make it understood by our world, and thus to find the answers to our great questions. In this work, it is also evident that faith is not only not opposed to reason, but that it opens the eyes of reason, it widens or horizon, and it allows us to find the answers [which are] necessary to the challenges of different times.

From an objective point of view, truth is God's Revelation in Christ Jesus, which demands as an answer obedience to the faith in communion with the Church and its Magisterium. When the identity of theology is thus retrieved, understood as a reasoned, systematic, and methodical reflection on Revelation and faith, also the question of the [theological] method is clarified. The method, in theology, must not be built only according to criteria and rules common to the other sciences, but it should observe, first of all, the principles and norms which derive from Revelation and from faith, from the fact that God has spoken.

From a subjective point of view - that is from the viewpoint of him who makes theology - the fundamental virtue of the theologian is to reach for obedience to the faith, the humility of the faith which opens our eyes: this humility renders the theologian a collaborator of truth. In this sense, it will not happen that he will speak of himself; innerly purified by his obedience to truth, he will instead achieve that Truth itself, that the Lord may speak through the theologian and theology. At the same time, he will accomplish that, through him, truth may be brought into the world.

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