The Catholic Book Club discussion

I am adding this thread, as Jill and I seem to have got there first, and will possibly want to add some comments.

I can't understand the first paragraph of chapter 10 in my Spanish translation of this book (which was written initially in German). Can any of you provide an English translation that may be clearer? My English translation of what I have is the following:

The central statement of the third part of the Symbol reads like this, according to the original Greek text: "I believe in the Holy Spirit"; therefore, the article to which the translation has accustomed us is missing. This is very important, to know the meaning of what is stated there; in effect, it can be inferred that this article was not originally conceived as trinitarian, but as historical-salvific.

I don't get what the word "article" means in this context.

Either the Spanish has a mistake or you are importing a meaning that isn't there out of customary usage.

". . . the central statement in the third section of the Creed runs simply: 'I believe in Holy Spirit.'" The definite article "the" is not present. That is the article that he is noting as missing.

Yes, the Spanish translation is wrong. It says "I believe in the Holy Spirit" and then states that the article is missing, which it isn't.

Also I was confused by the double meaning of the word "article," which appears twice in this paragraph with two different meanings:

1. The definite article "the."

2. The article of faith, a little later: "this article was not originally conceived as trinitarian."

Thanks for solving my problem.

My translation says "I believe in Holy Spirit," which is striking. I love his explanation "of the Holy Spirit as the power through which the risen Lord remains present in the history of the world as the principle of a new history and a new world." And his account of how tragic it is when "church" is detached from the dynamism of the Holy Spirit, leaving only the shell of an institution based on a human power hierarchy.

I love his assertion in chapter IIb, the big question of immortality, that having a soul means being willed, known, and loved by God in a special way, "being God's partner in a dialogue." Wow!

Isn't the problem that "Creo en Espíritu Santo", without an article, would not be correct in Spanish?

Mariangel wrote: "Isn't the problem that "Creo en Espíritu Santo", without an article, would not be correct in Spanish?"

Yes, that is the problem, but the translator should have found some alternative option that would not end in the contradiction of giving the phrase with the article, and then stating that there is no article. Or, given the context, "Creo en Espíritu Santo" would have been acceptable, although syntactically incorrect.

Unless I am mistaken, or reading my own thoughts in Ratzinger's book, I think the last section of the book (on the resurrection of the flesh) comes down to the following two ideas:

1. We are immortal because we are the idea that God has of us. As God's ideas are immortal, so we are.

2. There is no time interval between death and resurrection, when the soul is separate from the body. Rather, after death, we are taken by Christ to a new Earth under a new Heaven with a new body, in a time frame completely different from ours.