Annie’s Reviews > Introduction to Christianity > Status Update

Heresies that the Church worked through to understand the trinity, and that the process was not fruitless: “…all these statements are not so much gravestones as the bricks of a cathedral, which are, of course, only useful when they do not remain alone but are inserted into something bigger, just as even the positively accepted formulas are valid only if they are at the same time aware of their own inadequacy.”

..it becomes evident here how the categories of minimum & maximum, smallest and greatest, change in a perspective of this sort. In a world that in the last analysis is not mathematics but love, the minimum is a maximum; the smallest thing that can love is one of the biggest things; the particular is more than the universal; the person, the unique and unrepeatable, is at the same time the ultimate and highest thing.

-Discussion of how to bridge between the “God of faith” and the “God of the philosophers”

-Phil. paths ultimately fork over the “secret of being”: everything is ultimately material or “all being is ultimately being-thought and can be traced back to mind as the original reality”

-Christianity sides more with the latter, but not entirely so…

A great chapter. I may need to write summary notes for myself…

Feels like I’m Keller with more dense philosophy and church history.

So good.

Ratzinger is always very good, from what I’ve read of him so far (not just from this book).