I have just finished reading
(1) Ratzinger writes as a theologian in the honorable tradition of the Anselmian ‘faith seeking understanding’ which is to say, he writes as a believer seeking understanding; as a consequence, he writes from the angle of the hermeneutics of trust and not of suspicion.
(2) He understands the competence of the exegete but he refuses to allow the exegete to have the final say and, further, he appreciates that biblical exegesis did not begin for Catholics in the twentieth century. What he has learned from the “Third Quest” (as my esteemed colleague John Meier has said) is that if we do not see Jesus against the backkground of Judaism we see him wrongly.
(3) His work takes into account the
(4) His real antagonists are those who would reduce Jesus down to a genteel liberal Protestant or a political revolutionary or a philosopher (pick your reductionist category).
(5) In the background of this work is his own penchant for seeing things via the lens of the witness and proclamation of the church in its life; hence, his work is both catechesis (in the sense of “echoing” the faith) and theology (in the sense of trying to understand what he believes).
(6) While it is true that he cites a number of contemporary exegetes this is not a pastiche of scholarly opinions cobbled together but a rather singular christological portrait arising from years of study. It is a work that cries out for expansion and, in that sense, is not a profound book; it is rather a prologomenon for such a work. May God give him strength and health to finish the promised second volume.
(7) Finally, the book should be read not for its scholarship (although there is a fair amount of that in the book) but in the spirit of what Saint Bonaventure says at the end of his prologue to the