Ratzinger uses the term metanoia as a catchall description for what occurs at— and after—baptism. To understand metanoia is to have the pulse of Ratzinger’s theology: “metanoia is not just any Christian attitude, but the fundamental Christian act
per se, understood admittedly from a very definite perspective: that of transformation, ———————————
94. Again, if Jesus Christ is not true God and true man, baptism is meaningless: “Theo-christology.... is how the belonging to God that Jesus spoke of actually takes place” (EDEL, 115).
95. Again, “the identification of each human person with all other human persons is possible, because all do stand or can stand in the context of this fundamental [double] identification” accomplished in Christ (“Identification,” 24).
conversion, renewal and change” (PCT, 60 [62]).96 Ratzinger usesmetanoia to capture
the depths of Christian transformation, which is not only noetic and ethical, but ontic: “To be a Christian, one must change not just in some particular area but without reservation even to the innermost depths of one’s being.” For this reason, metanoia
perfectly describes faith, because “faith is located in the act of conversion, indeed, “it is a conversion [Bekerung], an about-turn [Kehre der Existenze], a shift of being [Wende des Seins]” (ItC, 88 [79 and 80], drawing on Heidegger).97 By emphasizing thatmetanoia
involves both reception and response, Ratzinger highlights that 1) conversion is neither natural for humanity nor against human nature, and 2) while humans cannot convert themselves, conversion does require human cooperation. Thus, Ratzinger allows that humans are “open to the truth” by nature, and that “sin has not quite extinguished in the heart of man the capacity to recognize the voice of God,” while continually stressing that “[n]o one can make himself a Christian” (ItC, 88). With regard to its possibility, “[c]onversion... always has its source from without; it is a gift which always comes... from Christ, who comes to meet us” (“Biblical Foundations of Priesthood,” 622; cf. NMT, 52–53; and ItC, 93).98 In rather stark terms: “God
intervenes where there is a human vacuum; he starts at the point at which, from the human point of view, nothing can be done” (DaP, 79).99 This is not, however, to say
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96. Ratzinger develops a “philosophy of metanoia” (that is, freedom and conversion) to critique the deficiencies of modern western philosophy (PCT, 171).
97. “[B]eliefis... conversion” (ItC, 51).
98. Note the trinitarian dynamic of conversion: “the Holy Spirit leads us to Christ, and Christ opens the door to the Father” (SL, 178). As the Word always precedes human activity, Ratzinger argues that infant baptism is justified. Furthermore, Ratzinger asks “what gift could be more precious and purer than this,” as it “gives us in advance the fact of being loved by eternal love” that is, “the gift of love that was waiting for us even before we began to breathe” (GJC, 29)? Note, though, that Ratzinger does not understand infant baptism to stand alone, but to be part of a whole that includes baptism, catechism and confirmation—i.e., a believing response.
99. Therefore, “baptism can take place only passively, as being baptized, for no one can make himself a son. [A son] must be made” (PCT, 32 [32]). Ratzinger here evidences his debt to Barth’s doctrine of election as he argues that because God’s name is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, “we ourselves are destined [bestimmt werden] to be sons, to enter into the Son’s relationship with God” (PCT, 32 [32]). Cf. Ratzinger’s early appreciation for Karl Barth’s doctrine of election (MCB, 75–84).
that there is not a human, earthly element in baptism.
Indeed, Ratzinger argues that baptism has two necessary elements “the activity [Handeln] of God” and “the cooperation [Mithandeln] of man” (PCT, 41 [43]). Ratzinger describes this cooperation as “obedience, humility in the face of God’s word” (DaP, 22), in which “[t]here exists no antithesis between purely active conferral and purely passive reception,” because baptism is “an active reception,” or “active passivity and passive activity” (PCT, 107, n. 27 and 41).100 Moreover, by the grace of God, the
church’s reception of the word becomes the transmission of the word—analogous to the way Jesus’ human words and actions in response to the Father themselves reveal the Father and in the same way the apostles’ words became scripture. So while the church is a creature of the Word—“[t]his Word is set above the Church” and “repeatedly goes before her in every place, calls her together, and builds her up”—the Word is also “within her and is entrusted to her as a living agent” and “in certain respects” the church is “the Word and the answer in one” (PFF, 142).101This means
that metanoiadoes not occur in isolation, and baptism “is not an isolated autonomous decision of the subject but essentially a reception: a sharing in the already existing decision of the Church” (PCT, 37 [38]). Being bound to the community, however, actually results in freedom, because it “throws open the frontier between the ‘I’ and the ‘not-I’” (NMT, 52). That is to say, “the liberation of man consists in his being freed from himself,” that is, “the being-taken-out-of-himself... not continuing to be himself, but in going out from himself.... and, in relinquishing himself, truly finding himself.” Becoming part of the whole does not destroy “the other, the particular, the apparently not-necessary and free,” but affirms it and gives it lasting life, that is reality (PCT, 171 ———————————
100. [Es gibt nicht ein Gegenüber von rein aktivem Spendem und bloss passivem Empfangen; die Spendung im Tauf-dialog verweist vielmehr auf ein aktives Empfangen,112—the German better indicates that Ratzinger has in his sights the false opposition between the activity of the clergy and the passivity of the laity.]
101. “In order to be present and effective in history, the Word of God needs this agent, and yet the agent for her part cannot exist without the life-giving power of the Word—indeed, it is this that makes her a living agent” (PFF, 142).
[179]). Yet, to receive this lasting “I” paradoxically requires the sacrifice, the death, of the “I.”