I don't know if this is new or old news. I hadn't heard that the the recent Pope denied the resurrection of the body and redefined what the soul was. I understood he was a return to the old Catholic Dogma. But evidently he has some old skeletons in his closet from his more liberal days.
This obviously also has to effect his doctrine of the person and work of Christ which is discussed shortly in this short article.
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Ratzinger’s book, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, covers, amongst other things, the nature of the resurrection. He notes that the accepted view among modern Roman Catholic and liberal Protestant theologians is that body and soul expire at the point of death and that 'the proper Christian thing, therefore, is to speak, not of the soul’s immortality, but of the resurrection of the complete human being and of that alone' (p 105). He notes that the word soul has disappeared from Roman Catholic liturgy (also from Roman Catholic Bible translations) as a consequence. Ratzinger offers his own new definition of the soul: 'The "soul" is our term for that in us which offers a foothold for this relation [with the eternal]. Soul is nothing other than man’s capacity for relatedness with truth, with love eternal' (p 259). The soul is therefore defined heretically as the capacity for relationship rather than real spiritual substance; having a soul means 'being God’s partner in dialogue'.[SUP]10
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In Introduction to Christianity, Ratzinger explicitly denies the resurrection of the body. 'It now becomes clear that the real heart of faith in the resurrection does not consist at all in the idea of the restoration of bodies, to which we have reduced it in our thinking; such is the case even though this is the pictorial image used throughout the Bible'. He says that the word body, or flesh, in the phrase, the resurrection of the body, 'in effect means "the world of man" . . . [it is] not meant in the sense of a corporality isolated from the soul' (pp 240-41).
Ratzinger is deliberately using a meaning that is impossible in the context, in order to explain away the clear meaning of the text. This is also done in relation to the word for body (Greek:soma), which he says can also mean self. He draws the conclusion that 'one thing at any rate may be fairly clear: both John (6:63) and Paul (1 Cor. 15:50) state with all possible emphasis that the "resurrection of the flesh", the "resurrection of the body", is not a "resurrection of physical bodies" . . . Paul teaches, not the resurrection of physical bodies, but the resurrection of persons, and this not in the return of "flesh body", that is, the biological structure, an idea he expressly describes as impossible ("the perishable cannot become imperishable") but in the different form of the life of the resurrection, as shown in the risen Lord' (p 246).
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This obviously also has to effect his doctrine of the person and work of Christ which is discussed shortly in this short article.
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