Franciscan Penance Library

FAITH IN ONE GOD

In Introduction to Christianity, Professor Joseph Ratzinger deals with what it actually means to profess belief in “One God” :  “Let us therefore return to our point of departure,  to the words of the Creed:  I believe in God , the Father, the almighty, the Creator.  This statement, with which Christians have been professing their faith in God for almost two thousand years, is the product of a still older history.   Behind it stands Israel’s daily profession of faith, the Christian form of which it represents: ‘Hear, O Israel, Yahweh, thy God, is an only God.’ With its first words the Christian creed takes up the creed of Israel and takes up with it Israel’s striving, its experience of faith, and its struggle for God, which thus becomes an inner dimension of the Christian faith, which would not exist without this struggle.”  We can see that Christianity shares her faith in One God with Israel.  But what was the alternative to faith in One God for Israel?  This certainly was polytheism (faith in many Gods). 

Professor Ratzinger says “ ‘Yahweh, thy God, is an only God’----this fundamental profession, which forms the background to our Creed, making it possible, is in its original sense a renunciation of the surrounding gods.   It is a profession in the fullest sense of this word, that is, it is not the registration of one view alongside others but an existential decision. As a renunciation of the gods, it also implies the renunciation both of the deification of political powers and of the deification of the cosmic cycle ‘Sterbe und werde’ (die and become).  If one can say that hunger, love, and power are the forces that motivate man, then one can point out, as an extension of this observation, that the three main forms of polytheism are the worship of bread, the worship of love, and the idolization of power.  All three paths are aberrations;  they make absolutes out of what is not in itself absolute, and they thereby make slaves of men.   They are also, it is true, aberrations in which something is sensed of the power that bears up the universe.  Israel’s profession is, as we have said, a declaration of war on this threefold worship  and thus an event of the greatest importance in the history of man’s liberation.  As a declaration of war on this threefold worship this profession of faith is at the same time a declaration of war on the multiplication of the divine in general.   It is a renunciation-----we shall have to look at this more closely later on---- of gods of one’s own, or in other words, of the deification of one’s own possessions, something that is fundamental to polytheism.  In this it is simultaneously, a renunciation of the attempt to keep one’s own possessions safe, a renunciation of the fear that tries to tame the mysterious by worshipping it, and an assent  to the one God of heaven as the power that guarantees everything;  it signifies the courage to entrust oneself  to the power that governs the whole world without grasping the divine in one’s hand.”

We can see that Israel is not only rejecting the specific neighboring gods and saying that their God (Yahweh) is the only God.  They were also rejecting the idolization of the human drives which are behind these “gods”----  food (pleasure), love (sex), and power (politics).  These things are not rejected outright but rather the idolization of these things.

Reading the Old Testament we can see how often Israel lapsed into idolatry by worshipping the neighboring gods alongside or instead of Yahweh.  It is easy to understand how this could happen when we understand the human drives of pleasure, sex, and politics which lie behind these gods.  We want to entrust ourselves to that which is immediate and close at hand rather than to the real God who often seems so distant.  We can understand why the ancient prophets often likened Israel’s lapses into idolatry as adultery since  these lapses are closely related to the drive behind idolatry (pleasure and sex).  In addition, these alien forms of worship also often involved cultic prostitution.

Professor Ratzinger then points out that the early Christians took up this very same rejection, but now it was the rejection not of neighboring gods but the rejection of the political and religious atmosphere of the Roman Empire: “For whoever assented to this creed renounced at the same time the laws of the world to which he belonged;  he renounced the worship of the ruling political power, on which the late Roman Empire rested, he renounce the worship of pleasure and the cult of fear and superstition that ruled the world.   It was no coincidence that the struggle over Christianity flared up in the field thereby defined and grew into a struggle over the whole shape of public life in the ancient world.”  

Professor Ratzinger asserts that now many would consider the early Christian rejection of even the most harmless forms of the Roman religious cult as extreme since there seems to be many ways to compromise Christian faith with the ruling political and religious climate.  Yet he also says “In any case it is important to realize that this refusal was far from being a piece of narrow-minded fanaticism  and that it changed the world in a way  in which it can only be changed by the readiness to suffer.   Those events showed that faith is not a matter of playing with ideas but a very serious business: it says no, and must say no, to the absoluteness of political power and to the worship of the mighty in general----‘He has put down the mighty from their thrones’ (Lk 1:52); and in doing so  it  has shattered the political  principle’s claim to totality once and for all.  In this sense the profession ‘There is only one God’ is, precisely  because it has itself no political aims, a program of decisive political importance: through the absoluteness that it lends the individual from his God, and through the relativization to which it relegates  all political communities in comparison  with the unity of God who embraces them all, it forms the only definitive  protection against the power of the collective and at the same time implies the complete  abolition  of any idea of exclusiveness in humanity as a whole.”

Even though Professor Ratzinger wrote these words in the middle 1960’s, we can see how they are very relevant today.  At the present time there certainly are many Christians and even Catholics who are so enamored of politicians and political programs that they are willing to set aside God’s commandments concerning abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, and marriage.   Just like ancient polytheism, they may be willing to recognize some sort of  Absolute Being, but this “absolute” has no relationship to their everyday lives.  Even though they do not worship the gods of ancient times, they worship the powers behind these gods --- pleasure, sex, politics.  Early Christianity destroyed the divinity of these “gods” and so there usually is not cultic worship of these things.  Yet the human drives behind the “gods” (pleasure, sex, power) remain to this day.  Those who try to totally remove Christianity from  the public sphere and relegate it exclusively to the private sphere have made a vacuum which is being filled by the alternative to Christianity, which is the idolization of pleasure, sex, and politics.  We must never forget what we are saying when we say “I believe in One God”.

James Nugent (Jim is a life pledge member of the CFP)