Theopedia

Benedict XVI

Overview

Benedict XVI (born Joseph Ratzinger, 1927-2022) served as pope of the Roman Catholic Church from 2005 to 2013. Reformed writers outside his own communion have engaged two of his arguments in particular: a relational, Christ-centered account of what it means to be a person, and a defense of the patristic and Reformed tradition’s use of Greek philosophical categories against the charge that doing so corrupted biblical faith.

Theological Contribution

Ratzinger argued that personhood is fundamentally relational and Christological, not a matter of substance. In his 1990 essay “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” he held it was “a mistake to see the person of the Son as a ‘unique ontological exception that must be treated as such.’”1 Instead, Christ discloses what personhood itself is: “what is disclosed in Christ, whom faith certainly presents as unique, is not only a speculative exception; what is disclosed in truth is what the riddle of the human person really intends.”2 On this view the Christological concept of person is not an exception to be fenced off from ordinary anthropology but “an indication for theology of how person is to be understood as such.”3 Ratzinger judged the classical, Boethian definition of person deficient because it operates “entirely on the level of substance,” and held that theology has done better at clarifying what personhood is not than at stating positively what it is.4

Southern Baptist theologian Darron Thomas Chapman, defending a Boethian/Thomistic definition of person against this critique, disagrees with Ratzinger’s negative assessment: “I see no reason Boethius[’s] definition should not be adopted, when understood through Aquinas,” adding that no single definition should be expected to “exhaust all that could be said” about personhood.5

Ratzinger also argued against the charge that the church’s classical doctrine of God corrupted a purer biblical faith by importing Greek philosophy. His 2006 Regensburg Lecture is cited by Reformed theologian Craig Carter as scholarship establishing that the nineteenth-century “theory of theology’s fall into Hellenization” (see Hellenization thesis) “is overstated and obscures more than it illumines.”6 Carter calls Ratzinger’s “analysis of what he calls ‘dehellenization’ … brilliant and repays careful reading.”6

Historical Significance

Both arguments still turn up in confessional Protestant scholarship outside Roman Catholicism. Chapman’s 2026 Southern Baptist Theological Seminary dissertation takes Ratzinger’s relational account of personhood as the chief modern view it argues against,5 and Carter leans on the Regensburg Lecture in his own case against the dehellenization narrative.6

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” Communio 17 (1990): 449, quoted in Darron Thomas Chapman, “Boethius’ Definition Examined and Defended,” in “The Concept of Person in Christian Theology: An Exposition and Defense of a Classical Boethian/Thomistic Definition of Person” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2026), 160. ↩

  2. Ratzinger, “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” 450, quoted in Chapman, “Boethius’ Definition Examined and Defended,” 160. ↩

  3. Ratzinger, “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” 450, quoted in Chapman, “Boethius’ Definition Examined and Defended,” 161. ↩

  4. Chapman, “Boethius’ Definition Examined and Defended,” 161n30. ↩

  5. Chapman, “Boethius’ Definition Examined and Defended,” 161. ↩ ↩2

  6. Craig A. Carter, “Do We Worship the God of the Bible?,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 9, n4. ↩ ↩2 ↩3