Friday, December 22, 2006
CARDINAL RATZINGER MENTIONS THE ANTICHRIST
in his study titled "The New Evangelization: Building the Civilization of Love".
This expropriation of one's person, offering it to Christ for the salvation of men, is the fundamental condition of the true commitment for the Gospel. "I have come in my Father's name, and you do not receive me; if another comes in his own name, him you will receive," says the Lord (John 5:43). The mark of the Antichrist is the fact that he speaks in his own name.
in his essay titled "Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: On the Question of the Foundations and Approaches to Exegesis Today":
In Wladimir Solowjew's History of the Antichrist, the eschatological enemy of the Redeemer recommended himself to believers, among other things, by the fact that he had earned his doctorate in theology at Tübingen and had written an exegetical work which was recognized as pioneering in the field. The Antichrist, a famous exegete! With this paradox Solowjew sought to shed light on the ambivalence inherent in biblical exegetical methodology for almost a hundred years now. To speak of the crisis of the historical-critical method today is practically a truism. This, despite the fact that it had gotten off to so optimistic a start.
Speaking of his father, Ratzinger is quoted in his bio. at the Ignatius Press website:
His father worked as a rural policeman, which kept his family continually moving from town to town. In his memoirs about his early life (prior to his appointment as Archbishop of Munich), Milestones: Memoirs 1927 – 1977 (Ignatius, 1999), Ratzinger depicts his family life as quite happy. Family and Church were, for him, inseparable – and he clearly saw Hitler and the Third Reich as the enemy to both. He has said of his father, “…He saw that a victory of Hitler would not be a victory for Germany but a victory of the Antichrist…”.
