God – not natural science or human artifice – is the ultimate source of meaning, the origin and end of the new kingship that is revealed in Jesus’ ministry. That is why Christian prayers speak of Christ as God and King – new sovereign and eternal high priest.
Thus, Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week broadens and deepens his meditation on the “figure and message of Jesus” begun in the first volume. In the second volume, he develops a new, theological hermeneutic that blends a faith-hermeneutic “appropriate to the text … with a historical hermeneutic, aware of its limits, so as to form a methodological whole.”
As such, the pope provides an extraordinarily rich and deeply philosophical exegesis that outflanks the old, narrow divide between liberals and conservatives.
Thank you for posting this.