Western Culture Today and Tomorrow: Addressing the Fundamental Issues

Well known for his important scholarly contributions to dogmatic theology and biblical commentary, Joseph Ratzinger has also been an insightful, shrewd analyst of political modernity and its discontents. This work reveals Ratzinger's keen insight into the fundamental challenges confronting the twenty-first-century West.

The West as a Civilizational Project

The civilizational project we call "the West" was a cultural achievement with a history. Ratzinger understands that Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome were the three legs of the cultural stool on which "the West" rests. From that understanding, Ratzinger draws his analysis of the West's post-modern crisis.

• Jerusalem: Nineteenth-century Western culture "kicked the Jerusalem leg out from under the stool" when its "atheist humanists" declared the God of the Bible the enemy of human maturation and liberation.
• Athens: When the Jerusalem leg is lost, the Athenian leg becomes wobbly. Without the conviction that the God of the Bible imprinted something of His own "rationality" into a world created by the Logos (the Word or "reason" of God), reason begins to doubt its own ability to discern the truth of anything.

The Dictatorship of Relativism

This assault on the capacity of reason to discern truth with certainty connects directly with what Ratzinger famously called the "dictatorship of relativism"—the use of coercive state power to impose a relativistic moral order on all of society.

Addressing the Crisis

In response to this grave crisis today, Ratzinger emphasizes the need to focus on answering fundamental questions, such as:

• How did Western culture originate, and what are its boundaries?
• What are the spiritual roots of Western culture?
• What is the moral foundation on which it is built?

The Path to Reconversion

"The witness of Christian lives nobly lived is the beginning of reconversion of the West, and that return to the truths taught by the God of the Bible is essential if the great Western civilizational project is not to crumble."

Joseph Ratzinger understood this danger long before many others. It would be well to attend to his prescription.