Ratzinger on Religious Pluralism

What can Christian theology claim about the place of other religions in God's providential plan for humanity? How can it reconcile the universality of God's saving plan and the particularity of Christ and the Church? What meaning is left to Christian existence and mission in a religiously pluralist world? As priest-theologian, cardinal archbishop, and pope, Joseph Ratzinger reflected on these difficult questions for more than half a century and in a variety of contexts, proffering an array of profound answers that are dispersed across his substantial literary corpus. In Ratzinger on Religious Pluralism, Sameer Advani assembles and synthesizes these reflections and answers of the late pontiff, providing a systematic study of Ratzinger's theology of religions that attends to the scope of his larger historical, philosophical, and theological concerns. The first part analyzes Ratzinger's critical engagement with various paradigms of religious pluralism, whose accounts of religion, Christianity, and non-Christian religions he found both phenomenologically and theologically wanting. The second part, in turn, explores Ratzinger's positive proposal for a theology of religions, which locates both Christianity and non-Christian religions against the larger backgrounds of anthropological unity, the human search for truth, and divine providence. Advani argues that while Ratzinger rejected the idea that other religions are salvific or on par with Christianity, he recognized both their important role in God's providential plan and their suitedness to an "assumption" into the Church through mutual, albeit asymmetric, purification and enrichment.

Fr. Sameer Advani, LC, is a Canadian priest of German and Indian background with degrees in theology, philosophy, and mathematics. He is professor of dogmatic theology at the Pontifical Atheneum Regina Apostolorum, where he is also director of the Christianity and Culture Program and research scholar in the Multiculturalism and Religion Project of the UNESCO Chair in Bioethics and Human Rights.