The letter interprets this simple, profound, and fundamental concept, which was likewise the basic concept of Vatican Council II, in the words: “Let us live by every word that comes from your mouth.” Let us live by the words that interpret the Word and that are the word from him and in him. This is a reference to Holy Scripture – a reminder that in Holy Scripture we encounter God’s living Word, which is always the source from which we receive the answer anew, from which life comes anew into this world; a reminder that from Scripture we must always find our way back to our own hearts, to ourselves and to God, and so build the world.

After Christocentrism, the second concrete concern of the Council was to establish Holy Scripture as the center of Christian faith. Not to know Scripture is not to know Jesus, Saint Jerome tells us. And we know Christ only if we are conversant with the words that are the words of God. Scripture tells us how such a oneness with Christ, such a penetration to the center, is to be achieved in practice. It tells us that faith is not something remote from us, something that would require us to engage in great research, or perhaps, to cross an ocean or make an expedition into the depths of the earth. It speaks to us of what is near. The word is in your heart. You have only to enter into your own heart and you will find it there.

Jesus is Lord, Jesus is risen. In these words Paul identifies the two confessional formulas of the Church, which form the heart of our confession of faith. He says: When you enter into your heart, you enter into the place where Jesus is, and vice versa you enter into your heart only when you do not simply hide yourself in yourself but co-believe with the faith of the living Church. In co-believing with the faith of the living Church, in letting yourself be carried along by it, even though many individual teachings continue to be obscure, you are hidden in the communality of the faith and so remain faithful to it, communicate with it. We read Holy Scripture as we should, from its center, from its inner unity, only when we read it in harmony with the faith of the Church.

From: L’Osservatore Romano 13, no.8 (1983), p.12

Time has a list of 10 interesting facts about the world’s oldest Bible.

When a man experiences God, he recognizes his own sinfulness, and it is only when he really knows and acknowledges this sinfulness that he really kows himself.  And in that way he becomes truly himself.  Only when a man knows that he is sinful and has comprehended the evil of sin does he also comprehend the summons: “Repent, and believe in the good news” (Mk 1:15).

For without conversion, it is impossible to discover Jesus, to discover the Gospel.  I am reminded here of Chesterton’s paradoxical sentence that states this thought with great accuracy: We know a saint by the fact that he knows he is a seinner.  The failure of modern man to experience God is reflected today in his failure to experience sin, and vice versa, his failure to acquire this knowledge draws him away from God.

Without regressing to a false pedagogy of anxiety, we should learn once more the truth of the words: Initium sapentiae timor Domini.  Wisdom, genuine understanding, begin with the proper fear of the Lord.  We must relearn this if we are to learn true love and to undertand what it means when we say that it is permitted us to love God and that he loves us.

Peter’s experience is likewise a fundamental prerequisite for the apostolate and thus for the priesthood.  Conversion- the first word of Christianity- can be preached only by one who has himself had personal experience of its necessity and has, in consequence, comprehended the greatness of grace.

From:Diener eurer Freude, pp. 92-93

Let us take an example:  if I know of someone that he falls under the concept “man”, this is still not enough to enable me to establish a relation to him.  Only the name makes him nameable; through the name the other enters into the structure, so to speak, of my fellow-humanity; through the name I can call him.  Thus the name signifies and effects the social incorporation, the inclusion in the structure of social relations.  Anyone who is still regarded only as a number is excluded from the structure of fellow-humanity.  But the name establishes the relation of fellow-humanity.  It gives to a being the “invocability” from which co-existence with the namer arises.  This will probably make clear what Old Testament faith means when it speaks of a name of God.

The aim is different from that of the philosopher seeking the concept of the highest Being.  The concept is a product of thinking that wants to know what that highest Being is like in itself.  Not so the name.  When God names himself after the self-understanding of faith he is not so much expressing his inner nature as making himself nameable; he is handing himself over to men in such a way that he can be called upon by them.  And by doing this he enters into co-existence with them, he puts himself within their reach, he is “there” for them.

Here too is the angle from which it would seem to become clear what it means when John presents the Lord Jesus Christ as the real, living name of God.  In him is fulfilled what a mere name could never in the end fulfill.  In him the meaning of the discussion of the name of God has reached its goal, and so too has that which was always menat and intended by the idea of the name of God.

From: Introduction to Christianity, pp. 91-92

The background of this Psalm verse is the ancient image of the cup containing the lots for each man, and God holding these lots.  Yet in this image two different conceptions about the meaning and challenge of time collide, conceptions that even nowadays still determine our struggle for the future. 

The pagan world view was also familiar with the image of the lots, but with entirely different premises: the world is a game of luck governed by the one rule – blind chance.  Time, altogether blind, spews out the lots, of this kind and that.  The Bible has fundamentally transformed this frightening image.  Indeed, there is the cup with the lots, containing winners and losers.  But this cup with the lots is held “in your hands”, in the hands of eternal Wisdom and eternal Love.  This is the indispensable premise that alone can provide for man any hope at all.  Because the cup is in his hands, the only losing lot would be the refusal to accept at all the lot from his hands. 

The Latin translation of the Bible has conferred on this inexhaustible Psalm verse still greater depth: In your hands, there rests my time.  In purely linguistic terms we could also translate: In your hands, there rest my temples.  Thus an image arises of ourselves entrusting our head, our temples, to God’s good hands.  It also becomes evident that man’s time is not merely the time reckoned by the revolutions of the sun, the earth, or the moon.  Far from it!  With man a new center of the world has appeared, a new unit of calculation: a heartbeat, constituting the measure of his existence, even the new measure of all being as such, and a new center of the world. 

To draw our existence out of this time, to acknowledge this time as our true time, and out of this awareness to model this our world – such is the call of this Psalm verse.  The time of the heart is transformed into sunlit time by the fact that our heart does not beat in a vacuum: our heart, conferring rhythm also on our brain and our mind, finds the true timing of its beat by putting itself into the hands of him who holds all our time in his hands – into the hands of eternal Wisdom, which is eternal Love and so our only true Hope. 

And so the, we put this new year, the new time and our future, into the hands of God: Lord, do accept us, and grant us your blessing!

From: Ordinariatskorrespondenz, no.1 January 4, 1979

The biblical term shalom, which is usually so translated, implies much more than the absence of armed conflict; it means the right order of human affairs, well-being -a world where trust and friendship prevail, where neither fear nor want nor treachery nor dishonesty is found.  Yet the song of the angels first lays down a precondition, without which there can be no lasting peace: God’s glory.  This is the message of peace at Bethlehem: peace among men results from God’s glory.  Those who are concerned about the human race and its well-being have to be concerned about God’s glory first of all. 

God’s glory is not some private concern, left to the personal choice of the individual; it is a public affair.  It is a common good, and wherever God is not honored among men, there man as well will not remain honorable.  The reason why Christmas affects the peace of man lies in this: because it has restored God’s glory among men.

From: Lob der Weihmacht, pp. 36f

We overlook, in so asking, that beauty given over to the Lord is the only true common property of everybody.  What a difference there is between a residence and a church, between a museum and a cathedral!  What a difference there is between laboring through the art museums of the Louvre, the Uffici, or the British Museum and prayerfully participating in the song of praise rising from the very stones in a living church!  The beauty offered the Child of Bethlehem is dedicated to all, and we need it like daily bread. 

Those who would rob a child of beauty to make something useful out of it do not support but destroy; they take away the light, without which all our calculations turn cold and trivial.  Of course, if we truly join the pilgrimage of the centuries, which was anxious to lavish the most beautiful things of this world on the newborn King, then we must never forget that he still lives in a stable, in a prison, in the favelas [South American slums], and that we do not praise him should we refuse to find him there.  Yet such an awareness will not enslave us under the tyranny of usefulness, where joy becomes a stranger and somber seriousness a dogma.

From: Gottes Angesich suchen, p.12

From: Unpublished homily, December 24, 1980

Nowadays we also hear it being said, in contrast, that this, after all, would be nothing but a sentimentality better put aside.  Yet the New Testament thinks differently.  For the Faith of the Bible and the Church, it is important that God desired to be such a creature who has to depend on a mother, on the sheltering love of humans.  He wished to be dependent in order to awaken in us love that purifies and redeems.  God became a child, and every child is dependent.  To be a child thus contains already the theme of the search for shelter, the elementary motif of Christmas.  And how many variations has this motif seen in our history!

In our days we experience this anew and in disturbing ways: the child knocks on the doors of our world.  The child is knocking.  This search for shelter is profound.  There is indeed an atmosphere of hostility toward children, but is this not preceded by an attitude that altogether bars any child from entering this world because there would be no more room for him?  This child knocks.  If we could receive him we are to rethink thoroughly our own attitude toward human life.  Here we are dealing with fundamentals, with our very concept of what it means to be human: to live in grandiose selfishness or in confident freedom that knows its vocation to be united in love, to be free to accept one another.

From: Munchener Katholische Kirchenzeitung, January 14, 1979