Central to the theology of Pope Benedict XVI is his perception of humans as receivers of existence, not primarily makers, actors, shapers, as modernity insists, writes Jim Corkery
Now that the papal election and inauguration are over, people are asking: what can we expect of this Pope? Hints have been given in some of what Benedict XVI has already promised: dialogue, listening, outreach to the other Christian churches, to the Jewish people, and to the poor and abandoned of the earth.
There were further hints in the line of those who were presented to the new Pope during his inaugural Mass: not a long parade of high-ranking prelates, as had occurred at the inauguration of John Paul II, but a smaller group, more broadly constituted, including lay men and women, also a child, in an effort to mirror the composition of the church as a whole.
From these signs new hopes arise; and there were others still. The Pope spoke of not proposing a new programme of government, or presenting his own ideas, but rather of being a shepherd standing on the side of the lambs, who represent the alienated, the broken and the abandoned of this world.
Are there any hints, from the over 70 books and hundreds of articles that Joseph Ratzinger has written, that offer a glimpse of how this universal shepherd will go about his task? To answer this question, a key theme of his theology must be highlighted.
This theme is humanity: how we human beings are not the products of blind chance but the project of a loving Creator-God.
We receive our existence, who and what we are, from a God who loves us. We are placed in the world through love and we exist for love. Our existence is empty without it - yet it is something we cannot give to ourselves; we must rely on God, and on others, to receive it. Thus we are, at root, receivers; we are not primarily makers, actors, shapers, as modernity insists.
Throughout the entire half century of his life as a theologian, Joseph Ratzinger has always emphasised receiving over making, not least because he has noted that many secular philosophies and ideologies have given priority to making over receiving.
Furthermore, a core theological method is visible here: he seeks to articulate the central vision of Christian faith (here its vision of the human) in opposition to the prevailing isms that truncate and distort the truth about humanity. It is essentially a polemical method: stating Christian truth, opposing secular untruth.
Before moving on to consider the consequences of this theological method for the route that Benedict XVI's papacy may take, let us look at where it has taken him during the last half-century.
Armed with the central Christian truth that we are receivers rather than makers, he has consistently opposed various philosophies and mentalities. Against Sartre's existentialism, which envisages us as making who and what we are through what we do, he highlighted how Christianity envisages us as receiving who and what we are through what God does.
Against the technical reason of modernity's second phase, a reason that envisages truth in pragmatic terms - in terms of what can be technologically produced - he posited the vision of faith, which envisages us entrusting ourselves to what we can never make, but only hope to receive.
Against liberation theology, which he saw as making a near-immanent kingdom of God the goal of historical activity, he emphasised the kingdom of God that is beyond our making and that our actions, at most, can only open up conditions for receiving.
Finally, against the relativism of moral values characteristic of contemporary "postmodern" culture, he spoke of true values that are not reducible to situation or context, or chosen according to fashion or taste, but rather are discovered, received.
The approach just outlined may be polemical, but it is also incisive, consistent and attuned to the wiles of the world. Readers with a theological background will have noticed the Augustinian-Platonic undertow, where priority is always given to the universal idea (the idea of the human as receiver, for example) and concrete realities are judged accordingly.
In itself this theological approach is not problematic, but it might be if it were the only one favoured in contemporary theologising.
That is what concerns me at the beginning of this papacy because an approach to human, secular reality that judges it in the light of Christian faith but is uninclined to examine it for possible traces of Christ - what the church fathers called seeds of the Word - would be an approach with quite limiting pastoral consequences.
So I mention another theological approach, rooted in Christian tradition going back to Justin the Martyr, given deep expression in St Thomas's affirmation of created nature in the Middle Ages, and present closer to our own time in theologians such as Karl Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx, many liberation theologians, Elizabeth Johnson, and others. There is a trust at the heart of this theological approach that God is at work in the world, often in the experiences of men and women beyond the visible boundaries of the church, and that the Spirit "blows where it wills".
According to this approach, Christians are like "detectives of grace", of the incarnate presence of God hidden in the human world. This approach is at home with persons and experiences that are, at first glance, not so obviously within the net of faith. The Pope, in his inaugural homily, spoke of casting the net wide.
Will his own theological method, however, with its tendency to oppose, dialectically, the Christian and the secular reality and to view the church as an island of grace in a world of sin, allow for this? Will it reach to many who are now gasping for air: our suffocating planet; women; theologians; homosexual persons; men and women of other faiths and of other religious experiences?
Everything that the new Pope has said at the start of his papacy gives hope that he will dialogue both widely and well, as do many of his written words; yet I fear that the method of the theology of Joseph Ratzinger may tend to restrain the universal pastoral outreach of Benedict XVI.
• Jim Corkery is a Jesuit priest, head of the department of systematic theology and history at the Milltown Institute, and an associate professor. He did a doctoral degree on human existence and Christian salvation in the theology of Joseph Ratzinger