Prof. Franz Josef Stegmann Bethlehem Social ... - Ordo Socialis

Stegmann
punished. The real Ulysses, Christopher Columbus, mastered the ocean two centuries later
and was not engulfed by a huge wave - in 1492 Columbus, arrived at America. The world,
which once naturally merged into metaphysical and eternal spheres, was discovered just as the
secular world in modern times. It is only world and nothing else.
From this "experience of the worldliness of the world", 12 as Joseph Ratzinger says, resulted
the knowledge and experience of its "makeability". Modern humans no longer believe themselves
- no longer to the same extent - to be at the mercy of world and nature. On the contrary,
world and nature are exposed to their intervention, are subject to their activities, are formed
and shaped by them and belong to them. They understand themselves as "builders" of the
world, who make their world; a world of the human beings, "a hominised world".
An analysis of this "change" shows that the "de-divinisation" of the world - which already in
ancient times was considered to be atheistic - has resulted not in opposition to Christianity but
just from Christian faith. Only belief in a creator, who is infinitely superior to the world and
eternally more noble, revealed its pure secular "worldliness" and caused an initial secularisation.
Thus the modern understanding of the world - which studies its laws and challenges it
by work, science and technology - is rooted "in the Christian teaching of the radical
'createdness' of the world". 13 It is true that the inquiry into the laws of nature and the objective
matter-of-fact treatment of it often developed in a clash with Church representatives. The
most well-known example may be the Galileo case. But they go back basically to the
Jewish-Christian understanding of the world. The Jewish-Christian approach has enabled
people to investigate the laws of nature and to deal rationally with the world. For “only a
world not full of gods", but created by God, and "only a world in which sun and moon are not
divine rulers of the cosmos, but lights hung up by the divine creator" - only such a "worldly
world" - "could become a starting point of scientific factual research into the world, and it
was not by chance that it developed in a sphere shaped and stamped by Christianity". 14
This process of "secularisation of the world'', however, also has negative implications and
creates dangers. Technical hominisation and manipulation may also happen to human beings.
They are no longer self-determinig subjects, but can become objects of intentional
manipulations. Accordingly, hominisation is indeed not always and automatically
humanisation.
"Secularisation of the world" may finally be understood and put into practice in an absolute
sense: the world is not seen as God's creation at all but only as the work of humans who then
misunderstand themselves to be the sole creators of the world.
1.4 Politics, economics and "knowledge of facts"
From what has been said up to now (there is "rightful independence" of the secular world and
no direct political mission of the Church), a logical conclusion follows: first and foremost,
political and economic action must be based on the "knowledge of facts". This involves not
only technical expertise, but also knowledge of structure, function and the order of reality as
such - a knowledge which the natural light of human insight is capable of achieving.
Knowledge of facts in this sense includes, firstly, empirical knowledge from everyday life.
The basic norms of moral order are not first and foremost the results of philosophical
12
Josef Ratzinger, Der Christ und die Welt von heute, in Metz (Ed.), Weltverständnis im Glauben, 143‐160, 154.
13
Karl Rahner, Theologische Deutung der Gegenwartssituation als Situation der Kirche, in: Handbuch der
Pastoraltheologie, Vol. 2, Freiburg 1966, 233‐256, 237.
14
Ratzinger, Der Christ und die Welt von heute, 147(see note 12)
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