In his Introduction to Christianity, Joseph Ratzinger considers the critical decision that was required in the early days of Christianity and the Church as to which God the Christian Faith would embrace: those gods worshiped by the pagans or the God of the philosophers? Ratzinger, who eventually became Pope Benedict XVI states: “Wherever the question arose to which god the Christian God corresponded, Zeus perhaps or Hermes or Dionysus or some other god, the answer ran: to none of them. To none of the gods to whom you pray but solely and alone to him to whom you do not pray, to that highest being of whom your philosophers speak. The early Church resolutely put aside the whole of it as deceit and illusion, and explained its faith by saying: When we say God, we do not mean or worship any of this; we mean only Being itself, what the philosophers have exposed as the ground of all being, as the God above all powers – that alone is our God.” Introduction to Christianity, Joseph Ratzinger, Herder and Herder, New York, 1971 pp. 94-95.
Otto Piechowski is a serious thinker. I know this from having studied philosophy with him at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. from 1975 -78. Along with being a serious thinker he is also a serious disciple of Jesus Christ. By creating this blog, Otto has taken up a most important and serious discussion, a discussion that took place in the earliest days of the Church and in every age that has followed – a discussion that considers the unique Being that is God. It is a discussion that will involve serious reasoning that is philosophical as well as a passionate love that is theological.
I pray that this blog will have success and that those who read and post on it, will grow in their knowledge of and love for God, the absolute ground of all being.
Monsignor Roger J. Scheckel
A Catholic Priest of the Diocese of La Crosse, Wisconsin
Catholic Philosophy and Theology 