Revelation, Hermeneutics, and Doctrinal Development in Joseph Ratzinger

Throughout his prodigious theological and ecclesiastical career, Joseph Ratzinger advanced a rich and nuanced theology of Revelation, reflecting at length on the nature, unity, and interrelationship of Scripture and Tradition, on their native ecclesial context, and on their transformative, Christ-centered purpose and aim. Ratzinger’s many writings in this area are marked not only by an unwavering fidelity to divinely revealed truth, but also by sensitivity to the difficulties of its interpretation, to the dynamics of historical progress and regress, and to the needs of the Church and the world within the modern era.

In Revelation, Hermeneutics, and Doctrinal Development in Joseph Ratzinger, Mauro Gagliardi offers a penetrating diachronic study of Ratzinger’s thought on these foundational themes. Beginning with his 1955 Habilitationsschrift on St. Bonaventure’s understanding of Revelation and continuing in his works of the conciliar and post-conciliar periods through those of his episcopacy and later pontificate, Gagliardi traces Ratzinger’s vision of Scripture and Tradition, of the Magisterium and theology, and of faith and its transmission today. By turns critical and appreciative, Gagliardi elucidates the German theologian’s teaching on Revelation in depth, exploring its underlying hermeneutic commitments, and, in the book’s final chapter, elaborating its implications for the question of the development of doctrine, a topic of both longstanding and pressing importance within Catholic theology and Christian thought.