[The Enlightenment began with carrying out Luther's denial of the Christ of the Church which he claimed had been falsified and distorted into a mere Christ of today, a mirror of her corrupt self]--even making herself Christ.
[That] search for the historical Jesus gradually pushed aside the Pauline and the Johannine Christ, and finally had to deny also the Jesus of the Synoptics, in order to picture behind him, ever farther behind, the Jesus who really was, who then became all the more fictitious the more authentic he was supposed to become through this strict concentration on the past. Whoever wants to see only the Christ of yesterday will not find him; and whoever wants to have him only today will likewise not encounter him.
From the very beginning it is proper to him that he was, he is, and he will come. As the living one, he was always already the one who is to come. The message of his coming and remaining belongs essentially to the image of himself: he makes a claim upon all the dimensions of time...If we deny ourselves an existence which allows itself to span these dimensions, we cannot understand him. Whoever grasps time merely as an unrecallable disappearing moment and lives accordingly, turns away in principle from what the figure of Jesus constitutes and what it proclaims.
[Jesus Christ today includes Jesus Christ yesterday and Jesus Christ eternal!]
Joseph Ratzinger in Communio Volume 2, Anthropology and Culture, pp. 85-86.
N.B. This principle of the real trans-historical reality of the living person of Jesus Christ is the basis of the great award winning historic Regensburg Address. The point of that address is that Jesus Christ is true and real and that his reality, his truth, historical and trans-historical, is corroborated by reason.
A chief achievement of Joseph Ratzinger has been to correct the fundamental error of biblical exegesis: viz. the philosophical bias against transcendence. He re-opened biblical exegesis to it's supernatural source and aim, while maintaining and promoting all of it's historical-critical method and true scientific rigor.
