Summary: Cardinal Ratzinger, now the current Pope, has stepped out from the unknown and let his theological ideas be known to a wider audience and also outlines his vision of what is critical in the Christian faith in so far as the Catholic Church understands it.

For Catholics, what is always at the forefront of theology is the dialogue between the past and the present, between what the church has understood both the sacred scriptures and sacred tradition to say about God, history, and salvation. In a way Pope Benedict says this can be summed up as Deus Caritas Est - God is love.

This of course is what one of the letters of John says (in relation to needing to love one's Christian brother); in love, we are effectively made partakers in God's nature as well as made God's children through baptism.

Benedict compares the Christian form of love as agape, charitable self-emptying, modelled on the love revealed in the crucified Christ to us, to the pagan ideal of love as eros, exemplified by Plato and Platonic philosophy, which is love of the transcendant Good. While the approach of both Philosophy as pursued by reason and Religion as pursued by faith differ, both also share a desire to reach the God who is our final end and beautitude.

Benedict believes that the revealing of God as love means very importantly that God is to be divorced from notions of compulsion and violence, something he clearly aims at religiously motivated terrorism, which tries to force people into belief against their will.

Ratzinger then begins a fairly detailed discussion of how God is revealed both to reflective philosophers as the Absolute or Reality, and how God is the One revealed in the Bible as the One who loves and cares for all of us in a deeply personal and loving way, and also as the Incarnate Word who comes down to us and in doing so, lifts us up to divine life.

The encyclical is highly detailed and tightly argued, and is worth careful reading by any Catholic and also by any student of theology.