God seeks out man in the midst of his worldly and earthly connections and relationships; God, whom no one, not even the purest of men, can discover for himself, comes to man of His own volition and enters into relationship with him... God is the one who acts, and it is He who brings salvation to man. (1)He [God] has entered into history, has come to meet man, and thus man can go to meet Him. He [man] can unite himself to God, because God has united Himself with man. (2)
Human listening to the message of faith is no passive reception of hitherto unknown information; rather, it is the awakening of our submerged conscience and the opening up of the powers of understanding that are awaiting the light of truth within us. (3)
The longing for the infinite is alive and unquenchable within man. None of the attempted answers will do; only the God who Himself became finite in order to tear open our finitude and lead us out into the wide spaces of His infinity, only He corresponds to the question of our being. (4)
In the revelation of God it is, in the end, precisely a matter of Him, the Living and True One, breaking into our world and thus breaking open the prison of our theories, by means of whose iron bars we seek to protect ourselves against the coming of God into our lives. (4)
~Pope Benedict XVI
(1) The Unity & Diversity of Religions(2) The Truth of Christianity
(3) Truth-Tolerance-Freedom
(4) The New Questions that Arose in the Nineties
** Compiled in the collection "Truth & Tolerance"
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