Anti-theological theology

By contrast with "Phariseeism," "Sadduceeism" is "the liberalist [(liberalistische)] misunderstanding that, in its determination to approximate the faith to the world, attempts to remove from it everything unlikely to please the world.  Here is indeed the walling-in of what is Christian [(die Ummaurerung des Christlichen)] that keeps it from having an effect in the world, decisively tattered [(entschieden abgerissen) as it is], such that [(aber)] the faith no longer serves the world as leaven, but . . . is transformed into the world and [becomes] for that reason neither interesting nor effective, but [rather] completely superfluous.  One cannot rightly [(wohl)] deny that it is like that today to a great extent.  There is a form of anti-theological theology, in which the important business of hermeneutics is converted into a method of transforming the whole of the Christian message into words without content, and of proving that it means just about the opposite of what must normally be taken to be its sense.  The content of such [a] theology consists fundamentally in this alone [(nur noch)], to explain to man that nothing was really meant as it is meant; that [it] all means fundamentally nothing; that from the whole, which appears at first so exciting and faith-necessitating, can be extracted, if only one employs the right hermeneutic, wholly plausible and harmless Existenzialien about which, however, no one can really be bothered because they are so commonplace [(allgemein)]; that one would consider them [mere] banalities had they not been extracted with such a display of learning from texts that, for the unpretentious mind, signify [however] something else entirely.  It’s not just that I am convinced that with such a sorry effort [(Machwerk)] one entices no cat out from behind the stove (which is to say, leads no one to Christianity); it’s that I am of the further opinion that whoever arrives at such judgments [(Meinungen)] would do better to strike the flag; to confess that he no longer extracts from Christianity any meaning [whatsoever], and therefore renounces the pretentious long-windedness [(Umständlichkeit)] of extracting from historical texts Existenzialien that can be had [far] more easily without them."

     Joseph Ratzinger, "Was heißt Erneuerung der Kirche?," Diakonia:  internationale Zeitschrift für die Praxis der Kirche 1 (1966):  ??? (303-316) =in Das neue Volk Gottes: Entwürfe zur Ekklesiologie, 2nd ed. (Düsseldorf:  Patmos, 1970), ??? (267-281) =in Kirche:  Zeichen unter den Völkern:  Schriften zur Ekklesiologie und Ökumene 2, Gesammelte Schriften 8/2 (Freiburg i. Br.:  2010), 1200 ff. (1186-1202), as quoted at Wolfgang Klausnitzer, "'Das Wort sie sollen lassen stahn':  neue Bibelhermeneutik oder Abschied vom Schriftprinzip in der ökumenisch umstrittenen Frage der Homosexualität," Catholica 67, no. 4 (2013):  265 (253-280), translation mine.  (So far as I've been able to tell, this essay has yet to be translated into English.)