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For Ratzinger, according to Rowland, "a 'daring new' Christocentric theological anthropology is the medicine that the world needs," and "it is the responsibility of the Church to administer it." We can understand our human destiny only through the revelation of Jesus Christ.

This emphasis on Christology is central to Ratzinger's thinking on just about everything else. Responding to the then–dominant view of revelation that championed its "propositional character," Ratzinger argued that revelation is not a mere collection of true statements about God. Revelation is Jesus Christ himself—not the Greek philosophers' unmoved–mover, but the God of Trinitarian and human relationships, active in the world as creator, redeemer and sanctifier. Dei Verbum, Vatican II's decree on revelation, restored, in Ratzinger's words, the "focus on the biblical God for whom it is precisely relationship and action that are the essential marks."

Revelation, however, is more than a text; here Rowland explains Ratzinger's reservations about the historical–critical method of biblical scholarship: Scripture must be read within a tradition, for the truth of revelation is mediated through a historically defined community—the church—that one can never interpret from the outside. To reject the providential guidance of the Holy Spirit in the historical development of Christian doctrine is to miss the historical role that the Christian church must play in its transmission.

In this light, Ratzinger argues that the church should be viewed sacramentally—as the sacrament of salvation to the world, as the institution that makes Christ present to humanity. Rowland repeatedly stresses that Ratzinger resists all attempts to think of the church in political or sociological terms. In its essence, the church consists of communities that gather to celebrate the Eucharist, but these don't make the Eucharist; the Eucharist makes the communities—which means, as Ratzinger puts it, that the universal church is "logically and ontologically prior to the particular churches."

It becomes easier to understand, then, Benedict's emphasis on church unity, the collegiality of bishops, and the ministry of unity entrusted to the bishop of Rome. Evangelicals might wonder where this places them. Ratzinger stands firmly in continuity with Vatican II in insisting that the church of Christ exists most fully and rightly only within the Catholic Church, but that there are elements of sanctification and truth in churches and ecclesial communities outside Catholicism's formal structure.

Since the church's mission is to reveal the God–Man to modern man, it is no surprise that Ratzinger has written so prolifically on the liturgy, for it is in the cosmic drama of the Mass that God most fully enters into the lives of His people. Despite what Ratzinger's detractors say, he does indeed support the liturgical reforms instituted at Vatican II. It is their implementation that he thinks has gone awry, requiring a reform of the reform. Post–conciliar liturgists argued that pastoral considerations required eliminating "archaic" languages, unnecessary repetitions, artistic music, and outdated gestures. But for Ratzinger, the integrity of Christian worship—and thus belief—is at stake when the liturgy's organic development of sacred actions, words, sounds, sights, and smells is interrupted. The result, as Ratzinger sees it, is akin to the apostasy of worshipping the golden calf—a celebration of the worshipping community itself, not of the true God.

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