Benedict XVI on the Mind of God

Benedict XVI resigns tonight as the 265th Pope of the Catholic Church, yet his thought has emerged as one of the most enlightened about the role of Mind: the Mind of God in his Will.
I truly think that Benedict XVI exposed the fallacy that the will of a dictator God is all what matters. In his lecture at the University of Regensburg in September 2006, Benedict XVI showed that the will of God, who is love, must be sought in the mind. His will must be reasonable or rational. In the Gospel according to St. John, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God" (John 1:1). John used this Greek expression to show that Christ was God. He is the same evangelist that spoke of love as the essence of God "God is Love" (1 John 4: 8). God is love and the Word of God is God. It is so in Greek philosophy because language is the most used tool in communication for rational beings. This is the way understanding developed in the Catholic Church since the beginning i.e. by marrying the uniqueness of God in Hebrew tradition to the good in seeking the Divine in Greek philosophy. In fact, the idea that humans go to eternal life has emerged in Jewish tradition only with the influence of Greek thought some 300 years before Christ when the Greeks invaded Palestine. It is a development of doctrine, well before the Christian Church was founded. The Greeks and Egyptians had the question of eternal life embedded in their search for the meaning of life. 

There is a larger point that Benedict pointed to. The Church that was probably a sect of Jewish tradition until the mid 50s of the first century, went out to the known world, engaged with the Pagan cultures and learned how to discern the good in Pagan philosophy and even to transform some feasts such as the Unconquered Sun to Christmas.  The dynamics of the dialogue of civilizations is simply to be open to the rays of God's goodness found in their expressions, languages, philosophy, arts, science and so on without in the least abandoning the faith in the revelation of Christ, the only Son of God who in his person and life reveals the Father. On the contrary the development of doctrine in the Catholic Church means that the perception of the truth develops as generations after generations reflect, research and pray. Thus Christ today is the same as he was a thousand years ago, but we know him or see him more abundantly through the unceasing help of the Spirit to his Church.