Thus belief embraces, as essential parts of itself, the profession of faith, the word and the unity which it effects; it embraces entry into the community's worship of God and so finally the fellowship which we call Church. Christian belief is not an idea but life; it is not mind existing for itself, but incarnation, mind in the body of history and its "We". It is not the mysticism of the self-identification of the mind with God, but obedience and service; the outstripping of oneself, liberation of the self precisely through its being taken into service by something not made or thought out by myself, the liberation of being taken into service of the whole.
This is by Professor Joseph Ratzinger [ now Pope Benedict XVI] in Introduction to Christianity 1968.
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