I’ve been wanting to comment for a few days now on Benedict’s comments at the University of Regensburg last Tuesday and the Muslim fallout that followed, but decided to wait until I had a chance to read the entirety of the Pontiff’s lecture (can always count on NPR and the BBC) before chiming in. While Benny probably should have been a little more careful with his choice of quotes, a charitable reading of the transcript conveys a hopeful message for true dialog and makes some very pertinent points.
What we’ve all heard…THE sound bite that seemed to escape from the context of the address:
…he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship of religion and violence in general saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and then you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith that he preached."
What we missed was the careful criticism of forceful evangelizing. Though he may have erred by focusing criticisms toward Islam and not looking back an acknowledging past wrongs of his own faith, the Pontiff espouses the central reason why faith must not be “spread by the sword.” From the Gospel of John: “In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was God.” Logos is the Greek used by the author in this passage and it means both Word and Reason. “In the beginning was Reason, and the Reason was God.” The nature of God is reasonable, Benedict claims, and to spread faith by force is not; therefore it goes against the very nature of the Divine. The claim he is really making is that God is not so all-powerful and all-knowing that we cannot even use the greatest capacities endowed on us to understand what is truly good. He is saying that we cannot expect killing and maiming one another to be a reasonable means to any good end, because it is against the very nature of God.
God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf.
Reason, not blind faith, is the way to God…a pretty extraordinary claim from a man of faith??? Not really, but that’s another story.
Benedict then goes on to make a call for dialog between Islam and Christianity, but more-so between Reason and Religion…or what he has seen Reason become. The Pontiff scolds the academia of the West not for becoming too reasonable (as Spaz claims) but for too narrowly defining what reason is. We are prone to defining reason, Benedict claims and I concur, as only that which can be defined with the “certainty resulting from the interplay between mathematical and empirical elements.” We have moved theology, questions of mysticism and divine experience, and even morality and social (soft) sciences to the fringes of reason or beyond. This narrow definition makes it difficult, if not impossible, for dialog to blossom. How are people of faith, mystics, moral thinkers supposed to speak if they cannot come to us with the scientific rigor we demand? They have tried, in the past to change their language to that of the sciences (Aquinas), but in doing so they lose their message and their heart and soul. The answer is on the side of reason. Reason must once again open her doors and welcome perspective from outside of the mathematic and empirical if we are truly to talk and, more importantly, listen to one another. Truth with a capital T is not only truth derived from scientific experimentation nor is it only truth derived from mystical experience. Truth with a capital T is Truth that arises out of a dialog of all human experience and Truth that leads us to acceptance and cordiality among one another. For what is it really that separates scientific knowledge from knowledge of faith but a simple decision of where one chooses to stop asking for verification of claims? The boundary of the games are different, the people playing the games must still live together.
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