Pope Benedict has created something of a fire-storm of protest this week over a lecture he gave in Germany. In this lecture he quoted the words of one of the last Byzantine emperors in Constantinople in 14th century, Manuel II. Manuel had spent many years as a hostage to the Ottoman sultan and endured many years under siege from him too, so he perhaps had a jaundiced view of Islam. The words were taken from an account of a dialogue between the Byzantine emperor and an educated Persian. The subject of this dialogue was Christianity and Islam, and their truth. The bit that has caused a fire-storm of protest from Muslims around the world was his quoting a vitriolic assessment of Islam as being violent and being propagated by violence. What I couldn’t grasp from the news reports was why Pope Benedict had used this quote and so I decided to follow the link on the BBC website to the text of his lecture and read it for myself.

I have to say it took me several reads to get it clear what he was saying. It is not an easy read and would have been even harder to listen to. But I think I have got there. To my mind he could have made his point without this quote. So it is rather bemusing as to why he used it. There are so many balancing phrases he could have used too but didn’t. That said, his lecture was about so much more; this is just an aside buried in the dense text. So this morning I thought I would give you a peek behind the headlines at what he was actually saying with some reflections on that. Some of this may be heavy going.

Fundamentally I think the lecture was about the place of reason in the Christian faith and what reason is based on. He takes us to the beginning of John’s Gospel. This is the great Christmas reading: “In the beginning was the Word”. To understand this we need to know a bit about Greek philosophy and thought. ‘The Word’, ‘the logos’ in Greek, means both reason and its expression. Christianity holds that the reason and rationality behind the universe is tangible and when we live in harmony with this essential reason we live in truth. This is what Jesus is about. This is who we say he is, to answer the question in the Gospel reading (Mark 8:27-end). He is, to Christians, the expression and making known for us of this essential reason. “In the beginning was the Word… and the Word became flesh.”

Pope Benedict went on to draw a distinction with Islam which he says holds that God is utterly transcendent and beyond reach. So ‘reason’ does not form a link with the divine for them. Christianity as I have said has God reaching out; bridging what would otherwise be an impassable gap. There is a theological and philosophical difference between us. I’m not sure I go along completely with that assessment. Islam has Allah giving the Qur’an and this is his word in their terms. The difference, as another German theologian (Hans Kung) puts it, is that for Islam “the Word became book” and is therefore completely unchanging whatever developments or new insights we may have. For Christians the Word became flesh and this opens up a whole host of cultural and local factors. The question that arises here is whether Islam has the conceptual framework to adapt to the changing world. That is where dialogue comes in and Pope Benedict seems to want to be open to that.

This is where Pope Benedict’s other strand to his lecture comes in. The Word becoming flesh, as a concept, was deeply expressed in the thought forms and language of Greek culture. He asks how much this culture is inseparable from the message. He argues explicitly that the Greek thought forms are inseparable from the heart of Christianity. They are themselves divinely inspired and therefore the window we use to see into this understanding of God has been made by God. That’s not as far away from what Muslims proclaim as the Pope might want to think! Muslims do not count translations of the Qur’an as being valid; it has to be read in Arabic.

Pope Benedict used this notion of reason and truth to make his point that it is unreasonable to advance a faith through violence because this is against the nature of God. If that is just what he had said, a lot of people would have said ‘Amen’, but it is a shame he did this through a 14th century quote that has a jaundiced view of Islam in its totality!

What Pope Benedict did not spell out was how we are to know when we are living in harmony with the essential reason at the heart of the universe. There are subtexts going on here. The Roman Catholic Church holds that the Magisterium of the Church is the arbiter of truth. The prevailing view in the rest of Western society today, since the 18th century, is that scientific method is sovereign - the burden of evidence being how we decide. This means that the prevailing view has to accept that its understanding is provisional. The Roman Catholic view talks of infallible statements for all time. The Anglican Church has three pillars of Scripture, Tradition and Reason and it is the balancing of these that determine what we regard as truth. So there are differences.

Pope Benedict was concerned that the prevailing view leaves no room for God and everyone is diminished in the process. But that is not necessarily the case. Even the Old Testament recognises that working out what is from God and what is delusional can be very hard at times. They came up with the precursor of scientific method - see what happens. If a prophet’s words come true, that prophet spoke truth. If it doesn’t, they were deluded. It is the Gamaliel principle in the Book of Acts when the fledgling church is causing consternation among the Jewish leaders. He says, if this is from man it will die out. If it is from God, nothing will prevail against it. But Pope Benedict didn’t go there, which is disappointing, but then he wouldn’t because that’s not what he thinks.

He also took time in his lecture to have a bit of a swipe at a few more pet issues for him. He attacks what is called inculturation. This is where we look at the Word being made flesh and try to work out what is to do with the essential heart of reason and what is time bound. The eternal truths are packaged in the thoughts of their times: it is inculturated. There is an attempt made to peel away the packaging and find the truth behind it. This is so that we can look at how things between then and now are different and still apply the heart of the message in new circumstances. It is a bit perilous because it touches the whole philosophy of language and how our words shape the way we think and therefore to say something in different words is actually to say something different. The debate is about how deep this goes: just packaging or to the heart. Is essential reason the core or an expression of culture?

I’m a bit both-and here, rather than either-or. There is something at the heart of language and rationality that is divine and when we live in harmony with that rationality we live in truth. However how we express this is culturally conditioned and that conditioning does change the essential message we give. However no one culture can fully express the totality of the divine, so cultural exchanges and dialogues open up the greater glory that is God. This is actually how the renaissance was triggered in the first place through the meeting of East and West, through the encounters between Islamic and Christian thinkers and how this in turn started the movements of which the Reformation is part. There is ‘history’ behind all of this.

In all of this I still couldn’t see how the controversial quote was necessary. He could have made his point without it. Essentially his point was that “violence is incompatible with the nature of God”. How we understand that nature and the rationality at the heart of the universe is where the real debate lies. Sadly through careless use of language (which has been seen as a side swipe) he has distracted attention from that debate. It is how we can live in harmony with God, with the essential rationality at the heart of the universe and therefore truth, and know that we are so doing that forms the real question that arises from his lecture. In that debate that which we affirm in Jesus is the major belief we bring to the table. “Who do you say I am” has far reaching consequences.

© Ian Black 2006

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