Christo says:

I think you’re on to something. Logos is a Greek word, but that doesn’t mean that John wasn’t being all things to all people – as the socio-linguistic relativist statement of Paul encourages. Christ/Logos/(the-unspeakable-name-that-may-sound-something-like-Yahweh) became flesh. It does seem therefore odd that the Pope would a word the Word. It reminds me of the Protestant penchant to call the Bible the Word. Why does that happen? Is this perhaps merely to assert the authority of a body of literature or the authority of the interpretations of an ancient political body?

Moeses says:

My pops sent me this….I trust you are well.

The Pope Was Right
By George Weigel
Posted: Wednesday, September 20, 2006

ARTICLE
The Los Angeles Times
Publication Date: September 20, 2006

In a brilliant lecture at the University of Regensburg last week, Pope Benedict
XVI made three crucial points that are now in danger of being lost in the
polemics about his supposedly offensive comments about Islam.

The pope’s first point was that all the great questions of life, including
social and political questions, are ultimately theological. How we think (or
don’t think) about God has much to do with how we judge what is good and what
is wicked, and with how we think about the appropriate methods for advancing
the truth in a world in which there are profound disagreements about the truth
of things.

If, for example, we imagine that God is pure will, a remote majesty with whom
our only possible relationship is one of unthinking submission, then we have
imagined a God who can even command what seems to be irrational — like the
murder of innocents. Pope Benedict reminds us, however, that mainstream
Christian tradition, following its Jewish parent, has a different concept of
God. The God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus is a God of reason, compassion and
love, a God who comes searching for man in history, appeals to the human mind
as well as the human heart and invites human beings into a dialogue of
salvation.

This God cannot demand the unreasonable or the irrational. This God’s
revelation of himself, in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament,
does not cancel out or abrogate human reason. That is why mainstream
Christianity has always taught that human beings can build decent societies by
attending to reason.

The pope’s second point, which flows from the first, was that irrational
violence aimed at innocent men, women and children “is incompatible with the
nature of God and the nature of the [human] soul.” If adherents of certain
currents of thought in contemporary Islam insist that the suicide bombing of
innocents is an act pleasing to God, then they must be told that they are
mistaken: about God, about God’s purposes and about the nature of moral
obligation.

Responsibility for challenging these distorted views of God and the distorted
understanding of moral duty that flows from them rests, first, with Islamic
leaders. But too few Islamic leaders, the pope seemed to suggest, have been
willing to undertake a cleansing of Islam’s conscience — as Pope John Paul II
taught the Catholic Church to cleanse its historical conscience.

We know that, in the past, Christians used violence to advance Christian
purposes. The Catholic Church has publicly repented of such distortions of the
Gospel and has developed a deep theological critique of the misunderstandings
that led to such episodes. Can the church, therefore, be of some help to those
brave Islamic reformers who, at the risk of their own lives, are trying to
develop a parallel Islamic critique of the distorted and lethal ideas of some
of their co-religionists?

By quoting from a robust exchange between a medieval Byzantine emperor and a
learned Islamic scholar, Benedict XVI was not making a cheap rhetorical point;
he was trying to illustrate the possibility of a tough-minded but rational
dialogue between Christians and Muslims. That dialogue can only take place,
however, on the basis of a shared commitment to reason and a mutual rejection
of irrational violence in the name of God.

The pope’s third point — which has been almost entirely ignored — was
directed to the West. If the West’s high culture keeps playing in the sandbox
of postmodern irrationalism — in which there is “your truth” and “my truth”
but nothing such as “the truth” — the West will be unable to defend itself.
Why? Because the West won’t be able to give reasons why its commitments to
civility, tolerance, human rights and the rule of law are worth defending. A
Western world stripped of convictions about the truths that make Western
civilization possible cannot make a useful contribution to a genuine dialogue
of civilizations, for any such dialogue must be based on a shared understanding
that human beings can, however imperfectly, come to know the truth of things.

Can Islam be self-critical? Can its leaders condemn and marginalize its
extremists, or are Muslims condemned to be held hostage to the passions of
those who consider the murder of innocents to be pleasing to God? Can the West
recover its commitment to reason and thus help support Islamic reformers? These
are the large questions that Pope Benedict XVI has put on the world’s agenda.
Men and women of reason and goodwill should be very glad that he has done so.

– George Weigel is a senior fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy
Center and the author of God’s Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the
Catholic Church.

Christo says:

I found it quite thought provoking. Covering subjects such as the university versus the multiversity, the role of reason in interfaith dialogue, theology in academia, and a couple of other themes I’m not quite recalling right now. But the idea that because God keeps his promises, he is reasonable intrigues me. And as a side thought, I find it interesting that Muslims do not appear to be upset about the lines in discussion of the point:

“But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practise idolatry.” (pg 2)

I would suspect that there are more than a few Christians who believe this also, but in this he makes a persuasive point. Is it really true that God is not bound to his word?

His picture of the relationship of Reason and Christ / of Hellenism and the early church is informative of the language the Pope uses to understand history, so I must honestly say I follow but I’m not willing to buy it quite yet. That Greek New Testament testifies for a God who works with Logos makes sense, that the Reformation was about substituting Reason for Practical Reason (thereby dehellenizing Christianity) doesn’t totally make sense. The word “Practical” in Practical Reason sounds to me like the Reformers were helping the church shift its focus back from Nomos to Logos. Secondly, his argument for the supremacy of the Hellenist ground of Christian faith is a little weak. I don’t quite follow his argument and it makes me think more of Euro-centric pride than an openness to the creativity of the Spirit in nurturing systemized expressions and orders of faith.

So while I’m fuzzy on the arguments about why the dehellenization is a detriment to the pursuit of truth, I found his concluding remarks potent. Modern scientific reason accepts the rationality of matter, why? Does it not point outside of itself? Somehow I must have imagined that he tied this whole matter back to the root of human dignity – that for a foundation for human dignity, the relationship of reason and faith must be understood to be together in a certain collocation, but I can’t find it now.

What did you think, Jono?