The Pope's Critique of Protestantism

John Duns Scotus

Proto-Protestant Dunce

(Image from Wikipedia)

The Pope's Regensburg lecture has received a great deal of attention for the Byzantine quote about Muhammad bringing nothing new except for things "evil and inhuman" (or: "bad and inhumane"), but less noted has been the Pope's criticisms of Protestantism -- namely, that it sunders the Christian synthesis of faith and reason -- which took up far more of his talk.

Let's take a look at this critique, which begins with an admission about some Medieval Catholic theology:

In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazm [i.e., "that God is not bound even by his own word, ... that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us," and that "we would even have to practise idolatry" if God so willed] and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which -- as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated -- unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. 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. Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, "transcends" knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul -- "λογικηλατρεία", worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).

Note that the Pope asserts the crucial significance of the "real analogy" between God and us, which is ultimately based (though unmentioned here) upon the scriptural statement that human beings are made in God's image (Genesis 1:26-27) and which is interpreted (and explicitly thematized here) in Greek terms as a shared rationality between God and individuals.

The Pope, then, would affirm the analogia entis (analogy of being) over such concepts as the analogia fidei (analogy of faith) emphasized by the great Protestant theologian Karl Barth -- and would perhaps accuse Barth of holding to a variant of fideism, i.e., faith unsupported by, and even against, reason.

The Pope would see Barth's position as a consequence stemming from the dehellenization of Christianity that began with the Protestant Reformation, a point that the Pope begins to make here:

The thesis that the critically purified Greek heritage forms an integral part of Christian faith has been countered by the call for a dehellenization of Christianity -- a call which has more and more dominated theological discussions since the beginning of the modern age. Viewed more closely, three stages can be observed in the programme of dehellenization: although interconnected, they are clearly distinct from one another in their motivations and objectives.

The Pope then expounds at some length on these three stages, but I will excise portions to summarize in his own words:

Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought. As a result, faith no longer appeared as a living historical Word but as one element of an overarching philosophical system. The principle of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word. Metaphysics appeared as a premise derived from another source, from which faith had to be liberated in order to become once more fully itself. When Kant stated that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this programme forward with a radicalism that the Reformers could never have foreseen. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to reality as a whole.

The Pope's concern here touches on an unmentioned point, namely, that the principle of sola scriptura entails a rejection of the Catholic Church's authority to speak as the true Church in interpreting scripture. His rehabilitation of reason -- of Greek thought -- for modern Christianity would entail a reassertion of Catholic authority over Protestants. Why so? Because the Greek-Christian synthesis was achieved by the early Church Fathers, and to accept the Church Fathers is already to reject the Protestant principle of sola scriptura. If the Pope can persuade Protestants that they tend in their theology toward the dangerous concept of a capricious God, then he might be able to draw them back to the mother church.

That's the subtext, anyway, that I'm reading here.

Be that as it may, the Pope doesn't stop at this point. There are yet stages two and three to treat. Here's stage two:

The liberal theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ushered in a second stage in the process of dehellenization, with Adolf von Harnack as its outstanding representative .... Harnack's central idea was to return simply to the man Jesus and to his simple message, underneath the accretions of theology and indeed of hellenization: this simple message was seen as the culmination of the religious development of humanity. Jesus was said to have put an end to worship in favour of morality. In the end he was presented as the father of a humanitarian moral message. Fundamentally, Harnack's goal was to bring Christianity back into harmony with modern reason, liberating it, that is to say, from seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith in Christ's divinity and the triune God. In this sense, historical-critical exegesis of the New Testament, as he saw it, restored to theology its place within the university: theology, for Harnack, is something essentially historical and therefore strictly scientific. What it is able to say critically about Jesus is, so to speak, an expression of practical reason and consequently it can take its rightful place within the university.

This was the liberal theology most characteristic of 19th-century Christianity, which tended to subordinate Christianity to culture, understood as Western culture but not so much in terms of tradition as in terms of moral progress. This grounding of Christianity in culture left it without an independent position from which to critique that culture. Recovering that independence, the Pope implies, would require returning to the concept of a rational God who made human beings in his own image and rejecting the liberal Christian view that made Christianity -- and therefore the Christian God -- in the image of culture.

Interestingly, one of the most powerful Protestant rejections of liberal theology comes to us in the work of the already-mentioned Karl Barth, whose reaction to the horrors of the First World War led him to articulate a system of neo-orthodoxy through his powerful commentary on Paul's letter to the Romans. From the Pope's perspective, Barth's reaction to WWI -- which led him to reject the validity of all human perspectives in the presence of the unfathomable otherness of God -- would be simply to reoccupy the position articulated by the early Protestant Reformers and thus would not solve the problem engendered by the dehellenization of Christianity.

The Pope doesn't mention all this, but it's on his mind.

But let's turn from our reading of the Pope's mind to a reading of his words concerning the third stage:

I must briefly refer to the third stage of dehellenization, which is now in progress. In the light of our experience with cultural pluralism, it is often said nowadays that the synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early Church was a preliminary inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures. The latter are said to have the right to return to the simple message of the New Testament prior to that inculturation, in order to inculturate it anew in their own particular milieux. This thesis is not only false; it is coarse and lacking in precision. The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed. True, there are elements in the evolution of the early Church which do not have to be integrated into all cultures. Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.

This -- the Pope implies -- would compound the errors of the first two stages by appropriating a sort of sola scriptura even while subordinating Christianity to culture ... or, rather, cultures.

The Pope is especially concerned about this third stage, for it threatens even the Catholic synthesis because as Church growth occurs outside of the West, such that non-Western Catholics begin to outnumber Western ones, even Catholic voices have been raised in favor of the indigenization of theology -- effectively a dehellenization of the sort feared by the Pope.

Some of the Pope's criticism thus takes aim at Catholic developments, but he uses much more of his ammunition on Protestantism ... if my reading is correct.

Therefore, against these insults to our divinely inspired reformed church, I call upon all of my Protestant brothers and sisters to rise up in violent protests (we are "Protestants," after all!) and breathe out threatenings and slaughter (cf. prooftext Acts 9:1: "empneo apeile kai phonos") against Catholics, the Catholic Church, and Pope Benedict XVI.

Nah ... just kidding. I call for further reasonable dialogue on these fascinating issues and hope that I am contributing something.