What Can Protestants Expect From The New Pope?
BY MICHAEL S. HORTON
In his first speech as pope, Benedict XVI declared, “The current Successor assumes as his primary commitment that of working tirelessly towards the reconstitution of the full and visible unity of all Christ’s followers.”1 Before he took the name Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger had already established a name for himself as the “Vatican’s doctrinal watch-dog,” head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. In that capacity, Cardinal Ratzinger was the guiding hand in John Paul II’s famous encyclicals, such as Dominus Iesus, which continued to regard the theology of the Reformation as “gravely deficient.” Yet he has also led Vatican consultations with mainline Protestants and evangelicals. What can Modern Reformation readers expect of the new pope? Will he look back to the pre-conciliar legacy of the Inquisition (the former name of the Congregation he headed was once upon a time called the Holy Office of the Roman Inquisition)? Or will he be a catalyst for Roman Catholic-Protestant unity? Or perhaps something in between? For all of us who care about truth and unity, these are not irrelevant questions.
What I’m offering here is not an essay so much as a series of quotations from some representative works written by then-Cardinal Ratzinger over the last twenty-five years. A prolific and colorful writer, Ratzinger is also a first-rate theologian: clear in argument, concise in presentation, and conversant with other traditions.
First, some background is necessary. While John Paul II can certainly be praised for his uncompromising stand on Christian social ethics and called for greater Christian unity, it must not be forgotten that he was regularly calling for a renewal of devotion to traditional Roman Catholic teaching, the cult of Mary, and in his papal visits to Latin America especially, warned against the incursion of Protestantism as if the Council of Trent had never been convened. All along the way, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger was his theologian-in-residence.
In 1988, John Paul II issued a document calling the faithful to obtain plenary indulgences (offered every 25 years) in the jubilee year of the Church in 2000, which caused the World Alliance of Reformed Churches to pull out of the jubilee celebrations in Rome, although the Lutheran World Federation remained involved. The 1988 papal declaration outlined the conditions for the indulgence: “Catholics must have been to confession, and on the day they wish to receive the indulgence they must receive the Eucharist and pray in one of the various places, such as churches in Rome, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth, in a Catholic cathedral or in any place where they are visiting those in difficulty. An indulgence can also be obtained in a jubilee year by refraining from smoking or alcohol and ‘donating a proportionate sum of money to the poor’ or by ‘devoting a suitable portion of personal free time to activities benefiting the community, or other similar forms of personal sacrifice.’”
On February 9-10, 2001, the Vatican’s Council for Promoting Christian Unity called upon the Lutheran World Federation and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches to engage in a consultation on indulgences. Dr. Idair Pedroso Mateus, a Reformed theologian from Brazil, who served on the consultation, likened indulgences to the “prosperity theology” of neo-pentecostalism.2 “An official ‘note’ by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, warns that describing Protestant churches as ‘sister churches’ can cause ‘ambiguities,’” since the Church of Rome “’is not sister but ‘mother’ of all the particular Churches’” Furthermore, this appellation can only apply to “those ecclesial communities that have preserved a valid episcopate and Eucharist.” The cardinal’s note, approved by Pope John Paul on June 9, is ‘to be held as authoritative and binding,’ according to Cardinal Ratzinger’s letter to the bishops’ conferences.”3
Then in September, 2000, the encyclical Dominus Iesus, signed by Ratzinger and promulgated by Pope John Paul, ignited a firestorm of protest, especially from Lutheran and Reformed bodies that had been engaged in fruitful ecumenical dialogue. On the other hand, defenders of “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” (ECT) read Dominus Iesus differently, as a statement on Rome’s side of “honest ecumenism,” which is only read negatively by left-of-center ecumenists. The phrase “gravely deficient” is directed at non-Christian religions. Non-Catholics are in a state of grace, their baptism is recognized, and they are therefore “in a certain communion, albeit imperfect, with the Church.”4
At the same time, The Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity was engaged in ecumenical discussions on justification especially with the Lutheran World Federation, which issued in the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (ET, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000): “The present Joint Declaration [1999] has this intention: namely, to show that on the basis of their dialogue the subscribing Lutheran churches and the Roman Catholic Church are now able to articulate a common understanding of our justification by God’s grace through faith in Christ,” despite remaining questions and issues (10-11). Building on previous consultations, the Joint Declaration affirmed remarkable agreement in essential points regarding justification and should be closely read as a clear advance in the ecumenical discussion. Nevertheless, key aspects of the evangelical doctrine of justification are, as in joint statements issuing from the U. S.-based group, Evangelicals and Catholics Together, are left unresolved while a common agreement in the gospel is nevertheless assumed. In other cases, particularly the capitulation on the Lutheran World Federation side to a definition of faith as “faith, hope, and love,” the evangelical doctrine of faith is explicitly rejected. Faith is love of God and neighbor, the document says (32). The conclusion of the Declaration is that the anathemas of each body no longer apply. “The teaching of the Lutheran churches presented in this Declaration does not fall under the condemnations of the Council of Trent. The condemnations in the Lutheran Confessions do not apply to the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church presented in this Declaration. Nothing is thereby taken away from the seriousness of the condemnations related to the doctrine of justification (26).
While mainline Protestants demonstrate ambivalence about this new pope, probably in large measure because of their liberal biases in theology and ethics, evangelicals have been practically unanimous in their praise. While doctrinal tensions still exist, Benedict XVI is seen as building on the “culture of life” so admirably defended by John Paul II. As for Norman Geisler, “He’s going to hold the line” against liberalism and relativism.5
With this background, we now turn to some of the representative statements by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, to obtain a better idea of what we might expect from his pontificate. Hopefully we will see that there is much to appreciate in an age of increasing pressure to conform the church’s message to the spirit of the age, while also recognizing the distance that remains between genuinely evangelical churches and the Bishop of Rome.
Catholic Doctrine
I will refer throughout to Cardinal Ratzinger, since the writings from which I am drawing pre-date his papacy, and I begin with The Ratzinger Report (1985).6 In describing the structure and content of Catholic faith, he argues against those who reduce the gospel to a banishment of all negative thinking, when sin is the obvious backdrop that cannot be underplayed. “The attempt to give Christianity a new publicity value by putting it in an unqualifiedly positive relationship to the world—by actually picturing it as a conversion to the world—corresponds to our feeling about life and hence continues to thrive” (56). Such “progressivism,” so widely praised in the years after Vatican II, “has today come under suspicion of being merely the apotheosis of the late-capitalist bourgeoisie, on which, instead of attacking it critically, it sheds a kind of religious glow.” “A Christianity that believes it has no other function than to be completely in tune with the spirit of the times has nothing to say and no meaning to offer…It is not the ideology of adaptation that will rescue Christianity,” despite their immediate publicity value, but only re-entering “the apostolic tradition [1 Cor 4:13]; nothing can rescue it but the prophetic courage to make its voice heard decisively and unmistakably at this very hour.” “Anyone who looks, however briefly, at the history of religion will learn to what extent it is dominated by the theme of guilt and atonement, with what abstruse and often strange efforts man has attempted to free himself form the burdensome feeling of guilt without being able actually to do so” (58). But the answer is metanoia, which is not only “repentance” (change of mind), as one finds it in Greek, but a full conversion of the soul and its actions (60-1).
Referring directly to the Hitler Youth movement’s slogan, says Rantzinger, Dietrich von Hildebrand writes, “Thus the fluidity of existence that is required of the Christian is, at the same time, ‘the exact opposite…of the cult of constant activity….’ In other words, Christian metanoia is, to all intents and purposes, identical with pistis (faith, constancy), a change that does not exclude constancy but makes it possible” (62). But it’s more than “a ‘formal conservatism,’ which is not necessarily grounded in truth (63). “In contrasting the two modes of change, von Hildebrand, I think, has made abundantly clear the true nature of the Christian readiness to change as opposed to that of the [Nazi] ‘cult of activity’” (64). “One thing above all should be clear [from the gospel as “good news”]: the joyous character of Christian faith does not depend on the effectiveness of ecclesiastical events. The Church is not a society for the promotion of good cheer, whose value rises and falls with the success of its activities,” like various social and civic institutions (81).
He says he does not understand why theology cannot be communicated to the church today the way Luther’s catechism did, instead of the tortured textbooks we now have. In this respect, at least, the Reformation was simply recovering ancient catechesis, at least in form (Decalogue, Our Father, the sacraments, the Creed) (131).
An untiring foe of theologians who threaten traditional Catholic teaching, Ratzinger defends Vatican II while nevertheless challenging the left-wing excesses that followed in its wake. (Even the Council itself was divided between advocates of ressourcement (going back to the sources for the current situation) and aggiornamento (openness to change). “We need only recall the names of Odo Casel, Hugo Rahner, Henri de Lubac, Jean Danielou to have before our eyes a theology that knew—and knows—that it was close to the Scriptures because it was close to the Fathers. This situation seems, in the meantime, to have ceased to exist” (134). The historical-critical method and the faith of the Church are affirmed together in Vatican II (Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation), but these are in origin and purpose at odds. For the Church holds “the understanding of Holy Scripture as an inner unity in which one part sustains the other, has its existence in it, so that each part can be read and understood only in terms of the whole” (135-6).
He doesn’t think that Karl Rahner’s theology of self-transcendence gets it right either. Rahner was a key theologian at Vatican II, who argued that humanity is essentially open to God, revelation, and grace, and thus underscored the correlation between revelation and general human experience. Because of this, all people—even atheists, reveal that God’s grace is at work in their lives when they display love for their neighbor. But Ratzinger remains unconvinced:
Is it true that Christianity adds nothing to the universal but merely makes it known? Is the Christian really just man as he is? Is that what he is supposed to be? Is not man as he is that which is insufficient, that which must be mastered and transcended?...Is not the main point of the faith of both Testaments that man is what he ought to be only by conversion, that is, when he ceases to be what he is? Does not Christianity become meaningless when it is reinstated in the universal, whereas what we really want is the new, the other, the saving trans-formation?...A Christianity that is no more than a reflected universality may be innocuous, but is it not also superfluous? And, it might be noted in passing, it is simply not empirically true that Christians do not say anything in particular that can be opposed; that they say only what is universal. They say much that is particular. Otherwise, how could they be a ‘sign that is rejected’ (Lk 2:34)? (166).
He also offers terrific criticisms of ex...
More... http://www.modernreformation.org/catholicism.htm about 1/3 into the article...
[This message has been edited by Notafraid (edited 4/25/2005 11:24p).]
BY MICHAEL S. HORTON
In his first speech as pope, Benedict XVI declared, “The current Successor assumes as his primary commitment that of working tirelessly towards the reconstitution of the full and visible unity of all Christ’s followers.”1 Before he took the name Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger had already established a name for himself as the “Vatican’s doctrinal watch-dog,” head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. In that capacity, Cardinal Ratzinger was the guiding hand in John Paul II’s famous encyclicals, such as Dominus Iesus, which continued to regard the theology of the Reformation as “gravely deficient.” Yet he has also led Vatican consultations with mainline Protestants and evangelicals. What can Modern Reformation readers expect of the new pope? Will he look back to the pre-conciliar legacy of the Inquisition (the former name of the Congregation he headed was once upon a time called the Holy Office of the Roman Inquisition)? Or will he be a catalyst for Roman Catholic-Protestant unity? Or perhaps something in between? For all of us who care about truth and unity, these are not irrelevant questions.
What I’m offering here is not an essay so much as a series of quotations from some representative works written by then-Cardinal Ratzinger over the last twenty-five years. A prolific and colorful writer, Ratzinger is also a first-rate theologian: clear in argument, concise in presentation, and conversant with other traditions.
First, some background is necessary. While John Paul II can certainly be praised for his uncompromising stand on Christian social ethics and called for greater Christian unity, it must not be forgotten that he was regularly calling for a renewal of devotion to traditional Roman Catholic teaching, the cult of Mary, and in his papal visits to Latin America especially, warned against the incursion of Protestantism as if the Council of Trent had never been convened. All along the way, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger was his theologian-in-residence.
In 1988, John Paul II issued a document calling the faithful to obtain plenary indulgences (offered every 25 years) in the jubilee year of the Church in 2000, which caused the World Alliance of Reformed Churches to pull out of the jubilee celebrations in Rome, although the Lutheran World Federation remained involved. The 1988 papal declaration outlined the conditions for the indulgence: “Catholics must have been to confession, and on the day they wish to receive the indulgence they must receive the Eucharist and pray in one of the various places, such as churches in Rome, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth, in a Catholic cathedral or in any place where they are visiting those in difficulty. An indulgence can also be obtained in a jubilee year by refraining from smoking or alcohol and ‘donating a proportionate sum of money to the poor’ or by ‘devoting a suitable portion of personal free time to activities benefiting the community, or other similar forms of personal sacrifice.’”
On February 9-10, 2001, the Vatican’s Council for Promoting Christian Unity called upon the Lutheran World Federation and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches to engage in a consultation on indulgences. Dr. Idair Pedroso Mateus, a Reformed theologian from Brazil, who served on the consultation, likened indulgences to the “prosperity theology” of neo-pentecostalism.2 “An official ‘note’ by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, warns that describing Protestant churches as ‘sister churches’ can cause ‘ambiguities,’” since the Church of Rome “’is not sister but ‘mother’ of all the particular Churches’” Furthermore, this appellation can only apply to “those ecclesial communities that have preserved a valid episcopate and Eucharist.” The cardinal’s note, approved by Pope John Paul on June 9, is ‘to be held as authoritative and binding,’ according to Cardinal Ratzinger’s letter to the bishops’ conferences.”3
Then in September, 2000, the encyclical Dominus Iesus, signed by Ratzinger and promulgated by Pope John Paul, ignited a firestorm of protest, especially from Lutheran and Reformed bodies that had been engaged in fruitful ecumenical dialogue. On the other hand, defenders of “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” (ECT) read Dominus Iesus differently, as a statement on Rome’s side of “honest ecumenism,” which is only read negatively by left-of-center ecumenists. The phrase “gravely deficient” is directed at non-Christian religions. Non-Catholics are in a state of grace, their baptism is recognized, and they are therefore “in a certain communion, albeit imperfect, with the Church.”4
At the same time, The Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity was engaged in ecumenical discussions on justification especially with the Lutheran World Federation, which issued in the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (ET, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000): “The present Joint Declaration [1999] has this intention: namely, to show that on the basis of their dialogue the subscribing Lutheran churches and the Roman Catholic Church are now able to articulate a common understanding of our justification by God’s grace through faith in Christ,” despite remaining questions and issues (10-11). Building on previous consultations, the Joint Declaration affirmed remarkable agreement in essential points regarding justification and should be closely read as a clear advance in the ecumenical discussion. Nevertheless, key aspects of the evangelical doctrine of justification are, as in joint statements issuing from the U. S.-based group, Evangelicals and Catholics Together, are left unresolved while a common agreement in the gospel is nevertheless assumed. In other cases, particularly the capitulation on the Lutheran World Federation side to a definition of faith as “faith, hope, and love,” the evangelical doctrine of faith is explicitly rejected. Faith is love of God and neighbor, the document says (32). The conclusion of the Declaration is that the anathemas of each body no longer apply. “The teaching of the Lutheran churches presented in this Declaration does not fall under the condemnations of the Council of Trent. The condemnations in the Lutheran Confessions do not apply to the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church presented in this Declaration. Nothing is thereby taken away from the seriousness of the condemnations related to the doctrine of justification (26).
While mainline Protestants demonstrate ambivalence about this new pope, probably in large measure because of their liberal biases in theology and ethics, evangelicals have been practically unanimous in their praise. While doctrinal tensions still exist, Benedict XVI is seen as building on the “culture of life” so admirably defended by John Paul II. As for Norman Geisler, “He’s going to hold the line” against liberalism and relativism.5
With this background, we now turn to some of the representative statements by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, to obtain a better idea of what we might expect from his pontificate. Hopefully we will see that there is much to appreciate in an age of increasing pressure to conform the church’s message to the spirit of the age, while also recognizing the distance that remains between genuinely evangelical churches and the Bishop of Rome.
Catholic Doctrine
I will refer throughout to Cardinal Ratzinger, since the writings from which I am drawing pre-date his papacy, and I begin with The Ratzinger Report (1985).6 In describing the structure and content of Catholic faith, he argues against those who reduce the gospel to a banishment of all negative thinking, when sin is the obvious backdrop that cannot be underplayed. “The attempt to give Christianity a new publicity value by putting it in an unqualifiedly positive relationship to the world—by actually picturing it as a conversion to the world—corresponds to our feeling about life and hence continues to thrive” (56). Such “progressivism,” so widely praised in the years after Vatican II, “has today come under suspicion of being merely the apotheosis of the late-capitalist bourgeoisie, on which, instead of attacking it critically, it sheds a kind of religious glow.” “A Christianity that believes it has no other function than to be completely in tune with the spirit of the times has nothing to say and no meaning to offer…It is not the ideology of adaptation that will rescue Christianity,” despite their immediate publicity value, but only re-entering “the apostolic tradition [1 Cor 4:13]; nothing can rescue it but the prophetic courage to make its voice heard decisively and unmistakably at this very hour.” “Anyone who looks, however briefly, at the history of religion will learn to what extent it is dominated by the theme of guilt and atonement, with what abstruse and often strange efforts man has attempted to free himself form the burdensome feeling of guilt without being able actually to do so” (58). But the answer is metanoia, which is not only “repentance” (change of mind), as one finds it in Greek, but a full conversion of the soul and its actions (60-1).
Referring directly to the Hitler Youth movement’s slogan, says Rantzinger, Dietrich von Hildebrand writes, “Thus the fluidity of existence that is required of the Christian is, at the same time, ‘the exact opposite…of the cult of constant activity….’ In other words, Christian metanoia is, to all intents and purposes, identical with pistis (faith, constancy), a change that does not exclude constancy but makes it possible” (62). But it’s more than “a ‘formal conservatism,’ which is not necessarily grounded in truth (63). “In contrasting the two modes of change, von Hildebrand, I think, has made abundantly clear the true nature of the Christian readiness to change as opposed to that of the [Nazi] ‘cult of activity’” (64). “One thing above all should be clear [from the gospel as “good news”]: the joyous character of Christian faith does not depend on the effectiveness of ecclesiastical events. The Church is not a society for the promotion of good cheer, whose value rises and falls with the success of its activities,” like various social and civic institutions (81).
He says he does not understand why theology cannot be communicated to the church today the way Luther’s catechism did, instead of the tortured textbooks we now have. In this respect, at least, the Reformation was simply recovering ancient catechesis, at least in form (Decalogue, Our Father, the sacraments, the Creed) (131).
An untiring foe of theologians who threaten traditional Catholic teaching, Ratzinger defends Vatican II while nevertheless challenging the left-wing excesses that followed in its wake. (Even the Council itself was divided between advocates of ressourcement (going back to the sources for the current situation) and aggiornamento (openness to change). “We need only recall the names of Odo Casel, Hugo Rahner, Henri de Lubac, Jean Danielou to have before our eyes a theology that knew—and knows—that it was close to the Scriptures because it was close to the Fathers. This situation seems, in the meantime, to have ceased to exist” (134). The historical-critical method and the faith of the Church are affirmed together in Vatican II (Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation), but these are in origin and purpose at odds. For the Church holds “the understanding of Holy Scripture as an inner unity in which one part sustains the other, has its existence in it, so that each part can be read and understood only in terms of the whole” (135-6).
He doesn’t think that Karl Rahner’s theology of self-transcendence gets it right either. Rahner was a key theologian at Vatican II, who argued that humanity is essentially open to God, revelation, and grace, and thus underscored the correlation between revelation and general human experience. Because of this, all people—even atheists, reveal that God’s grace is at work in their lives when they display love for their neighbor. But Ratzinger remains unconvinced:
Is it true that Christianity adds nothing to the universal but merely makes it known? Is the Christian really just man as he is? Is that what he is supposed to be? Is not man as he is that which is insufficient, that which must be mastered and transcended?...Is not the main point of the faith of both Testaments that man is what he ought to be only by conversion, that is, when he ceases to be what he is? Does not Christianity become meaningless when it is reinstated in the universal, whereas what we really want is the new, the other, the saving trans-formation?...A Christianity that is no more than a reflected universality may be innocuous, but is it not also superfluous? And, it might be noted in passing, it is simply not empirically true that Christians do not say anything in particular that can be opposed; that they say only what is universal. They say much that is particular. Otherwise, how could they be a ‘sign that is rejected’ (Lk 2:34)? (166).
He also offers terrific criticisms of ex...
More... http://www.modernreformation.org/catholicism.htm about 1/3 into the article...
[This message has been edited by Notafraid (edited 4/25/2005 11:24p).]
