Pope Benedict's ecumenical address at Erfurt

In September 2011 Pope Benedict addressed Lutheran clergy at the former Augustinian convent in Erfurt, Germany which was once home to Martin Luther. Here is an excerpt from his address:

“As the Bishop of Rome, it is deeply moving for me to be meeting you here in the ancient Augustinian convent in Erfurt. As we have just heard, this is where Luther studied theology. This is where he celebrated his first Mass. Against his father’s wishes, he did not continue the study of Law, but instead he studied theology and set off on the path towards priesthood in the Order of Saint Augustine. And on this path, he was not simply concerned with this or that. What constantly exercised him was the question of God, the deep passion and driving force of his whole life’s journey. 'How do I receive the grace of God?': this question struck him in the heart and lay at the foundation of all his theological searching and inner struggle. For Luther theology was no mere academic pursuit, but the struggle for oneself, which in turn was a struggle for and with God.

“How do I receive the grace of God? The fact that this question was the driving force of his whole life never ceases to make a deep impression on me. For who is actually concerned about this today – even among Christians? What does the question of God mean in our lives? In our preaching? Most people today, even Christians, set out from the presupposition that God is not fundamentally interested in our sins and virtues. He knows that we are all mere flesh. And insofar as people believe in an afterlife and a divine judgement at all, nearly everyone presumes for all practical purposes that God is bound to be magnanimous and that ultimately he mercifully overlooks our small failings. The question no longer troubles us. But are they really so small, our failings? Is not the world laid waste through the corruption of the great, but also of the small, who think only of their own advantage? Is it not laid waste through the power of drugs, which thrives on the one hand on greed and avarice, and on the other hand on the craving for pleasure of those who become addicted? Is the world not threatened by the growing readiness to use violence, frequently masking itself with claims to religious motivation? Could hunger and poverty so devastate parts of the world if love for God and godly love of neighbour – of his creatures, of men and women – were more alive in us? I could go on. No, evil is no small matter. Were we truly to place God at the centre of our lives, it could not be so powerful. The question: what is God’s position towards me, where do I stand before God? – Luther’s burning question must once more, doubtless in a new form, become our question too, not an academic question, but a real one. In my view, this is the first summons we should attend to in our encounter with Martin Luther.

“Another important point: God, the one God, creator of heaven and earth, is no mere philosophical hypothesis regarding the origins of the universe. This God has a face, and he has spoken to us. He became one of us in the man Jesus Christ – who is both true God and true man. Luther’s thinking, his whole spirituality, was thoroughly Christocentric: “What promotes Christ’s cause” was for Luther the decisive hermeneutical criterion for the exegesis of sacred Scripture. This presupposes, however, that Christ is at the heart of our spirituality and that love for him, living in communion with him, is what guides our life.

“Now perhaps one might say: all well and good, but what has this to do with our ecumenical situation? Could this just be an attempt to talk our way past the urgent problems that are still waiting for practical progress, for concrete results? I would respond by saying that the first and most important thing for ecumenism is that we keep in view just how much we have in common, not losing sight of it amid the pressure towards secularization – everything that makes us Christian in the first place and continues to be our gift and our task. It was the error of the Reformation period that for the most part we could only see what divided us and we failed to grasp existentially what we have in common in terms of the great deposit of sacred Scripture and the early Christian creeds. For me, the great ecumenical step forward of recent decades is that we have become aware of all this common ground, that we acknowledge it as we pray and sing together, as we make our joint commitment to the Christian ethos in our dealings with the world, as we bear common witness to the God of Jesus Christ in this world as our inalienable, shared foundation.

“To be sure, the risk of losing it is not unreal. I would like to make two brief points here. The geography of Christianity has changed dramatically in recent times, and is in the process of changing further. Faced with a new form of Christianity, which is spreading with overpowering missionary dynamism, sometimes in frightening ways, the mainstream Christian denominations often seem at a loss. This is a form of Christianity with little institutional depth, little rationality and even less dogmatic content, and with little stability. This worldwide phenomenon – that bishops from all over the world are constantly telling me about – poses a question to us all: what is this new form of Christianity saying to us, for better and for worse? In any event, it raises afresh the question about what has enduring validity and what can or must be changed – the question of our fundamental faith choice.

“The second challenge to worldwide Christianity of which I wish to speak is more profound and in our country more controversial: the secularized context of the world in which we Christians today have to live and bear witness to our faith. God is increasingly being driven out of our society, and the history of revelation that Scripture recounts to us seems locked into an ever more remote past. Are we to yield to the pressure of secularization, and become modern by watering down the faith? Naturally faith today has to be thought out afresh, and above all lived afresh, so that it is suited to the present day. Yet it is not by watering the faith down, but by living it today in its fullness that we achieve this. This is a key ecumenical task in which we have to help one another: developing a deeper and livelier faith. It is not strategy that saves us and saves Christianity, but faith – thought out and lived afresh; through such faith, Christ enters this world of ours, and with him, the living God. As the martyrs of the Nazi era brought us together and prompted that great initial ecumenical opening, so today, faith that is lived from deep within amid a secularized world is the most powerful ecumenical force that brings us together, guiding us towards unity in the one Lord. And we pray to him, asking that we may learn to live the faith anew, and that in this way we may then become one."

The compatibility of science and theology

My position is that science and theology, properly understood, are fully compatible and need not be consigned to “separate spheres" of enquiry.  Christians need not be afraid of science and in fact science supports some key theological suppositions about the nature of the universe.

First, we need to recognise that science and theology are both rational systems of thought but they have different (not necessarily opposed) a priori assumptions. 

The fundamental assumption of Christian theology is that God reveals himself to us through his Word  - all subsequent logical or systematic theological reasoning proceeds from this.  An atheist may not agree with this assumption but it cannot be disproved.

The fundamental assumption of science is that the universe is observable - from this hypotheses can be developed and tested.  A scientific hypothesis can be disproved (falsified) through observation if it does not fit what is observed.  If someone wants to deny clear scientific observations they would need to disagree with the fundamental assumption of science and hold, for instance, that the universe is not what it seems to be.

Therefore at a high level if you believe that God reveals himself to us through his Word and that the universe is observable you can accept both theology and science.

So what does science tell us that is consistent with a Christian worldview?  I find two examples from cosmology to be particularly relevant:

1. The universe had a single beginning.  The current scientific understanding of the universe, from many highly accurate observations, is that the universe came into being about 14 billion years ago.  This is more profound than it first appears, as an alternative plausible observation could have been that the universe was somehow eternal, cyclical or perhaps without any clear origin.
2. Time was created at the origin of the universe.  Classical theology since Augustine has held that time is part of the created order and that God stands outside time.  Science supports this view of time and it is intrinsic to the theory of relativity - time is essentially an additional dimension of the existing universe and not something external to it.  This is very important as it is entirely consistent with the classical understanding of how God's nature relates to time and events.

Of course science has also revealed many observations that have been uncomfortable to different groups of Christians over time and even now:  the earth revolves around the sun, the universe is not 5000 years old etc.  But the Word of God is not a science textbook and none of these observations is inconsistent with our ultimate understanding of God. 

On the contrary, a God who created and sustains a universe containing a hundred billion galaxies each containing hundreds of billions of stars is omnipotent indeed.

Faith seeking understanding

As background to my view on theological matters, I would like to quote a few paragraphs from Thomas C. Oden's Systematic Theology (a self described “paleo-orthodox" ecumenical theologian from a Reformed background) that I find particularly meaningful:

Christian theology seeks to understand in a reflective and orderly way what God has revealed.  It is not merely reading the Bible as such, although it presupposes having read the Bible... There is no Christian theology without the Bible, yet there is no Bible without an inspirited community to write, remember and translate it, to guard it and pass it on, to study it, live by it, and invite others to live by it.  The Bible provides means by which the Christian message can be received into the minds and hearts of each new generation... 

The Christian study of God is a faith seeking understanding (fides quarens intellectum), a branch of learning in which the faith of the Christian community is seeking intelligibility... 

It is this sort of emergent, maturing understanding that the study of God seeks to attain and articulate.  It is a knowledge that is not to be equated with faith, but that emerges out of faith.  It is not a form of knowing that is simply infused or given directly to the recipient by God, but acquired only with human effort enabled by grace.  It is a knowledge that differs from philosophical inquiry about God because it exists as a response to relevation.  Its reasoning is not self-sufficient, but lives out of its being enlightened by faith. 

(Thomas C. Oden, Systematic Theology, Volume One:  The Living God, p. 25)