As the condom-wars ignited by Benedict XVI’s
Light of the World abate, some
attention might finally be paid to the book’s broader themes and
what they indicate about Benedict’s pontificate. In this regard,
perhaps the interview’s most revealing aspect is the picture that
emerges of Pope Benedict as nothing more and nothing less than a
Christian radical.
Those accustomed to cartoon-like depictions of Joseph
Ratzinger as a “reactionary” might be surprised by this
description. But by “radical,” I don’t mean the type of priest or
minister who only wears clerical garb when attending left-wing
rallies or publically disputing particular church
doctrines.
The word “radical” comes from the Latin radix,
meaning “root.” It’s in this sense Benedict is radical. His
pontificate is about going back to Christianity’s roots to make, as
Benedict says, “visible again the center of Christian life” and
then shining that light upon the world so that we might see the
truth about ourselves.
At Christianity’s center, Benedict states, is the person
of Jesus Christ. But this person, the pope insists, is not whoever
we want him to be. Christ is not the self-help guru proclaimed by
the charlatans of the Prosperity Gospel. Nor is he the
proto-Marxist beloved by devotees of the now-defunct liberation
theologies. Still less is Christ a “compassionate,
super-intelligent gay man,” as once
opined by that noted biblical scholar, Elton
John.
According to Benedict, Christ is who Christ
says he is: the Son of God. Hence, there is no
contradiction between what some call “the Christ of faith” and “the
Christ of history.” In Light of the World, Benedict
confirms that underscoring this point was why he wrote his
best-selling
Jesus of Nazareth (2007). “The
Jesus in whom we believe,” Benedict claims, “is really also the
historical Jesus.”
Such observations hardly seem revolutionary for a
Christian. But the context of Benedict’s remarks is a world of
biblical studies dominated by what’s known as the
historical-critical method. Among other things, this involves
placing scripture in its historical conditions and exploring the
different literary genres used by biblical authors.
In itself, such analysis can help illuminate scripture’s
meaning. But from the beginning, many of its practitioners have
imposed readings upon biblical texts that explicitly sever the
Christian scriptures from the Christian faith from which they
emerged. It has also facilitated the piling-up of
tenuous-hypotheses upon tenuous-hypotheses about Christ which are
then masqueraded as “facts” that, in Benedict’s words, “eventually
lead to absurdity”: Christ-the-guru, Christ-the-revolutionary,
Christ-the name-your-fashionable-cause.
Yet, Benedict argues, these “alternative portraits” can’t
“explain how within such a short time something could suddenly
appear that completely transcends ordinary expectations.” In short,
Benedict states, “the only real, historical personage is the Christ
in whom the Gospels believe, and not the figure who has been
reconstituted from numerous exegetical studies.”
Before dismissing this as fundamentalism, let’s note that
Benedict maintains that the picture of Jesus as one who was really
crucified, really died, and really rose from the dead accords not
only with faith, but also with reason. For all their variations,
the Gospel accounts are reasonable because they provide the only
coherent explanation of what happened. These texts, Benedict notes,
provide “direct access to the events.” Some of these writings, he
reminds us, “originate literally from the 30s of the first
century.”
But why, we might ask, does Benedict belabor the point?
One reason is surely the damage done to Christian faith by scholars
parading various pet theories as “facts.” Another reason, however,
may be Benedict’s sense that even many faithful Christians have
forgotten the radical implications of accepting Christ as whom he
says he is.
First, such an acceptance rescues Christianity from
becoming what the German philosopher Rüdiger Safranski calls “a
cold religious project”: a “mix of social ethics, institutional
power thinking, psychotherapy, techniques of meditation, museum
curation, cultural project management, and social work.” That’s a
concise description of the “liberal Christianity” that’s helped
empty Western Europe’s churches, particularly in Benedict’s German
homeland.
Second, it forces us to take seriously aspects of
Christianity that have disappeared from public view over the past
forty years.
In recent decades, Benedict claims, Christian preaching
has stopped mentioning the Last Things revealed by Christ: i.e.,
heaven, hell, and the fact that all of us will be judged. Instead,
preaching has become “one-sided, in that it is largely directed
toward the creation of a better world, while hardly anyone talks
any more about the other, truly better world.”
For confirmation, just look at the websites of those
religious orders which talk endlessly about social justice without
relating it to Christian belief in the limits of earthly justice
and the reality of divine justice. This diminishes Christianity to
either what Benedict calls “political moralism, as happened in
liberation theology” or “psychotherapy and wellness.” It also, some
might interject, encourages us to conjure up secular messiahs who,
not being God, cannot possibly fulfill religious-like expectations
of hope and change.
In the end, it results in the same thing: practical
atheism, at the heart of which is a teddy-bear Christ who, as
Benedict wrote years ago, “demands nothing, never scolds, who
accepts everyone and everything, who no longer does anything but
affirm us.”
And therein may be the essence of Benedict’s Light of
the World. Yes, Christ always offers us forgiveness.
Nonetheless, Benedict adds, Christ also “takes us seriously.”
Having stated who he is, Christ leaves us free either to accept him
as he really is and order our lives accordingly, or to construct
what another Christian scholar, Thomas More, called “worldly
fantasies” of our own making.
More radically different paths are hard to
imagine.
