Pope Benedict XVI prays in Erfurt Cathedral in Erfurt, eastern Germany, Friday, Sept. 23, 2011. Pope Benedict XVI is on a four-day official visit to his homeland Germany.
Posted on 09/23/2011 1:40:37 PM PDT by NYer
During his State Visit to Germany, the Holy Father gave this address at Erfurt during an ecumenical gathering at the Lutheran church. Erfurt is, of course, where Martin Luther’s Augustinian convent was.
A highlight:
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.
My emphases and comments.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
As I begin to speak, I would like first of all to thank you for this opportunity to come together with you. I am particularly grateful to Pastor Schneider for greeting me and welcoming me into your midst with his kind words. At the same time I want to express my thanks for the particularly gracious gesture that our meeting can be held in this historic location. [Graciousness is important in all ecumenical matters. Graciousness does not mean that we have to water down our doctrine.]
As the Bishop of Rome, it is deeply moving for me to be meeting representatives of Council of the Lutheran Church of Germany here in the ancient Augustinian convent in Erfurt. This is where Luther studied theology. This is where he was ordained a priest in 1507. 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. 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 him 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 an impression on me. [NB:] For who is actually concerned about this today – even among Christians? What does the question of God mean in our lives? In our preaching? [Indeed!]
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. Insofar as people today 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. [NB:] 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? [These are not small things. They are huge. And they result in a systemic way because of the failures, the sins of omission and commission, of individuals.]
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? – this burning question of Martin Luther must once more, doubtless in a new form, become our question too. In my view, this is the first summons we should attend to in our encounter with Martin Luther. [Keep in mind that Luther isn't the only person who ever asked questions like this. So, this is not a huge concession on the part of the Roman Pontiff. But this is a good opportunity to pose the questions again to a new audience.]
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 you will 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? [Nice and direct. Consider for a moment whether Pope John Paul II would have said this, thought this way. I think not. Pope Benedict is the right person to pose this question to this group now. And he can do so in his native tongue. Of coure, Benedict XVI is also the Pope of Christian Unity.]
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. [This is something that the Orthodox know too: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. These are not the days of Mortalium animos, though what Pius XI wrote was not wrong. We do have to be careful not to compromise our doctrine. But these are the days of near total collapse of the Christian ethos in Europe, in the West.] 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. The great ecumenical step forward of recent decades is that we have become aware of all this common ground and 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 undying foundation.
The risk of losing this, sadly, is not unreal. I would like to make two points here. [1] 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 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. [He is surely talking about the missionary activity of the zillion evangelical or fundamentalist splinter groups. However, rather than just say that they must be resisted, he says that maybe the phenomenon requires an examination of conscience on our part and a review of our own Evangelization. We need a New Evangelization. I also think we need a Marshall Plan, grounded in renewal of our most perfect form of communication with the world, liturgical worship. Also, keep in mind how Papa Ratzinger has always been able to find a good kernel buried even in dangers theological errors. For example, he started off in one of his books on liturgy using a point of, of all things, Liberation Theology. Of course Ratzinger understood liberation theology better than liberation theologians. But consider Christ as the one who liberates the human person from sins and, through revealing man more fully to himself, freeing him from error about who man is. Christ is truly Liberator. Use that as a starting point for what Christ, the true Actor, does for us in our liturgical worship. So, we can find even in errant groups some points for our own edification. But I digress.]
The second challenge to worldwide Christianity of which I wish to speak is more profound and in our country [Germany] more controversial: [2] 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. [QUAERITUR:] 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. [In my rantings about a "Marshall Plan" I make the distinction about ad intra and ad extra. We have to know who we are and live who we are in order to have anything to say to the whole world. If we don't have a clear identity, why should the world listen to us? At the same time, if we cave in to the world, the world (under its Prince) will crush us out of the public square.]
This is a key ecumenical task. [We have a common task.] Moreover, we should help one another to develop a deeper and more lively 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 the first great ecumenical opening, [Common persecution.] 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. [An interesting parallel, no? Those who attack the Church from a secularist position are doing what the Nazis did. That's it, isn't it?]
Erfurt, September 23, 2011
The "Lutheran "group the pope has had contact with is the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), ...a liberal group that doctrinal Lutherans abhor..
Marx was not a Marxist, and Luther was not a Lutheran. The man was more than the sum of his words, and certainly more than how his interpreters saw him.
Impressive speech/sermon.
I think the usual response is along the lines of: Luther was just one guy, he got a lot wrong...
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