Posted on 09/17/2006 7:56:15 PM PDT by Lorianne
As expected, various and sundry Islamic leaders are criticizing Pope Benedict's Regensburg speech. The LA Times reports:
"Pope Benedict XVI flew back to Rome on Thursday to face an international flurry of protest over comments he made critical of historical Islamic violence during a six-day trip to his native Germany.
"Muslim clerics and community leaders from Europe to the Middle East and beyond condemned the pope's comments made this week."
Both the Times (not surprisingly) and the Muslim leaders, of course, have missed the point. Benedict's remarks (which you can read in full here) must be understood in the context of his theology as a whole.
Jesus claimed "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me." John 14:6. As C.S. Lewis put it of this claim:
"A man who was merely a man and said the sort of thing Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
In a 2002 interview, then-Cardinal Ratzinger came down clearly and emphatically on the side of the Son of God:
"Christ is totally different from all the founders of other religions, and he cannot be reduced to a Buddha, a Socrates or a Confucius. He is really the bridge between heaven and earth, the light of truth who has appeared to us."
Also in 2002, when presenting the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's Declaration "Dominus Iesus": On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church, the then-Cardinal condemned the belief that "all religions are equally valid roads to salvation for their followers." He explained:
"This is a widespread conviction today not only in theological environments, but also in ever greater sectors of Catholic and non-Catholic public opinion, especially those most influenced by the cultural orientation that prevails in the West today, which can be defined, without the fear of contradiction, by one word: relativism."
In turn, he argued, relativism leads ineluctably to the "refusal to identify the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth with the very reality of God, the living God."
Some of Benedict's predecessors -- arguably including his immediate predecessor John Paul II, who is otherwise well-deserving of his fast track to sainthood -- downplayed this aspect of Christian theology in order to promote inter-faith dialogue. In contrast, it is a core part of Benedict's faith and is rapidly becoming a major theme of his pontificate.
If Islamic leaders expect Pope Benedict to treat Islam as an "equally valid" "road to salvation," they are thus sure to be disappointed.
If rejecting the relativism constitutes a shot across Islam's bow, that shot also crosses any number of other bows. In the Regensburg speech, the Pope staked out a set of claims about the relationship of man and God that stand in opposition not only to the Islam of Ibn Hazn, but also that of the Protestant Reformers, the Jesus of History crowd, and (an area of particular concern for this pope) post-Christian Europe. The Pope renewed the claims of the Church Universal to have a truth that is transcendent, rather than culturally-bound:
"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."
Having said that, of course, I concede that the Pope does seem to have the problem of religiously motivated terror in mind. Even so, Islam was not his only target. He said:
"A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures."
I read that line as a shot across the bow of post-Christian Europe -- a warning that Europe increasingly lacks the tools demanded to meet the threats of the day. Hence, the speech implicitly recalls what may be the ultimate goal of Benedict's pontificate; namely, calling Europe back to Christ.
Steve Bainbridge is a TCS Daily Contributing Editor and a Professor of Law at UCLA. He writes two popular blogs: ProfessorBainbridge.com and ProfessorBainbridgeOnWine.com.
If the Muzzies do not agree, so what? Theirs is the only faith in which failure to agree with their theology results in decapitaion or slavery.
Six billion folks in the world, one fifth are muslim.
This 20% want to run the rest of us into the ground, as is openly stated in their Koran. There is no news here.
Islam is the only "religion" whose "holy" book advocates killing people who refuse to convert. It's time for the rest of us (Hindu, Atheist, Christian, Jew, Sikh, Voodoo, etc.) to wake up and knock these folks back to the 700's again, like what has been required every century or so since the 1400's.
Muslims obviously suffer from a massive case of self loathing and inferiority, otherwise they wouldn't fly into mob violence every time some Westerner says something unflattering about them. It's interesting though, how every time anyone refers to them as violent, they respond with uncontrolled rage and ....... violence.
That's an interesting thought.
Europe certainly needs it.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus
I'm not a Catholic, but does Drudge seem to be a little negative toward the Pope with his headings?
But I believe that as people have time to reflect on all that the Pope said there will be some thoughtful,good and very bright people who will speak of the beauty, truth and wisdom of his words. At least I hope so.
"Almost every time that the current supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, gives a sermon he mentions Salman Rushdie in these terms and denounces him as a man who has insulted the name of the Prophet and who can therefore be killed."
And what does the British government think about that?
"It’s just the standard rhetoric."
lol. With dhimmies like these, who needs enemies?
Pope to Islamofascists: I am sorry [rofl] your overreaction revealed the essential truth of my remarks.
I don't really know about literacy in the Muslim world, but I suspect the standard is not high. I wonder even whether they can read the Koran in any meaningful sense -- Arabic is a very difficult language, and I find it hard to believe that Richard Reid (for example) could learn it in months or a year. Even Arabs might find the Koran hard. An Israeli linguistics professor (he'd been born in Morocco) said in class once that "Written Arabic isn't spoken, and spoken Arabic isn't written," i.e., the country dialects actually spoken are very different from the classical Arabic of the Koran, though I believe there's some sort of pan-Arabic dialect based on classical Arabic that's used for, say, broadcasts and maybe some newspapers.
Maybe they only learn to "read" the way some American Bar Mitzvah boys learn Hebrew -- i.e., they learn the alphabet and the sounds and can "read" aloud without understanding.
I understand from other threads that the BBC was the first to pick up on the "offending" lines and see that they went out in translation to all the Arab countries well before translations of the entire speech were available in those languages -- if they are yet. And I wouldn't be surprised if there's some sort of "phone tree" among the mosques (not to necessarily involve the BBC or, say, Reuters, directly). I really think all these "spontaneous" demonstrations are the work of the mosques.
Both the Times and the Muslim leaders are determined to miss the point!
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