Knowledge and Vital Piety: A Protestant Remembers Benedict XVI
Pope Benedict XVI by giulio napolitano
I can still remember a session in systematic theology class in divinity school when Geoffrey Wainwright informed us all that he had to cancel our next class. He was headed to the Vatican for meetings with the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. We were all very impressed.
In my eager seminarian phase, I used to ask Wainwright all sorts of questions, both in class and out. This time, I wanted to know what one wears when meeting a cardinal in the Vatican. Why that was my question, I have no clue. I must have had this vision of the Vatican as a place where everyone, including a visiting Methodist theologian, is clad at all times in robes. So I asked him, and Geoffrey looked at me over his glasses and simply said, “A suit.”
Geoffrey Wainwright and Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, were two of the 20th and early 21st centuries’ theological giants. Both men sought in their life and in their work to resource the church with a faithful telling of the gospel, rejecting the claims of Protestant Liberalism, Marxism, various forms of liberation ideology, and the dehumanizing repercussions of secularism. Both men pointed to Jesus as the ultimate answer both to humanity’s fulfillment here in life, but also as he is the fulfillment of our eternity. Benedict’s last words, “Lord, I love you,” summarize his entire corpus.
In a recent Twitter discussion, I was asked why so many Protestant leaders were praising Benedict in the aftermath of his death on December 31st. My response was that Benedict, in his life, his writings, and in his commitment to be faithful showed the world a deep and abiding love for Jesus. There are very few writers who–perhaps especially in academic or intellectual writing–can convey their love for Christ through the written page. Episcopalian theologian Katherine Sonderegger comes to mind as one of the few who can. Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams is another. I would add Benedict to that list. His three-volume collection of books, Jesus of Nazareth, is a tour de force in which that love is evident on every page.
What Benedict is able to do in the three volumes of Jesus of Nazareth is to present the story and message of Jesus using Scripture, the rich traditions of the church (particularly the Church Fathers) and its history of interpretation, together with modern scholarship. One of Benedict’s lasting contributions is to remind us that the modern or contemporary line isn’t always right. Like G. K. Chesterton, who warned the world of the “tyranny of the present,” Benedict reminds readers that the witness of the church throughout the ages is just as vital to know and comprehend as anything we may come up with now. While not downplaying the role of critical scholarship, he speaks to the good that “higher criticism” of Scripture has given and then reminds the reader that even this approach has its limits. He wasn’t willing to give every “higher critic” the benefit of the doubt without also critiquing the critique. In fact, he often engaged their theories and offered more compelling ones that fit the traditional narrative. What Benedict does in these volumes in particular is to remind the reader that the Jesus of Scripture is the Jesus we encounter as the Risen Lord today. There is no difference between the two.
This ability to address the concerns of contemporary criticism of the church, its doctrines, and of the scriptural text itself, is one the great gifts that Benedict left us. As you read his own work you can see that his grasp of contemporary scholarship was vast. But so was his grasp of the church’s witness throughout the centuries. And what Benedict was able to do was to show in his own work the continuing validity of historic Christian claims while engaging contemporary ideas with the full depth and breadth of the Christian tradition. He showed us that being steeped in the Christian tradition is one of the best ways authentically to communicate its riches and to engage contemporary critique.
Benedict’s work on liturgy is vital to his overall scholarly contribution to the life of the church. He took seriously the Second Vatican Council’s claim that the Eucharist is the pinnacle of the Christian life. He will be known for a greater allowance of the traditional Latin mass–something his successor has undercut–but Benedict’s love for the liturgy of the church, the formative impact of its worship, and his belief that the Eucharist is the primary means by which Christ communicates himself to the faithful, place him firmly within the renewal that was originally intended by those who, like Romano Guardini, launched the liturgical movements of the early twentieth century.
His Spirit of the Liturgy is a classic liturgical textbook. I encourage you to read it. It has great depth but I still remember the first time I read it thinking that one of its major points is “get out of the way.” This isn’t the primary point of the book. In fact, what Benedict is able to do in this volume is to place worship within God’s overarching plan of salvation, the making whole of fallen creation. In worship, heaven and earth are brought together and we see a foretaste of God’s ultimate vision of renewal. But as such a vital aspect of God’s work of restoration, worship has to be taken seriously. We cannot simply make it up as we go.
When innovation in worship is seen as a good in itself, Benedict reminds us that the traditions of worship have immense benefit, if for no other reason than to remind us that worship isn’t about us. The freedom of liturgical worship is found in living into it, not in changing it to our personal wish or whim. I think it would be fair to say that Benedict’s approach to liturgical innovation was one of suspicion. And he was right. Worship is so central to the formation of faithful disciples and pointing to the authentic Christ is so vital to that enterprise that it takes centuries, not years or momentary whims, to carry this out with integrity.
The basic question that Benedict brings to those who are outside of liturgical traditions is what are you doing to get out of the way and to let the Risen Christ be the focus of your worship? If the Eucharist, for example, is rarely celebrated and only then as an addendum to the sermon, what have we done? Christ is the union of heaven and earth. How does our worship participate in his work? Do we still believe that the one who launched the new creation itself in a graveyard outside of Jerusalem can change lives today in our communities?
Throughout his life and ministry, Benedict called the faithful to trust the one who is trustworthy. Trust. The faith isn’t what you create. It’s what has been given. To create a religion of our own making, one that bends to our whims and wishes, is nothing but idolatry. It will not save. But this trust is not blind and unthinking trust. This is key. God has given us minds to think in addition to hearts that feel.
Benedict’s Regensburg address–overshadowed unfortunately by a misunderstood quotation–will be known as a brilliant explication of the way in which religion, reason, and science are not at odds, but can work in tandem for the benefit of humanity. He challenged the reliance on a sort of “scientific reason” that can only address things and issues in which empirical verification can be applied, arguing that while this type of reason is useful, it has limits and is thus incapable of addressing the complexity of the human situation or the telos of creation itself. He argued that, “We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically falsifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons.” He pointed to a reason that takes seriously science, theology, and philosophy for the true benefit of the whole of human experience.
He also spoke forcefully against relativism. This was the theme of the sermon he gave to the cardinals just before the conclave that elected him pope in 2005. That sermon will also go down in history as a substantive and ringing challenge to “the dictatorship of relativism” that marks aspects of contemporary thought and “does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires.” The mandate of the Gospel is not relative; it’s embodied in a person. Sounding much like the Church Fathers he knew so well Benedict told the gathered Cardinals:
We, however, have a different goal: the Son of God, the true man. He is the measure of true humanism. An "adult" faith is not a faith that follows the trends of fashion and the latest novelty; a mature adult faith is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ. It is this friendship that opens us up to all that is good and gives us a criterion by which to distinguish the true from the false, and deceit from truth.
One of the themes found in Benedict’s writings–both in content and in form–is his desire to show the faithful that the promises of God are true and that God still desires to be in a saving relationship with us. God is faithful. His continued presence with us is real. And together with Scripture, the experiences of the faithful over time, tested, point to the authentic Christ who can be known.
We shouldn’t imagine that we can grasp the eternal God on our own, however, even if we can experience him. The witnesses of Scripture, of the saints, of the church’s liturgy and teaching, and of the continued blessing of Christ’s presence in the Sacraments begin to shape us in ways and in patterns of life that make it possible for us to know the God revealed in Jesus. But on our own, we err. We fail. We see dimly in a context in which we are already said to see dimly before the final resurrection! So Benedict calls us to trust together, but not without thought, not without reason or critique. The tradition can be critiqued. But you can’t do this alone and you don’t have to. In fact, the family you may not have known that you had, the faithful throughout all centuries, is even larger than you can ever imagine.
Recently, Benedict spoke of his own death, mentioning a theme that runs throughout so many of his books, the theme of friendship with Jesus. He wrote:
Quite soon, I shall find myself before the final judge of my life. Even though, as I look back on my long life, I can have great reason for fear and trembling, I am nonetheless of good cheer, for I trust firmly that the Lord is not only the just judge, but also the friend and brother who himself has already suffered for my shortcomings, and is thus also my advocate, my ‘Paraclete.’ In light of the hour of judgment, the grace of being a Christian becomes all the more clear to me. It grants me knowledge, and indeed friendship, with the judge of my life, and thus allows me to pass confidently through the dark door of death.
With this in mind, we can better understand the words of Pope Francis at Benedict’s funeral, “Benedict, faithful friend of the Bridegroom, may your joy be complete as you hear his voice, now and forever!”
So why should a Wesleyan read Benedict’s work? It’s very simple: Benedict wrote about holiness. Wesley’s vision of holiness is one of becoming more and more like Jesus. To be holy is to take on the attributes, the character, the very mind of the only one who can be called holy. Benedict not only wrote about this Jesus, but he knew him, and called him friend. And he used his scholarship to point to the trustworthiness of the gospel, engaging contemporary concerns with the full depth of the church’s witness. As Protestants we may not agree with everything that he said, but we will be all the better for hearing it, because in Benedict we see one who in service to Christ fulfilled Charles Wesley’s words, “unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety.”
Ryan N. Danker is the Director of the John Wesley Institute in Washington, DC and Assistant Lead Editor of Firebrand.