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 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.
