Lost in the sound and fury of Islamic response to the Pope's perceived attack on Muhammad is his direct attack on the cherished assumptions of the secularized West. We in the West pride ourselves that our removal of faith from the public sphere has delivered us from so-called “sectarian” violence that bloodied Europe in the 17th century. The language of faith is assigned to a private, irrational (i.e. subjective) sphere.
The Pope argues that reason and faith are inseparable; indeed, a proper understanding of this means that violence is incompatible with faith. It also means that faith cannot be separated from “reality as a whole.”
Examples of such compartmentalization abound. I am reminded of one of my undergraduates in an ethics class who argued that she was in no position to judge whether Hitler was right or wrong. It's up to the individual, right? The Pope himself remembers a colleague saying there was something odd about a university having two faculties dedicated to something that didn't exist: God. Then there's George Bernard Shaw's quip about a Catholic (or Christian) university being an oxymoron. This is not, claims the Pope, the dominance of reason but its reduction.
He grounds this claim in the conviction that the Logos which was “in the beginning” (John 1) is both creative and self-communicative. In the Greek, logos can mean both reason and word; faith in this Logos is therefore rational and constructive rather than irrational and destructive.
This doesn't mean that, left to ourselves, humans alone can reason their way to God. Rather, between God and humans there exists a capacity to speak about God made possible because God has first spoken and acted on our behalf.
The upshot? Since faith has to do with all of reality, it cannot be sidelined by a scientific and technological rationality which ultimately reduces faith to the irrational.
Our worry in the West has to do with the implications of this statement. If religion enters the public realm, so we imagine, the result will be conflict, if not violence. The outburst that followed Benedict's lecture seems a case in point. Such rage not only horrifies us, but strikes us as deeply irrational. We cannot make sense of it. And we pride ourselves that we have chosen more wisely than the Islamic world. We are free to have or not have our own religion, the reasoning goes, as long as we keep it to ourselves. In the public realm, so this line goes, we must not impose our religion on anyone.
Thus we end up with the very thing the Pope is speaking against: religion as a set of personal beliefs or an inner awareness separate from our cultural, political and public lives. The world's “profoundly religious cultures,” the Pope states, “see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions.”
Even more, we can add, it becomes easy to condemn irrational sectarian violence while imagining our violence is rational — and unfortunately necessary to stop their violence.
We have long since passed the time when “the West” and Christianity were in any meaningful sense synonymous. The danger for us who follow Jesus is not that some coming Islamic tide will flood the Western world and “break the Cross” as one website put it. What threatens the followers of Jesus in North America and Western Europe is that we have so accommodated ourselves to the world around us that we have no distinctive alternative by which to understand or to address the challenges facing us.
One such alternative might be the Pope's assertion that peacemaking is the most profoundly rational course of action to follow, because at its heart is the peace that God in Christ has already extended to the world. That peace, more than nostrums about freedom or democracy, is something worth trying to share, but the Church can only do this by regaining her public, corporate voice.
If we are truly living in a time of the “clash of civilizations,” we as Christians would do well to examine our stake in that struggle.
Beth Newman
Professor of Theology and Ethics
Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond