The Pope, Islam, and Lutheranism

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This article discusses the controversial 2006 comments made by Pope Benedict XVI in Germany on Islam in view of their implications for Lutheranism.

Contents

[edit] Introduction

Early in 2006, when Danish cartoons depicting an “explosive” Mohammad were used to stir up the masses in some Muslim countries, Pope Benedict XVI used his political and spiritual weight to condemn, not only the violence by Muslims, but also the Danish cartoonists who, in his view, ridiculed what was sacred to one religion.[1] Since September 12, 2006, the pope finds himself as the object of much Muslim anger and hatred. Some remarks in a recent speech given in Regensburg, Germany,[2] caused Muslim leaders to accuse the pope of, among other things, displaying a “crusader mentality.”[3]

[edit] The Pope on Islam and Reason

What did the pope say? In his guest lecture at the University of Regensburg, where he served as professor of dogmatic theology between 1969 and 1977, the pope spoke about the relationship between faith and reason. After reminiscing about his time at Regensburg University – and about the role of theology in the context of the rational discourse at a modern university – Benedict quoted the erudite Byzantine emperor, Manuel II (1350-1425), who – in a dialogue with a learned Persian in Ankara, Turkey, during the winter break of a military campaign – accused Mohammad of having brought nothing new, only bad and inhumane things; of, in fact, having taught to advance the Muslim faith by the sword.[4] The pope characterized this as “startling brusqueness” and went on to give the emperor’s rationale for “having expressed himself so forcefully.”

This rationale ties Manuel’s comments into the general theme of Benedict’s presentation on faith and reason. For the emperor pointed out to his Persian interlocutor that, since faith is a matter of the soul and reason, not of the body, violence does nothing to win a person for the faith. Generally speaking, violence is incompatible with God’s nature because violence is unreasonable.[5] Says the pope: “The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.” Benedict then quotes the editor of the emperor’s dialogues as saying that in Islam God is not subject even to rationality. The basic question then is, according to the pope:

At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God.

The pope then goes on to elaborate on what he deems to be the genuine synthesis between faith and reason, namely, that of the Catholic Church. While he thus described Islam as being perceived as an irrational and hence violent faith, his main target was the secular West – after all, he was speaking to a Western audience. His university speech, as he stated, was an “attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within,” which – a mantra in official post-Vatican II Catholicism – was not meant to go back behind the Enlightenment. He criticized Western societies for uncritically worshiping a faithless, “positivistic reason.”

Both irrationalism and positivism he described as dangerous, “disturbing pathologies of religion and reason.” As violence is the outcome when faith is not tempered by reason (e.g., Islam), so violence is the outcome when reason is not tempered by faith, when faith, in other words, is pushed into “subcultures.” Such Western violence the pope detected, e.g., in the exploitation of nature and in a subjective view of ethics, because of which it is “man himself who ends up being reduced.” And such arbitrary exclusion of faith from reason makes the West not only less humane, but also unable to dialogue with the other, religiously shaped cultures of the world.

We can leave it to scholars of Islam to verify or correct the pope’s judgment on Islam[6] – and to Vatican diplomacy to mend the good relationship the papacy enjoyed with Muslims under Benedict’s predecessor, John Paul II.[7] We can also leave to others to speculate about how the pope’s presentation of religious freedom and peacefulness as results of the balanced synthesis of biblical faith and (Greek / Roman) reason found only in Catholicism would account for documents like the Codex Iustinianus of 534 A.D. that, going back to pertinent decrees by Emperor Theodosius II and shaping European legal thought well into early modernity, made religions other than orthodox Christianity illegal, or for events like the forced conversions of Jews and Muslims to Christianity in Catholic Spain during and after the reconquista. More interesting for Lutherans is that the pope, in admittedly “broad strokes,” explicitly and implicitly also defined Catholicism’s relationship to Lutheranism.

[edit] The Pope on Lutheranism and Reason

[edit] The Explicit Delimitation

He did so in two ways. First, and explicitly, Benedict grouped Lutherans and the other churches emerging from the 16th-century Reformation among those who operate based on a deficient, unbalanced and therefore dangerous relationship between faith and reason. Lutherans, in the view of the pope, thus stand somewhere between Catholicism’s “genuine synthesis” of faith and reason and either Islamic irrationalism or Western atheism. While they cannot be blamed for the Islamic “pathology,” they may well be counted among the reasons for the Western one. This the pope does by making the Reformation the first of three waves of “dehellenization” of Christianity which ultimately led to the far-reaching dechristianization of the West:[8]

Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought. As a result, faith no longer appeared as a living historical Word but as one element of an overarching philosophical system. The principle of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word. Metaphysics appeared as a premise derived from another source, from which faith had to be liberated in order to become once more fully itself. When Kant stated that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this programme forward with a radicalism that the Reformers could never have foreseen.

While acknowledging the differences between the individual waves, Benedict still connects them as a somewhat uniform “programme.” Is that a fair assessment, even if we take the broad brush into account? It obviously is not, for a number of reasons. Historic Lutherans – they were joined in their criticism of scholasticism by the Greek (Hellenistic!) Church – recognize the ecumenical creeds which Enlightenment rationalism and its successors view as philosophical (Hellenistic) deformations of the pious simplicity of the religion of Jesus,[9] which today might need to be enculturated differently. As evidenced, e.g., in the Book of Concord, Lutherans such as Melanchthon and Chemnitz – in the wake of humanism’s new appreciation for the writings of the ancient fathers of the church – display a remarkable and direct knowledge and use of those fathers. Traditional Lutherans also do not share Modernism’s godless view of world and ethics since they continue in the natural law and natural revelation traditions of earlier ages insofar as they are supported by the bible.[10] Detailed study would need to explore where there are agreements and differences between Catholicism and orthodox Lutheranism, but it cannot be said that Lutherans simply have given up on relating to “the world,” including reason, in a theologically positive way.

Therefore, while Benedict’s statement might not contain much historical truth, it does offer us a glimpse at how the Vatican currently views the last 500 years of European history: the fatal secularization of the West took its course in the 16th century, not from Renaissance rationalism, but from the Reformation. Luther grouped Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam together under the head of “justification by works,”[11] while Benedict grouped Protestants, Modernists, Atheists, and (some) Muslims together under the head of “deficient synthesis of faith and reason.” The fact that Lutheranism in Germany, with which Benedict should be most familiar – Regensburg University has a department of Protestant theology to which the pope referred to in his lecture – is mostly of the Modernist persuasion has likely clouded his judgment on historical Lutheranism.

[edit] Critique: the fall of reason and the incarnation of the Word of God

  • The Fall of Reason

As for the positive program of the pope regarding the relationship between faith and reason, two things are sorely lacking: first, any acknowledgement of the fall of reason; and second, any positive integration of the incarnation of the divine Logos in Jesus Christ into his discussion. To the first point, without an acknowledgement of the inability, and unwillingness, of the natural, fallen man to know the saving truth of God (1 Cor. 2:14; Rom. 8:7), one cannot understand Luther’s (and the later Lutherans’) criticism of reason’s magisterial role in theology. If natural reason is only tangentially affected by the fall, as Catholicism teaches,[12] then one can indeed, with the pope, find many positive teachings of reason, such as the nature of truth and goodness to which God is to be subject as well; grace then can be said to perfect a nature already partly headed in the right direction. Even after the measured reintroduction of metaphysics, orthodox Lutheranism, while denying two different orders of truth – one theological, one philosophical-scientific – did account for the fall by assigning reason a role subservient to Scripture and faith. Genuine reason certainly would not contradict the revealed truths of faith though they are above reason; but genuine reason is, after the fall, not fully available, even in the regenerate Christian.[13]

  • The Incarnation of the Logos in Jesus of Nazareth

The second shortcoming is that the pope, based on the quote from the Byzantine emperor, makes much of reason, Logos in Greek, but he fails to give this Logos a name. He only speaks of Jesus in connection with (rightly) criticizing Adolf von Harnack’s reduction of the Christological dogma to a belief in “Brother Jesus” (and in von Harnack’s case “dehellenization” is a term that makes sense). Yet apart from these negative references, one gets the impression that the incarnation never happened. The incarnation, for obvious reasons (John 14:6; Col. 2:9), has proved difficult to integrate into a theology of dialogue between the religions of the world. If indeed the fullness of the deity dwells in the man Jesus as its body, then there is nothing of God to be found outside of Jesus. Religions worshiping other gods can then not be said to have parts of the truth or be reasonable, though incomplete and partly erroneous, approximations to the fullness of Christian truth. The Roman Church does regard them as such because it falls into teaching a salvific activity of the Spirit which, though linked to Christ causally, is not exclusively tied to the means of grace (Rom. 1:16) and thereby to the Church.[14] Had Benedict emphasized the incarnate Logos, as he is revealed in Scripture, then indeed one could have agreed with the axiom of the Byzantine emperor: “not acting reasonably (συν λογω, [better: with Christ]) is contrary to God’s nature.” For then his would not have been a merely humanist axiom reflecting natural religion, but a truly divine-human one.

[edit] The Implicit Delimitation

The second, now implicit way in which Benedict delineates the relationship between Catholicism and Protestantism including Lutheranism is that he manages to find close analogies between Muslim “irrationality” in matters religious and Protestantism. This is done subtly by means of the doctor subtilis, John Duns Scotus (1266-1305):[15]

In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism[16] which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God’s voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God’s freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazn[17] and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God’s transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions.

According to the pope, reason is “our sense of the true and good;” it offers “an authentic mirror of God,” who is “bound to truth and goodness.” Any belief in a “capricious God,” who in his “deepest possibilities” is hidden and absolutely free, would obviously destroy this mirror. One might speculate whether Duns Scotus’ “voluntarism … in its later developments” includes, not only Scotus’ Nominalist student William of Ockham (1280-1349),[18] but also Luther and in particular his doctrine of the deus absconditus. Luther scholars have certainly seen the Reformer’s proximity to Scotus’ and the Nominalists’ thoughts on voluntas absoluta and ordinata.[19]

If there is indeed this implication, it seems that, for Benedict, the deus absconditus, or God’s hidden “deepest possibilities,” is made possible or even necessary by the principle of sola scriptura. Accordingly, the latter makes a theologically positive recourse to the world and reason unnecessary or even impossible; all that matters is found in the bible. This fits nicely with what the pope said about Luther elsewhere, namely, that Luther, fully convinced of the total depravity of the world and all its component parts including “the Greek element,” could arrive at no theologically positive relationship to the world, that he, in fact, became a dehellenizing dualist.[20]

[edit] Critique: God's incomprehensible freedom and man's salvation by grace through faith alone

It is indeed true that Luther taught that God is not subject to human reason and its notions of what is just, true, and good. Luther writes, in his treatise On the Bondage of the Will (290):[21]

… if [God’s] righteousness were such that it could be judged to be righteous by human standards, it would clearly not be divine and would in no way differ from human righteousness. But since he is the one true God, and is wholly incomprehensible and inaccessible to human reason, it is proper and indeed necessary that his righteousness also should be incomprehensible, as Paul also says [in Rom. 11:33].

In other words, if God were “comprehensible,” if he would conform to human standards of justice (206), then he would be human or, at any rate, “a ridiculous God, or idol rather” (189). As is to be expected in a rational religion, there would be no gospel, only the law. And whoever believed in this god would worship an idol; he would be condemned to save himself by meeting reason’s standards of “truth and goodness,” which the pope called “an authentic mirror of God.” However, because God is God, Luther can indeed say that whatever God wills is right (181):

He is God, and for his will there is no cause or reason that can be laid down as a rule or measure for it, since there is nothing equal or superior to it, but it is itself the rule of all things. For if there were any rule or standard for it, either as cause or reason, it could no longer be the will of God. For it is not because he is or was obliged so to will that what he wills is right, but on the contrary, because he himself so wills, therefore what happens must be right. Cause and reason can be assigned for a creature’s will, but not for the will of the Creator, unless you set up over him another creator.

One needs to keep in mind, however, that God’s justice is incomprehensible and unreasonable here on earth as to its positive and as to its negative effects. Observes Luther (292):

By the light of grace it is an insoluble problem how God can damn one who is unable by any power of his own to do anything but sin and be guilty. Here both the light of nature [i.e., reason] and the light of grace [i.e., faith] tell us that it is not the fault of the unhappy man, but of an unjust God; for they cannot judge otherwise of a God who crowns one ungodly man freely and apart from merits, yet damns another who may well be less, or at least not more, ungodly. But the light of glory tells us differently, and it will show us hereafter that the God whose judgment here is one of incomprehensible righteousness is a God of most perfect and manifest righteousness. In the meantime, we can only believe this …

If God’s fateful and inscrutable otherness (including his incessant omnipotence and necessity and man’s impotence and bondage) is not acknowledged, then any one-dimensional “good God” has to be defended by all sorts of distinctions, including that of ordained and absolute will of God, which are, at the end of the day, “empty talk” (190). We will indeed have to wait till heaven’s glory to have all of God’s ways and works made plain and clear to us. Building on judgments arrived at in the light of nature clearly does not move us closer to God, nor will trying to figure out the enigmatic works of the deus absconditus. It is the deus revelatus who, by the work of his Spirit in the preached word of Christ, refashions our heart so that it becomes willing to follow God and unwilling to follow Satan (64-66). While God’s counter-experiential and counter-reasonable ways thus do limit the importance of reason in relation to him, they do, in correlation the revealed word, make room for saving faith (62-63, 154f.).[22]

What is clear, furthermore, is that Luther’s deus absconditus is not the God of “deep possibilities” of Scotism and Nominalism. The hidden God is the God of omnipotent necessity who indiscriminately powers all things, good and bad, even the devil himself. Far from being “capricious,” though he often appears to be such, he is the eternally infallible Guarantor of the damnation of the damned and the equally infallible Author of the salvation of the saved (37-43, 138-140, 175-178).

God’s offensively and unreasonably free grace, which is an attribute of the deus absconditus, corresponds to the unreasonableness of the deus revelatus in Christo, to the God who revealed himself in Christ. Christ, the crucified divine-human Savior, along with the means of grace, cannot be deduced from what is general knowledge of reason; this is the teaching of Scripture and common human experience (154f., 250f., 281). After all, Christ is the gospel, not the law which alone reason knows in part.

The point here is not to give a complete discussion of Luther’s views of the hidden God; what was intended, though, was a demonstration of various instances of where and why Luther, based on the bible, put reason in a subservient place in Christian theology. In fact, if the goal is critiquing reason “from within,” then one should not overlook that, according to Luther’s observation, reason itself is at least dimly aware of the fact that God is finally beyond its grasp. God’s inscrutability in judgment and mercy is part of “natural religion” (41), which, in this way, nicely makes room for the certain gospel of the deus revelatus, which is the final goal of Luther’s teaching on the deus absconditus. Any discourse on reason and faith should take these disturbingly honest and, in a sense, evangelical insights of actual reason seriously.

Contrariwise, it does cast a distinct legalistic light on the Catholic religion when its chief teacher extols a certain kind of reason so highly. Reasonable salvation in the non-Christian religions might be considered a more or less rare occurrence, within the Catholic system, but it is revealing also for salvation in the Church. Such salvation might be said to take place for Christ’s sake alone and even by (medicinal) grace alone (CCC, ## 1996ff.), but it cannot be by faith alone, since man participates in Christ’s all-availing sacrifice by following his example of cross-bearing (CCC, # 618), not by trust in the promise which is imputed for righteousness. Christ’s example one may follow also as an “anonymous Christian,” outside the Church (and thereby without faith), at least to a level that will prove beneficial coram deo. Though typically couched in the language of “mystery” and garnished with many a biblical quotation, this is a quite rational and ultimately legalist approach to salvation. Yet it is precisely this reasonable legalism – keenly perceived by Luther when he placed Catholicism in the same category as Judaism and Islam – which offers a kind of natural universality to the Catholic Church and allows it to integrate, though not without due “transformation,” various world religions.

[edit] Conclusion

The current row with the Muslim world over the pope’s unkind quotation-theology will probably be no more than a speed-bump on the Vatican’s continued move toward Trinitarian universalism. One can expect the rulers of this world to be present also at Ratzinger’s funeral, praising him as a spiritual leader of great wisdom; this would be another difference between him and Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 2:8).

[edit] References

  1. ↑ He did so, e.g., in an address to the new Moroccan ambassador to the Vatican, on February 20, 2006.
  2. ↑ The Vatican translation of his speech is readily available at the Vatican's website.
  3. ↑ It is perhaps not surprising that especially Turkish leaders have criticized the pope, demanding a personal apology. Not only is the pope scheduled to visit this country in November 2006; Turkey currently is negotiating with the European Union as to whether or not it may become a full member of this organization. While for some this is a merely administrative, economical, or human-rights issue, for the pope and others it is a chiefly cultural and even religious matter, at the bottom of which is the question: What is “Europe”? And is Turkey a truly European country; can it ever become one? Just consider the pope’s veiled remarks at Regensburg: “this convergence [of Greek thought and biblical faith], with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.”
  4. ↑ Cf. similarly Luther who, based on his reading of the Koran, judges in 1529 (AE 46:176): “[Mohammad] has been commanded to bring the world to his faith, and if the world is not willing, to compel it or punish it with the sword; there is much glorification of the sword in [the Quran].” Luther, however, places Muslim violence in the context of false doctrine in general (cf. AE 46:179-181): every heretic, including the pope, after destroying souls by false teaching eventually resorts to destroying bodies as well – the devil is both a liar and a murderer (John 8:44, cf. LC III, 80).
  5. ↑ Luther, unlike the papacy at the time, did not try to organize a “crusade” to eliminate the Muslim religion; he simply urged the emperor and princes to do their duty by jointly and humbly defending the lives of their subjects against the Turkish armies and in this way to resist the devil; the Muslim faith had to be confronted, not with reason or sword, but with God’s word (logos!) and prayer alone (cf. AE 46:185ff.).
  6. ↑ Speaking some 150 years after Manuel, Luther -- after pointing out that, as “the true end-times Anti-Christ,” “the pope will not let Christians be saved without his authority” -- observes (SA II, IV, 11, cf. AE 43:227): “Neither the Turks nor the Tartars, despite being great enemies of the Christians, do any such thing. They allow whoever desires it to have faith in Christ, and they receive physical tribute and obedience from the Christians.” This surprisingly positive evaluation, however, did not prevent Luther from commending to pray for the (Catholic) emperor’s victory against the Turkish armies (cf. LC III, 77 and, with a forceful call to repentance to the Christians, AE 43:219ff.; 46:170-173) and from calling on pastors to catechize those well who were in danger of being captured by the Turks (cf. AE 43:239). Luther knew of the serious limitations of, and dangers for, Christianity under Turkish rule, AE 46:174f.
  7. ↑ The pope has since apologized for hurting the religious feelings of Muslims and has stated that the characterization of Islam in the quote does not reflect his personal opinion. The Vatican’s new secretary of state, Cardinal Bertone, in a statement issued on September 16, 2006, has reaffirmed the Vatican’s high regard for the Muslim religion expressed by Vatican II (“they adore the One God”) and the pope’s commitment to inter-religious dialog, and has stated that the pope’s remarks were meant to be critical merely of the violent cultural forms of Islam and other religions.
  8. ↑ Benedict’s is a more elaborate rephrasing of what John Paul II briefly characterized as “the drama of the separation of faith and reason” in his encyclical, Fides et Ratio, published eight years earlier almost to the day.
  9. ↑ Cf., e.g., Thomas Jefferson’s 1803 The Life and Morals of Jesus.
  10. ↑ Cf. for brevity’s sake the summary offered by F. Pieper, Christian Dogmatics (St. Louis: CPH 1950), 1:371-376, who states, quite correctly: “atheism of all shades – crass atheism, or pantheism or polytheism, or agnosticism – is neither rational nor scientific” (372f.), but also clearly points out the fatal deficits of fallen reason in relation to God, the main one being, of course, that the religion of reason is a religion of the law.
  11. ↑ Cf. only LC II, 66 and the pertinent clarification by the Faculty of Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, IN, “Religious Pluralism and the Knowledge of the True God: Fraternal Reflection and Discussion,” CTQ 66 (2002): 299f.
  12. ↑ Cf. the current Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC] (New York: Doubleday, 1995), # 405: “original sin … is a deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is wounded in the natural powers proper to it; subject to ignorance, suffering, and the dominion of death; and inclined (!) to sin.” Original holiness and justice constitute the donum superadditum of divine grace in creation which, after the fall, is restored in baptism, which takes original sin away while not directly affecting the weaknesses and evil inclinations of human nature. Cf. Luther’s reply to Erasmus, in the Bondage of the Will, AE 33:271ff.
  13. ↑ Cf. the summary of Quenstedt provided by Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, 1:196-201. For a summary of the Catholic position that sheds light on the similarities and differences between Catholics and Lutherans see CCC, # 159. This difference, in part, should account for the fact that modern Catholicism has embraced theistic evolution while orthodox Lutheranism has not.
  14. ↑ This is precisely where the declaration Dominus Iesus breaks down, which was issued in 2000 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then chaired by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the man who is now Benedict XVI. This document, on the one hand, affirms in a clarity lacking in Ratzinger’s Regensburg lecture the unity of the divine-human Person of Christ and therefore rejects any and all assertions of a need to complete God’s revelation and work in Jesus. Yet, on the other hand, it succumbs – with the Second Vatican Council: it asserted, e.g., that Muslims adore the one God and Creator even though they admittedly do not recognize Jesus as God and Creator – to enthusiasm. For the document teaches that, while Christ is the only Savior of the world, Christ’s benefits are distributed by the Spirit also in other religions and other human “aspirations,” though not as richly as in the Church (cf. esp. sections ##12, 20-22 of the document). This, to be sure, might surprise in view of the superabundant talk of “sacraments” in the Catholic Church, but Luther detected this “religious raving” already 500 years ago in both papacy and Islam (cf. SA III, VIII, 4-5, 9). – Cf. AE 46:176-178 for a much more sober comparison between Muslim beliefs and genuine Christianity. Luther did not split up the Trinity to concede the “Creator” to Muslims (and Jews), but stated: “In the article that Christ is beneath Mohammed, and less than he, everything is destroyed.” Yet Luther also knew: “it is extraordinarily pleasing to reason that Christ is not God, as the Jews, too, believe.”
  15. ↑ On March 20, 1993, John Paul II had beatified Scotus.
  16. ↑ The position of Duns Scotus is not “voluntarism” (everything depends on God’s free will) strictly speaking because, for him, God’s will was bound by God’s intellect and its ideas. Within this realm of what is logically(!) possible (God’s potestas / voluntas absoluta), including opposites, God’s will freely determines which possibility becomes “real” and which does not (the realm God’s potestas / voluntas ordinata). In soteriology, this distinction meant for Duns that God, despite his revelation (belonging to his voluntas ordinata), is not forced to save those who have meritorious works as promised by the voluntas ordinata; God saves by a free act of his will, that is to say, one not bound by his voluntas ordinata, which is thereby rendered uncertain, cf. H.-J. Werner, “Johannes Duns Scotus,” in Gestalten der Kirchengeschichte, ed. M. Greschat (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1993), 4:86f.
  17. ↑ According to the pope, “Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us.” Benedict referred to a work by French scholar R. Arnaldez. Cf. also R. Arnaldez, “Ibn Hazm,” tr. M. Rosen, where he points out that Ibn Hazm (944-1064) argued for the grammatical-literal interpretation of the Koran and against the excessive, magisterial use of reason in its interpretation.
  18. ↑ Cf. J. Miethke, “Wilhelm von Ockham,” in Gestalten der Kirchengeschichte, ed. M. Greschat (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1993), 4:157ff.
  19. ↑ Cf. Ph. S. Watson, “The Lutheran Riposte,” in Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, ed. E. G. Rupp and Ph. S. Watson (Philadelphia: WJK, 1969), 17, 22, on Luther’s coming “perilously close” to Scotist and Ockhamist dualism of voluntas ordinata and inordinata.
  20. ↑ Cf. J. Ratzinger, “In the Beginning …:” A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 83-89. Luther is featured here along G. Bruno and G. Galilei as one of the great “repressors” of a genuine faith in creation: Bruno and Galilei did so by returning to pre-Christian Greek rationalism (either as pantheism or deism); Luther did so by adopting an “unreasonable” dualism between nature and grace. The pope here at least concedes that it was the Renaissance movement represented by Bruno and Galilei, not Luther, that “lay the foundations of the post-Christian world of reason” (86).
  21. ↑ The page numbers in what follows refer to vol. 33 of the American Edition of Luther’s Works (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972).
  22. ↑ Luther makes this point repeatedly, both for God’s revealed law and gospel, not only in On the Bondage of the Will, but also, e.g., in his 1541 call to prayer against the Turks where he warns his readers against adopting Muslim fatalism (AE 43:235f.): “Yes, of course, it is true: if it is predestined, it will happen. But it has not been given to us to know what is predestined. Much rather, we are forbidden to know what has been predestined. Because I do not know what God has decreed, it is tempting God to push on into unknowable things, and so go to ruin. I am commanded to act on the basis of knowledge. For that reason God has given us his word so that we should know what we are to do and not act on the basis of ignorance. The rest we have to leave to God and hold to our duty, vocation, and office.”
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