Pope Benedict XVI Championed A Restoration Of Reason And Faith

[Chris]

Despite atheistic claim reason and faith are incompatable, Amid The Ruin Of Modernity, Pope Benedict XVI Championed A Restoration Of Reason And Faith.

This is based on "interviews conducted in the ’90s with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the man destined to become Pope Benedict XVI." I think this is the set of interviews: The Ratzinger Interview - His Holiness Benedict XVI (EWTN).

This is the view of the author, John Daniel Davidson.

...Here was a man who insisted there was no conflict between faith and reason, who could easily and convincingly explain the reasonableness not just of religious faith but of faith in Jesus Christ, in His crucifixion and resurrection, and in the “one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church” He established on Earth. Here, too, was a truly educated man who grasped the entire sweep of Western civilization and, in a kindly and even mirthful way, could level devastating critiques of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, and modernity’s blinkered, anemic understanding of human reason and the role it should play in answering ultimate questions.

Those interviews eventually prompted me to go back and read Benedict’s 2006 Regensburg address, which I remembered at the time only because of the feigned outrage it provoked among an ignorant and malicious corporate press that misread it as an attack on Islam. It wasn’t that, but it was an attack on the modern West’s narrow, “scientistic” view of knowledge and truth, a ringing defense of the inherent reasonableness and rationality of faith, and a call to include theology as a legitimate science, properly understood.

Benedict knew what should be obvious to all of us by now: We have serious problems with our modern view of science and knowledge, and with what he called the “dehellenization of Christianity.” At Regensburg, he described “the modern self-limitation of reason” and explained how “modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology.” Put another way, what we can know, and know with certainty, is more than what our instruments can measure and our scientific methods can replicate in a lab. Excluding questions about God from what we can know means “a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.”.

This was important, Benedict said, because if ultimate questions about human origins and destiny — the sort of questions raised by religion — have no place in the modern world’s view of what constitutes legitimate or scientific knowledge, then those questions “must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective.” The problem, he argued, is that if each person’s subjective conscience becomes the arbiter of right and wrong,

ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.

Benedict was not calling for a rejection of science or a turning back of the clock to pre-Enlightenment times, “but of broadening our concept of reason and its application.” If reason and faith could be brought together in a new way, we could rediscover what he called reason’s “vast horizons.”...

[Chris]

Regensburg: University Address, 12 September - Pope Benedict XVI, reference above, addresses the historical separation of reason and faith. Worth reading i the whole, I'll touch on highlights.

...A dehellenization of Christianity?

The thesis that the critically purified Greek heritage forms an integral part of Christian faith has been countered by the call for a dehellenization of Christianity — a call which has more and more dominated theological discussions since the beginning of the modern age. Viewed more closely, three stages can be observed in the programme of dehellenization: although interconnected, they are clearly distinct from one another in their motivations and objectives.

Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century.

...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. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to reality as a whole.

The liberal theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ushered in a second stage in the process of dehellenization, with Adolf von Harnack as its outstanding representative.

...Harnack's central idea was to return simply to the man Jesus and to his simple message, underneath the accretions of theology and indeed of hellenization: this simple message was seen as the culmination of the religious development of humanity. Jesus was said to have put an end to worship in favour of morality. In the end he was presented as the father of a humanitarian moral message.

...Behind this thinking lies the modern self-limitation of reason, classically expressed in Kant's "Critiques", but in the meantime further radicalized by the impact of the natural sciences. This modern concept of reason is based, to put it briefly, on a synthesis between Platonism (Cartesianism) and empiricism, a synthesis confirmed by the success of technology.

...This gives rise to two principles which are crucial for the issue we have raised.

First, only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific....

A second point, which is important for our reflections, is that by its very nature this method excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question. Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.

...Before I draw the conclusions to which all this has been leading, I must briefly refer to the third stage of dehellenization, which is now in progress. In the light of our experience with cultural pluralism, it is often said nowadays that the synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early Church was an initial inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures....

What follows then is his resynthesis of reason and faith. He concludes:

...The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur — this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time.

"Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God", said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.

[HawkTheSlayer]

All I know is.... for a Pope who claimed he was too old , too fragile , and not fully able to handle the job, he sure lived a long time!
Almost 10 more years.
I think he's got a better chance at the gate than Francis.
But St. Peter could be a socialist. We just don't know.

[carolina73]

I think the sex scandal took it's toll on Benedict. Something not of his making, dominated his time as pope. He was attacked by a media that promotes pedophilia, by protecting those the call for its legalization.

[Chris]

I found his grasp of history amazing.