It's all about faith and reason Phillip Blond* | International Herald Tribune | September 19, 2006
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/09/19/opinion/edblond.php In his speech last week at the University of Regensburg, Pope Benedict XVI certainly used a prejudicial source to interrogate the Islamic notion of holy war: Emperor Manuel II who, when under siege from Muslim armies, questioned the religious legitimacy of violence. The pope should have refrained from repeating Manuel's claim that the demand to spread Islam by the sword was "evil and inhuman." But Manuel's variant of Byzantine Christianity can also be used to repudiate Catholic violence. In fact, Byzantium orthodoxy helped to formulate the first just war theories, which argued that Christians should only engage in warfare for defensive purposes. So the use by Benedict of such an authority was indeed a double edged sword as the denunciation applies as equally to Rome as it does to Mecca. Benedict would have known this. Thus the real message of the pope's lecture has been entirely missed. Theologically, Benedict was trying to chart where all the monotheistic faiths have become perverted in their use of war and violence. He suggested that insofar as Islam has gone wrong so has Christianity. Benedict argued that the common paradigm that underpins the illegitimate justification of war by religion is the separation of faith and reason. The hallmark of fundamentalism is the claim to have direct, unmediated access to the will of God. Reason prevents this logic by stressing that knowledge of God is never direct, but is always partial, limited and mediated. For Benedict, recognition of the impossibility of direct knowledge of God should prevent fundamentalists from killing in his name. In fact, Benedict's lecture was a call for a new kind of interfaith dialogue. It acknowledges that a fresh engagement between the faiths is an urgent necessity. However, the pope recognizes that the last 50 years of liberal dialogue has achieved absolutely nothing, not the least because the framework that has dictated the relationship between the faiths has been a variant of secular fundamentalism. Liberal models of interfaith understanding rely on exactly the separation of faith and reason that the pope sees in religious fundamentalism. Faiths are assumed to be private and mutually incompatible, thus they are relegated to an interior sphere such that they cannot meet and debate with each other. Secular reason as value- free and religiously neutral is then meant to police the interactions of these privatized faiths. Little wonder then that religious people are so unable to interact about what is most crucial to them. Benedict wants to change this - he wishes to restore the last time the great faiths talked to each other - the high Middle Ages when faith and reason were not separated and Christians could criticize Islamic conceptions of God, and Muslims could do likewise. His address was intended to inaugurate an authentic theological engagement between the faiths. That it has been so misunderstood only stresses the urgency of its application. *Phillip Blond is a lecturer in theology and philosophy at St. Martin's College, Lancaster. -- This is ZESTGlobal. Post articles on international affairs to [email protected] If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTGlobal by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR, if you have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/join/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
