Explorations in the Theology of Benedict XVI

Chapter 6: God’s Saving Justice

157 chapte r six GOD’S SAVING JUSTICE Faith, Reason, and Reconciliation in the Political Thought of Pope Benedict XVI       In both substance and sensibility, Pope Benedict XVI’s writings on politics portray the modern world as an “age of upheaval,” to borrow from the title of a book he published just before he became pope.1 Having lived through Nazi Germany, he carries a textured sense of the twentieth century as a time of totalitarianism, mass atrocity, and general political crisis. In more recent decades, he believes, an age of globalization and technological progress has become one in which disintegrating moral certainties are threatening the foundations of political orders based on human rights, the rule of law, and freedom. Such is the “dictatorship of relativism” of which he spoke.2 What explains the age of upheaval, according to Benedict? At the center of his account is an idea that, I propose, also stands at the center of his corpus of writings on politics: the synthesis of faith and reason. The decline of this synthesis Benedict associates closely w 158 Daniel Philpott with the past century’s upheavals. The best hope for recovering this synthesis—and thus the foundations for a just and free society—lies in a revival of the Christian faith, especially the Catholic faith, where he believes this synthesis is found most strongly. Benedict’s case for the synthesis of faith and reason is powerful and pressing. A just response to past political evils, though, requires more than a recovery of sound belief. Mass injustices, whether the totalitarian atrocities of the past century, ethnic conflict, civil war, genocide, religious terrorism, or abortion in modern and modernizing societies, do not exhaust their evil once they have been committed but rather leave behind wounds to persons, communities, and societies. They leave in their wake death, injury, economic loss, trauma, and despair that can persist over ensuing generations, as well as collectively held emotions like hatred, vengeance, and fear that propel cycles of violence. What is also needed, then, is a response that can bring a measure of healing and transformation to these wounds.In the Christian faith this response can be found in God’s reconciliation of humanity to himself through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Divine reconciliation then creates the possibility and illuminates the practice of reconciliation among humans in the political and social realm.Reconciliation resonates in the thought of Benedict.He indeed wrote about reconciliation both before and after he became pope. In this essay I wish to argue that these strands in Benedict’s political thought—the need for a renewed synthesis of faith and reason, a revival of belief, and reconciliation, an active, transformational response to past evil—can be woven together to fashion a Catholic response to large-scale political evils of the kind that have characterized the past century. First I want to chart the contours of Benedict’s thought on faith and reason. Reconciliation, though, requires more treatment.In the second section of the essay, drawing from Benedict’s writings on reconciliation, I develop the idea of reconciliation further as a Christian notion of justice, peace, and mercy and offer some ideas for its enactment in politics. Reconciliation, I argue, not only complements the synthesis of faith and reason but reflects and embodies it as well. God’s Saving Justice 159 THE SYNTHESIS OF FAITH AND REASON When, in his “Regensburg Address” of September 12, 2006, Benedict quoted a Byzantine emperor who drew a connection between violence and the disseverance of faith and reason in Islam, he ignited a nowfamous brouhaha with the Muslim world, one that began with riots and even the killing of a nun and then evolved into a global dialogue over faith and reason.3 The irony of the episode is that Benedict had devoted the vast majority of this address to the breakdown of the synthesis of faith and reason in the West. Originally, he argued, the New Testament had achieved a “profound encounter” of Hebrew faith and Hellenistic reason. But over the centuries, in Western thought, this woven cord became unraveled through several intellectual mutations: medieval nominalism, the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment , and the relativism of the present day. The importance of the synthesis of faith and reason, its unraveling in the West, and the dangers of this unraveling for society and politics are themes to which Benedict returns again and...