Servais: Your Holiness, the question posed this year
as part of the study days promoted by the rectory of the Gesu (the
residence for Jesuit seminarians in Rome) is that of justification by
faith. The last volume of your collected works highlights your resolute
affirmation: “The Christian faith is not an idea, but a life.”
Commenting on the famous Pauline affirmation in Romans 3:28, you
mentioned, in this regard, a twofold transcendence: “Faith is a gift to
the believers communicated through the community, which for its part is
the result of God's gift” (“Glaube ist Gabe durch die Gemeinschaft; die
sich selbst gegeben wird,” gs iv, 512). Could you explain what you meant
by that statement, taking into account of course the fact that the aim
of these days of study is to clarify the pastoral theology and vivify
the spiritual experience of the faithful?
Benedict XVI: The
question concerns what faith is and how one comes to believe. On the
one hand, faith is a profoundly personal contact with God, which touches
me in my innermost being and places me in front of the living God in
absolute immediacy in such a way that I can speak with Him, love Him and
enter into communion with Him. But at the same time this reality which
is so fundamentally personal also has inseparably to do with the
community. It is an essential part of faith that I be introduced into
the “we” of the sons and daughters of God, into the pilgrim community of
brothers and sisters. The encounter with God means also, at the same
time, that I myself become open, torn from my closed solitude and
received into the living community of the Church. That living community
is also a mediator of my encounter with God, though that encounter
touches my heart in an entirely personal way. Faith comes from hearing
(fides ex auditu), St. Paul teaches us. Listening in turn always implies
a partner.
Faith is not a product of reflection nor is it even
an attempt to penetrate the depths of my own being. Both of these things
may be present, but they remain insufficient without the “listening”
through which God, from without, from a story He himself created,
challenges me. In order for me to believe, I need witnesses who have met
God and make Him accessible to me. In my article on baptism I spoke of
the double transcendence of the community, in this way causing to emerge
once again an important element: the faith community does not create
itself. It is not an assembly of men who have some ideas in common and
who decide to work for the spread of such ideas. Then everything would
be based on its own decision and, in the final analysis, on the majority
vote principle, which is, in the end it would be based on human
opinion. A Church built in this way cannot be for me the guarantor of
eternal life nor require decisions from me that make me suffer and are
contrary to my desires. No, the Church is not self-made, she was created
by God and she is continuously formed by him. This finds expression in
the sacraments, above all in that of baptism: I enter into the Church
not by a bureaucratic act, but through the sacrament. And this is to say
that I am welcomed into a community that did not originate in itself
and is projected beyond itself. The ministry that aims to form the
spiritual experience of the faithful must proceed from these fundamental
givens.
It is necessary to abandon the idea of a Church which
produces herself and to make clear that the Church becomes a community
in the communion of the body of Christ. The Church must introduce the
individual Christian into an encounter with Jesus Christ and bring
Christians into His presence in the sacrament.
Servais: When
you were Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
commenting on the Joint Declaration of the Catholic Church and the
Lutheran World Federation on the Doctrine of Justification of Oct. 31,
1999, you pointed out a difference of mentality in relation to Luther
and the question of salvation and blessedness as he had posed it. The
religious experience of Luther was dominated by terror before the wrath
of God, a feeling quite alien to modern men, who sense rather the
absence of God (see your article in Communio, 2000, 430). For these, the
problem is not so much how to obtain eternal life, but rather how to
ensure, in the precarious conditions of our world, a certain balance of
fully human life. Can the teaching of St. Paul of justification by
faith, in this new context, reach the “religious” experience or at least
the “elementary” experience of our contemporaries?
Benedict XVI: First
of all, I want to emphasize once again what I wrote in Communio (2000)
on the issue of justification. For the man of today, compared to those
of the time of Luther and to those holding the classical perspective of
the Christian faith, things are in a certain sense inverted, or rather,
is no longer man who believes he needs justification before God, but
rather he is of the opinion that God is obliged to justify himself
because of all the horrible things in the world and in the face of the
misery of being human, all of which ultimately depend on Him. In this
regard, I find it significant that a Catholic theologian may profess
even in a direct and formal this inverted position: that Christ did not
suffer for the sins of men, but rather, as it were, had "canceled the
guilt of God." Even if most Christians today would not share such a
drastic reversal of our faith, we could say that all of this reveals an
underlying trend of our times. When Johann Baptist Metz argues that
theology today must be “sensitive to theodicy” (German: theodizee
empfindlich), this highlights the same problem in a positive way. Even
rescinding from such a radical contestation of the Church's vision of
the relationship between God and man, the man of today has in a very
general way the sense that God cannot let most of humanity be damned. In
this sense, the concern for the personal salvation of souls typical of
past times has for the most part disappeared.
However, in my
opinion, there continues to exist, in another way, the perception that
we are in need of grace and forgiveness. For me it is a “sign of the
times” the fact that the idea of the mercy of God should become more and
more central and dominant – starting from Sister Faustina, whose
visions in various ways reflect deeply the image of God held by the men
of today and their desire for the divine goodness. Pope John Paul II was
deeply impregnated by this impulse, even if this did not always emerge
explicitly. But it is certainly not by chance that his last book,
published just before his death, speaks of God's mercy. Starting from
the experiences which, from the earliest years of life, exposed him to
all of the cruel acts men can perform, he affirms that mercy is the only
true and ultimate effective reaction against the power of evil.
Only
where there is mercy does cruelty end, only with mercy do evil and
violence end. Pope Francis is totally in agreement with this line. His
pastoral practice is expressed in the fact that he continually speaks to
us of God's mercy. It is mercy that moves us toward God, while justice
frightens us before Him. In my view, this makes clear that, under a
veneer of self-assuredness and self-righteousness, the man of today
hides a deep knowledge of his wounds and his unworthiness before God. He
is waiting for mercy.
It is certainly no coincidence that the
parable of the Good Samaritan is particularly attractive to contemporary
man. And not just because that parable strongly emphasizes the social
dimension of Christian existence, nor only because in it the Samaritan,
the man not religious, in comparison with the representatives of
religion seems, so to speak, as one who acts really so in conformity
with God, while the official representatives of religion seem, as it
were, immune to God. This clearly pleases modern man. But it seems just
as important to me, nevertheless, that men in their intimate consciences
expect the Samaritan will come to their aid; that he will bend down
over them, pour oil on their wounds, care for them and take them to
safety. In the final analysis, they know that they need God's mercy and
his tenderness. In the hardness of the technologized world in which
feelings no longer count for anything, the expectation however increases
of a saving love that is freely given. It seems to me that in the theme
of divine mercy is expressed in a new way what is means by
justification by faith. Starting from the mercy of God, which everyone
is looking for, it is possible even today to interpret anew the
fundamental nucleus of the doctrine of justification and have it appear
again in all its relevance.
When Anselm says that Christ had to
die on the cross to repair the infinite offense that had been made to
God, and in this way to restore the shattered order, he uses a language
which is difficult for modern man to accept (cfr. Gs 215.ss iv).
Expressing oneself in this way, one risks likely to project onto God an
image of a God of wrath, relentless toward the sin of man, with feelings
of violence and aggression comparable with what we can experience
ourselves. How is it possible to speak of God's justice without
potentially undermining the certainty, deeply established among the
faithful, that the God of the Christians is a God “rich in mercy”
(Ephesians 2:4)? The conceptuality of St. Anselm has now become for us
incomprehensible. It is our job to try again to understand the truth
that lies behind this mode of expression. For my part I offer three
points of view on this point:
a) the contrast between the Father,
who insists in an absolute way on justice, and the Son who obeys the
Father and, obedient, accepts the cruel demands of justice, is not only
incomprehensible today, but, from the point of view of Trinitarian
theology, is in itself all wrong. The Father and the Son are one and
therefore their will is intrinsically one. When the Son in the Garden of
Olives struggles with the will of the Father, it is not a matter of
accepting for himself a cruel disposition of God, but rather of
attracting humanity into the very will of God. We will have to come back
again, later, to the relationship of the two wills of the Father and of
the Son.
b) So why would the cross and the atonement? Somehow
today, in the contortions of modern thought we mentioned above, the
answer to these questions can be formulated in a new way. Let's place
ourselves in front of the incredible amount of evil, violence,
falsehood, hatred, cruelty and arrogance that infect and destroy the
whole world. This mass of evil cannot simply be declared non-existent,
not even by God. It must be cleansed, reworked and overcome. Ancient
Israel was convinced that the daily sacrifice for sins and above all the
great liturgy of the Day of Atonement (Yom-Kippur) were necessary as a
counterweight to the mass of evil in the world and that only through
such rebalancing the world could, as it were, remain bearable. Once the
sacrifices in the temple disappeared, it had to be asked what could be
opposed to the higher powers of evil, how to find somehow a
counterweight. The Christians knew that the temple destroyed was
replaced by the resurrected body of the crucified Lord and in his
radical and incommensurable love was created a counterweight to the
immeasurable presence of evil. Indeed, they knew that the offers
presented up until then could only be conceived of as a gesture of
longing for a genuine counterweight. They also knew that in front of the
excessive power of evil only an infinite love was enough, only an
infinite atonement. They knew that the crucified and risen Christ is a
power that can counter the power of evil and save the world. And on this
basis they could even understand the meaning of their own sufferings as
inserted into the suffering love of Christ and included as part of the
redemptive power of such love. Above I quoted the theologian for whom
God had to suffer for his sins in regard to the world. Now, due to this
reversal of perspective, the following truths emerge: God simply cannot
leave “as is” the mass of evil that comes from the freedom that he
himself has granted. Only He, coming to share in the world's suffering,
can redeem the world.
c) On this basis, the relationship between
the Father and the Son becomes more comprehensible. I will reproduce
here on this subject a passage from the book by Henri de Lubac on Origen
which I feel is very clear: “The Redeemer came into the world out of
compassion for mankind. He took upon himself our passions even before
being crucified, indeed even before descending to assume our flesh: if
he had not experienced them beforehand, he would not have come to
partake of our human life. But what was this suffering that he endured
in advance for us? It was the passion of love. But the Father himself,
the God of the universe, he who is overflowing with long-suffering,
patience, mercy and compassion, does he also not suffer in a certain
sense? 'The Lord your God, in fact, has taken upon himself your ways as
the one who takes upon himself his son' (Deuteronomy 1, 31). God thus
takes upon himself our customs as the Son of God took upon himself our
sufferings. The Father himself is not without passion! If He is invoked,
then He knows mercy and compassion. He perceives a suffering of love
(Homilies on Ezekiel 6:6).”
In some parts of Germany there was a
very moving devotion that contemplated the Not Gottes (“poverty of
God”). For my part, that makes pass before my eyes an impressive image
representing the suffering Father, who, as Father, shares inwardly the
sufferings of the Son. And also the image of the “throne of grace” is
part of this devotion: the Father supports the cross and the crucified,
bends lovingly over him and the two are, as it were, together on the
cross. So in a grand and pure way, one perceives there what God's mercy
means, what the participation of God in man's suffering means. It is not
a matter of a cruel justice, not a matter of the Father's fanaticism,
but rather of the truth and the reality of creation: the true intimate
overcoming of evil that ultimately can be realized only in the suffering
of love.
Servais: In the Spiritual
Exercises, Ignatius of Loyola does not use the Old Testament images of
revenge, as opposed to Paul (cfr. 2 Thessalonians 1: 5-9); nevertheless
he invites us to contemplate how men, until the Incarnation, “descended
into hell” (Spiritual Exercises n. 102; see. ds iv, 376) and to consider
the example of the “countless others who ended up there for far fewer
sins than I have I committed” (Spiritual Exercises, n. 52). It is in
this spirit that St. Francis Xavier lived his pastoral work, convinced
he had to try to save from the terrible fate of eternal damnation as
many “infidels” as possible. The teaching, formalized in the Council of
Trent, in the passage with regard to the judgment of the good and the
evil, later radicalized by the Jansenists, was taken up in a much more
restrained way in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (cfr. § 5 633,
1037). Can it be said that on this point, in recent decades, there has
been a kind of “development of dogma” that the Catechism should
definitely take into account?
Benedict XVI:
There is no doubt that on this point we are faced with a profound
evolution of dogma. While the fathers and theologians of the Middle Ages
could still be of the opinion that, essentially, the whole human race
had become Catholic and that paganism existed now only on the margins,
the discovery of the New World at the beginning of the modern era
radically changed perspectives. In the second half of the last century
it has been fully affirmed the understanding that God cannot let go to
perdition all the unbaptized and that even a purely natural happiness
for them does not represent a real answer to the question of human
existence. If it is true that the great missionaries of the 16th century
were still convinced that those who are not baptized are forever lost –
and this explains their missionary commitment – in the Catholic Church
after the Second Vatican Council that conviction was finally abandoned.
From
this came a deep double crisis. On the one hand this seems to remove
any motivation for a future missionary commitment. Why should one try to
convince the people to accept the Christian faith when they can be
saved even without it? But also for Christians an issue emerged: the
obligatory nature of the faith and its way of life began to seem
uncertain and problematic. If there are those who can save themselves in
other ways, it is not clear, in the final analysis, why the Christian
himself is bound by the requirements of the Christian faith and its
morals. If faith and salvation are no longer interdependent, faith
itself becomes unmotivated.
Lately several attempts have been
formulated in order to reconcile the universal necessity of the
Christian faith with the opportunity to save oneself without it. I will
mention here two: first, the well-known thesis of the anonymous
Christians of Karl Rahner. He sustains that the basic, essential act at
the basis of Christian existence, decisive for salvation, in the
transcendental structure of our consciousness, consists in the opening
to the entirely Other, toward unity with God. The Christian faith would
in this view cause to rise to consciousness what is structural in man as
such. So when a man accepts himself in his essential being, he fulfills
the essence of being a Christian without knowing what it is in a
conceptual way. The Christian, therefore, coincides with the human and,
in this sense, every man who accepts himself is a Christian even if he
does not know it. It is true that this theory is fascinating, but it
reduces Christianity itself to a pure conscious presentation of what a
human being is in himself and therefore overlooks the drama of change
and renewal that is central to Christianity. Even less acceptable is the
solution proposed by the pluralistic theories of religion, for which
all religions, each in their own way, would be ways of salvation and in
this sense, in their effects must be considered equivalent. The critique
of religion of the kind exercised in the Old Testament, in the New
Testament and in the early Church is essentially more realistic, more
concrete and true in its examination of the various religions. Such a
simplistic reception is not proportional to the magnitude of the issue.
Let
us recall, lastly, above all Henri de Lubac and with him some other
theologians who have reflected on the concept of vicarious substitution.
For them the “pro-existence” (“being for”) of Christ would be an
expression of the fundamental figure of the Christian life and of the
Church as such. It is possible to explain this “being for” in a somewhat
more abstract way. It is important to mankind that there is truth in
it, this is believed and practiced. That one suffers for it. That one
loves. These realities penetrate with their light into the world as such
and support it. I think that in this present situation it becomes for
us ever more clear what the Lord said to Abraham, that is, that 10
righteous would have been sufficient to save a city, but that it
destroys itself if such a small number is not reached. It is clear that
we need to further reflect on the whole question.
Servais: In
the eyes of many secular humanists, marked by the atheism of the 19th
and 20th centuries, as you have noted, it is rather God – if he exists –
not man who should be held accountable for injustice, the suffering of
the innocent, the cynicism of power we are witnessing, powerless, in the
world and in world history (see. Spe Salvi, n. 42) ... In your book
Jesus of Nazareth, you echo what for them – and for us – is a scandal:
“The reality of injustice, of evil, cannot be simply ignored, simply put
aside. It absolutely must be overcome and conquered. Only in this way
is there really mercy” (Jesus of Nazareth, ii 153, quoting 2 Timothy
2:13). Is the sacrament of confession, one of the places where evil can
be “repaired?” If so, how?
Benedict XVI: I
have already tried to expose as a whole the main points related to this
issue in my answer to your third question. The counterweight to the
dominion of evil can consist in the first place only in the divine-human
love of Jesus Christ that is always greater than any possible power of
evil. But it is necessary that we place ourselves inside this answer
that God gives us through Jesus Christ. Even if the individual is
responsible for a fragment of evil, and therefore is an accomplice of
evil's power, together with Christ he can nevertheless "complete what is
lacking in his sufferings" (cfr. Colossians 1, 24). The sacrament of
penance certainly has an important role in this field. It means that we
always allow ourselves to be molded and transformed by Christ and that
we pass continuously from the side of him who destroys to the side of
Him who saves.
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