The Biblical Vision of Pope John Paul II

Though I was then a Protestant minister--Calvinist in training, evangelical in approach, and instinctively anti-Catholic--I was first drawn to Pope John Paul II in the early 1980s. I was not alone among his hesitant admirers. He captured our attention because of his effective combat in the culture wars. But he kept our attention because of something else.

Gradually and grudgingly, many of us, Protestants and Catholics alike, came to admit that he was effective in the culture wars, not because of his bully pulpit or his media savvy or his philosophical suavity, but because of his superior command of scripture.

This particular quality set him apart from popes of the post-Reformation era. It's not that these men were unscriptural or anti-scriptural. But their methods were scholastic, precise, emphasizing ever-finer distinctions in thought. Moreover, their pastoral style set the tone for preachers and teachers throughout the Catholic world. So Protestants, those similar to me at least, found Catholic literature easy to dismiss as insufficiently scriptural.

But then came Pope John Paul II.

We should have known, from his first words as pope, that the world was in for something different. He began with "Be not afraid," the exhortation of prophets and angels--and God himself--uttered whenever history had taken a momentous turn (see, for example, Genesis 46:3 and Luke 2:10). This phrase became a watchword of his pontificate, a reminder and reassurance, even to those of us who did not count ourselves among his flock.

And he confirmed his pervasively scriptural style in all of his early documents. In his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis (The Redeemer of Man) in 1979, almost three-quarters of the 205 notes are scriptural citations.

Everyone knows his "theology of the body" addresses, delivered 1979-84, but few people recognize that they were sustained studies of selected texts from the Bible--both Old and New Testaments--employing all the best tools of ancient and modern scripture scholarship.

Here, I thought, was a pope who could speak to Protestants. But it was more than that. He could speak to the whole world, because scripture speaks to the whole world - and that is because God's word speaks most eloquently to hearts that God himself created and redeemed.

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