That’s the title of Jon Meacham’s Newsweek piece on the contretemps.
Once again we ask…who’s fomenting discord?
The point is, as is the case with much of the analysis, grandly missed. Meacham thinks he addresses the reason for the citation:
The pope’s intentions in discussing “holy war” were presumably good—he approvingly quoted an early Qu’ranic “surah” (chapter), which says “there is no compulsion in religion”—and he was right to raise the issue of how to confront and combat the religious extremism that gives rise to terror and violence. Sadly, though, he did so clumsily and obliquely, and, far from opening a constructive conversation, instead exacerbated tensions between Christianity and Islam. The episode also marks the first widely noted break with the spirit of the papacy of Benedict’s beloved predecessor. A reassuring pastor, John Paul II was the first pope to visit a mosque (in Damascus, Syria, in 2000), and he managed to project an air of ecumenicism while holding fast to the fundamentals of faith and doctrine. “This is clearly not John Paul II,” says R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. “It’s a very different direction for the papacy, and reflects Benedict XVI’s worries about secularism, Islam and a declining Christian vigor in Europe.”
Much of the Regensburg address was a meditation on faith and reason, the roots of religiously inspired violence and the need for believers to see God as a figure of love. Roughly put, his argument was this: to Benedict, Islam’s conception of God so stresses God’s will that God can be understood to command the irrational.
For the pope, the Christian encounter with the classical world married faith and reason and thereby precluded, in principle, such misunderstandings of the nature of the God of Abraham, a nature that is, according to this argument, rooted in love and reason, not the will to dominance. Seen in such a light, “jihad,” which means “struggle,” can too easily be taken literally (as a call to violence against others) rather than figuratively (as many Muslim scholars argue it should be).
Almost, but not quite. What is missed is the essence of the Emperor’s question:
Your religious text claims there is to be no compulsion in religion. Yet you practice compulsion in religion. How do you harmonize this?
Which is then the jumping-off point for the discussion of reason. If God’s own revelation about himself does not necessarily describe him…what is knowable?
Read Previous Post
