Pope Benedict XVI has framed a central theological question, perhaps the theological question as it concerns the matters of Christianity and Islam. We would phrase it this way: can a god who commands men to acts of wanton and irrational evil be God? Or, to put it in the words of the Reuters story on the subject: “Pope Benedict invited Muslims on Tuesday to join a dialogue of cultures that agrees the concept of Islamic ‘holy war’ is unreasonable and against God’s nature.” Here is TIME Magazine’s take:

[The Pope's] discourse Tuesday sought to delineate what he sees as a fundamental difference between Christianity’s view that God is intrinsically linked to reason (the Greek concept of logos) and Islam´s view that “God is absolutely transcendent.” Benedict said that Islam teaches that God’s “will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.” The risk he sees implicit in this concept of the divine is that the irrationality of violence can potentially be justified if someone believes it is God’s will. “As far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we find ourselves faced with a dilemma which nowadays challenges us directly. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?”

The Pope’s speech raises questions of profound theological importance, including one that the Catholic Church seemed to have settled previously. We have read that the Catholic catechism recognizes Allah as the same god as the God of the Bible, but Pope Benedict’s comments call that idea into question. As the Pope put it in the English edition of his speech:

“Not to act reasonably (with logos) is contrary to the nature of God,” said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor.

Therefore, if a god counsels irrational violence, bloodlust, and some of the other elements of jihad, that god is not god, or man has made a mistake in understanding God. Pope Benedict has, it seems to us, drawn a line in the sand. Either men are wrong in their interpretation of God when they justify patently irrational violence as divine, or the god they worship is not god. This is a central question for Islam both as a religion and as a political ideology. The submission of man’s rationality to irrational, violent commands is incompatible with precisely those things that make the modern world modern, and, in the Pope’s opinion, incompatible with who God must be.

Thus the Pope’s comments are either an attack on the authority and sufficiency of the Koran, which is said by Muslims to be a perfect revelation, or it is an attack on those currently interpreting the Koran to justify patently irrational violence and jihad. One way or another, the stakes don’t get much higher.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 14th, 2006 at 2:54 pm and is filed under art, culture, General, Religion, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.