IN A BRILLIANT lecture at the University of Regensburg last week, Pope Benedict XVI made three crucial points that are now in danger of being lost in the polemics about his supposedly offensive comments about Islam.
The pope's first point was that all the great questions of life, including social and political questions, are ultimately theological. How we think (or don't think) about God has much to do with how we judge what is good and what is wicked, and with how we think about the appropriate methods for advancing the truth in a world in which there are profound disagreements about the truth of things.
If, for example, we imagine that God is pure will, a remote majesty with whom our only possible relationship is one of unthinking submission, then we have imagined a God who can even command what seems to be irrational -- like the murder of innocents. Pope Benedict reminds us, however, that mainstream Christian tradition, following its Jewish parent, has a different concept of God. The God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus is a God of reason, compassion and love, a God who comes searching for man in history, appeals to the human mind as well as the human heart and invites human beings into a dialogue of salvation.
This God cannot demand the unreasonable or the irrational. This God's revelation of himself, in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, does not cancel out or abrogate human reason. That is why mainstream Christianity has always taught that human beings can build decent societies by attending to reason.
The pope's second point, which flows from the first, was that irrational violence aimed at innocent men, women and children "is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the [human] soul." If adherents of certain currents of thought in contemporary Islam insist that the suicide bombing of innocents is an act pleasing to God, then they must be told that they are mistaken: about God, about God's purposes and about the nature of moral obligation.
Responsibility for challenging these distorted views of God and the distorted understanding of moral duty that flows from them rests, first, with Islamic leaders. But too few Islamic leaders, the pope seemed to suggest, have been willing to undertake a cleansing of Islam's conscience -- as Pope John Paul II taught the Catholic Church to cleanse its historical conscience.
