On Friday Pope Benedict addressed representatives of the Protestant EKD (Evangelische
Kirche in Deutschland), a federation of 22 Lutheran, Unified and Reformed Protestant
regional church bodies in Germany, headed by Council Chair Nikolaus Schneider. The
encounter took place in the former Augustinian Convent in Erfurt, which was once the
home of Martin Luther.
The full text of the Pope’s remarks is published below: Ladies
and Gentlemen,
As I begin to speak, I would like first of all to thank you
for this opportunity to come together with you. I am particularly grateful to Pastor
Schneider for greeting me and welcoming me into your midst with his kind words. At
the same time I want to express my thanks for the particularly gracious gesture that
our meeting can be held in this historic location.
As the Bishop of Rome, it
is deeply moving for me to be meeting representatives of Council of the EKD here in
the ancient Augustinian convent in Erfurt. This is where Luther studied theology.
This is where he was ordained a priest in 1507. Against his father’s wishes, he did
not continue the study of Law, but instead he studied theology and set off on the
path towards priesthood in the Order of Saint Augustine. On this path, he was not
simply concerned with this or that. What constantly exercised him was the question
of God, the deep passion and driving force of his whole life’s journey. “How do I
receive the grace of God?”: this question struck him in the heart and lay at the foundation
of all his theological searching and inner struggle. For him theology was no mere
academic pursuit, but the struggle for oneself, which in turn was a struggle for and
with God.
“How do I receive the grace of God?” The fact that this question
was the driving force of his whole life never ceases to make an impression on me.
For who is actually concerned about this today – even among Christians? What does
the question of God mean in our lives? In our preaching? Most people today, even
Christians, set out from the presupposition that God is not fundamentally interested
in our sins and virtues. He knows that we are all mere flesh. Insofar as people
today believe in an afterlife and a divine judgement at all, nearly everyone presumes
for all practical purposes that God is bound to be magnanimous and that ultimately
he mercifully overlooks our small failings. But are they really so small, our failings?
Is not the world laid waste through the corruption of the great, but also of the small,
who think only of their own advantage? Is it not laid waste through the power of
drugs, which thrives on the one hand on greed and avarice, and on the other hand on
the craving for pleasure of those who become addicted? Is the world not threatened
by the growing readiness to use violence, frequently masking itself with claims to
religious motivation? Could hunger and poverty so devastate parts of the world if
love for God and godly love of neighbour – of his creatures, of men and women – were
more alive in us? I could go on. No, evil is no small matter. Were we truly to
place God at the centre of our lives, it could not be so powerful. The question:
what is God’s position towards me, where do I stand before God? – this burning question
of Martin Luther must once more, doubtless in a new form, become our question too.
In my view, this is the first summons we should attend to in our encounter with Martin
Luther.
Another important point: God, the one God, creator of heaven and earth,
is no mere philosophical hypothesis regarding the origins of the universe. This God
has a face, and he has spoken to us. He became one of us in the man Jesus Christ
– who is both true God and true man. Luther’s thinking, his whole spirituality, was
thoroughly Christocentric: “What promotes Christ’s cause” was for Luther the decisive
hermeneutical criterion for the exegesis of sacred Scripture. This presupposes, however,
that Christ is at the heart of our spirituality and that love for him, living in communion
with him, is what guides our life.
Now perhaps you will say: all well and good,
but what has this to do with our ecumenical situation? Could this just be an attempt
to talk our way past the urgent problems that are still waiting for practical progress,
for concrete results? I would respond by saying that the first and most important
thing for ecumenism is that we keep in view just how much we have in common, not losing
sight of it amid the pressure towards secularization – everything that makes us Christian
in the first place and continues to be our gift and our task. It was the error of
the Reformation period that for the most part we could only see what divided us and
we failed to grasp existentially what we have in common in terms of the great deposit
of sacred Scripture and the early Christian creeds. The great ecumenical step forward
of recent decades is that we have become aware of all this common ground and that
we acknowledge it as we pray and sing together, as we make our joint commitment to
the Christian ethos in our dealings with the world, as we bear common witness to the
God of Jesus Christ in this world as our undying foundation.
The risk of losing
this, sadly, is not unreal. I would like to make two points here. The geography
of Christianity has changed dramatically in recent times, and is in the process of
changing further. Faced with a new form of Christianity, which is spreading with
overpowering missionary dynamism, sometimes in frightening ways, the mainstream Christian
denominations often seem at a loss. This is a form of Christianity with little institutional
depth, little rationality and even less dogmatic content, and with little stability.
This worldwide phenomenon poses a question to us all: what is this new form of Christianity
saying to us, for better and for worse? In any event, it raises afresh the question
about what has enduring validity and what can or must be changed – the question of
our fundamental faith choice.
The second challenge to worldwide Christianity
of which I wish to speak is more profound and in our country more controversial: the
secularized context of the world in which we Christians today have to live and bear
witness to our faith. God is increasingly being driven out of our society, and the
history of revelation that Scripture recounts to us seems locked into an ever more
remote past. Are we to yield to the pressure of secularization, and become modern
by watering down the faith? Naturally faith today has to be thought out afresh, and
above all lived afresh, so that it is suited to the present day. Yet it is not by
watering the faith down, but by living it today in its fullness that we achieve this.
This is a key ecumenical task. Moreover, we should help one another to develop a
deeper and more lively faith. It is not strategy that saves us and saves Christianity,
but faith – thought out and lived afresh; through such faith, Christ enters this world
of ours, and with him, the living God. As the martyrs of the Nazi era brought us
together and prompted the first great ecumenical opening, so today, faith that is
lived from deep within amid a secularized world is the most powerful ecumenical force
that brings us together, guiding us towards unity in the one Lord.