VATICAN - Pope Benedict XVI in Bavaria - “The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur - this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time.”

Regensburg (Agenzia Fides) - A lengthy reflection on the relation between faith and reason marked the Holy Father’s meeting with representatives of the world of science in the afternoon of 12 September at the University of Regensburg. In this college, which has 12 faculties and 25,000 students, Joseph Ratzinger held the chair of dogmatic and the history of dogma between 1969 and 1971, and he was also vice Rector. After voicing his emotion at being once again at the University of Regensburg, Pope Benedict XVI recalled the beginnings of his activity as an academic teacher at the University of Bonn stressing the importance of theology faculties since it is always “necessary and sensible to question oneself about God using reason and this must be done in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith”.
The Holy Father then gave a profound lecture starting from “an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God”. The encounter between the biblical message and Greek did not happen by chance. The Pope then quoted the Greek Translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria - the Septuagint - “more than a simple (and in that sense really less than satisfactory) translation of the Hebrew text: it is an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity. A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion.”.
The Holy Father recalled the development in theology in the late Middle Ages “tendencies which break this synthesis between Greek and Christian spirit” and led to positions according to which “God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God …. As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which - as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated - unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism”.
The inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry “was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history” the Pope said it was thanks to this encounter that Christianity, “despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe…this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.”
Since the beginning of the modern age theological research has been dominated increasingly by the request for the dehellenisation of Christianty: three stages can be observed in the programme of dehellenization: although interconnected, they are clearly distinct from one another in their motivations and objectives. “Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century" the Pope recalled. Later, liberal theology of the 19th and 20th century aimed to "bring Christianity back into harmony with modern reason, liberating it, that is to say, from seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith in Christ's divinity and the triune God”. At present there is a third wave of dehellenisation according to which “the synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early Church was a preliminary inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures… This thesis is not only false; it is coarse and lacking in precision. The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed.”
Concluding his reflections the Holy Father excluded that critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment: “The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us”. Instead it is a question of “broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them.”. We will succeed “only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons..”
These are the presuppositions for theology, understood “as inquiry into the rationality of faith.”, to have its place in the university and in the dialogue of sciences, rendering us capable of “genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today”. In fact “the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures”.
Pope Benedict XVI ended his discourse with this statement: “The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur - this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time..” (S.L.) (Agenzia Fides 14/9/2006 - righe 79, parole 1.126)