..
Benedict XVI
meets with
Lutheran
Pastor
Schneider at
Erfurt
Monastery
“How
Do
I Receive
the Grace
of God?”
.
A
Reflection on
Martin
Luther's Pursuit
on
Faith
and Grace
in Christ, and
the Ecumenical
Task for
Christians
Today
by
Benedict XVI
In September 2011 Benedict XVI
meet with Lutheran leaders at the monastery
in Erfurt, Germany where Martin Luther had
studied. This is the full text of his
remarks:
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.
Luther's driving question:
“How do I receive the grace of God?”
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
neighbor – 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 center 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.
Luther’s thinking and
spirituality, was thoroughly
Christocentric
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.
Ecumenical task today: common
ground and common witness
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.
[source
of text for Benedict's address:
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2011/09/23/full-text-popes-speech-to-lutheran-leaders/]
Joseph
Ratzinger (Emeritus Pope Benedict
XVI), for many years a renowned
theologian, scripture scholar, and
university professor, before becoming
an archbishop, cardinal, and pope of
the Roman Catholic Church between
2005-2013, was born in Bavaria,
Germany in 1927. He was ordained
priest in 1951. He became Archbishop
of Munich and Freising in 1977.
When
he was elected pope on April 19, 2005, he
took the name Benedict XVI, in honor of St.
Benedict of Nursia, the founder of Western
monasticism. The pope said that “with his
life and work St Benedict exercised a
fundamental influence on the development of
European civilization and culture” and
helped Europe to emerge from the "dark night
of history" that followed the fall of the
Roman Empire.
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