Commentary on Benedict XVI Encyclical Letter “Deus Caritas Est”

by John W. Wright

In the introduction to his encyclical, Benedict XVI calmly states the core convictions of the Christian tradition, or, as he states, “the heart of the Christian faith.” Some might think such a claim pretentious – surely one cannot claim that the Christian faith has a single center. It is because the Christian faith has no “heart,” no center but only different, disconnected historical manifestations that get expressed in different ways. It is up to an individual to find a “center” for himself or herself, or the elite philosopher/theology to make this historical language relevant by translating it into the latest philosophical idiom. Benedict kindly defers from such modernist readings. There is a heart, a center, to the Christian faith. While the depths of this heart are unending, capable of enfolding the mightiest intellects into an explorations of its depths, this heart is extremely simple, summarily stated in 1 John 4:16: “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.”

We should not miss the significance of Benedict’s move here. He begins his first encyclical with a quote from Scripture. What follows is not to be understood merely as his idea, as solely his words. Benedict begins his papacy here as a witness, one whose job is to point to God in Christ via the Scriptures, not to his own experience or authority. We find the “heart of the Christian faith” already stated within the Holy Scriptures, presented to us by Benedict to take up and read. Without fanfare he uses the chair of St. Peter to direct believers and unbelievers to look simply at the Scriptures. The ease with which the encyclical flows from the verse masks the importance of this move theologically. There is a heart to the Christian faith, and it is found already attested to in the Scriptures.

We should read the whole encyclical as an exposition and meditation upon this Scriptural verse. It is a move that should please even a Southern Baptist, though curiously leave one formed by the canons of rationality of the Enlightenment wondering why he would start with the Scriptures to speak of God – why not start with reason, with philosophy or better, psychology, with a universal starting point to which any rational individual might assent. Benedict knows of no such universal reason. Benedict is speaking in the encyclical from faith for faith, a faith not contrary to reason, as he will make clear later in the encyclical, but a rationality that begins with faith nonetheless. Meet Benedict, the nonfoundationalist Pope, a pope genuinely writing subsequent to the modern.

Benedict begins with an exposition of the “heart” of the Christian faith. The word “heart” is carefully chosen. Of course, it corresponds with his theme of love. The word “heart” bears connotations as a seat of the affections in Western culture – his use of the term, however, might require some “translation” for different cultures! Yet the term also embeds the center of the Christian faith in a body, a human body. Benedict does not speak of an “essence of Christianity” as its core, but its heart. Earlier nineteenth and twentieth century Protestant theology (and some Catholic thought as well!) had searched for an “essence” of Christianity, a disembodied, foundational proposition that one could affirm or a universal experience to express. From this rational starting point, it was thought that one could build a theology that could coerce consent, provide a universal rational argument into faith – build “evidence that demands a verdict” or describe a core human “experience” into which the west might collapse all other ‘religions” as subspecies.

The result, of course, was a cultural colonialism of Western Europe imposed upon the world in which the church often has and continues to participate, a violence that continues to this day. The tie between Enlightenment rationality, the European nation-state, and this violence is not hard to see. If one will not “be reasonable,” then the state must use violence to restrain and coerce those who will refuse to assimilate to this universal reason. Similarly, if one will not consent that one must confine one’s “religion” to private experiences or values, obviously a secular state needs imposed, by violence if necessary, so that everyone in a society might understand themselves as “rational individuals” with personal “freedom” to their own chosen private experiences and/or personal values. In such a situation, the state will control the body by violence, threatened or implemented.

Given this setting, we should not miss the context in which Benedict places his encyclical. Benedict addresses a context of divinely justified violence with the teaching that “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.” Benedict understands the heart of the Christian faith to respond to the deepest socio-political and personal need of the world: “In a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred and violence, this message is both timely and significant. For this reason, I wish in my first Encyclical to speak of the love which God lavishes upon us and which we in turn must share with others.”

Those in the United States and Western Europe will most likely think of radical Islamic jihad, what has come to be called “terrorism,” as the referent for the Pope’s statement. No doubt it is one of his references. Yet it is interesting that he places “vengeance” as the crucial point where people invoke God to legitimate their violence. One does not need to look far to see this as a not-so-subtle response to the God of America, invoked by the United States government and in churches often after September 11, 2001, and continually so in order to justify the United State’s preemptive war in Iraq. Benedict desires to distance God from the violence of the nation-state. He understands that love by its very nature cannot participate in the cycle of violence.

As his predecessor Benedict XV, Benedict XVI calls Christians and the world to peace where vengeance is the Lord’s, not ours. Instead of a response of violence with violence, “the love which God lavishes upon us and which we in turn must share with others,” even our enemies, becomes the Christian response to the world of violence controlled by the contemporary nation-state. As the second half of the encyclical will show, this is not liberal sentimentality, but a concrete response of believers in the world grounded in God’s very revelation of God’s own Being in Christ by the Spirit. Benedict offers a world of violence a concrete God of Love.

Where does this Love become known and concrete? In perhaps his most profound statement in the encyclical, Benedict writes, “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” Of course, this event, the person that we encounter is the person of Jesus Christ.” In one deft sentence Benedict distinguishes the Christian life from its Kantian (“ethical choice”) and Hegelian (“loft idea”) modernist distortions. The precise language has echoes with the work of Karl Barth, an overlap found elsewhere in Cardinal Ratzinger’s textual corpus (particular in his use of Christ as God’s Yes! to humanity). In Church Dogmatics 1.1, Barth writes, “the experience of God’s Word involves a relation of man as person to another person, naturally the person of God . . . Jesus Christ Himself lives in the message of his witnesses, lives in the proclamation of His Church on the basis of this message, strides forward as the Lord of grace and judgment to meet the existence of the hearer of the Word. Experience of God’s Word, then, must at least be also experience of His presence, and because this presence does not rest on man’s act of recollection but on God’s making Himself present in the life of man, it is acknowledgement of His presence” (p. 205-06). Encounter with a person, an event, the experience of the God who is love in Jesus Christ by the power of the Spirit becomes fundamental. God meets us in the particularity of our own history by becoming particular in history in Jesus Christ so that we might participate in an encounter with an event, a person.

The observant reader will see here the real fruition of Vatican II coming to bear. Barth supposedly was a “reformed” theologian – how could his work, especially 1.1 with its constant references to Luther and Calvin, find echoes with the Roman pontiff in the early 21st century? The answer is found in Vatican II’s return to sources, particularly the Christological center of the Christian faith, the God of love seen in the sacred heart of Jesus as the heart of the Christian faith – a heart of love that beckons for human beings to participate within. In the event of Christ according to 1 John 4:16, we literally participate in God as we participate in the Love that is Christ. Christ is with us – Christ is the Love that is God in whom we live and move and have our being. A good and true and beautiful ontology of Love emerges under girding Benedict XVI’s encyclical. In response to the violent nihilism that the secular world, the world in denial that it results from the Love of the God who created it from nothing through God’s Word, Benedict offers the good news that God is Love.