It is fascinating how the press just can't get Benedict correct. The article begins speaking of what Benedict "condemns" in two consecutive paragraphs, and then writes "His views were largely consistent with those he held in his earlier life as Joseph Ratzinger, a conservative and contentious cardinal." I am reminded again what J. Augustine DiNoia wrote in the essay that I blogged on Monday, "When the Church, in this environment, advances her vision of the integral human good, her interventions are frequently caricatured as retrogressive and intrusive. The alternative anthropology has so powerful a hold on the media, the international aid agencies, many NGOs, and other influential bodies that it is difficult to advance the Christian vision of the integral human good through dialogue, argument and counter-argument." If one is not an emotivist, one is condemned as one who constantly condemns.

As I read Benedict's address, I couldn't help hearing Barth's concerns ring out, but without the "shrillness" of which Barth is sometimes accused (both unfairly and fairly). As I read Benedict, I hear Barthian convictions and concerns transformed and elevated by the incorporation into a deeper catholicity than Barth's reformed position allowed. It hear Barth placed more deeply within an Augustinian framework through de Lubac. Of course, in so saying, I merely am saying I hear the gospel in its full evangelical, catholic, and orthodox sense.

At the center of Benedict's address is Jesus Christ as the revelation of God. Barth could not say the following any clearer: "God is the foundational reality, not a God who is merely imagined or hypothetical, but God with a human face; he is God-with-us, the God who loves even to the Cross. When the disciple arrives at an understanding of this love of Christ "to the end", he cannot fail to respond to this love with a similar love: "I will follow you wherever you go" (Luke 9:57)." Likewise Benedict speaks of the importance of immersion in the "Word of God" as the most important task of the church: "First and foremost, Christ makes his person, his life and his teaching known to us through the word of God. . . . To achieve this, we must train people to read and meditate on the word of God: this must become their staple diet, so that, through their own experience, the faithful will see that the words of Jesus are spirit and life (cf. John 6:63). Otherwise, how could they proclaim a message whose content and spirit they do not know thoroughly? We must build our missionary commitment and the whole of our lives on the rock of the word of God." (It is interesting that the NY Time article doesn't mention this Christological or Scriptural center to Benedict's speech!)

I aslo want to bring out the common understanding of the role of the church amid the unjust structures and battles for control of a society's resources under the guise of the contemporary nation-state. Benedict uses "political" in the sense of the hegemony that the nation-state bears over the resources of those within its borders. Yet in so doing he points out that the political task of the church remains, and must remain, independent of any of these disputes precisely for the sake of its commitment to the poor and to a genuine justice:

"This political task is not the immediate competence of the Church. Respect for a healthy secularity -- including the pluralism of political opinions -- is essential in the authentic Christian tradition. If the Church were to start transforming herself into a directly political subject, she would do less, not more, for the poor and for justice, because she would lose her independence and her moral authority, identifying herself with a single political path and with debatable partisan positions. The Church is the advocate of justice and of the poor, precisely because she does not identify with politicians nor with partisan interests. Only by remaining independent can she teach the great criteria and inalienable values, guide consciences and offer a life choice that goes beyond the political sphere."

The church's allegiance is ultimately to its Lord, Jesus Christ, who points us to the poor, the hungry, the sick, and those who suffer under injustice.

Of course, Barth is rightly understood and praised for having the theological resources to resist the Nazi's co-optation of the church for its political program, supported by the liberal Protestant theological establishment. Webster points to an essay Barth wrote in 1946, "The Christian Community and the Civil Community." Webster summarizes the themes of the essay: "the role of the state as providential witness to Christ's rule; the state as protection against chaos by the rule of law; the repudiation of the direct identity between God's dominion and political society" (p. 152).

Webster then quotes Barth's 1941 "Letter to Great Britain from Switzerland": "the world in which we live is the place where Jesus Christ rose from the dead, and present age is the time of God's long-suffering until the day when the same Jesus Christ shall come again in His glory . . . Since this is true, the world in which we live is not some sinsiter wilderness where fate or chance holds sway, or where all sorts of 'principalities and powers' run riot unrestrained and rage about unchecked. . . . There is no doubt that such 'principalities andpowers' . . . do exist . . . But at the same time it is written, and we can and must hold on to it even today: that although at the present the glory of the Kingdom of God is held out to us only as a hope, yet the Kingly Rule of Christ extends not merely over the Church as the congregation of the faithful but . . . over the whole universe in all its height and depths; and it also confronts and overrules with sovereign dignity the principalities and powers and evil spirits of this world."

Webster then summarizes: "But Christ's kingly rule is not a mere consoling warrant for indolence; because Christ rule the world, Christians are called to resist the passivity which totalitarian regimes breed, to be not simply political subjects but political agents" (pp. 153-54).

A third way -- to avoid "the passivity which totalitarian regimes breed" -- and the contemporary nation-state is a type of totalitarian regime -- but not be pulled into the fighting between the 'principalities and powers' but to live faithfully to Christ in all spheres of life in obeying the command of God to witness through involvement in the life of the poor, the sick, the hungry. Here Barth and Benedict come together in their non-foundational theology that finds its foundation in the revelation of the one True God in the face of Jesus Christ, God's great "Yes" to humanity.

As I continue reading and reflecting, I am beginning to wonder whether Barth's impact may ironically have become more evident in the life of the Roman Catholic Church rather than in the so-called "Protestant" tradition from which Barth supposed spoke. Of course, that may be because Barth, in his very commitment to a reformed church, spoke simultaneously as one deeply commited to catholicity through the church's witness to Jesus Christ. As his health failed in the 1960's, and theological liberalism, never really relinquishing its pull in Western Christianity, re-emerged in the concern for "contextually-relevant" theologies, Barth's christocentric thought that must lead to catholicity found a home within a Roman Catholic church equally committed to reform and revitalization back towards the "human face of God in Jesus Christ."