Now that the first Pope to resign in 600 years has been laid to rest, there is one key question. It is not “is the Pope a Catholic?” but rather “will this pope be in heaven?”
It is the one question the flurry of Protestant comments about Pope Benedict 16, who has been laid to rest, mostly fall short of answering.
And comments that “he is in Purgatory” by people who don’t believe in Purgatory don’t quite work. (The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines purgatory as a “purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven,” which is experienced by those “who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified” )
It is entirely proper for commenters about Pope Benedict not to pronounce his final destination, though. No Christian, Protestant or Catholic, Pentecostal or Presbyterian can pronounce whether a person is saved.
But the comment we made about Purgatory which we took from a very loyal Catholic site, catholic.com is indicative of the questions Catholicism will raise for those of us in other churches. What does it mean to die in a state of grace?
One comment in Benedicts Last Testament: In His Own Words has attracted Protestant attention.
“Never one to presume on God’s mercy, he also wrote that when he encountered the Lord, “I will plead with him to have leniency towards my wretchedness.’’
The quote from The Australian makes it sound as though Benedict is far from confident in Jesus sacrifice for his sins. In fact it is a quote, not from Benedict’s writing but from an interview in 2016 in a conversation about what he his regrets about his life. There are better places to go to find out what this theologian thought about the cross.
It is fairer to give someone like Benedict more than one quip in an interview to set out his view of the atonement. Here us a quote from his book “Introduction to Christianity,” where he sets out his stance on atonement. (I will summarise the key points below if it is TL DR for you.)
“What position is really occupied by the cross within faith in Jesus as the Christ… As we have already established, the universal Christian consciousness in this matter is extensively influenced by a much coarsened version of St. Anselm’s theology of atonement, the main lines of which we have considered in another context.
[Anselm in brief set out that God required “satisfaction” for sin. Benedict earlier in his book describes it this way “His answer runs thus: God himself removes the injustice; not (as he could) by a simple amnesty, which cannot after all overcome from inside what has happened, but by the infinite Being’s himself becoming man and then as a man – who thus belongs to the race of the offenders yet possesses the power, denied to man, of infinite reparation – making the required expiation.“]
To many Christians, and especially to those who only know the faith from a fair distance, it looks as if the cross is to be understood as part of a mechanism of injured and restored right. It is the form, so it seems, in which the infinitely offended righteousness of God was propitiated again by means of an infinite expiation. It thus appears to people as the expression of an attitude which insists on a precise balance between debit and credit; at the same time one gets the feeling that this balance is based on a fiction. One gives first secretly with the left hand what one takes back again ceremonially with the right. The `infinite expiation’ on which God seems to insist thus moves into a doubly sinister light. Many devotional texts actually force one to think that Christian faith in the cross visualizes a God whose unrelenting righteousness demanded a human sacrifice, the sacrifice of his own Son, sinister wrath makes the message of love incredible.
“This picture is as false as it is widespread. In the Bible the cross does not appear as part of a mechanism of injured right; on the contrary, in the Bible the cross is quite the reverse: it is the expression of the radical nature of the love which gives itself completely, of the process in which one is what one does, and does what one is; it is the expression of a life that is completely being for others. To anyone who looks more closely, the scriptural theology of the cross represents a real revolution as compared with the notions of expiation and redemption entertained by non-Christian religions, though it certainly cannot be denied that in the later Christian consciousness this revolution was largely neutralized and its whole scope seldom recognized. In other world religions expiation usually means the restoration of the damaged relationship with God by means of expiatory actions on the part of men. Almost all religions center round the problem of expiation; they arise out of man’s knowledge of his guilt before God and signify the attempt to remove this feeling of guilt, to surmount the guilt through conciliatory actions offered up to God. The expiatory activity by which men hope to conciliate the divinity and to put him in a gracious mood stands at the heart of the history of religion.
“In the New Testament the situation is almost completely reversed. It is not man who goes to God with a compensatory gift, but God who comes to man, in order to give to him. He restores disturbed right on the initiative of his own power to love, by making unjust man just again, the dead living again, through his own creative mercy. His righteousness to grace; it is active righteousness, which sets crooked man right, that is, bends him straight, makes him right. Here we stand before the twist which Christianity put into the history of religion. The New Testament does not say that men conciliate God, as we really ought to expect, since after all it is they who have failed, not God. It says on the contrary that `God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself’ (2 Cor. 5, 19). This is truly something new, something unheard of – the starting-point of Christian existence and the center of New Testament theology of the cross: God does not wait until the guilty come to be reconciled; he goes to meet them and reconciles them. Here we can see the true direction of the incarnation, of the Cross.
“Accordingly, in the New Testament the Cross appears primarily as a movement from above to below. It does not stand there as the work of expiation which mankind offers to the wrathful God, but as the expression of that foolish love of God’s which gives itself away to the point of humiliation in order thus to save man; it is his approach to us, not the other way about. With this twist in the idea of expiation, and thus in the whole axis of religion, worship too, man’s whole existence, acquires in Christianity a new direction. Worship follows in Christianity first of all in thankful acceptance of the divine deed of salvation. The essential form of Christian worship is therefore rightly called `Eucharistia,’ thanksgiving. In this form of worship human achievements are not placed before God; on the contrary, it consists in man’s letting himself be endowed with gifts; we do not glorify God by supposedly giving to him out of our resources – as if they were not his already! – but by letting ourselves be endowed with his own gifts and thus recognizing him as the only Lord. We worship him by dropping the fiction of a realm in which we could face him as independent business partners, whereas in truth we can only exist at all in him and from him. Christian sacrifice does not consist in a giving of what God would to have without us but in our becoming totally receptive and letting ourselves be completely taken over by him. Letting God act on us – that is Christian sacrifice.”
TL DR
In this passage Benedict is not relying on his peer to persuade God to be “lenient” but on Christ’s death on the cross.. Salvation he says is something that God brings about not man. And worships something we do in response to Christ’s saving work, not to complete it.
This Pope was Catholic
Benedict was a firm believer in purgatory, his writings make that clear. Protestants will rightly protest this, it is not found in the Bible. But it is worth considering that Purgatory, a place you are sent to to be purified, points to grace. Even in this system, it is ultimately the work of Good that saves.
This leaves the most cogent critique of Catholicism in place: that the Catholic Church with an elaborate system of confession, penance and the Mass places itself between christ and the deliver. Andrew Moody of Gospel Coalition in a short summary of differences between reformed and Catholic Christians puts it this way.
“Catholicism tends to give the (Catholic) church a monopoly on the distribution of Christ’s grace. If you want forgiveness or strengthening you need to get baptised; or go to confession; or attend mass etc. The sacraments (and other means of grace) parcel-out the grace of Christ and deliver them to the faithful. Baptism provides the biggest chunk of grace, providing forgiveness for every previous sin and transforming believers so that you become truly righteous.”
Lest that appear to be a bit flip ‘chunk of grace’, he is being Australian. But he also finishes with a quote from Thérèse of Lisieux from the Catholic catechism.
In the evening of this life, I shall appear before you with empty hands, for I do not ask you, Lord, to count my works. All our justice is blemished in your eyes. I wish, then, to be clothed in your own justice and to receive from your love the eternal possession of yourself.
Catholics need to look through the sacrament to the cross, “ex opere operato” meaning that the act or work in performing the observance does not make oneself worthy.
Taking the best interpretation of Benedict’s words – and we should always seek to read charitably – he was trusting in. Christ.
The question of who is saved remains beyond definitive answering, yet Benedict the theologian, made his views on the atonement easier to determine than almost anyone.
Without assuming I can detect the elect, I look forward to seeing him someday.