The
Preacher of the Papal Household, Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, O.F.M. Cap.,
gave his fifth Lenten Sermon to Pope Francis on Friday morning in the
Redemptoris Mater Chapel. The theme of the Lenten meditations is: “No one can say, ‘Jesus is
Lord’, except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3). This fifth
iteration carried the title: 'The Righteousness of God has been
Manifested: The Fifth Centenary of the Protestant Reformation, an
Occasion of Grace and Reconciliation for the Whole Church.'
You read his words here and consider what he said:
Fifth Lenten Sermon 2017
“THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD HAS BEEN MANIFESTED”: The Fifth Centenary of the Protestant Reformation, an Occasion of Grace and Reconciliation for the Whole Church
1. The Origins of the Protestant Reformation
The Holy Spirit, who, as we saw in the preceding meditations, leads
us into the fullness of truth about the person of Christ and his paschal
mystery, also enlightens us on a crucial aspect of our faith in Christ,
that is, on how we obtain in the Church today the salvation Christ
accomplished for us. In other words, the Holy Spirit enlightens us on
the important question of justification by faith for sinners. I believe
that trying to shed light on history and on the current state of that
discussion is the most useful way to make the anniversary of the Fifth
Centenary of the Protestant Reformation an occasion of grace and
reconciliation for the whole Church.
We cannot dispense with rereading the whole passage from the Letter to the Romans on which that discussion is centered. It says,
But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from law,
although the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness
of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is
no distinction; since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of
God, they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption
which is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an expiation by his
blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness,
because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins; it was
to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he
justifies him who has faith in Jesus. Then what becomes of our boasting?
It is excluded. On what principle? On the principle of works? No, but
on the principle of faith. For we hold that a man is justified by faith
apart from works of law. (Rom 3:21-28)
How could it have happened that such a comforting and clear message
became the bone of contention at the heart of western Christianity,
splitting the Church and Europe into two different religious continents?
Even today, for the average believer in certain countries in Northern
Europe, that doctrine constitutes the dividing line between Catholicism
and Protestantism. I myself have had faithful Lutheran lay people ask
me, “Do you believe in justification by faith?” as the condition for
them to hear what I had to say. This doctrine is defined by those who
began the Reformation themselves as “the article by which the Church
stands or falls” (articulus stantis et cadentis Ecclesiae).
We need to go back to Martin Luther’s famous “tower experience” that
took place in 1511 or 1512. (It is referred to this way because it is
thought to have occurred in a cell at the Augustinian monastery in
Wittenberg called “the Tower”). Luther was in torment, almost to the
point of desperation and resentment toward God, because all his
religious and penitential observances did not succeed in making him feel
accepted by God and at peace with him. It was here that suddenly Paul’s
word in Romans 1:17 flashed through his mind: “The just shall live by
faith.” It was a liberating experience. Recounting this experience
himself when he was close to death, he wrote, “When I discovered this, I
felt I was reborn, and it seemed that the doors of paradise opened up
for me.”[1]
Some Lutheran historians rightly go back to this moment some years
before 1517 as the real beginning of the Reformation. What transformed
this inner experience into a real religious chain reaction was the issue
of indulgences, which made Luther decide to nail his famous 95 theses
to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. It
is important to note the historical succession of these facts. It tells
us that the thesis of justification by faith and not by works was not
the result of a polemic with the Church of his time but its cause. It
was a genuine illumination from above, an “experience,” “Erlebnis,” as
he himself described it.
A question immediately arises: how do we explain the earthquake that
was caused by the position Luther took? What was there about it that was
so revolutionary? St. Augustine had given the same explanation for the
expression “righteousness of God” many centuries earlier. “The
righteousness of God [justitia Dei],” he wrote, “is the righteousness by
which, through his grace, we become justified, exactly the way that the
salvation of God [salus Dei] (Ps 3:9) is the salvation by which God
saves us.”[2]
St. Gregory the Great had said, “We do not attain faith from virtue
but virtue from faith.”[3] And St Bernard had said, “What I cannot
obtain on my own, I confidently appropriate (usurpo!) from the pierced
side of the Lord because he is full of mercy. . . . And what about my
righteousness? O Lord, I will remember only your righteousness. In fact
it is also mine because you became God’s justification for me (see 1 Cor
1:30).”[4] St. Thomas Aquinas went even further. Commenting on the
Pauline saying that “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (see 2
Cor 3:6), he writes that the “letter” also includes the moral precepts
of the gospel, so “even the letter of the gospel would kill if the grace
of faith that heals were not added to it.”[5]
The Council of Trent, convened in response to the Reformation, did
not have any difficulty in reaffirming the primacy of faith and grace,
while still maintaining (as would the branch of the Reformation that
followed John Calvin) the necessity of works and the observance of the
laws in the context of the whole process of salvation, according to the
Pauline formula of “faith working through love” (“fides quae per
caritatem operatur”) (Gal 5:6).[6] This explains how, in the context of
the new climate of ecumenical dialogue, it was possible for the Catholic
Church and the Lutheran World Federation to arrive at a joint
declaration on justification by grace through faith that was signed on
October 31, 1999, which acknowledges a fundamental, if not yet total,
agreement on that doctrine.
So was the Protestant Reformation a case of “much ado about nothing?”
The result of a misunderstanding? We need to answer with a firm “No”!
It is true that the magisterium of the Church had never reversed any
decisions made by preceding councils (especially against the Pelagians);
it had never forgotten what Augustine, Gregory, Bernard, and Thomas
Aquinas had written. Human revolutions do not break out, however,
because of ideas or abstract theories but because of concrete historical
situations, and unfortunately for a long time the praxis of the Church
was not truly reflecting its official doctrine. Church life, catechesis,
Christian piety, spiritual direction, not to mention popular
preaching—all these things seemed to affirm just the opposite, that what
really matters is in fact works, human effort. In addition, “good
works” were not generally understood to mean the works listed by Jesus
in Matthew 25, without which, he says, we cannot enter the kingdom of
heaven. Instead, “good works” meant pilgrimages, votive candles,
novenas, and donations to the Church, and as compensation for doing
these things, indulgences.
The phenomenon had deep roots common to all of Christianity and not
just Latin Christianity. After Christianity became the state religion,
faith was something that was absorbed instinctively through the family,
school, and society. It was not as important to emphasize the moment in
which faith was born and a person’s decision to become a believer as it
was to emphasize the practical requirements of the faith, in other
words, morals and behavior.
One revealing sign of this shift of focus is noted by Henri de Lubac
in his Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture. In its most
ancient phase, the sequence of the four senses was the literal
historical sense, the christological or faith sense, the moral sense,
and the eschatological sense.[7] However, that sequence was increaingly
substituted by a different one in which the moral sense came before the
christological or the faith sense. “What to do” came before “what to
believe”; duty came first before gift. In spiritual life, people
thought, first comes the path of purification then that of illumination
and union.[8] Without realizing it, people ended up saying exactly the
opposite of what Gregory the Great had written when he said, “We do not
attain faith from virtue but virtue from faith.”
2. The Doctrine of Justification by Faith after Luther
After Luther and very soon after the two other great reformers,
Calvin and Ulrich Zwigli, the doctrine of the free gift of justification
by faith resulted, for those who lived by it, in an unquestionable
improvement in the quality of Christian life, thanks to the circulation
of the word of God in the vernacular, to numerous inspired hymns and
songs, and to written aids made accessible to people by the recent
invention of the printing press and distribution of printed materials.
On the external front, the thesis of justification only by faith
became the dividing line between Catholicism and Protestantism. Very
soon (and in part with Luther himself) this opposition broadened out to
become an opposition between Christianity and Judaism as well, with
Catholics representing, according to some, the continuation of Jewish
legalism and ritualism, and Protestants representing the Christian
innovation.
Anti-Catholic polemic was joined to anti-Jewish polemic that, for
other reasons, was no less present in the Catholic world. According to
this perspective, Christianity was formed in opposition to—and was not
derived from—Judaism. Starting with Ferdinand Christian Baur
(1792-1860), the theory of two souls in early Christianity increasingly
gained ground: Petrine Christianity, as expressed in the so-called
“proto-catholicism “ (Frühkatholizismus), and Pauline Christianity that
finds its more complete expression in Protestantism.
This belief led to distancing the Christian religion as far as
possible from Judaism. People would try to explain the doctrines and
Christian mysteries (including the title Kyrios, Lord, and the divine
worship owed to Jesus) as the result of contact with Hellenism. The
criterion used to judge the authenticity of a saying or a fact from the
gospel was how different it was from what characterized the Jewish world
of that time. Even if that approach was not the main reason for the
tragic anti-Semitism that followed, it is certain that, together with
the accusation of deicide, it encouraged anti-Semitism by giving it a
tacit religious covering.
Beginning in the 1970s, there was a radical reversal in this area of
biblical studies. It is necessary to say something about it to clarify
the current state of the Pauline and Lutheran doctrine of the free gift
of justification through faith in Christ. The nature and the aim of my
talk exempt me from citing the names of the modern writers engaged in
this debate. Whoever is versed in this subject will not have difficulty
identifying the authors of the theories alluded to here to, but for
others, I think, it is not the names but the ideas that are of interest.
This reversal involves the so-called “third quest of the historical
Jesus.” (It is called “third” after the liberal quest of the 1800s and
then that of Rudolf Bultmann and his followers in the 1900s). This new
perspective recognizes Judaism as the true matrix within which
Christianity was formed, debunking the myth of the irreducible otherness
of Christianity with respect to Judaism. The criterion used to assess
the major or minor probability that a saying or fact about Jesus’ life
is authentic is its compatibility with the Judaism of his time—not its
incompatibility, as people at one time thought.
Certain advantages of this new approach are obvious. The continuity
of revelation is recovered. Jesus is situated within the Jewish world in
the line of biblical prophets. It also does more justice to the Judaism
of Jesus’ time, demonstrating its richness and variety. The problem is
that this approach went too far so that this gain was transformed into a
loss. In many representatives of this third quest, Jesus ends up
dissolving into the Jewish world completely, without any longer being
distinct except through a few particular interpretations of the Torah.
He is reduced to being one of the Hebrew prophets, an “itinerant
charismatic,” “a Mediterranean Jewish peasant,” as someone has written.
The continuity with Judaism has been recovered, but at the expense of
the newness of the New Testament. The new historical quest has produced
studies on a whole different level (for example, those of James D. G.
Dunn, my favorite New Testament scholar), but what I have sketched out
is the version that is most widely circulated on the popular level and
has influenced public opinion.
The person who shed light on the misleading character of this
approach for the purposes of serious dialogue between Judaism and
Christianity was precisely a Jew, the American rabbi, Jacob Neusner.[9]
Whoever has read Benedict XVI’s book on Jesus of Nazareth is already
familiar with much of the thinking of this rabbi with whom he dialogues
in one of the most fascinating chapters of his book. Jesus cannot be
considered a Jew like other Jews, Neusner explains, given that he puts
himself above Moses and proclaims that he is “Lord also of the Sabbath.”
But it is especially in regard to St. Paul that the “new perspective”
demonstrates its inadequacy. According to one of its most famous
representatives, the religion of works, against which the Apostle rails
with such vehemence in his letters, does not exist in real life.
Judaism, even in the time of Jesus, is a “covenantal nomism,” that is, a
religion based on the free initiative of God and his love; the
observance of his laws is the consequence of a relationship with God,
not its cause. The law serves to help people remain in the covenant
rather than to enter it. The Jewish religion continues to be that of the
patriarchs and prophets, and its center is hesed, grace and divine
benevolence.
Scholars then have to look for possible targets of Paul’s polemic:
not the “Jews” but the “Jewish-Christians,” or a kind of “Zealot”
Judaism that feels itself threatened by the pagan world around it and
reacts in the manner of the Maccabees—in brief, the Judaism of Paul
prior to his conversion that led him to persecute Hellenistic believers
like Stephen. But these explanations appear immediately unsustainable
and result in making the apostle’s thinking incomprehensible and
contradictory. In the preceding part of his letter, the apostle
formulates a indictment as universal as humanity itself: “There is no
distinction; . . . all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”
(Rom 3: 22-23). Three times in the first three chapters of this letter
he returns to the wording “Jews and Greeks alike.” How can anyone think
that to such a universal evil a remedy corresponds which is aimed at a
very limited group of believers?
3. Justification by Faith: A Doctrine of Paul or of Jesus?
The difficulty comes, in my opinion, from the fact that the exegesis
of Paul is carried on at times as if the doctrine began with him and as
if Jesus had said nothing on this matter. The doctrine of the free gift
of justification by faith is not Paul’s invention but is the central
message of the gospel of Christ, whether it was made known to Paul by a
direct revelation from the Risen One or by the “tradition” that he says
he received, which was certainly not limited to a few words about the
kerygma (see 1 Cor 15:3). If this were not the case, then those who say
that Paul, not Jesus, is the real founder of Christianity would be
correct.
However, the core of this doctrine is already found in the word
“gospel,” “good news,” that Paul certainly did not invent out of thin
air. At the beginning of his ministry Jesus went around proclaiming,
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and
believe in the gospel” (Mk 1:15). How could this proclamation be called
“good news” if it were only an intimidating call to change one’s life?
What Christ includes in the expression “kingdom of God”—that is, the
salvific initiative by God, his offer of salvation to all humanity—St.
Paul calls the “righteousness of God,” but it refers to the same
fundamental reality. “The kingdom of God” and “the righteousness of God”
are coupled together by Jesus himself when he says, “Seek first his
kingdom and his righteousness” (Mt 6:33).
When Jesus said, “repent, and believe the gospel,” he was thus
already teaching justification by faith. Before him, “to repent” always
meant “to turn back,” as indicated by the Hebrew word shub; it meant to
turn back, through a renewed observance of the law, to the covenant that
had been broken. “To repent,” consequently, had a meaning that was
mainly ascetic, moral, and penitential, and it was implemented by
changing one’s behavior. Repentance was seen as a condition for
salvation; it meant “repent and you will be saved; repent and salvation
will come to you.” This was the meaning of “repent” up to this point,
including on the lips of John the Baptist.
When Jesus speaks of repentance, metanoia, its moral meaning moves
into second place (at least at the beginning of his preaching) with
respect to a new, previously unknown meaning. Repenting no longer means
turning back to the covenant and the observance of the law. It means
instead taking a leap forward, entering into a new covenant, seizing
this kingdom that has appeared, and entering into it. And entering it by
faith. “Repent and believe” does not point to two different successive
steps but to the same action: repent, that is, believe; repent by
believing! Repenting does not signify “mending one’s ways” so much as
“perceiving” something new and thinking in a new way. The humanist
Lorenzo Valla (1405-1457), in his Adnotations on the New Testament, had
already highlighted this new meaning of the word metanoia in Mark’s
text.
Innumerable sayings from the gospel, among the ones that most
certainly go back to Jesus, confirm this interpretation. One is Jesus’
insistence on the necessity of becoming like children to enter the
kingdom of heaven. A characteristic of children is that they have
nothing to give and can only receive. They do not ask anything from
their parents because they have earned it but simply because they know
they are loved. They accept what is freely given.
The Pauline polemic against the claim to be saved by one’s own works
also does not begin with him. We would need to exclude an endless number
of texts to remove all the polemic references in the gospel to a number
of “scribes, Pharisees, and doctors of the law.” We cannot fail to
recognize in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax-collector in the
temple the two types of religiosity that St. Paul later contrasts: one
man trusts in his own religious performance and the other trusts in the
mercy of God and returns home “justified” (Lk 18:14).
It is not a temptation present only in one particular religion, but
in every religion, including of course Christianity. (The Evangelists
didn’t relate the sayings of Jesus to correct the Pharisees, but to warn
the Christians!) If Paul takes aim at Judaism, it is because that is
the religious context in which he and those to whom he is speaking live,
but it involves a religious rather than an ethnic category. Jews, in
this context, are those who, unlike the pagans, are in possession of
revelation; they know God’s will and, emboldened by this fact, they feel
themselves secure with God and can judge the rest of humanity. One
indication that Paul was designating a religious category is that Origen
was already saying in the third century that the target of the
apostle’s words are now the “heads of the Church: bishops, presbyters,
and deacons,” that is, the guides, the teachers of the people.[10]
The difficulty in reconciling the picture that Paul gives us of the
Jewish religion and what we know about it from other sources is based on
a fundamental error in methodology. Jesus and Paul are dealing with
life as people lived it, with the heart; scholars deal instead with
books and written testimonies. Oral and written statements tell us what
people know they should be or would like to be, but not necessarily what
they are. No one should be surprised to find in the Scripture and
rabbinical sources of the time moving and sincere affirmations about
grace, mercy, and the prevenient initiative of God. But it is one thing
to say what Scripture says and leaders teach and another thing to say
what is in people’s hearts and what governs their actions.
What happened at the time of the Protestant Reformation helps us to
understand this situation during the time of Jesus and Paul. At the time
of the Reformation, if one looks at the doctrine taught in the schools
of theology, at ancient definitions that were never disputed, at
Augustine’s writings that were held in great honor, or even only at the
Imitation of Christ that was daily reading for pious souls, one will
find there the magnificent doctrine of grace and will not understand
whom Luther was fighting against. But if one looks at what was going on
in real life in the Church, the result, as we have seen, is quite
different.
4. How to Preach Justification by Faith Today
What can we conclude from this bird’s-eye view of the five centuries
since the beginning of the Protestant Reformation? It is indeed vital
that the centenary of the Reformation not be wasted, that it not remain a
prisoner of the past and try to determine rights and wrongs, even if
that is done in a more irenic tone than in the past. We need instead to
take a leap forward, the way a river that finds itself blocked resumes
its course at a higher level.
The situation has changed since then. The issues that brought about
the separation between the Church of Rome and the Reformation were above
all indulgences and how sinners are justified. But can we say that
these are the problems on which people’s faith stands or falls today? I
remember Cardinal Kasper on one occasion making this observation: For
Luther the number one existential problem was how to overcome the sense
of guilt and find a gracious God; today the problem is rather the
opposite: how to restore to human beings a genuine sense of sin that
they have completely lost.
This does not mean ignoring the enrichment brought by the Reformation
and wanting to return to the situation before it. It means rather
allowing all of Christianity to benefit from its many important
achievements once they are freed from certain distortions and excesses
due to the overheated climate of the moment and the need to correct
major abuses.
Among the negative aspects resulting from the centuries-old emphasis
on the issue of the justification of sinners, it seems to me one is
having made western Christianity be a gloomy proclamation, completely
focused on sin, that the secular culture ended up resisting and
rejecting. The most important thing is not what Jesus, by his death, has
removed from human beings—sin—but what he has given to them, that is,
his Holy Spirit. Many exegetes today consider the third chapter of the
letter to the Romans on justification by faith to be inseparable from
the eighth chapter on the gift of the Spirit and to be one piece with
it.
The free gift of justification through faith in Christ should be
preached today by the whole Church and with more vigor than ever. Not,
however, in contrast to the “works” the New Testament speaks of but in
contrast to the claim of post-modern people of being able to save
themselves with their science and technology or with an improvised,
comforting spirituality. These are the “works” that modern human beings
rely on. I am convinced that if Luther came back to life, this would be
the way that he too would preach justification by faith today.
There is another thing that we all—Lutherans and Catholics—should
learn from the man who initiated the Reformation. As we saw, for Luther
the free gift of justification by faith was above all a lived experience
and only later something about which to theorize. After him
justification though faith became increasingly a theological thesis to
defend or to oppose and less and less a personal, liberating experience
to be lived out in one’s intimate relationship with God. The joint
declaration of 1999 very appropriately points out that the consensus
reached by Catholics and Lutherans on the fundamental truths of the
doctrine of justification must take effect and be confirmed not just in
the teaching of the Church but in people’s lives as well (no. 43).
We must never lose sight of the main point of the Pauline message.
What the apostle wishes to affirm above all in Romans 3 is not that we
are justified by faith but that we are justified by faith in Christ; we
are not so much justified by grace as we are justified by the grace of
Christ. Christ is the heart of the message, more so than grace and
faith. Today he himself is the article by which the Church stands or
falls: a person, not a doctrine.
We ought to rejoice because this is what is happening in the Church
and to a greater extent than commonly realized. In recent months I was
able to attend two conferences: one in Switzerland organized by
Protestants with the participation of Catholics, and the other in
Germany organized by Catholics with the participation of Protestants.
The latter conference, which took place in Augsburg this past January,
seemed to me truly to be a sign of the times. There were 6,000 Catholics
and 2,000 Lutherans, the majority of whom were young, who had come from
all over Germany. Its title was “Holy Fascination.” What fascinated
that crowd was Jesus of Nazareth, made present and almost tangible by
the Holy Spirit. Behind this effort was a community of lay people and a
house of prayer (Gebetshaus), which has been active for years and is in
full communion with the local Catholic church.
It was not an easy ecumenism. There was a very Catholic Mass with
lots of incense celebrated once by me and once by the auxiliary bishop
of Augsburg; on another day, the Lord’s Supper was celebrated by a
Lutheran pastor with full respect for each other’s liturgies. Worship,
teachings, music: it was an atmosphere that only young people today are
able to create and that could serve as a model for some special event
during World Youth Day.
I once asked those in charge if they wanted me to speak about
Christian unity. They answered, “No. We prefer to live that unity
instead of talking about it.” They were right. These are signs of the
direction in which the Spirit—and with him Pope Francis—invite us to go.
_______________________________
Translated from Italian by Marsha Daigle Williamson
[1] Martin Luther, “Preface to his Latin Works,” Weimar ed., vol. 54, p. 186.
[2] Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter, 32, 56 (PL 44, 237).
[3] Gregory the Great, Homilies on Ezekiel, 2, 7 (PL 76, 1018).
[4] Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the “Song of Songs,” 61, 4-5 (PL 183, 1072).
[5] Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1-IIae, q. 106, a.2.
[6] Council of Trent, “Decretum de iustificatione,” 7, in Denziger and Schoenmetzer, Enchridion Symbolorum, ed. 34, n. 1531.
[7] The classical couplet that sets forth this sequence is
“Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria. / Moralis quid agas; quo
tendas anagogia”: “The literal sense proclaims the events, the
allegorical sense what you should believe. / The moral sense what you
should do, the anagogical sense where you are going.”
[8] See Henri de Lubac, Histoire de l’exégèse médiéval. Les
quatre sens de l’Écriture (Paris, Aubier,1959), vol. 1, 1, pp. 139-157.
[9] Jacob Neusner, A Rabbi Talks with Jesus (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000).
[10] Origen, Commentary on the “Letter to the Romans,” 2, 2 (PG 14, 873).
