June 2011 Print

The interview with Prof. Beyerhaus is a translation from Kirchliche Umschau, Nr. 4, April 2011, a traditional monthly magazine in Germany. The interest of the interview resides in the fact, that Prof. Beyerhaus (born in 1929) is a protestant opponent of the inter religious Assisi meeting. The evangelical clergyman was professor of mission studies and ecumenical theology in the University of Tübingen from 1965 until 1997, teaching Joseph Ratzinger from 1966 until 1969. In 1978 he was the chairman for the International Conference of Confessing Communities (Internationale Konferenz Bekennender Gemeinschaften).

Dr. Beyerhaus, you are presently one of the most prominent professors of missionary science, founder of the Conference of Confessing Communities, manager of the Diakrisis Institute and long-time chairman of the International Conference of Confessing Communities. Twenty-five years ago you raised your voice as one of the most important representatives of the evangelical Protestants against the interreligious prayer gatherings at Assisi. Why?

When we heard, in our Confessing Evangelical Communities, of the intention of the late Pope John Paul II to invite the representatives of not only all churches and church fellowships, but also the non-Christian religions to Assisi on October 27, 1986, to pray together for peace, we were profoundly horrified and concerned.

I myself was especially concerned because I, as the professor of mission and religious studies and ecumenical theology, constantly find in my research that the idea of religious syncretism (or the mixing of religions) can be dangerous to the Christian faith. This had already begun during my time as a missionary in South Africa, where I met widespread syncretistic sects, harmlessly named things like the “African Nondenominational Church,” and therefore observed how this spiritual uncertainty and danger of falling back into pagan animistic religion spread throughout our mission community.

In 1965, at our Lutheran seminary in Natal, I had invited my colleagues from other training facilities to a study conference during which we analyzed this phenomenon. Finally, we published our findings to exhort our missions and also our church.

It gives us no little sorrow to know that here, through the somewhat hidden union of biblical faith and ancestor worship, the First Commandment is violated; no other gods besides the God of Israel can be adored.

Now, however, I have seen this danger break out within the Catholic Church in Europe and worldwide under the initiative of the Vatican. I had a private audience with Pope John Paul II only six years before the Assisi gathering, on March 30, 1980, in which I spoke with him about the new dialogue program of the Geneva World Council of Churches, and there conceived the notion that the Holy Father had a full understanding of the anxiety of the International Conference of Confessing Communities. Therefore it seemed incomprehensible that he himself called for the interreligious prayer meeting in Assisi.

The Conference of Confessing Communities presented an open letter to the Pope to ask him to distance himself from this plan. I asked my former colleague from Tübingen, Joseph Ratzinger, by now a cardinal in the curia, to give this letter to the Pope along with a personal letter, which he did.

Do not all men pray to a higher being? Do we not all pray to the same God? Has not any kind of syncretism been avoided in Assisi? Did not John Paul II confess Christ before all?

Of course, in one way or another, almost all men pray in their different religions, but not all pray to one higher being, for there are also polytheistic religions, in which many gods and powerful spirits are called upon.

But also, the highest divinity in monotheistic religions is in no way alike. There is, for instance, a huge difference between the God that we Christians worship, who is triune and whose being is love, and the all-powerful god Allah that the Muslims call upon, whose existence is unrecognizable and is never spoken of in the Koran as being our loving Father.

Now, we already find in the time approaching the prayer gathering, growing organizations of concerned evangelical and Catholic Christians–for instance, the Society of Saint Pius X–who warned against the immanent syncretism in Assisi. A representative from the Vatican answered with the dialectical formula, “The representatives of the different religions are not coming to Assisi in order to pray together; rather they come together in order to pray.” One seeks to nullify the impression of mixing religions by saying that no prayer rituals will take place in which all pray together with the same words, but every representative of a religion comes forward when it is his turn and prays in his own rite.

And therefore it is openly known that many different gods will be called upon here in the same place and at the same time before the eyes of the presiding Pope: Allah through the Muslims, Rama through the Hindus, Manitu through the Indians, and the God of the Old and New Testaments through the Jews and Christians.

In his own speech to the crowd, and also in his prayers, the Pope confessed that God, called in the New Testament the Father of Jesus Christ (Eph. 2:14), is our peace. That was a clear testimony for the biblical faith, for which I was very thankful to the Holy Father. However, he stressed that this was his personal belief, suggesting he was tolerant towards the beliefs of the other religious leaders and that he had respect for them. I watched the video along with my students to see this example of clear relativism.

You are close to Joseph Ratzinger, who was for a time your colleague in Tübingen. Now Pope, he seemed to many until now to be “reserved” toward the prayer meeting of the religions. What do you expect from the “Anniversary Meeting” in October?

Yes, there has been a friendly relationship between my Catholic colleague Ratzinger and me, despite our different confessions, as we united together, along with another prudent professor, in the face of an outbreak of turbulence in both our theological faculties during the student revolt of 1968, and this was on the basis of our same biblical background. There we were fortunate to be united by our confession of the same faith in Christ. This was always the case in later situations.

Because I remained in contact with Joseph Ratzinger through writing after he left for Regensburg, and then Munich and finally Rome, I was sure in 1980 that he also would share our concerns as a cardinal in the curia and prefect of the Congregation of Faith. Therefore I trustingly turned to him, as I mentioned before, with the request for mediation.

This expectation was fully justified, for he, unlike his fellow cardinals, did not take part at any of the Assisi prayer meetings. Also, during the second meeting of the kind in the year 2002, he rode in his train with his back symbolically to the engine as a mere observer.

It was a puzzle to me to see the surprising manner with which he himself looked forward to Assisi III. So I decided, encouraged by the board of our International Conference of Confessing Communities, to write him a personal letter in which I expressed my astonishment and asked about his intentions, for we had been like-minded for many years. Already, after only three weeks, he sent me a detailed answer, dated March 4, 2011.

In this letter it was indicated that the initiative to assist at the meeting, however, did not come from him. He will go, however, and, as he writes word for word, “seek to define the direction of the whole and do everything possible to demonstrate how a syncretistic or relativistic interpretation of the event will be impossible.” He told me explicitly that I was free to give an open opinion, but he asked, “thereby to acknowledge that I trust that the Pope stands by what he is called to by his office–to strengthen his brothers in faith in Jesus Christ as the only Son of God and Redeemer, and he himself unmistakably confesses this.” This I will do gladly.

If the current Pope will set other priorities, a biblical critique seems however difficult to avoid.

Yes, Benedict XVI will set “other priorities” as he did as a professor and as archbishop–and he already has–as he has entered a tradition with his election to the papacy, that of his predecessors, and in this particular case, already began with his decades-long association with John Paul II and his firm installation in the theology and politics of religion of the Roman praxis.

It also necessary that evangelical and orthodox ecumenical groups dialogue with the other religions to set a goal for a common endeavor; to protect the earth from that which threatens world peace in multi-religious crisis areas. As long as it is on a strictly political and academic basis, without a cultish exaggeration through common prayers and rituals, nothing has to be changed. Obviously a healthy realism is sought after, so that one does not have a quixotic hope for the realization of a reign of world peace with such dialogue. For that would open the way to the biblical revelation of the one world government of the anti-Christ (Apoc. 17:11-14).

Aside from the denominational controversy, is not the hasty beatification of John Paul II an approval of the theology behind Assisi?

One can see it that way, and many observers have seen it that way. However I do not think that this is the intention of Benedict, for the rash beatification was caused by a group who gathered at St. Peter’s Square, who adored the Pope’s predecessor, and already shortly after John Paul II’s death, challenged the Pope.

For me and my evangelical friends, the practice of beatification and canonization is foreign, and we are sorry to say that this is a fact; a colleague in Erlangen asked me directly to ask Pope Benedict to intervene in all the things that I cannot because of my ministry.

The prayer meeting at Assisi in 1986 had a long ideological incubation period and a paradigmatic function for many similar meetings. Key word: from Chicago to Hans Küng’s “global ethic.” Could you show us a short panorama of this development?

That would need its own composition, if not an entire book. Actually, a colleague from Münster, who unfortunately passed away two years ago, who became my friend during his last year of life, the prominent professor of missionary science, Professor Johannes Dörmann, did that in an entire series of remarkable books. In them he shows that Assisi was not just a spontaneous idea of the Pope at the time, but the philosophy of history and theology as well as anthropology–the idea of man–of Karol Wojtyla, that had been anchored deeply in his thinking for a long time.

Dörmann was mostly of the school of Ratzinger, and had graduated with him in Münster and had sent his publications that criticized Assisi to the responsible doctoral advisor of the curia for the Preservation of the Roman Catholic Faith. I do not know whether and how Cardinal Ratzinger answered him; at least he has not put him in a teaching discipline, as Dörmann gladly expressed to me.

It is also generally true that the practice of reconciliation of religions in Assisi has a long previous history which is founded on the changing theology about the non-Christian religions. Here the dogmatist from Munich, Rahner, played an ominous role with his theory that the believers of other religions are “anonymous Christians.”

No one has advanced that to such an historically pivotal central theme as Hans Küng with his global ethics program.

Did Assisi distort ecumenism 
or did it empower it?

It depends on how one understands the word ecumenism. The leaders of the Geneva World Council of Churches were invited to Assisi in 1986 and came gladly. They will happily be there this year also, for they had developed a program of dialogue with other religions and saw this was only strengthened by Assisi. In 1971 a sophisticated Program of Dialogue with ideologies (ÖRK) was started, but it failed, and in facing the present financial crisis of the World Council of Churches almost all the associates of this program left.

The International Conference of Confessing Communities, of which I am an honorary chairman, has a different conception of ecumenism, what we call “Christ-centered creed ecumenism.” I am currently writing a book about it. We remain critical of the Assisi initiative of Rome, as has already been said, and accordingly reacted with concern to the announcement in January of the anniversary in October in the same place. We ask ourselves also whether one can see the warning signs here that were seen by many faithful Catholics and Evangelicals on September 26, 1997, when the church of San Francesco was badly damaged by a terrible earthquake, which took the lives of four men, including two Franciscan monks.

Against a rejection of the gathering of religions is often quoted the speech of St. Paul on the Areopagus (Acts 17:17-34).

Whoever says that only has a shallow understanding of the speech of St. Paul on the Areopagus. He has firstly failed to see that this quote begins with verse 16, which is: “Now whilst Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred within him, seeing the city wholly given to idolatry.” In face of the “unknown god” whose altar he found on his way, he says in verse 23: “What therefore you worship, without knowing it, that I preach to you.” And the apostle concludes the message of his mission sermon in verse 30 with an exhortation: “And God indeed having winked at the times of this ignorance, now declareth unto men, that all should everywhere do penance.…”

The penance that should be done by the believers of different religions that convert to the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the only divine Lord and Redeemer was not preached in the church of San Francesco on October 27, 1986! That would be hard to tolerate with a peaceful interreligious dialogue and a united prayer community!

Today biblical theology is dominated by the catch phrases “exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism.” Is this the case with mission studies?

Yes, those are the three categories that one uses to categorize the different forms of interreligious dialogue. Either one sees the revelations and holy laws of the other religions as excluded from the authentic biblical revelations, or one sees them as implicit and common together, or one see them all, non-Christian and Christian religions alike, as identical.

Most of the mission and religion scholars lean toward inclusivism or pluralism. Therefore the idea of the mission of the Church as being to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ as Redeemer to the non-Christian world, the men of all religions and world views, “so that all men would believe in him and be saved” as it was defined in 1961 during the third assembly of the ÖRK in New Delhi for the Commission on World Mission and Evangelization, is disappearing from more and more theological faculties of both confessions.

I am very glad that Pope Benedict XVI shares this view in the letter he wrote to me in explanation of Dominus Jesus (2000).

What can we do?

We should seek to bring into account the biblical interpretation of events in every matter, especially in our hopes for the formation of the upcoming interreligious meeting in Assisi this October.