This from “On Faith” at the Washington Post:
Second, Pope Francis seems to be making the point that Christ did not come to promote a political agenda. Pope Francis warns against the faith becoming an “ideology among ideologies.” If the church is defined by its political agenda, it will inevitably be divisive and distort the true mission of the church.
An excessive focus on politics and waging a culture war will lead many to define church teaching using secular political labels like liberal and conservative that do not reflect the church’s understanding of human dignity and the common good. Those who identify with the political left or right will feel alienated when their views clash with the church’s social and moral teachings, instead of challenged by the difficult task of ensuring that their political positions reflect Gospel values. Meanwhile, those who share the church’s positions may feel triumphant and look to drive others from the church, instead of drawing them into it.
The core teachings of the Catholic faith revolve around the church’s understanding of God, Jesus Christ, and the Gospel. Pope Francis makes this clear when he states that “the proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives.” Pope Francis notes, “Proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary things: this is also what fascinates and attracts more, what makes the heart burn, as it did for the disciples at Emmaus.”
This focus on the actions, life, love, and redeeming power of Christ and the God that Christ helps us to more fully comprehend is the true foundation of Catholicism, and these teachings should be seen as the core, central teachings of the church. As Pope Francis stated, “The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent.”
Now if only Pope Francis can remove Boniface VIII, Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII, and Pius XII from the history of the Roman Catholic Church.
Old Life 
Perhaps Francis is saying those popes erred… Next thing you know, he will infallibly declare that the Magesterium is fallible.
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sdb,
If he claims the papacy is fallible he’ll do so infallibly.
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But isn’t “ensuring that…political positions reflect Gospel values” the sort of reasoning that gives us ecclesiastically backed culture war? (Come on, sdb, can I get an aymenah!)
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Francis: “The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent.”
How do we know which ones are more important than others? Boniface certainly though submission to him was a good idea.
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Hey DGH, off topic, but I saw a few pics of you yesterday in the slideshow for the EOPC 10th Anniversary shindig.
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Last night at Bethlehem Baptist, John Piper and Doug Wilson had a “discussion” about Christian involvement in modern culture. A significant portion of the night was taken up with John Piper defending himself for having Doug Wilson because of Doug Wilson’s view of the civil war and its racial implications. Inviting Doug Wilson has caused consternation among desiringod nation. Doug Wilson came out looking like the adult.
What was missing was a serious discussion about the two kingdom view and how Christian should interact with culture.
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Is it a sad situation that the neo Reformed are more concern about Doug Wilson’s view on the Civil War views than his views on justification?
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sdb
Posted September 27, 2013 at 2:09 pm | Permalink
Now if only Pope Francis can remove Boniface VIII, Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII, and Pius XII from the history of the Roman Catholic Church.
Perhaps Francis is saying those popes erred… Next thing you know, he will infallibly declare that the Magesterium is fallible.
Now, now. Even by Roman Catholic lights, of course popes can err. I thought of you fellows the other day when I ran across this. Once the facts come out, your snarliness makes one to want to swim the Tiber just to get away from you.
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/09/25/when-paul-corrected-peter
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Dan: What was missing was a serious discussion about the two kingdom view and how Christian should interact with culture.
I think that was a perfect demonstration of what happens when interaction with culture is the #1 priority of certain rock star preachers.
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sdb: Perhaps Francis is saying those popes erred… Next thing you know, he will infallibly declare that the Magesterium is fallible.
You mean something like he is infallible and thought other popes were wrong (and himself included) but he was mistaken about that?
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Could it be that there is some inherent relationship between Doug Wilson’s view of the kingdom of Christ (theonomic anti 2k) and his view on justification? Or to ask it another way, since Piper sees the Christian life not as a matter of gratitude for justification but as motivated by the “beauty of threats” and “works of faith” which will make “future grace” possible, does Piper also reject Luther’s view of the two kingdoms?
Luther’s commentary on the Sermon on the Mount: “When Christians go to war, there is no difference between Christians and the heathen. They do nothing contrary to this text (Matthew 5:38-39), for they do not it not as Christians, but as obedient subjects under authority to a secular person and authority. In these situations, they have a different rule and are different persons.”
but is the new pope really taking sides with Luther at this point?
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Ross Douthat weighs in on Pope Francis in Sunday’s New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-promise-and-peril-of-pope-francis.html?_r=0
TO understand Pope Francis — his purpose, his program and its potential pitfalls — it’s useful to think about what’s been happening to New York City’s Jews.
From the 1950s on, New York’s Jewish population declined, amid suburbanization and assimilation. But over the last 10 years, the numbers began to rise again, climbing 10 percent between 2002 and 2011.
But this growth was almost all among Orthodox Jews. The city’s Reform and Conservative populations continued to drop, as did Jewish religious observance over all.
As a result, New York’s Jewish community is increasingly polarized, with more Jews at the most traditional end of the theological spectrum, more Jews entirely detached from the institutions of their ancestral faith — and ever-fewer observant Jews anywhere in the middle. What’s happened in New York is happening nationally: a recent Pew study found a similar pattern of growth among the Orthodox and a similar waning of religious practice and affiliation in the rest of the American Jewish population.
This is not just a Jewish story. It’s been the story of religion in the West for over 40 years. The most traditional groups have been relatively resilient. The more liberal, modernizing bodies have lost membership, money, morale. And the culture as a whole has become steadily more disengaged from organized faith. There is still a religious middle today, but it isn’t institutionally Judeo-Christian in the way it was in 1945. Instead, it’s defined by nondenominational ministries, “spiritual but not religious” pieties and ancient heresies reinvented as self-help.
Of late, this process of polarization has carried an air of inevitability. You can hew to a traditional faith in late modernity, it has seemed, only to the extent that you separate yourself from the American and Western mainstream. There is no middle ground, no center that holds for long, and the attempt to find one quickly leads to accommodation, drift and dissolution.
And this is where Pope Francis comes in, because so much of the excitement around his pontificate is a response to his obvious desire to reject these alternatives — self-segregation or surrender — in favor of an almost-frantic engagement with the lapsed-Catholic, post-Catholic and non-Catholic world.
The idea of such engagement — of a “new evangelization,” a “new springtime” for Christianity — is hardly a novel one for the Vatican. But Francis’s style and substance are pitched much more aggressively to a world that often tuned out his predecessors. His deliberate demystification of the papacy, his digressive interviews with outlets secular and religious, his calls for experimentation within the church and his softer tone on the issues — abortion, gay marriage — where traditional religion and the culture are in sharpest conflict: these are not doctrinal changes, but they are clear strategic shifts.
John Allen Jr., one of the keenest observers of the Vatican, has called Francis a “pope for the Catholic middle,” positioned somewhere between the church’s rigorists and the progressives who pine to Episcopalianize the faith.
But the significance of this positioning goes beyond Catholicism. In words and gestures, Francis seems to be determined to recreate, or regain, the kind of center that has failed to hold in every major Western faith.
So far, he has at least gained the world’s attention. The question is whether that attention will translate into real interest in the pope’s underlying religious message or whether the culture will simply claim him for its own — finally, a pope who doesn’t harsh our buzz! — without being inspired to actually consider Christianity anew.
In the uncertain reaction to Francis from many conservative Catholics, you can see the fear that the second possibility is more likely. Their anxiety is not that the new pope is about to radically change church teaching, since part of being a conservative Catholic is believing that such a change can’t happen. Rather, they fear that the center he’s trying to seize will crumble beneath him, because the chasm between the culture and orthodox faith is simply too immense.
And they worry as well that we have seen something like his strategy attempted before, when the church’s 1970s-era emphasis on social justice, liturgical improvisation and casual-cool style had disappointing results: not a rich engagement with modern culture but a surrender to that culture’s “Me Decade” manifestations — producing tacky liturgy, ugly churches, Jonathan Livingston Seagull theology and ultimately empty pews.
Francis seems acquainted with that danger — witness his warnings against a church that just “becomes an N.G.O.,” or against reducing Christianity to “taking a spiritual bath in the cosmos.”
But the test of his approach will ultimately be a practical one. Will the church grow or stagnate under his leadership? Will his style just win casual admirers, or will it gain converts, inspire vocations, create saints? Will it actually change the world, or just give the worldly another excuse to close their ears to the church’s moral message?
By his fruits we will know — but not for some time yet.
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Jesus was pretty much an equal opportunity offender so I don’t have a hard time with what the Pope was saying. D.G.’s comments at the end are appropriate as well. Development of doctrine, I guess (although the Callers will assure us that no doctrines have changed). Development of approach, then.
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