Uwe Justus Wenzel on faith and reason

The Pope's visit to Turkey prompts feature writer Uwe Justus Wenzel to reconsider the relationship between faith and reason, the subject of Pope Benedikt XVI's controversial Regensburg lecture. "After some distance, what stands out is that Benedikt finds the same fault in Protestantism for which he reproaches the followers of Mohammed - citing the Byzantine Emperor Manuel: the tearing apart of religion from reason. According to the text of his speech, the result for Islam is that the sword becomes the means by which the supposedly true faith is spread; and in the case of Protestantism, the result is the subjectivity of the conscience, the 'randomness' of individual relationships to God, an approach that hardly offers any opposition to the relativism of modern life - at any rate it has no more 'community-forming power.' Protestantism and Islamism as two sides of one coin? That would surely be an escalation of the idea, but it would still be the same idea."

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