Thomas G. Guarino Analysis

Thomas G. Guarino begins his article “The God of Philosophy and of the Bible: Theological Reflections on Regensburg” by suggesting that there is several attempts to interpret what Pope Benedict XVI addressed at University of Regensburg. Yet, no one of these attempts have focused in one of the major points of his speech. For the Pope, true Christianity uses reason, which proceeds by faith. The Church does not adopt wholesale any philosophical system; it critically appropriate and purifies philosophy by revelation. It is because, for him, faith and reason are always conjoined. However, Benedict insists that the Church did well by rejecting “myth and custom [of the ancient thinkers] for the truth of being. [because by doing so], the Church undertook the abiding task of insisting on the uniqueness of her own claims.” In this
The author of the article suggests that “Benedict recognizes that in late-medieval Christianity the scent of voluntarism also entered the Church, whereby God’s ordained will was considered distinct from his absolute will so that God’s absolute freedom could contradict, at least theoretically, what he himself had instituted.” In the same way, he mentions that reformers, especially Luther, attempted to take philosophy away from revelation. On the contrary to the eighteen century Enlightenment philosophy, which tried to deny the idea of revelation. They stood in the belief that God as creator remained in a deistic sense, not as a God who reveals Himself in relationship with human beings. For them the later was seen as a kind of superstition. By the same token, Guarino comments that Benedict XVI criticizes the work of Adolf Von Harnack. He says that Harnack prefers to see Jesus not as God but only as a great