Regensburg Address and the concept of God - Logos and/or Will

Just a quick quote from Zenit: (stolen from http://www.catholic-pages.com/forum/topic.asp?topic_id=9457)

Q: At Regensburg, Benedict XVI highlighted the Christian understanding of God as Logos. How does the idea of God as Logos differ from an Islamic conception of God?

Father Schall: The Holy Father posed the fundamental question that lies behind all the discussion about war and terror. If God is Logos, it means that a norm of reason follows from what God is. Things are, because they have natures and are intended to be the way they are because God is what he is: He has his own inner order.

If God is not Logos but "Will," as most Muslim thinkers hold Allah to be, it means that, for them, Logos places a "limit" on Allah. He cannot do everything because he cannot do both evil and good. He cannot do contradictories.

Thus, if we want to "worship" Allah, it means we must be able to make what is evil good or what is good evil. That is, we can do whatever is said to be the "will" of Allah, even if it means doing violence as if it were "reasonable."

Otherwise, we would "limit" the "power" of Allah. This is what the Pope meant about making violence "reasonable." This different conception of the Godhead constitutes the essential difference between Christianity and Islam, both in their concept of worship and of science.

He also talked about the "dialogue" between different cultures (as would be between the west and Islam) - and he had this essential insight:

Q: The Western media have often taken Benedict XVI's words out of context and stoked the flames of Islamic aggression. How does the cultural dominance and hostility to the Church by the mass media affect its ability to participate in the dialogue of cultures?

Father Schall: There can be no "dialogue" about anything until the basic principles of reason are granted both in theory and practice. Chesterton remarked on the fact that those who begin to attack the Church for this or that reason, mostly end up attacking it for any reason.

What is behind the attack on reason or the refusal to admit that God is Logos is already a suspicion that the Church is right about intellect and its conditions. We have no guarantee that reason will freely be accepted.

Von Balthasar said that we are warned that we are sent among wolves. We are naive to think that Christ was wrong when he warned us that the world would hate us for upholding Logos and the order of things it implies.

But Benedict is right. He has put the citizens of world on notice that they are also accountable for how they use or do not use their reason. No one else could have done this. The fact is, the world has wildly underestimated Benedict XVI precisely because it would not see the ability he displays in getting to the heart of intellectual things.

See the whole thing (and many more goodies) at:
http://www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=95902

So what is logos? Wikipedia (click for the definition) defines it as having an order, being rational, etc. Benedict XVI's definition is also cited. For christians: "Christianity has understood itself as the religion of the Logos, as the religion according to reason";"s also open to all that is truly rational." <sup>[1]"

Truly an interesting discussion.

Fr. Schall has more comments here</sup>
Some highlights:

That "God can contradict himself in his decrees so that certain political or moral actions are thereby justified as obedience to God" is rather prevalent outcome of the notion "God as "will""
[Schall]. [Rather confusing sentence]

Hmm. Certainly pertains to the definition God as "will" And yet, Judeo-Christian concept of God can do somewhat the same, no? Christianity is also a religion of contradiction in some sense: death unto life; the incarnation and death of Jesus; obedience unto freedom;

Or are these "contradictions" not contradictions at all? Death has become the vehicle for life; God who is powerful enough to put aside his divinity to become human; True freedom refers to the power and the courage to do good and to love, and it only comes about from total integration of the self, which comes from obedience to our true natures as God as created.

What also seems to follow: God as will can bend the definition of good and evil at will, and make evil to be reasonable. What is good or evil is at the whim of God? [Doesn't sound all that bad - God is omnipotent, right?] This also means that the revelation of God is not necessarily stable, demonstrated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where the current prophet can change the deposit of faith as stated by the previous prophet.

One consequence of this line of thought as Schall quotes it: If certain moral and political actions can be attributed to the obedience to the will of God, the recent Muslim terrorist activities, that justify violence as obedience to God, make sense.

Another consequence of this line of thought: modern relativism and skepticsm. The modern mind does not accept that one can know AND believe; Especially in Europe, people don't think faith and reason belong in the same sphere, despite the fact that it was where the relationship between the two were hammered out during the last 2000 years.

For us academics, the scientific method is based on the metaphysics of a world of order: that things behave in orderly, predictable ways. Otherwise, the scientific method would not work. We can't do experiments and expect repeatable results; We can't test hypotheses; we can't expect anything to work in a predictable manner. [Granted, at the cutting edge of scientific discovery, things certainly look that way.

Full text of the address here:

BBC says that there is an update, but I can't find the final edition online... any help would be nice...