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We Protestants might disagree with some aspects of that rationale, but the bottom line is one of standing together.

Our Evangelicals and Catholics Together meetings are returning to this theme. We began in 1994 by acknowledging we are co-belligerents with Catholics on these moral issues, and then some people would say got sidetracked. I think it was an important trajectory when we began to look at the theological issues.

Now we're coming back during the next round of discussions, which begin on April 21 in New York, on the cost of discipleship. Of course this is a Bonhoeffer theme, but we're using Evangelium Vitae as our basic text. You can say many, many things about Pope John Paul II, his world historical significance, his role in the downfall of communism, and on and on and on. That's why I say he's the greatest pope since the Reformation, maybe since Innocent III.

One thing that is often overlooked in the media and the public discussions is the fact that he was an intellectual leader, and he provided a kind of theological intellectual ballast for the Christian faith quite apart from the internal Roman Catholic issues. On these moral, social, humanitarian concerns it has to be said, he did not always please the Religious Right. For example, capital punishment, the war in Iraq, he came down you might say on the liberal side of those issues. But I think in his own mind it was a similar rationale that motivated him.

Continuing on that intellectual theme, how about his breaching faith/science issues?

For the next hundred years, scholars, theologians, and students will be pouring over the papal encyclicals that have come out of the Vatican. Three stand out. I've already mentioned Evangelium Vitae. The second would be Ut Unum Sint: That They May Be One, which was his call to ecumenism. And the third is Fides et Ratio: Faith and Reason. And in that encyclical he discussed the importance of connecting Christian faith with rational discourse. Not rationalism, but a discourse that takes seriously what we evangelicals were taught to call propositional truth—reason as a discourse of the mind that is enlightened by faith and guided by the Holy Spirit but is not despairing of meaning and of purpose in human language. That's the breeding ground of science. And so in that sense I think yes, John Paul II has given new Christian underpinning to legitimate scientific inquiry—without, again, falling into the fallacy of scientism, which is making science the prism through which we see everything else.

You see this in a couple of things: one, his revitalization of Galileo. He led the church to say, We were wrong back then to condemn Galileo. And we need to take another look at that and see it in a broader, deeper context.

And the other thing is this whole question of evolution. This is a little more controversial, in that I think the pope said, "We need to look at this whole question of evolution." He didn't validate Darwin. But he did recognize what I think a lot of scientists recognize: that there is evolution at some level. And he opened the door to look at that through the lenses of faith.

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April (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49