As have many of you, I’ve been thinking about the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI, wondering what it means in the grand scheme of things. I’ve also been wondering if there are any take home points for us in the very different world of mainline Protestantism. So what does the election of Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI mean for American mainline Protestants? I think of several things.

We can expect in Benedict XVI a deeply learned, seasoned theologian and church leader who has both upheld traditional Roman Catholic doctrine and taken some careful (and no doubt carefully calculated) steps towards ecumenical understanding with Protestant churches.

Ratzinger has been deeply involved in Roman Catholic-Protestant relations, including the process leading to the famous Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, signed both by Rome and by the Lutheran World Federation. This was a major event in ecumenical relations that sought to overcome one of the defining disagreements between Protestants and Catholics, namely the basis on which we are deemed righteous by God and thereby saved. (See Note 1) In fact, Ratzinger has been alternately credited with throwing major obstacles in the way of the Joint Declaration and thereafter coming to the rescue and playing a key role in its eventual signing by both parties. Perhaps one thing we can learn from these reports is a difficult, twin commitment to the integrity of one’s own tradition and to the visible unity of the church universal.

We can expect such a twin commitment from Benedict XVI, as can be seen also in his Dominus Iesus, a document that was ratified and confirmed by Pope John Paul II. In this work, Ratzinger is quite honest in reminding his fellow Catholics that Rome teaches that Protestant churches “are not churches in the proper sense” and that they “suffer from defects.” He also reminds Catholics that calling Protestant churches “sister churches” is not appropriate; rather, such “churches” are only “ecclesial communities” in relation with the Church, that is the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, i.e. the Church of Rome. This is honest ecumenism.

With regard to the church’s posture toward prevailing contemporary culture, Ratzinger has been outspoken about the decadence and decline of mainline American Protestantism. The selection of his papal name, Benedict, may clue us into what’s behind his criticism. It was the original St. Benedict whose Benedictine Rule outlines a life of self-denial, a self-sacrificial devotion to the welfare of the whole Christian community, and the necessary relationship between rightness of belief and laboring for the least among us. Or the selection of Benedict may be a reference to Benedict XIV, who labored in the 18th century, a time of rapid secularization, which Ratzinger firmly believes characterizes our own age as well. In this case, Ratzinger might see himself as having been given a similar task, that of responsibly communicating the truth of the Gospel to an increasingly hostile world; his own northern European background would make sense out of such a self-understanding.

On the “Christianity and culture” front, it is not surprising that numerous liberal commentators have been employing the stock-and-trade dismissive rhetoric in their response to Ratzinger’s election: titles like “arch-conservative enforcer of Roman dogma” are clearly designed to give people the willies. But what is even less surprising to me is that, in the face of Ratzinger’s homily at his first papal mass, in which he offered a determined defense of absolute truth and a damning critique of relativism, we witness on television the throngs of young people who came to Rome to cheer their new leader. While we might disagree with Benedict XVI regarding which issues require us to be courageously countercultural, the fact that he stands with the full wealth of conviction and with intelligence against prevailing cultural mores and does so with integrity, all the while attracting the next generation of believers, ought to teach us something: the future of the church does not rest with those whose Christian conviction diminishes as cultural pressures mount. The future of the church rests with those who, by the power of the Holy Spirit, maintain the full wealth of conviction.

In short, respectful engagement with Protestants, a determined commitment to Rome’s exclusive claims, and a deep resolve to maintain fidelity to his Church’s convictions in the face of secularization, have all marked Ratzinger’s work in the past and we have no reason to expect this pattern to be broken. This is a good time for Protestants to learn from his conviction. Do we understand why we are Protestants and is our resolve firm in the face of temptations to compromise? Now is the time for us to put our roots down deep into our confessional heritage, to study the nature of salvation, to ask the tough but basic ecclesiological questions like “what is the church?”, and to meditate about those areas where God is calling us to be courageously countercultural.

One more thing to learn from Ratzinger today, something that speaks directly to the Presbyterian experience of polarized national debates. I typically find category-exploding comments insightful, this one from a recent article by Richard John Neuhaus: “The argument that Ratzinger has tried to make through these many years, and the argument that Benedict will undoubtedly be making, is that there is no tension, never mind conflict, between truth and love. The caricature is that liberals are big on love while conservatives are big on truth. As Ratzinger said in his homily before the conclave, love without truth is blind and truth without love is empty. Without truth, love is mere sentimentality and, without love, truth is sterile.”

Now there’s a countercultural conviction. And it’s one that I share.

(1) The JDDJ, while a worthwhile exercise, did not, in my view, overcome the Reformation divide.