“Pope Francis makes a powerful, imperative, and urgent point that the response to terrorism, like what happened in Paris, cannot simply be military, or diplomatic; it has to be theological,” said a noted Boston College professor today.
Responding to Pope Francis’ address this morning to diplomats attached to the Holy See, Boston College professor Thomas Groome said, “ We have to make a theological response to what’s happening within Islam and the West needs to help Islam to make a theological response to the extremism that has emerged.”
“As the Pope indicated, it is a deviant form of religion,” Groome said in a statement released by the college today.
“There’s nothing more fanatical, there’s nothing more destructive than fanatical religion. We can throw bombs and drones at it, but it will not cease until we confront it theologically, he said.
Groome is chair of the department of religious education and pastoral ministry in Boston College’s School of Theology and Ministry.
The complete text of Groome’s statement follows:
“I think Pope Francis makes a powerful, imperative, and urgent point that the response to terrorism, like what happened in Paris, cannot simply be military, or diplomatic; it has to be theological. We have to make a theological response to what’s happening within Islam and the West needs to help Islam to make a theological response to the extremism that has emerged. As the Pope indicated, it is a deviant form of religion.
We cannot defeat extremism and terrorism militarily. You stamp it out in one place, it will break out in another. It will go on forever unless we confront it theologically because militarily we will not be able to defeat it. There’s nothing more fanatical, there’s nothing more destructive than fanatical religion. We can throw bombs and drones at it, but it will not cease until we confront it theologically.
The Pope has invited moderate Muslim leaders and theologians to step up and say, ‘This is not Islam.’ Long term, the only solution is to convince the extremism within Islam that they are misreading their texts, that this is not what the Holy Koran is asking of them. That will take Muslim scholars to do that but I think Christian scholars can support them along the way.
There are great moderate voices; indeed the great vast majorities within the Muslim world are moderate voices but they’re not being heard and the Western theologians have to help encourage moderate Muslim theologians to come out clearly and condemn the kind of stuff that happened in Paris and is happening all over the world. All this dreadful form of extremism is based on a deviant form of religion, a deviant form of Islam and it has to be addressed. There’s no point in saying, ‘Oh, Islam is basically a religion of peace.’ That’s true, but all kinds of extremists have gotten a hold of it and convinced young people this is what Allah or the Koran asks of them, and it’s basically a kind of fundamentalism that Christians had to face a hundred years ago.
Revelation always needs reason. Without reason, the revelation becomes dreadfully dangerous and that’s true with our Bible, it’s true of the Holy Koran, it’s true with whatever religion book you want to take; if you approach any one of these religious texts as a fundamentalist direct message from God, and not as a historically contextual text of a particular era, if you approach it as absolute truth and final revelation, then it will lead to dreadful fundamentalism and deviant religion.”
