"for many"/"for all" controversy

[bear06]

Just ran across something our Holy Father wrote on this issue:

"

At this point, I should like to include a question about which some people argue in extremely heated fashion: The German [as well as the English] translation no longer says, ‘for many’, but ‘for all’, and this takes into account that in the Latin Missal and in the Greek New Testament, that is to say, in thr original text that is being translated, we find ‘for many’. This disparity has given rise to some disquiet; the question is raised as to whether the text of the Bible is not being misrepresented, whether perhaps an element of untruth has been brought into the most sacred place in our worship. In this connection, I would like to make three points.

1. In the New Testament as a whole, and in the whole of the tradition of the Church, it has always been clear that God desires that everyone be should be saved and that Jesus died, not just for part of mankind, but for everyone; that God himself–as we were just saying–does not draw the line anywhere. He does not make any distinction between people he dislikes, people he does not want to be saved, and others whom he prefers; he loves everyone because he has created everyone. That is why the Lord died for all. That is what we find in Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans: God ‘did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all’ (8:32); and in the fifth chapter of the Second Letter Corinthians: ‘One has died for all’ (2 Cor 5:14). The first Letter to Timothy speaks of "Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all’ (1Tim 2:6). This sentence is particularly important in that we can see, by the context and by the way it is formulated, that a eucharistic text is being quoted here. Thus we know that at that time, in a certain part of the Church, the formula that speaks of a sacrifice ‘for all’ was being used in the Eucharist. The insight that was thus preserved has never been lost from the tradition of the Church. On Maundy Thursday, in the old missal, the account of the Last Supper was introduced with the words: ‘On the evening before he died, for the salvation of all he…’ It was on the basis of this knowledge that in the seventeenth century there was an explicit condemnation of a Jansenist proposition that asserted that Christ did not die for everyone. This limitation of salvation was thus explicitly rejected as an erroneous teaching that contradicted the faith of the whole Church. The teaching of the Church says exactly the opposite: Christ died for all.

We cannot start to set limits on God’s behalf; the very heart of the faith has been lost to anyone who supposes that it is only worthwhile, if it is, so to say, made worthwhile by the damnation of others. Such a way of thinking, which finds the punishment of their people necessary, springs from not having inwardly accepted the faith; from loving only oneself and not God the Creator, to whom his creatures belong. That way of thinking would be like the attitude of people who feel who could not bear the workers who came last being paid a denarius like the rest; like the attitude who feel properly rewarded only if others have received less. This would be the attitude of the son who stayed at home, who could not bear the reconciling kindness of his father. It would be a hardening of our hearts, in which it would become clear that we were only looking out for ourselves and not looking for God; in which it would be clear that we did not love our faith, but merely bore it like a burden. We must finally come to the point where we no longer believe it to be better to live without faith, standing around the marketplace, so to speak, unemployed, along with the workers who were taken on at the eleventh hour; we must be freed from the delusion that spiritual unemployment is better than living with the Word of God. We have to learn once more so to live our faith, so to assent to it, that we can discover in it that joy which we do not simply carry round with us because others at a disadvantage, but with which we are filled, for which we are thankful, and which we would like to share with others. This, then, is the first point: It is a basic element of the biblical message that the Lord died for all–being jealous of salvation is not Christian.

continued…

 

[bear06]

continued…

1. A second point to add to this is that God never, in any case, forces anyone to be saved. God accepts man’s freedom. He is no magician, who will in the end wipe out everything that has happened and wheel out his happy ending. He is a true father; a creator who assents to freedom, even when it is used to reject him. That is why God’s all-embracing desire to save people does not involve the actual salvation of all men. He allows us the proper power to refuse. God loves us; we need only to summon the humility to allow ourselves, again and again, whether we are not possessed of the pride of wanting to do it for ourselves; whether we do not rob man, as a creature, along with the Creator-God, of all his dignity and stature by removing all element of seriousness from the life of man and degrading God to a kind of magician or grandfather, who is unmoved by anything. Even on account of the unconditional greatness of God’s love–indeed, because of that very quality–the freedom to refuse, and thus the possibility of perdition, is not removed.

1. What, then, should we make of the new translation? Both formulations, ‘for all’ and ‘for many’, are found in Scripture and in tradition. Each expresses one aspect of the matter: on one hand, the all-embracing salvation inherent in the death of Christ, which he suffered for all men; on the other hand, the freedom to refuse, as setting a limit to salvation.
   Neither of the two formulae can express the whole of this; each needs correct interpretation, which sets in the context of the Christian gospel as a whole. I leave open the question of whether it is sensible to choose the translation “for all” here and, thus, to confuse translation with interpretation, at a point at which the process of interpretation remains in any case indispensable. There can be no question of misrepresentation here, since whichever of the formulations is allowed to stand, we must in any case listen to the whole of the gospel message: that the Lord truly loves everyone and that he died for all. And the other aspect: that he does not, by some magic trick, set aside our freedom but allows us to choose to enter into his great mercy" (God is Near Us, The Eucharist, The Heart of Life pp. 34-38 Ignatius Press 2003)